Eric Ries: Lean Startup to Tech Ethicist

Summary

Eric Ries, the author of the 2011 bestseller The Lean Startup, joins Paul Ford and Rich Ziade in the studio to talk about his new book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great. The conversation opens with Ries’s origin story as the stereotypical kid programming an IBM XT in his parents’ basement, faking his way into co-authoring a Java game-programming book as a teenager (they only discovered his age when the contract required a birth date), and eventually writing the book that gave the industry “pivot,” “minimum viable product,” and “continuous deployment.” Ries reflects on what it’s like to become a concept in people’s minds — and how, in the years since, he has seen both the best and the darkest sides of the startup world.

The heart of the book is what Ries calls “financial gravity”: a systemic pull that drags successful, mission-driven companies down into mediocrity or worse. He argues the culprit is “shareholder primacy” — the idea that a corporation is merely a financial instrument to enrich its shareholders — which he dates not to the 1780s or 1880s but to the 1980s, enacted quietly by a small cadre of judges and legal academics without any popular vote. He wants to revive an older, broader sense of “corruption” (closer to “corrosion”) that his grandparents would have recognized immediately, and to remind founders that before 1899 in Delaware you had to declare a company’s public purpose to incorporate at all.

Against that bleak diagnosis, Ries offers a blueprint built on real examples: the legend of Saul Price, who ran FedMart as a “fiduciary to the customer,” was ousted by his investors, and whose philosophy lives on in the roughly $400 billion “governance fortress” that is Costco. He points to research that purpose-driven and employee-owned companies actually outperform, and cites Anthropic — a public benefit corporation with a Long-term Benefit Trust whose governance he helped set up pro bono — as a live example of consistency winning. Ries frames the work as a “50-year plan,” a cathedral none of the participants may live to see completed, and insists that you do the right thing not because it’s likely to succeed but because it’s the right thing.

Highlights

”There is this force in the world. I call it financial gravity.”

“There is this force in the world. I call it financial gravity. This pull in companies down into mediocrity or worse. When I tell you that your favorite restaurant got bought by private equity, is your first reaction like, ‘Oh, I bet the food got a lot better?’” — Eric Ries, 21:31

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”This is not a party, it’s a wake.”

“This is not a party, it’s a wake.” — Eric Ries, 19:22

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”Costco takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders…”

“I quote in the book an analyst, a Wall Street analyst who said something like ‘Costco is a company that takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invests it in improving the customer experience.’ That’s a criticism.” — Eric Ries, 29:41

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”Our grandparents would not have found this difficult to name.”

“The thing that clicked for me for this book was that our grandparents would not have found this difficult to name. They would have had no trouble calling this corruption. … To them corruption meant something more like corrosion, like an illicit or an unprofitable way of making money.” — Eric Ries, 31:03

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”That’s how Anthropic was founded in the first place.”

“It’s a public benefit corp. I helped them set up their governance so that’s in Chapter 11 of the book for those who want to look. … They also have something called the Long-term Benefit Trust, which is a set of outside trustees who have the responsibility and the power to hold the for-profit directors to account.” — Eric Ries, 45:40

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”This may be a cathedral none of us live to see completed.”

“This may be a cathedral none of us live to see completed, but so what? What’s the alternative?” — Eric Ries, 55:40

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Key Points

• The IBM XT origin story (1:44) - Ries’s first computer was a grey-beige IBM XT with a 5.25-inch floppy disk “powered by rubber bands” and memory measured in kilobytes.
• Faking his way into a book deal as a kid (9:07) - A desperate publisher asked a teenage Ries for a sample chapter of The Black Art of Java Game Programming; they only learned his age at contract-signing.
• The dot-com bubble failure (10:49) - Ries got “swept up into that mania” in college, “utterly failed,” and then went to work for people who understood entrepreneurship.
• The Lean Startup (2011) (11:30) - Published at a “pure time of pure optimism,” it became the standard reference for building with technology.
• Continuous deployment was once “reckless” (12:43) - One of Ries’s companies released software 40 times a day when “the peak of agile” was once a month.
• Ideas now bigger than the book (13:32) - Pivot, MVP, and build-measure-learn are so embedded that most people who use them have never read the book.
• The Professor and the wake (17:34) - An AI founder trying to recruit tenured professors couldn’t promise the company wouldn’t turn exploitative; Ries watches a celebrated CEO who was ousted “at the first opportunity.”
• Is an incorruptible company even possible? (19:52) - The question that launches the book; Ries says most people say no, but he thinks the answer is yes.
• Financial gravity (21:31) - The systemic pull dragging companies “down into mediocrity or worse,” felt when private equity buys your favorite restaurant.
• The blueprint: alignment and fiduciary commitments (22:36) - “Who would you rather die than betray?” If the answer is shareholders only, “I’m a little worried for you.”
• The legend of Saul Price (24:19) - The father of modern retail founded FedMart; Sam Walton named Walmart as a tribute to it.
• Ousted, then bankrupt in seven years (25:50) - Investors changed the locks on Price’s office; running FedMart by “best practices” bankrupted it in seven years.
• Price Club becomes Costco (26:43) - Price and fellow FedMart refugee Jim Sinegal built Price Club and Costco, now a ~$400B company run on “fiduciary to the customer.”
• The governance fortress (28:18) - Costco earns the worst possible governance scores because it “simply defies our modern best practices” — and is protected from Wall Street because of it.
• Shareholder primacy (30:00) - The idea that a corporation is “just a financial instrument to enrich its shareholders,” mining customers and employees as a resource.
• Reclaiming “corruption” (31:03) - We’re “swimming in this corruption” but have no word for it; grandparents would have called it corrosion.
• LLM psychosis and gleeful layoffs (33:02) - Ries: “if you hate your employees so much, why did you hire them in the first place?”
• Jack Dorsey’s Block layoff (35:24) - Laying off 40% of Block reportedly made Dorsey ~$2 billion in one day as the stock jumped — rewarding “sociopathic behavior.”
• Layoffs as social contagion (35:51) - Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer found even executives who know layoffs are value-destroying do them anyway.
• The plantation parable (37:35) - Econ textbooks smuggle disputable claims (customers won’t pay for quality; mistreating workers lowers costs) in as universal truths.
• Purpose-driven companies outperform (38:45) - The book is “loaded with evidence” that trustworthy, mission-run companies are financially better off.
• Shareholder primacy dates to the 1980s (41:01) - Not the 1880s or 1780s; and it was never subject to any popular referendum or legislative action.
• Purposeful incorporation (42:04) - Before 1899 in Delaware, you had to declare a company’s public purpose to incorporate; changing a charter to enrich yourself could void it.
• Employee ownership shows dose-response (51:15) - A meta-analysis of 55,000 companies found more employee ownership drives more commercial growth, 0% < 10% < 50% < 100%.
• The Costco DEI vote, 98 to 2 (48:35) - An anti-DEI activist campaign that worked at Target was crushed at Costco because shareholders trusted the company to make its own decision.
• A 50-year plan (54:35) - The shift to shareholder primacy took ~50 years, so reversing it is not impossible; the pervasive sense of inevitability is its “most pernicious attribute.”

Mentions

Companies

• Aboard (0:32) - The hosts’ AI transformation company.
• IBM (1:44) - Maker of the XT that was Ries’s first computer.
• Intel (4:21) - Rich’s joke that Ries became a chip designer.
• Adobe (4:58) - Another joke about where Ries programmed.
• Sun Microsystems (7:59) - “One of the all-time hype jobs on a piece of technology” for Java.
• Xerox PARC / Apple (5:30) - Cited as being so close in the Valley they’d drive back and forth.
• Flickr / Yahoo Mail (11:43) - Emblems of the optimistic 2011-era web.
• Yammer (11:51) - The business social platform where people discussed The Lean Startup; later “got bought.”
• Long-Term Stock Exchange, Answer AI, Virgil (15:46) - Companies Ries built since The Lean Startup.
• FedMart (24:19) - Saul Price’s original American discount retailer.
• Walmart (24:27) - Sam Walton named it as a tribute to FedMart.
• Price Club / Costco / Price Costco (26:43) - Price and Sinegal’s companies that merged into today’s Costco.
• Block (35:24) - Jack Dorsey reportedly made ~$2B the day he laid off 40% of it.
• Anthropic (45:35) - Public benefit corp founded to make a more ethical AI company; Ries helped set up its governance.
• OpenAI (46:53) - The company Anthropic’s founders left.
• Zeiss (46:53) - German optics company that used a trust governance structure in 1887.
• Target (48:35) - Where the anti-DEI activist playbook worked, unlike at Costco.
• Novo Nordisk / Tony’s Chocolonely (51:15) - Old and new companies profiled in the book.
• Bookshop.org (57:11) - Price-competitive place to buy the book while supporting independent bookstores.

Products & Technologies

• IBM XT & 5.25-inch floppy disk (1:44) - Ries’s first, “extremely primitive” machine.
• Java (7:57) - The hyped language a teenage Ries learned in a weekend to land expert jobs.
• Usenet & multi-user dungeons (6:18) - Where a young programmer could “ascend to become a wizard” and learn object-oriented programming.
• Continuous deployment / minimum viable product / the pivot (12:43) - Lean Startup concepts now embedded in the culture.
• Public Benefit Corporation & Long-term Benefit Trust (45:40) - Governance structures that hold for-profit directors to account.
• LLMs / “LLM psychosis” (33:02) - The condition where constant AI conversation undermines one’s sense of what’s real.

People

• Eric Ries (1:13) - Guest; author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible.
• Marcus Gosling (14:47) - Ries’s friend who designed the Incorruptible cover.
• Jack White (14:19) - Paul’s analogy: “Seven Nation Army” no longer feels like his own song, like Lean Startup concepts in the culture.
• Saul Price (24:16) - Father of modern retail, founder of FedMart and Price Club; “fiduciary to the customer.”
• Sam Walton (24:27) - Named Walmart as a tribute to FedMart.
• Jim Sinegal (26:43) - FedMart refugee who helped start Costco.
• Jack Dorsey (35:24) - Reportedly made ~$2B the day he laid off 40% of Block.
• Jeffrey Pfeffer (35:51) - Stanford researcher who called layoffs a “social contagion.”
• Elon Musk (45:58) - Cited over the controversy of Anthropic paying him for a data center.
• Adam Smith (42:04) - Invoked for the “obvious” idea that a corporation should be incorporated for a specific thing.
• Reagan (41:37) - “Maybe Reagan more than cocaine” as the origin of shareholder primacy.

Surprising Quotes

“Oh, it tastes like money now.” — Rich Ziade, 21:46

“These CEOs and executives who are like palpably turned on by the possibility of laying off all their team, I’m just like, if you hate your employees so much, why did you hire them in the first place?” — Eric Ries, 33:22

“When Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of Block, the stock went up so much that he made like two billion dollars that day.” — Eric Ries, 35:24

“We are in an era of temporary organizations being led by temporary managers for the benefit of temporary owners and then we’re like ‘how come no one trusts us? Why would they?’” — Eric Ries, 42:04

“To make a profit means that its correct definition is to maximize human flourishing. Not just money, flourishing.” — Eric Ries, 46:45

Transcript

Paul Ford: 0:00 Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: 0:01 And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul Ford: 0:03 And this is the Abord podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, how software is changing culture, all that good stuff. Uh, we have a great guest today to talk about how to build really good businesses. They’ve written a book and we’re going to talk to them in a minute. Rich, let’s play the theme song.

Rich Ziade: 0:32 Abord is an AI transformation company. You call us into your organization or company and everyone’s like, what do I do about AI? Well, let’s have a conversation first, understand what you need. We have great people, great tools to solve problems for you.

Paul Ford: 0:46 Let’s be clear, when we say AI transformation, we will advise and help, but we build things with these tools. We build the software, we get your… or we help you build things. That’s right. 95% of AI projects fail. We’re the 5%. Ah, that’s nice. Thanks, thanks. So look, today we’re going to have a big discussion with Eric Ries. Hi, Eric. Welcome.

Eric Ries: 1:13 Thank you very much.

Paul Ford: 1:14 And we’re going to talk about your new book. It’s called Incorruptible. I’m going to hold it up here to the camera. And it’s a book about a lot of different things. It’s about how to build businesses, not simply more ethical, but but businesses that have a really different place in culture and it’s about long term change of how we do business. And so I think we should talk a little bit about how you got here and where you started and let’s go from there.

Eric Ries: 1:21 Sounds great. Let’s do it.

Paul Ford: 1:22 You have a a long biography. You are an author of books about, I was about to say technology, but more about culture as it applies to startups and to the valley. You didn’t start as a writer. You didn’t come out of school saying I’m going to write books.

Eric Ries: 1:24 No.

Paul Ford: 1:25 Give us the two minute journey.

Eric Ries: 1:28 Oh, yeah. If you have an image in your mind of that stereotypical kid in their parent’s basement programming computers when their parents would probably prefer they were outside.

Paul Ford: 1:34 I have an image in my mirror.

Eric Ries: 1:35 You know exactly. I am like so the cliche to type. I look back on it now and I’m like, God bless my parents for putting up with what must have seemed to them like the most unhealthy hobby of all time.

Paul Ford: 1:42 What was that first computer?

Eric Ries: 1:44 My father brought home a grey beige IBM XT personal computer with a five and a quarter inch floppy disk.

Paul Ford: 1:50 I can feel that on-off switch, right? Clunk clunk.

Eric Ries: 1:52 The little clunk clunk. Yeah, it was a very, very mechanical thing. I remember the first time I opened one of those things up and realized the five and a quarter inch floppy disk is powered by rubber bands.

Paul Ford: 1:58 Yeah, that’s right. It’s got a fan belt.

Eric Ries: 2:00 Yeah, it’s got… yeah. All I could want from the day he brought it home, all I wanted to do was learn how this thing worked, learn how to program it, learn how to make it do things. I just thought it was the most magical.

Rich Ziade: 2:11 You know what I wonder? I… this is going to… I’m going to derail immediately. But like, describe to the listeners, some of whom may be a little bit younger, what that looked like when you looked at the screen. What were you… what could you actually see?

Eric Ries: 2:11 Nothing. It was a… it was a… like a… Green, you know, teletype terminal. So we’re just talking about, like, what was it, 40 lines on a screen? Like, it was a very simple text interface. And, you know, that machine had, like, memory measured in kilobytes. It had no hard drive. A program had to fit on the 1 megabyte that you could fit onto a 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk. And it was, like, when you would lo— you turn the computer off, you had to boot it into the software that you put in the drive. That was, like, you could run one program at a time. It was an extremely primitive machine in retrospect. It’s hard to understand it because we look at it through the lens of what technology can do today. It could hardly do anything at all. And yet, somehow it was absolutely captivating.

Paul Ford: 3:41 You know my thesis is that we love deep down, we’re always searching for constraint so that we can order the world. And this was a way for you as a kid to be like, ‘Okay, this is how this works.’ This grown-up artifact, ‘I’m gonna figure it out piece by piece.’ The— and I know I’m not supposed to add too many stories, but I took a class recently in how to make synths. And it was— I was learning to solder and all that, and I had to program a little tiny microcontroller. And it was so exciting because it has, like, two megs of memory.

Eric Ries: 4:05 So fun. I love that.

Paul Ford: 4:07 Yeah, and it’s I’ve never done that before. I vibe-coded into it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, a whole world of constraints has opened for me.’ And I couldn’t think about anything else for like a week and this whole business I just put behind us.

Rich Ziade: 4:21 And so you became a chip designer for Intel, right Eric?

Eric Ries: 4:25 No, not even close. First of all, I can only do software. I’m too clumsy to do any kind of hardware. I would set everything on fire with a— with a soldering iron.

Paul Ford: 4:31 Do you ever solder? It’s very—

Eric Ries: 4:32 I have done it, but I am quite, quite poor. And I remember taking a digital circuits course in college because it was a requirement for the computer science major. It was my only foray into hardware. And I— I was in big trouble until I realized that there were these extra credit assignments you could do on the simulator. Yeah. And I was like, ‘Great! My inability to do a breadboard will be compensated for the fact that I could make anything in the simulator.’ That was like my native environment. It was so easy.

Paul Ford: 4:56 So you’re a software guy.

Eric Ries: 4:57 I’m a pure software. Software, not hardware.

Rich Ziade: 4:58 So you became a programmer for Adobe.

Eric Ries: 5:00 A computer programmer. Not for Adobe, but I was so shocked, you won’t even believe it.

Paul Ford: 5:04 And where did you grow up? Were you—

Eric Ries: 5:06 So I grew up in San Diego, California.

Rich Ziade: 5:08 Okay, so you were— you weren’t too far from the—

Eric Ries: 5:09 No, but I wasn’t in, you know, Cupertino or anything. In fact, years later when I found out that Cupertino was a real place, like, that was like Adventureland. You know, it was like the Magic Kingdom has Adventureland, it has Frontierland, it has Tomorrowland, it has Cupertino in it. That’s how I, you know, envisioned it.

Paul Ford: 5:24 It’s also wild the first time I went there and you realize how close everything is. Just right there, all these companies are all next to each other.

Eric Ries: 5:30 Xerox PARC is really close to Apple. Like, they just were driving back and forth.

Paul Ford: 5:33 Just drove right by it. No, 100%. So, sorry, what was your question?

Rich Ziade: 5:36 You became a legendary software engineer.

Eric Ries: 5:38 Well, I actually couldn’t believe it when I found out you can get paid for computer programming. Like, I would pay them! I thought it was something that you— to me that was like playing video games.

Paul Ford: 5:50 See, your parents have been trying to get you to stop doing this, you know, and do something else. Do something useful with your life. This was fun. This was fun too.

Eric Ries: 5:56 Now look, I come from a family of doctors, okay? So they want people who have a profession.

Paul Ford: 6:00 And here I am like, I want to be a computer— I couldn’t be, you know, that’s like very low on the totem pole of things I could have said.

Rich Ziade: 6:05 They’re so worried about you in the basement.

Paul Ford: 6:07 Yeah. Yeah, it’s like— so I really, again, I appreciate that they somehow managed to go with it, but I was also awfully stubborn.

Rich Ziade: 6:13 Yep.

Paul Ford: 6:13 And I, you know, I was in this in the days of Usenet.

Rich Ziade: 6:18 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 6:18 I remember the first time I got, you know, online to get on the internet to play a multi-user dungeon.

Rich Ziade: 6:24 Yep.

Paul Ford: 6:25 And in the dungeon, when you got to the highest level you could as a player, you could ascend to become a wizard.

Rich Ziade: 6:32 Sure.

Paul Ford: 6:33 Meaning someone who programs the game. And in retrospect, this was like the best possible programming environment to learn in because, first of all, I was interacting with real people in real time. People talk about how programming is like magic. But here it really was. You could actually instance an object and now you hold it in your hand. It was like very visceral. It’s a great way to learn object-oriented programming, great way to get into this.

Rich Ziade: 6:52 Gosh, that’s peak nerd.

Eric Ries: 6:54 That’s extremely dorky, yeah.

Rich Ziade: 6:55 The fact that the medieval game on Usenet integrated programming is just perfect.

Paul Ford: 7:03 For me at that age, it was like I had discovered this whole other world that was like so— I lived like Harry Potter. Any of these— any of these fictional stories, when I read those stories, I was like, oh, this is exactly— someone is like having therapy processing the experience that I actually had. And of course, in retrospect, I was interacting with adults. I didn’t— I didn’t really know that. I mean, like, now I think about that as a parent, like, oh my god. Because, you know, this was like— on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. So I also like, as a precocious kid, got to be interacting with people who took me seriously. They didn’t know who I was. And so yeah, then I started to get job offers and do, like, all this super cool adult stuff.

Eric Ries: 7:40 How old were you?

Paul Ford: 7:41 What’s that? This started when I was like 12 or 13.

Eric Ries: 7:44 So you were doing side gigs programming?

Paul Ford: 7:46 Oh, totally. And I still remember— it was very hard to actually get a paid programming job at, like— you know, I would occasionally do freelance stuff here and there. But like I said, I would do it for free. I thought I was the one getting the privilege to do it. And then, you’re going to laugh.

Rich Ziade: 7:57 Remember when Java programming came out?

Paul Ford: 7:58 Oh, yes. Sun Microsystems did one of the all-time hype jobs on a piece of technology that has ever been done. So I was sitting in my parents’ study reading the San Diego Union-Tribune when there was a front page— not front page of the business section, front page article about the new Java programming language announced by Sun. And I’m reading this article and at the end it said, free compiler download at, you know, java.sun.com. And that was the only thing I saw.

Rich Ziade: 8:27 You went straight to that Motorola modem.

Paul Ford: 8:29 I was like— I was like free, because you know, in those days, you paid for programming tools and my parents wouldn’t let me pay money for this hobby. So I download Java and I spend the weekend teaching myself how to use this. And then on Usenet, on comp.lang.java, there is an insane demand for Java, expert Java programmers, because the hype machine is out of control. So they’d be like 10 years Java programming experience required.

Eric Ries: 9:00 It’s like been two weeks. expert as anybody else.

Rich Ziade: 9:01 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 9:01 And so I, I would like apply for these jobs. Now most jobs they would say, “Great, send us your resume.”

Paul Ford: 9:02 It’s been out in beta, okay? There’s no 10. So I was like— and I just had this epiphany, I was what, maybe 15. If everybody got Java at the same time, then I’m as ex— And I’d be like, “Never mind.”

Eric Ries: 9:06 Yeah. And I, I applied for a writing job. There was a book coming out called the Black Art of Java Game Programming. It was being done by two or three authors together, and one of the authors got sick and had to drop out at the last second, so the publisher was totally desperate. And they wrote to me and instead of saying, “Can you send us a resume?” they said, “Can you send us a 20-page sample chapter on Topic X?” And I was like, whatever Topic X was, I’m an expert on that. Absolutely. No, and I’m like, “No, what is it again? You know, client-server networking? I can learn about that, no problem.” And so they, like, forgot to check who I was. They were just so eager, and they didn’t find out I was a kid until I had to sign the contract and you had to put your birth date on it. I tried to, like, smudge the ink a little bit and I remember they were like, “Mmm, we need to speak to you on the phone,” and I knew the gig was up. I was like, “Oh no, oh no, I’m caught.” But to the…

Rich Ziade: 9:57 Did you end up co-author on the book?

Eric Ries: 9:59 Yeah, I did, because by the time they realized I was a kid it was too late to do anything about it and I’d already produced the work.

Rich Ziade: 10:05 Sure.

Eric Ries: 10:05 And they were like, well, it was credible. I’ll never forget, they were like, “Does this say that your birth date is 1978?” I’m like, “Yes, sir.” And they, there’s this, like, pause on the other end of the line and they’re like, “Well, in that case your parent or guardian has to sign the contract, you’re not old enough.”

Rich Ziade: 10:17 Amazing.

Paul Ford: 10:18 There was, but for people listening, right? There really was a context for young nerds to just get up to stuff. Sometimes they’d write games and sell them in, in like a, a floppy disk would go out in a piece of plastic wrap.

Rich Ziade: 10:31 There were no ground rules yet.

Paul Ford: 10:32 It was, it was very, it was just the whole context was very, very, very different.

Rich Ziade: 10:37 It was so cool.

Eric Ries: 10:38 And it was, yeah, like we had an optimism about technology that obviously is so different than how kids are being, you know, raised today.

Paul Ford: 10:45 I think that’s right. I think we should, we should hold on to that thought, right? And then you go and you, you became kind of like a startup person for a while.

Eric Ries: 10:49 Yeah, yeah, I was in college during the dot-com bubble. So of course, like everybody else, I got swept up into that mania and had a terrible experience, didn’t know what I was doing, you know, utterly failed. And then I wanted to work, you know, for people who did understand entrepreneurship, and I took a job, you know, at a startup in Silicon Valley. That was my introduction to that legendary place.

Paul Ford: 11:11 Hmm. And then you write a book called The Lean Startup, which is frankly one of those books that people kind of hand other people. Like, “Oh, you want to do this inside of an organization?” or like, “You’re a kid who wants to start your own company?” Like, it became sort of the standard for understanding new ways of working with technology. And when was that?

Eric Ries: 11:30 That book came out in 2011.

Paul Ford: 11:34 Okay, so sort of peak of a lot of stuff, but before a lot of the sort of gloomy cloud-covered days.

Eric Ries: 11:39 Oh yes, it was a pure time of pure optimism about the possibilities.

Paul Ford: 11:43 And everything was growing and we have, you know, amazing tools like Flickr, right? Like just everything’s, you know, you’re logging into your Yahoo mail and we’re just having a good time.

Rich Ziade: 11:51 What was the business social media platform? Yammer.

Paul Ford: 11:54 Yammer!

Rich Ziade: 11:55 Yammer, that’s right. Yeah, from that time.

Paul Ford: 11:57 People were talking about the Lean Startup on Yammer. So this is, that was a book about…

Rich Ziade: 12:00 how to build, right? And it has a lot of sort of very fun advice that is very like… it’s not… you don’t want people to sit in a room at a computer. You want them out talking to customers.

Eric Ries: 12:12 You got it.

Rich Ziade: 12:13 And it’s good. It’s just like a good standard reference and I think even though we are in a slightly bleaker time, it’s definitely a good thing to engage with because it’s a positive view of building.

Eric Ries: 12:23 It is, it is. It is ultimately about building as a force for change in the world and it’s about being more scientific and more humane in the process of doing that. Which, it’s funny by look at it now as the standard reference, but of course at the time was extremely controversial.

Rich Ziade: 12:40 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a new way of working. Yeah. How so? Why controversial?

Eric Ries: 12:43 So, so for example, one of the ideas in Lean Startup is the idea of continuous deployment. Remember, it was not that long ago when the year of software was made, it was in the name of the software. Remember Windows 95, Office 2000, right? So because we released software very infrequently. And at one of the companies that I built we would release software 40 times a day on average. Now today the kids aren’t impressed with that. Yeah. But at that time, at a time when it was like considered the peak of agile to release once a month, to do it continuously was seen as almost impossible.

Paul Ford: 13:22 Reckless.

Eric Ries: 13:23 Absolutely reckless. And of course we did it with safety and with security and with automated testing and all these new, all these new techniques. And the other aspect of it was entrepreneurship was not… there’s so much entrepreneurial content now, but it was still like relatively the apprentice system, it was very waterfall-driven, it was very much like code of the visionary, you know, lock yourself in a cave for years, come out with the perfect product. Like that was considered very much conventional wisdom. And here I am, and I remember talking to some like fairly luminary Silicon Valley people who were like, ‘Who the f is this guy to tell us that we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time? What does he know?’ But of course far more people said, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for.’ Like this puts into language concepts that I’ve felt intellectually, intuitively, but could never quite articulate, you know, concepts like the pivot, minimum viable product, continuous deployment, build-measure-learn, those things are now like very much standard concepts to the point now where although the book has sold millions of copies, the vast majority of people who use those concepts have not read the book.

Paul Ford: 14:11 No, sure, of course. It’s in the culture. It’s like an incredibly strange experience where they’ll sometimes criticize it and not know what they’re criticizing because they don’t actually know what it means. You know, Jack White? They asked him, he was at a Dodgers game. And they’re like, ‘So what does it like when you hear Seven Nation Army?’ And he said, ‘It’s not really mine anymore.’ He’s like, ‘It’s kind of in the culture and it’s in the world and I… that’s a song I wrote and it feels like a different song than the one that plays in all the stadiums and arenas and one…’

Eric Ries: 14:34 Oh, that’s a great… that’s a great reference.

Rich Ziade: 14:36 So, you wrote a book called Incorruptible. Yeah. It’s coming out very soon. Well it’ll be out by the time the podcast airs. May 26th, May 26th. May 26th will be the release day.

Eric Ries: 14:47 Thank you for holding it up. Beautiful cover designed by my friend Marcus Gosling.

Paul Ford: 14:50 Beautiful cover. It’s a tough time in the world, Eric. You’ve heard. You’re like four years late with this book. But we appreciate that it’s here now. Okay, what is the book… so… there have been other…

Rich Ziade: 15:00 Books, but you know, Lean Startup was a big one. And that was about like entrepreneurship, lean in, let’s build, let’s go.

Eric Ries: 15:03 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 15:07 This book, the subtitle here is Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great.

Eric Ries: 15:11 Okay.

Rich Ziade: 15:14 So, so get me from there to here. You were like let’s go team and now you’re like hold on a minute team.

Eric Ries: 15:18 Sure. Well, look, the great privilege of my life being the Lean Startup guy. I mean you go from being a human being to being a concept in people’s mind, it’s a whole thing.

Paul Ford: 15:33 How are you with that? Are you like glad it’s happened?

Eric Ries: 15:36 I mean, it’s dehumanizing a little bit, you know, but at the end of the day, like the privilege of it is absolute every day of my life, no exceptions, somebody calls me for advice about how to start a company. Or how to revitalize an existing company or to keep a company public, like…

Paul Ford: 15:44 But no one calls you to play guitar.

Eric Ries: 15:46 Right, exactly. Yeah, okay. You get it. You become known for that thing, but I love doing it. To me, the ideas of entrepreneurship are like intrinsically interesting, so it keeps my life fresh and rich all the time. So even though I’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve built companies, I’ve built, you know, Long-Term Stock Exchange and Answer AI and Virgil and these other companies in the years since Lean Startup has come out, far more impact have I had through other entrepreneurs who I’ve helped make like billions of dollars. Like no joke. And so I’ve seen the absolute best that this industry has to offer, but man have I seen the dark side too.

Rich Ziade: 16:21 What is, okay, the best? What’s the best?

Eric Ries: 16:28 I mean, the best is we build products that can change the world.

Rich Ziade: 16:31 Okay.

Eric Ries: 16:31 And I thought it was obvious, like that old Reddit meme, that it’s for the better, right?

Rich Ziade: 16:34 Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Eric Ries: 16:35 For the better. And of course I think that’s actually one of the oversights is that a lot of these companies when they’re raising money are like rah rah I am a world-beating, I will rewire the world to my will and then you’re like oh you’re so powerful, do you have any moral responsibility? And they’re like oh no I’m just a little database plus.

Rich Ziade: 16:46 Everyone becomes a small bean when it’s… yeah.

Paul Ford: 16:48 When the ethics show up, what is the accountability?

Eric Ries: 16:50 So there’s that aspect of it. But the best of it is, you know, you build these companies that have this beautiful spark. You know, they’re like vital living organisms, they build high-quality products, they make people’s lives better. Millions of people are excited about it. And I won’t sit here and trash specific companies, but like think about how many companies we had that sense of optimism and enthusiasm about and how many of them have been dragged down into mediocrity or worse.

Paul Ford: 17:20 Yammer! You brought it up. No I’m kidding. But anyway…

Eric Ries: 17:24 Yammer got bought. I don’t like to pick on specific companies, although of course the book I have a bunch of case studies.

Rich Ziade: 17:32 Okay.

Eric Ries: 17:34 The thing is, like to just give you the best and worst of it in one story. I tell this story in the book of a guy I just call him the Professor to protect his privacy. He’s like a brand new entrepreneur in AI building this like really revolutionary technology. And he calls me for advice one day and he’s like, look, I’m in this really bizarre situation where I’m trying to get the tenured professors to leave their lab to join my startup. So they’re not like kids coming out of college. They have like hard questions for me about what is this technology going to be used for? How do I know that we’re going to be dedicated to long-term value creation or we’re going to become exploitative and use this technology for bad? technology like for blackmail because it’s that power.

Paul Ford: 18:01 Right, and it’s you’ve got tenured profs who are worried about their reps but also their ethical…

Eric Ries: 18:05 Yeah, they’re just like an ethical… and then also like, this is their life. This project is going to take many years to come to fruition. You’re asking me to dedicate my life to it, what assurances can you give me? And he’s like, well I have such good intentions.

Paul Ford: 18:16 Yeah. They’re like, mm, that’s not getting it done.

Eric Ries: 18:18 But then when he would talk to investors and say look, I have these concerns, they’d be like, oh sweetheart, that’s so nice. Yeah, pumpkin. Oh okay, but maybe you’re not too serious about making a for-profit company then, right? Like just extremely condescending. So he’s kind of like trapped. He’s like, I could see how these investors would be perfectly comfortable with me becoming a monster who can’t sleep at night as long as they make a dollar. But I literally can’t recruit the talent I need unless I can make these promises, what can I do? Anyway, I happened to be having this conversation at the same time as I was going to this event to commemorate a founder who had had an incredible run. He had made more money for his investors than they could spend in five lifetimes. I mean, just an incredible entrepreneur. And at the first opportunity, they ousted him.

Rich Ziade: 18:57 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 18:58 Because they wanted more. And it was just a very sad thing. So anyway, so I’m explaining to the guy, look, I can’t talk to you right now, I got to go to this event. I could see people streaming into the venue, people had flown in from all over the country to be at this event for this CEO. And I saw someone walk in, I was like, that’s someone who I know was laid off by that CEO. He’s still here to celebrate.

Paul Ford: 19:13 Sure.

Eric Ries: 19:14 And the founder I’m talking to, the professor, is like, wow, mad respect. That’s the kind of company I want to build one day. And I’m like, my dude, you are not listening to me. He doesn’t work there anymore.

Paul Ford: 19:21 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 19:22 This is not a party, it’s a wake.

Paul Ford: 19:25 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 19:26 And he’s like, well did he die? No, he didn’t die. Well did the company die? No, the company’s fine. He’s like, well what are you mourning? And none of us in that room that day could have answered that question. We were all like, something’s gone wrong here, but like, in retrospect, I can say I know what it is, but at the time we were like, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. He did everything right. This was a person and a company we all trusted to do the right thing. If he could be replaced at a moment’s notice, what are the promises by the new CEO going to be worth? How could we ever trust this company again? And the professor’s like, wait, wait, wait, are you saying that’s going to be me someday? I’m like, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.

Paul Ford: 19:51 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 19:52 Yeah. And he asked the question that kind of launches this whole book. He’s like, okay, but is it even possible to build an incorruptible company? And I was like, look, most people will say no. The good news is, I think the answer is yes. But the bad news is, you’ve already taken wrong steps because you’re following these best practices that we’ve all been taught are the best way to build structure and govern a company.

Paul Ford: 20:09 All right, let’s build an incorruptible company.

Eric Ries: 20:10 All right. Great idea.

Rich Ziade: 20:11 All right. You know what? We’re a consulting firm, but we build a lot of product and we’re out there in the world. We take a lot of clients in, a lot of clients from a lot of different industries. And sometimes people don’t like the clients we bring in. Like some people will be really excited to work with them, others won’t. Like a big bank or things like that. Sure. We pivot all the time. So help us get incorruptible, man. What do we do? Where do we start?

Eric Ries: 20:30 Okay. Sure.

Paul Ford: 20:35 You’re assuming we’re already corrupt and we need to be fixable.

Rich Ziade: 20:39 Rephrase, please. I was raised Presbyterian. So— We’re not anything yet.

Paul Ford: 21:04 We’re small. It’s okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric Ries: 21:07 And you’ve got the two founders here. It’s about 40 people all in but—

Paul Ford: 21:10 That’s not that small anymore.

Rich Ziade: 21:11 No. Well, that’s not that small anymore. Yeah. Hand us a playbook.

Eric Ries: 21:14 Yeah, well, and this is—well, he did I think. I think that’s—yeah, you’re holding it in your hand. Well, and I promise because there’s people hear what the book is about and it’s like, “Is this going to be grim?” And look, part one of the book is literally called The Shape of the Abyss. Okay? So I’m not going to—I’m not going to sugarcoat anything or pull any punches.

Paul Ford: 21:27 That sounds fun, I mean—

Eric Ries: 21:29 We are in a very—

Paul Ford: 21:30 That’s a—

Eric Ries: 21:31 We’re in a dark time, okay? There’s bad stuff going on and I—and I really want founders to understand what they’re up against. There is this force in the world. I call it financial gravity. This pull in companies down into mediocrity or worse. When you—when I tell you that your favorite restaurant got bought by private equity, is your first reaction like, “Oh, I bet the food got a lot better?”

Rich Ziade: 21:46 Oh, it tastes like money now. Yeah.

Eric Ries: 21:49 How is it possible that the capital structure of a company could have a flavor? Oh, isn’t that interesting?

Paul Ford: 21:54 I have an answer for you. It’s the company Sysco backing up and like putting that—that—that hose out of the—the truck and just here, it’s both bread and meat. Yeah, yeah. Okay so yes, private equity, suddenly the breadsticks taste like plastic.

Eric Ries: 22:13 It’s like all of a sudden—and it’s funny I’ve been telling that joke for a while now and people come up to me after lectures now and they’re like, “I know what restaurant you’re talking about.” And of course they all name a different one. So we’ve built this economy that’s just loaded up with ways to make money without creating value, or even by destroying value. So if we don’t want that to happen to our company, we need two things. They’re called the blueprint. The first thing is an inner thing. Are we aligned? You mentioned like what clients to work with. I’m not going to tell you what your values should be. But are you and your team aligned around some common set of values? Is there in fact a mission or just a mission statement? Yeah. Right? So that’s the first question. Um, what kind of fiduciary commitments are we prepared to make? Who would you rather die than betray? I won’t tell you who it should be. But if you tell me it’s shareholders only, I’m a little worried for you. Who would you rather die than betray, Rich?

Rich Ziade: 22:57 I’m confused. And I’ll tell you why I’m confused. Up until now, it sounds like you were sort of drawing a—an ethical framework.

Eric Ries: 23:08 Uh-huh.

Rich Ziade: 23:09 But what I’m hearing here is that—because you mentioned growth.

Eric Ries: 23:11 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 23:13 And it’s like, well, he’s oscillating between ethical and—

Eric Ries: 23:16 —the right way to make money, right?

Rich Ziade: 23:18 Which is—

Eric Ries: 23:20 —coming up, it’s about to happen.

Paul Ford: 23:21 Yeah, yeah.

Rich Ziade: 23:22 So—so—structural maybe is the better word? Like what you’re about, which really has nothing to do with your being—let me frame it in a much dumber way. That restaurant that sold to private equity.

Eric Ries: 23:39 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 23:40 Perfectly ethical. They just made a decision to sell to private equity. There’s nothing unethical about selling to private equity. The salmon gets a little blander, but we’ll put that aside for a sec. So, what you’re describing is—

Eric Ries: 23:54 Yeah. It’s not primarily an ethical concern, although I’d be happy if people did it just on the basis of ethics. But interestingly, like, so this is— This is the thing I have to kind of approach it carefully because most of your listeners don’t think what I’m describing is possible. So I try to be, you know, real circumspect about it.

Rich Ziade: 24:05 Yeah, but let’s go, let’s be, let’s be real circumspect about it.

Eric Ries: 24:08 Maybe the best way, maybe before I try—I was about to do the blueprint like as an abstract thing, let me tell you a story first.

Paul Ford: 24:13 Yeah, tell us the story.

Rich Ziade: 24:15 I like stories.

Eric Ries: 24:16 Do you guys know the legend of Saul Price?

Paul Ford: 24:18 No.

Eric Ries: 24:19 See, this is Saul Price is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, but he’s kind of fallen out of the popular culture. Um, in the 1950s, Saul created a company called FedMart.

Rich Ziade: 24:26 Okay.

Eric Ries: 24:27 Saul is widely considered to be the father of modern retail. If you were in the retail sector, you would know his name. If you want to see how influential he is, um, a guy name Sam Walton decided to create a retailer. He decided to call his company Walmart as an intentional tribute to Saul’s company FedMart.

Rich Ziade: 24:42 Okay.

Eric Ries: 24:44 FedMart was the original American discount retailer. Now the interesting thing about Saul is that before he became a retailer, he was a lawyer. And as a lawyer, he was trained that he was a fiduciary for his client.

Rich Ziade: 24:52 Sure.

Eric Ries: 24:54 So when he became a retailer, he asked himself this question: who’s my client? And he thought the customer was his client. And he called his philosophy of business being a fiduciary to the customer. So, for example, when competitors would try to undercut FedMart by offering a product at lower than their own cost, Saul would post their Sunday circulars up in his own store and say, don’t buy this product from me, you can get it cheaper from those guys, because he felt that’s my ethical obligation to customers and as a result, customers trusted him. They trusted his company and they would drive miles out of their way to shop there. So FedMart prospered, it got huge, he took the company public, and you can imagine where this is going. As a public company, he was subject to all this pressure, this gravitational pressure to raise prices and lower wages and the whole thing, culminating in a big fight in 1975 when he comes into work one day and he can’t get into his office because they’ve changed the locks on his door and he doesn’t work there anymore.

Paul Ford: 25:48 Poor Saul.

Eric Ries: 25:50 Poor Saul. Now, that’s just like my friend I was telling this story about the event, like that is so common. Now what’s so interesting about this is what happened next. The investors got their way. Saul out of the way, the company could be run according to retail best practices. He had, by 1975, he’d been running this company for more than 20 years. It took the investors only seven years to bankrupt it.

Rich Ziade: 26:11 Sure.

Eric Ries: 26:12 By betraying everything that it stood for. But I like this story, that’s a bleak story, but I like the happy ending to it because Saul, classic entrepreneur that he was, when this happened to him, he took two weeks off, licked his wounds, and then he was back. He leased the office upstairs from FedMart and he started a new company which he called the Price Club.

Paul Ford: 26:33 Whoa.

Eric Ries: 26:34 Now, most people don’t remember Price Club today, but when I was a kid, that’s where we shopped. I didn’t even know that Price was a guy’s name. I thought it was just the store where you get the low price.

Paul Ford: 26:37 Is that his real name?

Eric Ries: 26:38 His real name was Saul Price. Ironically his name was so good.

Rich Ziade: 26:40 That’s so good.

Paul Ford: 26:41 That’s just winning out of the box.

Eric Ries: 26:43 It’s incredible, right? And today you don’t really know Price Club because of something else that happened at the same time, because he was not the only person who quit FedMart in protest of his firing, so too did a guy named Jim Sinegal. For those who know the history of retail, this name is going to start to sound familiar because he helped start Costco. Bill Price Club and then a few years later he started his own company and a few years after that his company merged with Saul’s to form a company that they called Price Costco.

Paul Ford: 27:09 Yeah. Okay.

Eric Ries: 27:11 And now it’s starting to sound familiar. We call that company Costco today. Today Costco is a 400 billion dollar public company that is still run according to Saul’s philosophy of fiduciary to the customer. And I used to think when I would, you know, hear about Costco, Costco is like the exception to every business rule. People love to talk about how it’s the world’s few companies that can really keep its promises, it’s a company that has what I call integrity.

Paul Ford: 27:31 Famously treats its employees well. Pays above market wages, hires and promotes from within, um, most- performs almost 40% of all the health food safety inspections that are done in the United States, almost as many as the federal government itself.

Rich Ziade: 27:44 Also very serious about diversity and stuck to its guns even as culture changed around it. Yeah.

Eric Ries: 27:49 Absolutely. It- it was funny they- they were doing DEI when DEI was super unpopular, then they were doing it when it was super popular, and then they kept doing it when it was… they just don’t care. They’re like we do our thing. So anyway—

Rich Ziade: 27:59 Well they- they also are like ‘it’s good for business, get out of my- get out of my way’.

Eric Ries: 28:02 Get out of my way. That’s absolutely how they conceive of their thing. Now I used to think, well I guess the reason that Costco can get away with being different from everybody else is they’re just so big, too big for Wall Street to mess with. You’re supposed to laugh.

Rich Ziade: 28:15 Nothing on this earth is too big for Wall Street to mess with.

Eric Ries: 28:18 Costco is protected by what I call a governance fortress. Costco routinely is given the worst possible governance scores from governance ratings agencies because Costco simply defies our modern best practices. They have a- they do it a different way. And it’s this combination of the ethos of Sol Price and the integrity of Costco, this is the blueprint we want to go after. So when we go back to the question Paul asked you about who would you rather die than betray, like how about your employees? How about your clients?

Paul Ford: 28:42 You don’t- I don’t put you on the spot, but like I bet you that the reason you started this company was something to do with them. It’s the— I mean employees are a given, right? That’s the community—

Eric Ries: 28:49 Are they? Are you a Delaware C-corp?

Paul Ford: 28:51 Are we? Do you remember? We are.

Rich Ziade: 28:54 Okay.

Eric Ries: 28:55 Yeah. Yeah. So unless you took a very special step at the beginning, I bet you have what’s called a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.

Paul Ford: 29:01 I mean, I was born with that fiduciary duty, Eric. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric Ries: 29:08 Yeah, yeah. So if you look at Costco, like one of the more recent activist campaigns against Costco, there’s been a lot. Wall Street’s tried this many times. You look at the complaints that analysts have about Costco, they’ll say stuff like this, they’ll say—

Rich Ziade: 29:19 So just to further to the audience, Costco is- is a publicly- publicly traded company. So they’re owned by the public, they have millions of retail— disclosure responsibility, they report quarterly, they do all the things people say automatically lead to corruption.

Paul Ford: 29:31 And it’s very- and it’s very profitable, very, very successful company, one of the best performing stocks in the entire S&P of the last 40 years.

Eric Ries: 29:39 But it’s just not enough. Nothing is ever enough. And I- I quote in the book an analyst, a Wall Street analyst who said something like ‘Costco is a company that takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invests it in improving the customer experience.’ That’s a criticism.

Rich Ziade: 29:57 That’s awesome. That’s— wow. He set that right up for you.

Eric Ries: 29:59 Because— Our modern economy is driven by an idea that’s called shareholder primacy, which is that a corporation is not a vital, living, beautiful thing that makes quality products. Oh, employees are a given, really? No. It is just a financial instrument to enrich its shareholders, that’s what it’s for. Which means, like unless you take special steps, your corporate charter is interpreted to mean you have to do this thing, which means most companies have a mission statement,

Rich Ziade: 30:29 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 30:30 but then their actual legal charter, their legal purpose is to do something different. And in that quote from that analyst you can see the idea. The idea is that customers and employees are a resource to be mined for the benefit of investors. That’s what’s going on with the private equity takeover. That’s what’s going on when companies go public and then it gets really—like this corruption is treating human lives like a consumable resource. And obviously people are like, wait are you talking about AI? Yeah, no kidding, right? So we’ll get to that, I’m sure. But that’s a really dangerous idea.

Rich Ziade: 30:57 Is corruption too strong of a word here?

Eric Ries: 31:00 Yeah, most people think so.

Rich Ziade: 31:02 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 31:03 But I don’t think so. I think that we are swimming in this corruption, so much so that we don’t even know what to call it. Like I go around, I’ve been talking to young people, old people, board members, CEOs—we all live this thing where brands are being destroyed, where companies become malign, where like we’re constantly being betrayed and we’ve been taught that it’s normal. People are like, what do you call it? Mission drift? Bureaucracy? Like no, we don’t have a word for it and the thing that clicked for me for this book was that our grandparents would not have found this difficult to name. They would have had no trouble calling this corruption. We think of corruption as this very narrow thing that’s like about, you know, bribery or embezzlement or something, but they had a much broader view of it. To them corruption meant something more like corrosion, like an illicit or an unprofitable way of making money. And I think we have to bring that back. I’m sick and tired of people telling me about some horrible person, well at least you got to hand it to him, at least it works.

Rich Ziade: 31:54 No kidding, of course it works, that’s what makes it dangerous.

Paul Ford: 31:56 No but here’s the thing. You wrote The Lean Startup. You’re very much a Valley guy. Encourage—not encourage, but like you are part of the Valley. You’re Valley infrastructure. Fair enough. And the Valley seems to be going from a New York point of view through what I would call a state of ethical collapse. So you’re telling us, Rich is a lawyer, I’m a journalist, we operate pretty transparently and I’m like, okay, good, like sure, this is good, it’s good to have this in the world. I like staying aligned, I like staying transparent. And our customer is our clients and if our clients are thriving and we’re driving growth towards them, we’re gonna be doing okay. And I will find balance there. We went through it with the last agency, we’ll find balance here and we’ll make sure that employees have a voice. So we’ll find a framework. I’ll read the book, like, so and so. Now take me back to San Francisco where people are like now we’re just going to lose 20 million jobs next week and it’s okay because the end’s almost here.

Eric Ries: 32:53 It’s extremely sad.

Paul Ford: 32:55 Can you get through to them with this message?

Eric Ries: 33:00 Yeah, yeah I can. Like it’s interesting, like I just—

Paul Ford: 33:00 Might be too late, but give it a swing.

Eric Ries: 33:02 I don’t think so. Yes, I know obviously there’s some people who are losing their minds right now. And look, we call it LLM psychosis. I mean, that’s literally what it’s called. This condition people are getting into where they’re like, their sense of what is real is being undermined by the fact they’re talking to the AI all the time.

Rich Ziade: 33:17 Some of the smartest people we know have been saying crazy things to us.

Eric Ries: 33:22 Just absolutely crazy stuff. And we’re going to have to, we’re going to get through this period. It’s going to be dark before it gets better. And I personally think these CEOs and executives who are like palpably turned on by the possibility of laying off all their team, I’m just like, if you hate your employees so much, why did you hire them in the first place? Like that whole thing is really gross. I personally do not think AI should ever, ever be used as a replacement for human creativity. It’s not good at that, but rather as an augmentation of it. We can get to that, of course. But most of these guys, even the ones who are like publicly having a meltdown in front of everybody, they didn’t start out that way. I know a lot of them from when they were young.

Rich Ziade: 33:54 Yeah, what the hell happened, man? ‘Cause we know some of them too. Let me defend them.

Paul Ford: 33:59 All right, go defend them.

Eric Ries: 34:00 Yes, please.

Rich Ziade: 34:01 I’ll try to defend them. Because I think it’s a page out of the kinds of businesses we’ve built together—I’ve built personally and I’ve built with Paul last time. I don’t think they’re relishing the, like, swaths of layoffs. I really don’t. I think their bearings are around survival and the paranoia that can kick in in a dramatic—like, I built an agency, we built an agency together, and we understand, sort of, low visibility, high volatility business. And the decisions you make in that environment are less about, I’m going to just park the charter for a minute here and do what feels like really delicious to me and my shareholders, and more about, like, I think I’m going to have to make some moves here so I can survive another day.

Eric Ries: 34:48 Services is a very existential business. You never can build up too much cash.

Rich Ziade: 34:54 And just to sort of draw a dotted line to what’s happening in the Valley right now, I think everyone is disoriented right now, and I think they’re feeling like that guy on the horizon is going to bite my head off if I don’t make some dramatic moves. And I think their bearings are around the decisions they’re making.

Eric Ries: 35:13 Yeah, that’s certainly true.

Rich Ziade: 35:14 And because a lot of these, they’re doing it and they’re not even—like, it’s not even to sort of scoop in more profits. They’re just like, I got to do more—

Eric Ries: 35:24 Well, okay, yeah, that’s all true and also when Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of Block, the stock went up so much that he made like two billion dollars that day.

Paul Ford: 35:35 I’m sure he needs good days. Good for god’s sake.

Eric Ries: 35:37 But you don’t think every executive watching that was like, wait a second, I can be rewarded for this sociopathic behavior? Of course they are.

Rich Ziade: 35:44 This always happens with layoffs too, where it’s like somebody finally gets it together and does a big layoff and then like five other companies just jump in.

Eric Ries: 35:51 Yeah, Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford did the research on this. He called it a social contagion. Yeah, sure. That like even executives who know it’s value destroying do it anyway. And that kind of is when I talk about financial gravity, it’s actually a psychological— logical mechanism, by which values are unconsciously transmitted from those who have resources to those who want resources.

Rich Ziade: 36:06 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 36:06 So all these guys, they thought if they got rich, they would be powerful and free.

Paul Ford: 36:10 Yeah, no it’s true.

Eric Ries: 36:11 And they are, they have been co-opted like almost captured. To me, it’s like the… like if you think of a celestial object being captured by the gravitational well of a larger one. This is what’s happened to them and like, and it’s their lack of dignity and their lack of the inability to… like they thought they would be so free if they got so rich,

Paul Ford: 36:31 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 36:32 forgetting that the more valuable an organization becomes, the more successful it is, the more valuable it is as a target.

Paul Ford: 36:41 I think I think I agree with a lot of that. And I think some of them are just, you know, relishing the yacht that’s getting built and what I mean, there’s wealth. But there’s-

Eric Ries: 36:49 But some of them have more wealth than that. So what do they need more wealth for?

Paul Ford: 36:51 Well, I don’t, here’s what I’m getting… they run out of ideas. I think some of them are just hyper-competitive and insane and it’s just small penis stuff. Like there’s some of that, right? I’m not gonna deny that. But I think for a many of them,

Rich Ziade: 37:04 Name names.

Paul Ford: 37:05 I’m sorry?

Rich Ziade: 37:05 Go ahead.

Paul Ford: 37:06 We’ll include a chart in the podcast notes. I really think they’ve lost their bearings on what competition is right now because I don’t think we’ve, like literally a new sport showed up with new tools and a new kind of ball and everyone has lost their bearings. And I feel like-

Rich Ziade: 37:21 Have you ever seen kids at a birthday party when the piñata, like, lets out all the-

Paul Ford: 37:25 They lose their minds, right? And they become like violent out of control monsters over Tootsie Rolls because if they don’t get in there and push all the other kids away, they won’t get twenty-two cents of sugar.

Eric Ries: 37:35 Okay, now, okay, this is all true, this is all true. And yet, here’s some thing I want us to really grapple with, okay? We’ve all been indoctrinated into the idea that this kind of ruthless behavior is more competitive. Like it’s ultimately what is necessary for survival because we’ve internalized this economics-finance lesson that we live in a race to the bottom. And and this is the way econ is taught in business school still to this day. They’ll be like, oh, let’s say you, you have a plantation.

Paul Ford: 38:00 Oof.

Rich Ziade: 38:00 Don’t use the plantation.

Paul Ford: 38:01 But okay.

Eric Ries: 38:03 That’s how it’s taught. Go check the econ textbooks. It’s very common.

Paul Ford: 38:05 Really?

Eric Ries: 38:06 Yeah. Uh, you are really nice to your workers and you use organic materials and you don’t use pesticides and you do this-

Paul Ford: 38:14 I guess it’s good they say workers.

Eric Ries: 38:18 I guess. Yeah. And blah, blah, blah, but uh-oh, the plantation down the street, they’re more ruthless. They treat their workers badly. They don’t care about quality. They undercut you on price and then they drive you out of business, right? You’ve all heard this parable.

Paul Ford: 38:30 Sure.

Rich Ziade: 38:30 Sure.

Eric Ries: 38:31 All right. What’s so interesting to me about this parable is it is trying to smuggle into the dialogue empirically disputable things as universal truths. For example, you’re assuming that customers won’t pay for quality.

Paul Ford: 38:44 Mm-hmm.

Eric Ries: 38:45 But is that always true? You’re assuming that treating your workers like crap and having them die on the job and have bad attrition, that’s gonna lower your costs? Are you sure? So in fact, this book is loaded with evidence that companies that are purpose-driven, that are trustworthy, that are run for the mission outperform.

Paul Ford: 39:00 Do better.

Eric Ries: 39:00 they are financially better and better off, and of course in all the other things that we truly care about. They outperform.

Paul Ford: 39:04 It’s weird because I opened it up, it says Incorruptible on the front but then it just becomes, it’s called Das Kapital.

Eric Ries: 39:10 No, see this is the thing, like people want to make everything into a highly polarizing topic, I understand.

Paul Ford: 39:16 I’m throwing that to you. Okay.

Eric Ries: 39:18 No, no, no, it’s fine. I’ve had people—

Rich Ziade: 39:20 You’re saying it’s good for business.

Eric Ries: 39:22 It is. I’ve had test readers of this book tell me that it is much too harsh on capitalism, and I’ve had younger readers tell me it is the first book they’ve ever read in their life that defends capitalism.

Rich Ziade: 39:29 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 39:30 What’s funny is that the word capitalism is not really in it. I’m just trying to present what the research shows, what the facts show.

Paul Ford: 39:37 So one more counter.

Eric Ries: 39:38 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 39:39 This is far and away the most successful economic system in history. Like, the wealth amassed—we probably don’t deserve a lot of it, frankly, but it freaking worked real well. And the Valley, this little town, frankly, the value creation there—

Eric Ries: 39:58 It’s been incredible.

Paul Ford: 39:59 —has been incredible. And one can argue that that is a product of a lot of the systems that are in place and a lot of that competitive environment.

Eric Ries: 40:07 True.

Paul Ford: 40:08 I’m going to say something that may land a little off-color. There’s a European vibe to your thesis here, which Europe’s kind of going through it—they don’t innovate a lot, there’s a lot of bureaucracy, it’s hard to stand up a business. I have a friend who wanted to open a cafe in Paris and got stonewalled with all the paperwork and all the fees and all the stuff starting anew, right?

Eric Ries: 40:21 Right.

Paul Ford: 40:22 Whereas here, you can go. And that is part of the—it’s ingrained in American thinking, right?

Eric Ries: 40:31 Right.

Paul Ford: 40:32 And for better or worse, I’m not saying I’m not defending it, I just wanted to put it forward as a counter.

Eric Ries: 41:01 No, no, I understand where you’re coming from, but I would dispute the premise of your question. Not because I think the European system is bad—like, I don’t even agree with the factual assessment of Europe versus the US—but this book is written from a US perspective, because this is the thing I think most of us do not realize: the specific problems that we’re dealing with in this country, many of them were caused by relatively recent changes that are not historical parts of the American way. So for example, the idea of shareholder primacy dates to the 1980s, not the 1880s or the 1780s.

Rich Ziade: 41:35 Cocaine, baby.

Paul Ford: 41:36 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 41:37 Yeah. So maybe Reagan more than cocaine, but okay.

Paul Ford: 41:40 Well, but let’s—

Eric Ries: 41:41 But unlike Reagan, shareholder primacy was never, ever, ever subject to any kind of popular referendum or legislative action. It was enacted by a very small cadre of judges, lawyers, and legal academics.

Paul Ford: 41:57 Sure.

Eric Ries: 41:58 So let’s go back, not to antiquity, but for how corporations were— For the vast majority of the time there’s been a Republic here—

Paul Ford: 42:03 In America.

Eric Ries: 42:04 In America, strictly on the American model. Before 1899 in Delaware, okay, it’s not ancient history, if you wanted to incorporate a company, you had to declare what its public purpose was. It was a prerequisite. You had to say, ‘this is the public benefit that will be accrued to the public if we are allowed to do this company.’ If you were the richest man in America in the 19th century and you wanted to borrow a bunch of money from banks and take over a certain company and change its charter from making a railroad to enriching me and my shareholder buddies, that would have been considered a crime and the courts would void your charter. So, this is not some ancient… this is relatively recently, even up until the 1950s, even as we had this idea that was called general incorporation, meaning anyone should be allowed to form a company for any reason, it was still seen as completely obvious as it would have been to Adam Smith that every corporation should be incorporated to do a specific thing.

Rich Ziade: 43:03 A specific thing. It could be for profit. It doesn’t have to be for a public good.

Eric Ries: 43:07 No, I’m talking about for-profit companies. That to make a profit nonetheless was meant to create more value than was captured. The idea was you’re creating surplus value in the world, some of which you capture for yourself. That is the ancient wisdom. That’s the American way. This more recent extractive turn of American capitalism is actually I think very self-destructive and the evidence shows… like the argument people make that capitalism is a system that has created so much value is not the argument I think people think it is. It makes so much value that it can support a whole lot of bullshit. We can have incredibly value-destroying practices that on average are still averaged out by the tremendous growth of the overall system. But if you look at the data, first of all, the vast majority of new value creation created in this country, especially in the public markets, is accruing from a very small number of companies. Most companies are losing value, not creating value, in our modern economy. Secondly, the average tenure of executives at companies, the average lifespan of public companies, the average number of public companies in this country, and the average holding period of stocks, if you look at any of those graphs, they are straight down. We are in an era of temporary organizations being led by temporary managers for the benefit of temporary owners and then we’re like ‘how come no one trusts us? Why would they?’ So I think we’ve made a bit of a wrong turn that we could still do something about. And since no democratic action was ever consented to, we don’t even need to pass a new law. We just have to decide this idea of shareholder primacy is ludicrous and be done with it.

Paul Ford: 44:41 This makes sense and is heartening for someone who… I think I’ve always believed that making money and being decent and having values can coexist. But the ultimate test has arrived, right? Humanity’s final exam is here.

Eric Ries: 44:59 Humanity’s final exam is… yeah.

Paul Ford: 45:00 Yeah, yeah. I mean, AI is… I’ve never seen the velocity—

Rich Ziade: 45:00 intensity of something so dramatic land in our laps… here we are. There’s conversations about it starting and, boy, you timed your book impeccably here.

Eric Ries: 45:10 I know. Listen, I didn’t know when I started writing this that the issue of public corruption would be so on people’s minds. I wish it wasn’t, but here we are.

Rich Ziade: 45:18 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 45:18 And well, at the same time, this is a moment where the lack of distrust for giant AI efforts is so great that…

Rich Ziade: 45:26 Out of the box, detection…

Paul Ford: 45:27 it’s off the charts.

Eric Ries: 45:28 Off the charts.

Paul Ford: 45:29 you could see people saying we’re going to make a more ethical AI company just from a business point of view.

Eric Ries: 45:35 That’s how Anthropic was founded in the first place.

Paul Ford: 45:37 Yeah, and it still, it remains a B corp, right?

Eric Ries: 45:40 Yeah, so it’s a public benefit corp. I helped them set up their governance so that’s in Chapter 11 of the book for those who want to look. And for the record, I’m not taking credit for their incredible success, nor do I want to be responsible for all the things they do, okay? Like I’m not trying to say that—

Rich Ziade: 45:52 I hope you got some of the juice though, Eric.

Eric Ries: 45:54 No, no, I did this pro bono. I didn’t make a single dollar from it.

Rich Ziade: 45:56 That’s okay.

Paul Ford: 45:58 It’s because I’m in a cohort where a lot of online progressive types and they tended to like drift towards Claude because they want to learn about this stuff. When Anthropic started to pay Elon Musk for the data center, everybody freaked out.

Eric Ries: 46:10 Yeah, of course, everybody’s upset, yeah.

Paul Ford: 46:12 Everybody freaked out, but I was like, but if you were paying attention to this organization, this is utterly in line with their ethics in every way. Like I didn’t see this in any way as them going off of their mission or their beam. I don’t agree with it. I didn’t like it. But at the same time, I’m like no, I made a deal with them when I started using their products and they’re honoring their part of the deal.

Eric Ries: 46:31 So when we say that a company—this is really interesting, we live in such a polarized time and as a business author this is a real pain. Because if I mention a company and I use vaguely positive sounding language…

Rich Ziade: 46:40 Oh yeah.

Paul Ford: 46:42 If you say business is good, you’ve screwed up.

Eric Ries: 46:45 People are all so angry about it. But actually, to me, to make a profit means that its correct definition is to maximize human flourishing.

Paul Ford: 46:52 Okay.

Eric Ries: 46:53 Not just money, flourishing. Because what we currently—the distinction we currently draw between for-profit and non-profit is totally incoherent. So obviously people learn all about that all in the book. When the founders of Anthropic left OpenAI, this is what, three or four OpenAI crises ago? It’s hard for me to keep track, I mean there’s been how many there’s been. But like because I played a very bit part in helping them set up the structure. They’re not just a public benefit corp, which I think every—every mission-driven for-profit company should be at the absolute bare minimum. But they also have something called the Long-term Benefit Trust. Which is a set of outside trustees who have the responsibility and the power to hold the for-profit directors to account. This is an incredibly old structure. The German optics company Zeiss, who made our lenses probably, had this structure in 1887. So it’s not like some new-fangled thing. It’s so old that there’s a whole dataset of companies that have that structure that shows that they’re just more stable long-term, they’re five times or six times more likely to live to year 50. There’s all these commercial benefits, financial benefits, even before we get to the ethical, environmental, other benefits. Anyway, I bring this up because when I say that…

Paul Ford: 48:00 The company did the right thing. People get all hinky about it. It’s like, wait, am I saying that I agree with their values? No. Part of the reason why people gravitated to Claude when Anthropic refused that money from the DOD was not necessarily because they even agreed Anthropic did the right thing in that moment, but rather that we have respect for companies that defend their own values and act consistently with them, have the strength to do so.

Rich Ziade: 48:24 Yeah, it’s the word consistency to me. It’s almost as a consumer, I’m just like, I want to know that the thing I’m buying will be the same thing tomorrow.

Paul Ford: 48:33 You know what it’s gonna be.

Rich Ziade: 48:34 Yeah.

Eric Ries: 48:35 And you mentioned Costco’s fight over DEI. One of the most interesting subplots of that whole thing—for the people that don’t know, there’s a bunch of, you know, DEI’s become super unpopular recently, there’s been all this anti-DEI activism, and an activist tried that same playbook that had worked great at Target, they tried it at Costco, and Costco just told them to f-off. They were just like, ‘No, we don’t do that.’ So they forced a shareholder vote on this policy, and Costco won the vote 98 percent to two. Now, what’s interesting about Costco is they have literally millions of retail shareholders all over this country. You’re telling me that 98 percent of Costco customers are woke? No! Obviously not. People who probably don’t agree with DEI nonetheless understood that this is Costco’s decision to make, not some outside agitator, and nonetheless—

Rich Ziade: 49:21 And they trusted Costco.

Paul Ford: 49:23 They trust them.

Rich Ziade: 49:24 Let this organization continue along its system. It seems to be good enough. It’s very successful.

Paul Ford: 49:31 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 49:32 I mean, there’s also just a sense of like, ‘This is good enough. It’s very successful.’ The hot dogs are still a dollar.

Paul Ford: 49:41 $1.50, yeah.

Eric Ries: 49:42 $1.50, yeah. Have been since 1986. That’s also in the book. The backstory of that is crazy about how much work they have undertaken to keep that price point because it’s not a loss leader. They really want to make money on everything they sell. It’s incredible.

Rich Ziade: 50:00 That’s amazing.

Eric Ries: 50:02 It’s incredible.

Rich Ziade: 50:06 I mean, one way to frame the book is that it’s a guide and it’s advice for business leaders and whatnot.

Paul Ford: 50:11 For sure.

Rich Ziade: 50:12 There’s guide and advice, and then there’s laws, and then there’s a lot of conversation right now about—I mean, Anthropic is a positive story. I see it as a positive signal. It’s early, but promising. There are other behemoths right now in the space that don’t mirror that same position and posture and whatnot. So there’s a lot of conversation—there’s starting to be conversation now about regulation, right? And so this is a book. It’s not a law. It’s not a set of laws or guidelines. What would you like to see happen? I mean, obviously holy grail, everybody buys the book, the leaders buy the book, they buy in, the customers buy the book, and the world’s a better place. But we know the world’s—

Eric Ries: 50:40 Well, there is—and there is—there’s a strong case in here that’s very interesting, which is Anthropic was always coming from behind, and now it’s the biggest AI company. It’s definitely the one that continues to operate in the most consistent manner, and it has stayed pretty close to its roots. Even though, like I said, I may not agree with everything they do, I understand where it’s coming from. And as a result, they’ve become the biggest.

Rich Ziade: 51:00 company and I feel that the people will not draw the line between the structure that was in place and this outcome. They’ll just be like, ‘Oh, they’re just smarter,’ or—

Paul Ford: 51:08 Or, ‘Oh, it’s just— it’s the same.’ It’s gonna be like Costco where they’re like, ‘Oh, they’re just the exception.’ But these exceptions are driven by a willingness to buck these best practices.

Eric Ries: 51:15 Costco thrives. There’s— and I tell a whole bunch of stories of companies in the book, from old companies like Novo Nordisk to new companies like Tony’s Chocolonely and Anthropic. It’s like, if you notice— if you pay attention to the pattern, it’s actually very striking. And what’s really interesting for leaders is to ask yourself the question, ‘How come I’m hearing about it on a podcast from this random guy? How come my lawyers have never told me? How come my bankers have never mentioned it? Why do I—’ Like, there’s this whole body of research that there are better ways to build companies. Like, most leaders have never seen the evidence that employee ownership drives commercial outcomes. It’s so powerful that in one meta-analysis of 55,000 companies, they showed that employee ownership exhibits dose response. 0% ownership is worse than 10% is worse than 50% is worse than 100%, just from a commercial growth perspective, before we get to any benefit to the employees whatsoever. So I think there’s, like, almost like our birthright as leaders has been stolen from us. There’s a bunch of knowledge that— that is, like, latent, that is lying around waiting for us to act on. And so for— like, my goal with the book was just to put those pieces together and show people a roadmap to how to access it. And this is not just a leadership thing either, because every one of these principles can be understood in reverse. I’m a founder, so of course I tell every story from Anthropic’s perspective, from Costco’s perspective. I can’t tell a story from— from the employee’s perspective, from the customer— I’m just wired that way. But this is the same. So this is— we say things like, ‘Okay, companies that are trustworthy, that do the right thing, they have greater employee loyalty, they have better customer loyalty, they raise money at— they make more money for investors.’ That is a leadership guide, but it’s also a shopping guide and it’s also a guide about where to work and where to invest your money. So I think there is, like, a nascent movement brewing here to say, like, we— we spend so much of our energy and time on the question of, ‘What should companies be allowed to do or not do?’ An important question, but I don’t have anything new to say about that. My question is kind of a more old-fashioned question: what should we ought to want to do? And once we start to form new ideas about that, that allows us to build standards, to hold people to account, to start to be more clear, as our grandparents were, that we want to buy products without fearing that they’ll become corrupted. We want to work at companies where we don’t feel like we’re complicit in something awful and where we demand that that consistency be baked in to the organizations that— that govern our everyday life.

Rich Ziade: 53:47 Well, and I think in a couple weeks we’ll have that. Okay, okay, this is very good. It’s very important. I think let me— let me ask you, you’re from the— you’re from the Valley. You like a long bet, right?

Eric Ries: 53:59 Sure.

Rich Ziade: 54:00 Let’s say— Eric reads this and they’re into it. How long do you think it would take to turn corporate life in America around to have this system? Like, how long would you give it? You think that this would take—

Eric Ries: 54:11 Okay, I’m not making a prediction. Because like honestly I don’t know and I don’t think it’s any of our business to know. Like my view is you don’t do the right thing because it’s likely to succeed, you do it because it’s the right thing, period. So if this takes a year or 100 years, makes no difference to me. But if you look at the shift from what I call purposeful incorporation to shareholder primacy.

Rich Ziade: 54:30 Okay.

Eric Ries: 54:31 That took approximately 50 years.

Rich Ziade: 54:34 Okay.

Eric Ries: 54:35 So, it’s not that long. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not 100, that’s not 500 years. And the way you know it’s possible is if you think about the economy that our grandparents inhabited, it’s unrecognizably different from our economy. So too our grandchildren’s economy could be different than the one we inhabit. So I think the sense of pervasive inevitability that our current financial system has is its most pernicious attribute. Because it makes us all feel a real lack of agency, lack of ability to change. But we’re living through an era of institutional collapse. So new institutions are going to need to be built, we’re going to need leaders and entrepreneurs to tackle that challenge and if they don’t even have in their minds the possibility of a better future, what can they use to guide them?

Rich Ziade: 55:10 I totally… the reason… that was a leading question though because I want the audience to understand, because so many things are offered as quick hits, you know. There’s no quick hits here. This is the work of decades, right? So you’re—it sounds like you’re signing up for this work for a pretty long stretch of the rest of your life?

Eric Ries: 55:28 Listen, I built a company called the Long-Term Stock Exchange. And I had to remember—we have investor meetings all the time where I have to be like: we put it right on the tin. It literally says ‘long-term’. If you are in this for a seven-year IRR, you’re in the wrong business. So yeah, I don’t think— This may be a cathedral none of us live to see completed, but so what? What’s the alternative?

Paul Ford: 55:58 Well, you could take peptides and vitamins and testosterone, bro, don’t do this.

Eric Ries: 56:02 We’re in New York City, don’t do this.

Rich Ziade: 56:06 All right, this is great. We need this back in the world, and I think like… we need the 50—no, we need the 50-year plan because we’re very short on 50-year plans. We’re very big on—it’s getting shorter and shorter. It’s getting like six months to AGI total collapse and superintelligent death robots. So, and I’m gonna be frank, I don’t buy the short-termism, I think we’re gonna find that humans and robots and machines are roughly the same as we go on because humans don’t change. I do buy that in 50 years you could have a better economy that is—that serves more people. Never perfect. And so that’s great. We should try that.

Eric Ries: 56:40 Thank you for saying that.

Paul Ford: 56:42 Of course. Thank you for coming on to this podcast.

Eric Ries: 56:46 Oh, it’s my pleasure, great to hang out with you guys.

Rich Ziade: 56:48 Eric, this is great.

Paul Ford: 56:50 ‘Incorruptible’ by Eric Ries.

Rich Ziade: 56:52 And so people can buy it wherever books are found?

Eric Ries: 56:55 Yes, if they want to, maybe they could walk into their local independent bookstore—

Paul Ford: 57:00 Oh, that’s what we like.

Eric Ries: 57:00 Buy ten copies of this book. —and buy it there. Because honestly, independent bookstores are such an important community resource, and it’s just so rare for someone to come in and say—

Rich Ziade: 57:01 There you go! Not only would you make my day, not only would you make my day if you did that, but you’d be making your local community institution’s day.

Paul Ford: 57:08 You went to—I—we—we also like bookshop.org, which is excellent.

Eric Ries: 57:11 Bookshop.org is also excellent. They carry the book. It’s actually, it’s price-competitive there with Amazon.

Paul Ford: 57:16 Yeah, I’m a big fan of that. Big fan of that.

Rich Ziade: 57:18 All right. Well, thank you so much and come back anytime.

Eric Ries: 57:21 Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Paul Ford: 57:22 Come back in 50 years, Eric. We’re gonna check in.

Rich Ziade: 57:24 Yeah, check in. Thank you.

Eric Ries: 57:25 Listen, I’m not making predictions because maybe it’ll be sooner, you don’t know.

Rich Ziade: 57:28 Hope so.

Paul Ford: 57:29 It’s up to you.

Eric Ries: 57:29 It’s up to everybody listening right now. It’s not up to me.

Paul Ford: 57:47 Aboard.