Eric Ries retweeted
This is very good. Great exercise in thinking about good governance from first principles. Best business book I’ve read in quite some time.
Bravo @ericries
Eric Ries retweeted
Eric Ries's (@ericries) One Regret About The Lean Startup: It Never Said "For the Better."
What if "best practices" are why great companies get destroyed?
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, joins us for a conversation on building companies that last — and what he wishes he had said differently.
Takeaways:
• “Change the World” Needed Three More Words
• Companies “Murdered in the Name of Profit”
• 5x More Likely to Reach Year 50
• Every Frontier AI Lab Has a Mission Guardian
• The Todd Park Rule
• Token Maxxing Is the Ultimate Vanity Metric
Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=2NtKUPkg…
Eric Ries retweeted
What a treat! Last week, I got to record a presentation by Eric Ries, lean startup expert at the Responsive Conference in Oakland. Check out his new book "Incorruptible"!
@ericries
@Responsive_Con
#graphicrecording
#leanstartup
#incorruptible
#mission
#purpose
Eric Ries retweeted
The AI Conference is almost here!
Hear from @ericries of LTSE, @timoreilly of O’Reilly Media, @bgchun of FriendliAI, and @jasonhiner of The Deep View, alongside 120+ speakers bringing perspectives from across the AI ecosystem.
From building and scaling companies to AI infrastructure, technology, and what’s coming next, these are the conversations shaping where AI goes from here.
Join us in San Francisco, September 29–October 1, and be part of the conversation.
aiconference.com/#tickets
Eric Ries retweeted
Enjoyed reading Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great - From the Bestselling Author of The Lean Startup by @ericries.
update
less than a week in, cfo.ai is growing faster than runway has ever grown in any month in our entire history
anyway
1. here's your obligatory launch video
2. you can now just sign up and try cfo.ai instantly. for free. no waitlist.
3. tag @arithecfo with your most unhinged financial modeling requests. she's back on duty and feeling spicy.
(and so is @gerithecfo but people won't stop asking him about his memecoin 🤷)
Eric Ries retweeted
Replying to @ericries
Great discussion. Startups that prioritize sustainable growth over short-term revenue spikes are the ones that endure. Trust compounds, churn does too. #LongTermThinking
Eric Ries retweeted
Thanks @ericries
This changed the way I see entrepreneurship. Highly recommend it to anyone building or thinking of building something.
Worth every minute.
youtu.be/eErcrQQHzg4?si=VU5A…
Eric Ries retweeted
The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company has raised $55M to audit and insure frontier AI models.
Insurance produces audits the public can trust and understand. The mechanism is simple: insurers need audits to price the risk. They pick auditors they believe will help them price the risk most accurately. Insurers then turn the audits into a price signal that cuts through political debates. Insurers are aligned with the public: if they get the audits wrong, they go out of business. That’s different from today, where labs pick their own auditors, creating public distrust.
Insurance only works if we scale up auditing, and we are building the infrastructure to do that. Millions of agents are being deployed; they leave terabytes of traces and will create thousands of incidents across dozens of risk categories. To scale auditing, we need reliable agents to surface evidence traces for human review.
History guides us. Take cars: auto insurers funded crash tests to price risks; crash tests led us to airbags, lowering the risk. Take electricity: home insurers funded lightbulb tests to price fire risks; today, every lightbulb carries a safety mark. Nuclear safety works similarly.
We’ve been learning by doing.. In the last 6 months, we’ve audited and insured frontier agent builders like Cursor, ElevenLabs, Lovable and Harvey. For ElevenLabs to get the world’s first agent insurance coverage, a Lloyd’s of London insurer required quarterly technical audits by an auditor of the insurer’s choice. We’ve built infrastructure for quarterly technical audits of any agent, working alongside firms like Gray Swan (technical evaluations) and Schellman (audit).
In the coming weeks, we’ll share our vision for how an insurance ecosystem can work for the frontier, and open source the world’s first actuarial model for frontier AI catastrophic risk.
We’re hiring across all roles in San Francisco. Come do your life’s work with us.
Rune & Rajiv
Eric Ries retweeted
Interview this week is with @ericries New York Times bestseller author of "The Lean Startup" and now "Incorruptible." He taught a generation of builders about the MVP, build, measure, learn. We talk about how it applies in the age of AI and why your company mission is all wrong.
Timestamps:
02:05 — Why "Build, Measure, Learn" Still Wins in the AI Era
04:18 — The One Thing AI Still Can't Speed Up: Learning
05:57 — Why Software Is Getting More Expensive, Not Less
10:01 — Why Talking to Customers Is Still the Rate-Limiting Skill
13:20 — What "Incorruptible" Actually Means
19:21 — The Sentence Hidden in Every Corporate Charter
20:52 — Would You Sell to the Company You Hate Most?
25:33 — How the Credo Collapsed Into a Cover-Up
28:13 — The Tylenol Recall That Built a Century of Trust
30:36 — The Blueprint: Purpose, Coherence, Integrity
31:41 — What a Public Benefit Corporation Actually Does
34:10 — Anthropic's Mission Guardian and the Companies That Copied It
42:57 — How Eric Ries Measures His Own Life
Eric Ries retweeted
How do you build organizations that resist corruption, inspire trust, and create enduring value without losing their soul?
Watch founder and CEO @TheAnnaGat host bestselling author @ericries as they discuss his book "Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great."
Together, they explore organizational resilience, long-term thinking, and moving beyond shareholder primacy in the age of AI and post-pandemic work.
Eric Ries retweeted
loved the talk @ericries
the book is incredible and I’ve given out 8 copies to friends and colleagues already - one even shared their copy with their grandpa who said “this is everything I’ve seen in the corporate world”
privilege to have my copy signed ❤️
Eric Ries retweeted
Reading @ericries's Incorruptible all while Apple sells a bendable 2K phone, oil is in the triple digits, Bitcoin is "holding" $78k...and laptop.
The world doesn’t have a product problem, it has a governance problem.
We built companies that can ship anything
and structures that can’t protect its soul.
Spiritual holding company isn’t a vibe.
It’s the patch.
Eric Ries retweeted
Ask why Sears died and almost everyone answers Amazon.
@ericries , who wrote The Lean Startup, tells it differently. Disruption was the final illness, and the disease had arrived years earlier.
"It was taken over by a parasite. Somebody took over Sears and managed to extract for himself $1.5 billion at a time when the company lost $11 billion."
More than a century of American retail, and the last chapter went to a man who did better out of it than the company did.
Technology is the comfortable explanation for a collapse. It means nobody decided anything. It arrives like weather.
Extraction is a decision. It has a name attached, a board that approved it, and a legal theory that called it a duty to shareholders.
Every time I hear a failure explained by disruption now, I check who got paid.
Which one in your industry would look different under that test?
Eric Ries retweeted
This week at @Gemini_Notebook, we're featuring two notebooks built around a pair of recent popular advice books, starting with @ericries' instant classic, The Lean Startup. Add Eric's book to any notebook, and it's like having him as your personal coach. notebook.google.com/notebook…
Eric Ries retweeted
Replying to @ericries
Other leadership books for founders only let you get to third base.
Why the document that decides whether your company survives its own success is the one you signed and never read, from Eric Ries(@ericries), author of The Lean Startup and the new book Incorruptible, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and co-founder of Answer. AI (he helped Anthropic design its Long-Term Benefit Trust years before anyone had heard of it).
What you'll learn:
- The retailer who hung his competitors' ads inside his own stores, and what his own board did to him 20 years later
- Why "sell to the highest bidder" is a legal default nobody consciously chose, and the lung health company that proved it
- Why the companies rated worst on governance have quietly outperformed the ones rated best since 2008
- Why a promise from a CEO is worth nothing, and what has to change in a company for a promise to outlive the person who made it
- What AI still cannot accelerate in build, measure, learn, 15 years on, and the one shift he made in every prompt
Timeline:
00:00 Intro
01:22 Why Great Companies Get Destroyed
08:14 Built to Resist - Ethos + Integrity = Incorruptible
16:30 Build a Company That Outlives You
21:24 Rethinking the Lean Startup
23:50 Advice for Founders


































