Great Companies With Eric Ries - TWMJ #1053

Mitch Joel (0:00)

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 1053 of Thinking With Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, September the 13th, 2026 Let's get on with the conversation.

What causes a good company to lose its way? We tend to blame bad leaders or unethical decisions, or the occasional corporate scandal, which we see way too much, I think. But what if those are just symptoms and not the cause? And what if success itself creates forces that quietly pull organizations away from the very values that made them successful in the first place? That's the question at the center of my conversation with Eric Ries. Eric is best known as the creator of The Lean Startup, a book that fundamentally changed how entrepreneurs build companies and bring new ideas to the market. And his latest book is very different. It's called Incorruptible. After years of working alongside these founders and leadership teams, Eric began asking why so many mission-driven organizations eventually lose the trust of their employees, their customers, and even the founders. His answer is both surprising and deeply structural. Ultimately, this is a conversation about building organizations that endure, not because they're protected from success, but because they're designed to remain true to what made them worth building in the first place. Enjoy the conversation.

So who are you and what do you do?

Eric Ries (1:36)

Hey, I am Eric Ries. Most people know me as the author of The Lean Startup. Although, what I'm doing right now is launching a new book called Incorruptible.

Mitch Joel (1:43)

Great to see you. We were just saying, I haven't seen each other in a long time when we both would speak out in public.

Eric Ries (1:50)

Yes. Always good to hang out.

Mitch Joel (1:53)

Are you still doing a lot of public speaking as well, Eric?

Eric Ries (1:56)

Not like it was before the pandemic. It's really interesting how much that has changed the culture of business. But yes, especially with the new book coming out, I have been on the road quite a bit.

Mitch Joel (2:03)

Okay, that's great.

So I have to say that I heard you had a new book out. I got super excited. They sent it to me a while ago and I was like, wow, this was not where I thought we were going and here we are. Talk a little bit about not what incorruptible is. People can check that out, but there seems to be something that happened in how all use were maybe homogenous, the idea of the Lean Startup became that led you down this path or what got us here.

Eric Ries (2:31)

It's interesting that you think about it in those terms. Obviously, a big part of the story is the success of Lean Startup because I got to see so many companies.

I mean, it is not an exaggeration to say that I have helped people create literally billions of dollars of personal networks. And I'm very proud of it. That you know of.

Mitch Joel (2:50)

Yeah, that I know of, right, that I know of.

Eric Ries (2:51)

And every event I do, people come up to me and say, you don't know this, but this book helped me do something transformative, something amazing.

I've seen the very best that this industry has to offer truly. And I've also seen the darker side of it. So, so many of the companies that I got to be involved with, even the ones that made money, many of them, the founders, the early team, they have some regret. They have a sense of loss about how it turned out. And I think frankly, a lot of us, myself included, were naive about the forces that we were up against when we tried to build a great company. And so, to me, this has all felt like one continuous journey, just the question of how do we create great companies? That's really what I've been obsessed with for a long time. How do we create companies that are long-term in their thinking, that are humane in their philosophy, and that are dynamic and innovative, not stagnant and bureaucratic? And we're still struggling with that in so many corners of our economy.

Mitch Joel (3:49)

It's a unique word, incorruptible, because there's a semblance of not just negativity, but something much graver than that.

What were you hearing from these founders? What did they feel? What line had been crossed? What happened to them?

Eric Ries (4:02)

So this is a very difficult thing to talk about, because we don't have language for it. That is one of the reasons it took me so long to figure it out and why this book was so hard to write. I tell the story in the book of going to an event to commemorate a founder who had had tremendous success. I mean, he had created more wealth for his investors than they could spend in five lifetimes. And at the very first opportunity, they ousted him from the company, because they were never satisfied. However much money he made from them, they always wanted more. And we had this party slash wake to commemorate him. And people flew in from all over the country, employees, ex-employees. I think I might have been the only non-employee in the building. Must have been a thousand people there. It was amazing.