How to build a company that withstands any era | Eric Ries, Lean Startup author

**Eric Ries** (0:00)
All kinds of famous companies. The thing that destroyed them was not competition. Their very success became a liability.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:07)
I want to hear the OpenAI versus Anthropic story.

**Eric Ries** (0:09)
Dario was a first-time founder. Wasn't a hot company at all. The boom hadn't happened yet. ChatGPD hadn't been invented yet. Nonetheless, they were true believers in this safety mission, and so one of their investors suggested they come talk to me. I told them, look, if you don't get this right, here's what's gonna happen. They were very determined to do something about it. They wrote into their charter, Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. Whenever you see Anthropic do the right thing, like when they refuse to release a model because they think it's too dangerous, think about how much that's costing them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
This new book, Incorruptible, is about helping you protect what you've built. What is it that you need protection from?

**Eric Ries** (0:48)
We all know this force. I call it the force that no one controls, but everyone obeys, that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity, to the point that we lose control of them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:00)
What's a broad-stroke solution to this?

**Eric Ries** (1:02)
Harder is easier. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards. But most leaders, when asked to defend their principles, can't do it because they've been taught ROI-based thinking, shareholder primacy, that's the path of maximum profitability. That's nuts.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:22)
Today, my guest is Eric Ries, author of the most influential and impactful book in startup history, The Lean Startup. Today, he is back with a new book, 15 years later, called Incorruptible, Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. The way Eric describes the connection between these two books is that The Lean Startup was about helping you build a successful company, and this book is about helping you protect what you've built.
Eric wrote this book because he's seen way too many founders lose control of their company and end up being very disappointed and depressed about how things turned out. This is not something that you hear a lot about, but it's a problem that basically every successful founder will face. Eric shares a ton of powerful stories and specific tactics and very specific advice for what you need to understand and do as a founder if you want to build something lasting. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Eric Ries.
Eric Ries, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

**Eric Ries** (2:34)
It's an honor to be back. Congrats on everything that's happened since I was here last time.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:38)
Wow, thanks Eric. So for people that have been living under a rock, you famously wrote The Lean Startup 15 years ago at this point.
Maybe the most impactful, successful founder startup book out there. And it feels like over this 15 years, if you think about it, it's gone through all these waves of just like, this is correct the way to do it. And this is completely wrong. Why would anyone build this way? This doesn't work anymore.
Okay, this actually is right. I was actually just thinking about this as I was preparing for our chat. It feels like the way the top AI companies are building now is actually exactly Lean Startup. Like I just had the head of product of Cloud Code in the podcast, Kat. The way they operate. Okay, we're going to ship the MVP. They don't call it that, but we're going to ship the MVP research preview, get it out there, see if people care a lot at all about this thing. We're going to tell you it's not ready for everyone, but it's out there. And then they iterate and build. I feel like people don't give you credit for like, this is actually the way AI companies are operating now.

**Eric Ries** (3:34)
I appreciate you saying that. And it is funny how every wave, there's like a backlash and somebody writes the article like, because of this, you don't need to do Lean Startup anymore. I remember when people wrote that about Quibi, they're like, Quibi proves that you don't need Lean Startup. I was like, why don't we wait till the companies are successful and then see if it proves it. But also people forget this is not a religion. So what matters to me is not if people use the term minimum viable product or whatever. By the way, those aren't customer facing terms. So a lot of companies that use these concepts, they don't talk about how they use it. They just use it internally. To them, it's just the obviously right way to go.