Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How to build a company that withstands any era | Eric Ries, Lean Startup author
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All kinds of famous companies. The thing that destroyed them was not competition. Their very success became a liability. I want to hear the opening eye versus anthropic story. Aria was a first time founder. Wasn't a hot company at all. The boom hadn't happened yet. Chi Chi PD 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 going to 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. This new book, Incorruptible, is about helping you protect what you've built. What is it that you need protection from? 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. What's a broad stroke solution to this? 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. 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,
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