Inverted Podcast #22: Become Incorruptible with Eric Ries

Host: Foreign. Welcome everybody to a very special episode of the Inverted podcast where we talk about things like security, privacy, cyber, um, abuse and spam. Because success for us is when nothing happens. And as always, I'm joined by my friends Dana and Dario. Welcome. And special guest Eric Ries. We are so excited. Going to get to you, uh, in a moment. Um, as always, we represent our own opinions, not our clients or employers or whatever. And we really, really would love to teach you how to build better inverted products. And today we have one of my personal heroes on the podcast, Eric. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Eric Ries: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here.

Host: And um, for those of you who don't know, uh, Eric, Eric has written a book that is known in the startup world very, called the Lean Startup, which is one of the few books I've actually handed out to one of my investors to tell him this is how we're doing it when I was doing a startup. And he's also started a long term stock exchange. We're going to talk about that. And um, he's currently connected to a company called Answers AI that tries to build products based on research and virtual. That tries to help, uh, entrepreneurs with their back office. I'm probably not doing it all justice. Maybe. Eric, you could start by reminding folks what the Lean Startup, uh, was about, uh, and how that sort of launched you into the world.

Eric Ries: Yeah, yeah. So I'm a software engineer by training. You know, I was programming computers in my parents basement. I still remember the beige uh, IBM XT my father brought home with the five and a quarter inch floppy disk, remember with the rubber bands that would drive the motor? Yeah. So that was my entry to computers and to technology. And I thought technology was the most powerful force in the universe. I felt like I had discovered actual magic and I would be doing that for my whole life. And then later, um, you know, I got bit by the startup bug. I was in college during the dot com bubble and did a startup for my dorm room. Have you seen the movie the Social Network? It was just like that, except for the part where we didn't need to sue each other because we didn't make any money. So that was nothing to, nothing to sue each other about. We would have, it ended badly. We would have. But we didn't uh, we didn't know anything about how to build a business at all. And everywhere, you know, and I came out to Silicon Valley and I started to really study entrepreneurship and I realized that after a while. No, no, no. Management is the most powerful force in the universe because technology is made by people and you have to manage those people. Um, same is true if you're managing agents. Doesn't matter. Same, same thing. But then, you know, as we'll talk about, of course, like, that was just my, my setup for the fact that. Actually, no, there are even weirder and darker forces that, uh, that management is constrained by. But yeah, my, my entry into it all was building these companies and these technologies and these products that like, looked really good on paper. We had an amazing business plan. Everything worked like, except for some reason the customers didn't read the business plan so they didn't do what it said they were supposed to do. So, like everything but the customers was perfect. And I kept having this experience over and over again where we're following the best practices of management. We've been taught to treat a, uh, startup like it was like a shrunken down, miniature version of a big company. And it kept not working over and over again. Even though in the movies it works great on TV and Harvard Business School case studies, it works great in real life, it really didn't. And it set me on this path of trying to understand like, is there a better way to work when we're dealing with so much uncertainty? And that ultimately is what led, led to Lean startup techniques like minimum viable product or pivot, continuous, uh, deployment, build, measure, learn, which today have entered the kind of product and innovation lexicon, but at the time were seen as very countercultural practices. That got a lot of people yelling at me. So happy to talk about the specifics if you guys, if you guys want.

Host: Go ahead. Dana.

Dana: I was going to say. So, so you said build, measure, learn. You talked about Agile. That's what you were talking about in the, the Lean startup. But then comes this long term stock exchange which has the phrase long term in it. So that seems to go against the Agile, um, that you're promoting in Lean Startup. How did that come about?

Eric Ries: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something that, in retrospect I understand where this confusion came from, but at the time I found it very confusing. Uh, so let's back up. Okay, so why is it called Lean Startup? What's the lean? Where does the lean come from? Lean is actually an homage to Lean manufacturing, Toyota production system. Because that was. Of the many different intellectual traditions that I drew on for building Lean Startup, that was the one that was most dominant in my thinking because fundamentally understanding batch lies, batch size and flow and all this stuff, like, it was really important. And I conceived of a startup as a factory, not that makes physical items, but where hypotheses are being tested scientifically in a rapid and kind of high volume way. So a lot of techniques could transfer over. We could talk about, you know, build, measure, learn is just the idea of fundamental cycle time, but applied to our own ideas rather than to physical, physical objects. Now at the time I said in order to use this system of agility, this is true for any agile system, you have to have a foundation first, a foundation of long term thinking. The research is really clear about this. If you read any book about Toyota, this comes up again and again and again and again, it's going to come up, which are a lot in our conversation. Um, so, so what people heard Lean startup was about going fast and like, oh, experiment with all the things. And I, you know, I encourage that. I was like, yes, experiment with all the things. And people will be like, oh, including with experimentation itself. And I'm like, no, that's impossible. Because one of the biggest fights we ever got into in the lean startup movement, this thing became uh, a, uh, behemoth of a social phenomenon. It was huge. And one of the fights we would get into all the time is people would be like, look, um, you say we should use data to make decision making, but I want to use something else. So we'd have this fight. It'd be like, okay. I remember coming to these meetings, I would go to meetings I'd never forget. When I first started doing AB split testing in product, people would look at me. I remember I first suggested my engineers would do AB split testing. They were like, why? For what? That's like a direct marketing technique. What does that have to do with product? Like, people really like did not understand scientific method at all as it applied to their own work. So I would come to these meetings and someone would be like, I like the new signup sheet better than the old signup page. And I'd be like, well, would you like to know that it performs 4% worse? And they'd be like, well, says who? I'm like, I showed a thousand people this signup page and a thousand people that sign up page and here's the result. They'd be like, well, is that a statistically significant sample? It's like, okay, let's do another. Like, how many you want me to do? We'll do it again. The next thousand. Like these numbers would be incredibly consistent. Like, look, this is, this is a fact, this is evidence. And they'd be like, yeah, but what about my gut Feeling so, so like a big part of why these are controversial was saying like gut feelings are useful. They're very useful for hypothesis generation, but they're not so good for hypothesis validation. So as Deming said, like in God we trust, all others bring data. So this is like the idea that we're going to have this kind of long term philosophical commitment to scientific decision making, to humanism in our uh, it's like, it's like, it's a philosophical commitment before it's a bunch of techniques. And so to me I always thought this was very clear. We have a philosophy of long term thinking and this foundation of holding people accountable in this humane way, which is what enables agility. You actually can't go fast if the foundation's moving around. Uh, imagine trying to work in a building where like the foundation's trying to walk around. Also it's like, ah, right, like I'm dizzy.

Dana: So if you can go fast, you just might not end up where you really wanted to go.

Eric Ries: Well, and that was the other problem is some people, that was people who are like, I don't want to do this, I don't want to make, I don't want to have to make these kind of commitments. Another kind of person would be like, oh, you said go as fast as possible. Got it. I get in my car, I said, what's the way I can go fastest in my car? Well turn it on, close your eyes and floor the accelerator. And boy will you go fast for a while. But you may not go where you want to go. And of course when the car explodes, you may uh, feel you were betrayed by the person who told you to go fast. So I've been trying to make this like measured argument that there's an optimal speed, a speed that is governed by on the one hand, scientific decision making, on another, on the other side like a, ah, respect for human uh, human creativity and human intuition. And of course in our very polarized world people are like, oh, I got it, like herp derp. Go fast. That's what you're saying. And I'd be like, okay, doing my best here, doing my best. But yes, that is ultimately what led me into things like long term stock exchange trying to prove to people that I was serious that this agility has to be conditioned on long term thinking.

Dario: Do you think sometimes people all, sometimes people picked cherry picked out of lean startup just the part of the being fast and your narrative around long term stock exchange allowed you to bring back that lean or lean startup wasn't just about Speed. Or it was probably the least about speed. Speed was just an example of, uh, failing less. Um,

Eric Ries: in retrospect. Sure, sure. I wish I could say I had some kind of conscious strategy about these things. No, I was just constantly fighting these battles because I felt like, yeah, people love to cherry pick. And a lot of times people, um, when an idea becomes a meme, it becomes, um, dissociated from its intellectual origins. And so you find people that would be like, I remember someone once wrote this blog post, really hurt me at the time. Someone said blog post title was Nobody should ever listen to Eric Reese as a title. I was like, whoa, man. First sentence of the blog post was, I have never met the guy. But you're like, come on, man, like, that's, that's harsh. Like, shouldn't you meet me before you talk about how stupid I am? And then they were like, yeah, people keep telling me about minimum viable product. It sounds dumb, haven't read his work or anything, but I just, I don't like this idea. And then he was describing the things people told him under the. Using the excuse of lean startup for whatever, and I'm like, oh, God, am I responsible for the idiotic things people say? You know, who. And, and you know, because it's like a game of telephone. Somebody read the book and was excited about it. And now two or three generations of people away from that who have not read the book are out opining about whatever. But I eventually had this insight that really helped me, like, stay centered in the situation, which is. Yeah, go ahead.

Host: I think. Ah, sorry, go ahead, Eric.

Eric Ries: I'll just say one last thing. We live in the era where ignorance is optional. Okay? We, like, this has never been true in human history before, but there is no topic at all that if you did not want to spend like, at most five minutes looking into, you could not get basically well informed about expert consensus on that topic. There are some polarizing topics where maybe you have to wade through some misinformation, but like, okay, for most things, you could just read the Wikipedia page. You'll get a perfectly fine neutral. Most things. You know, any, any reasonable LLM can give you a new. If you give it the right prompt, can give you a relatively clear, unbiase assessment of the thing. It's just at the top level. Obviously not for details, but just basically like, what is clean startup? If you want to know, you can. So every time you see someone opining, uh, about something that they obviously know nothing about, you know, that they didn't spend even five minutes learning about it. So that helped me to be like, okay, people are actually broadcasting their own ignorance, and they're proud to have chosen ignorance over knowledge. Okay. And I, again, I don't. But people who are badly educated, I'm not blaming them. People who got the wrong information from the wrong book, that happens. Okay, so not every person who's ever been wrong, but there's some people that just. They're so lazy, they didn't even try to get well informed. They just wanted to score points. They just wanted to feed outrage or whatever nonsense thing they're doing. And once I had that realization, it helped me, like, not take them seriously. It's like, oh, this is not a good faith interlocutor. This is just somebody who's spouting off. So, yeah, I think if you, if you put an idea into the public, in the public consciousness, you will eventually face this problem and you'll have to find some level of equanimity with it. That's how I found mine.

Host: Yeah. And I guess people, you know, when you have an idea like this, that's so, uh, it's a complex thing that you made really graspable. I'm not sure if that's an English word, but it made it easy to take it and run with it. Like I've heard, minimum shippable product, minimum testable product, um, you know, the minimum viable product, uh, came of course, from there, but I've seen many versions. And I mean, over the years, you must have seen so many different companies get started and crash, uh, which led you to write your newest book, which is why we're talking to you tonight, which is called Incorruptible. And, um, I would love for you to just explain to the audience, uh, in a few minutes, what is the main idea behind the book of incorruptible? And why did you decide to read it after seeing all these things?

Eric Ries: Yeah, thanks for the question. Um, no, I'm very proud of all the success we've had as a movement, lean startup movement, but the broader startup movement, I would say, like the technology industry, all the products and innovation, like, a lot of good stuff has come out of it. A lot of wealth has been created, A lot of good stuff. But I've also been witness to the dark underbelly of it. And in the book, I tell the story of several founders, leaders, board members, people who have been betrayed by their own investors, betrayed by their own board who tried to build a company that stood for something. And sometimes the thing it stood for something really Lofty, like fixing climate change or whatever. But sometimes it's something very humble. Yeah, like security quality. Like, well, I want to bring a little beauty into my customers lives. I want to make their life a little bit more efficient. And over and over and over again we see this parable of the killing of the golden goose. Precisely because these companies are so trustworthy, precisely because they're successful, that makes them a valuable target. Makes it so that someone might like to take them over, control them.

Host: Can you, can you explain the killing of the golden goose, uh, concept to the.

Eric Ries: Let me get. Can I tell you a story?

Host: Yes, yes, of course. Okay.

Eric Ries: All right. One of my favorite stories in the book is the story the Legend of Saul Price. Saul Price is just a towering, uh, figure in business history, but I kind of feel like as the years have gone on, he's kind of fallen out of the public consciousness. So I kind of feel like I get to bring him back, which is pretty fun. Saul is truly the father of modern, uh, retail. He once joked he was so much, people kept calling him that. And he says, man, maybe I should have worn a condom. Because he actually spawned all these other companies that went on to make tons and tons of money, including Walmart. Walmart is named Walmart. Sam Walton named the company as an homage to Saul Price's original company, Fed Mart. So he was, he was a giant. And he was originally trained as a lawyer. He came to entrepreneurship late in life. And when he was a lawyer, he was trained that you have what's called a fiduciary duty to your client. What does that mean? You must put the client's interest before your own. True of a lot of caretaking professions, including lawyers. So when he became a retailer, he asked himself, who's my client? He's like, oh, obviously the customer is my client. So he built Fed Martin on the principle of what he called a fiduciary duty to the customer. He actually had a hierarchy of fiduciary priorities. First customers, then employees, shareholders last. This is a recurring pattern you see among really good companies. Not that shareholders aren't important, but the idea that shareholder value is caused by being trustworthy to customers and employees, that was his idea. And there's so many great Saul stories. He was like a stickler for ethics. He would go above and beyond in so many ways. Like there's a story about one time he convinced a supplier that they should each cut 50, 50 cents from the retail price because it was a thing that cost 3, 99. He's like, we'll sell more units at 2 99. He was like, uh, you take a $0.50 hit and we'll take a $0.5 hit and we'll sell more units. The supplier agreed. They put the thing on sale and they basically sold the same number of units as before. Saul called them up. He made the category buyer call them up and give them the 50 cents back. Buyer's like, we don't have to give him 50 cents back. He's like, yeah, but I told him this was going to work and it didn't. That was his integrity. His competitors would often try to drive him out of business by, um, do what is called product dumping. They would sell, um, products below cost as a lost leader to say, see, he doesn't have the lowest price. He would post their own advertisements up inside his store and put up signs like, don't buy eggs from me. They're cheaper down the street. Drove his competitors crazy when he do that. But from his point of view, it's very logical. I'm a fiduciary to the customer. I want them to get the lowest price. I don't care if it's from me. So anyway, this worked. Customers loved shopping at fedmart. His employees love working there. He paid above market wages. He treated his employees with respect. Um, anyway, customers would drive miles out of their way to shop at fedmart because they knew they were getting a fair price. And so what happened? Well, company was successful. It grew. He took it public. And when he was public, his investors started to really harp on him. They didn't like it. Why? I don't like growth. They don't like all this money he's making? No, they just feel like he could be making even more money if he would just cut some corners, if he would raise prices a little bit, if he pay his employees a little bit less. The things he did, the very things he did that made the company worthy of investment in the first place, they saw as obstacles to their increased profits. This drove him crazy. So much so that he decided to take the company private. So he arranged with a really sophisticated retail investor to, um, his people who really knew retail to build a syndicate to take the company private. They took 51%. He owned 49%. And the problem got worse, not better. He had this new board. The board was enamored with all these new best practices that were emerging around that are today called go by the name of shareholder primacy. So what do they, what did the new board want him to do? Faster growth. Acquire other companies like raise, raise prices and Lower wages. Just the same old stuff the public markets had wanted. So he refused. Saul was a person who was extremely stubborn. He would not give into this. The fight was brewing for years. So one day in 1975, after he had been building Fedmart for 20 years, he comes into work one day and the locks on his door have been changed. He doesn't work there anymore. So the investors got their way. They got Saul Price out, and they instantly returned the company. Not returned. They instantly. They instantly changed the company to a more conventional retail playbook. So shall we discuss what happened next? You will be shocked to hear that within seven years in 1982, Fed Mart was bankruptcy. They had their pursuit of higher profits drove the company into bankruptcy. This is such a common pattern that happens through history. I have so many case studies of this, it's unbelievable. And people who hear the story, like, how can that be? Wouldn't investors want to make money, not lose money? Hold on to that. So it was a death sentence for fedmart. What did Saul Price do? Saul Price was the classic entrepreneur. He took two weeks off to nurse his wounds. Then he came back to the same office building where fedmart headquarters were, and he leased the office upstairs. And he started again. He built a new company. He called it Price Club. Now, Price Club today has long since been forgotten, but when I was growing up in San Diego, it was like a local fixture. Everyone loved to drive miles out of their way to shop at Price Club because we really believed in it. Um, it's a very famous company, though, because, um, his disciple, kind of the person who learned the most from Saul Price over the years was a guy named Jim Sinegal. Jim Sinegal went from fedmart, joined him at Price Club, and he decided to try his own hand at becoming an entrepreneur. He left Price Club and started a little company called Cost. And today, the company you now call Costco is actually the result of the corporate merger between Jim Sinegal's Costco and Price Club. That's. That's the modern company. It's actually the Price Costco company. Uh, and what I like about this story. So I talk about the killing of the golden goose. That's what investors did. They didn't understand the value of the system, the engine that Saul Price had created. And he didn't. He, uh, understood it. He knew that if he lost it, he could build it again, because it was a system. It was a repeatable system. But they understood something that he never understood. I think they understood that the reason the system worked was because of its trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business today. And because customers trusted fedmart, that's why they realized they could get away with betraying them. Because they wouldn't expect it. Though the person you least expect to betray you is the one you trust the most. So when Jim Sinegal set up Costco, he learned an important lesson from Saul. Saul had one aspect of what I call being an incorruptible company. He had the ethos, the character, to treat customers like a fiduciary, to cultivate trustworthiness. But the company itself was weak. It was easy to take over. Investors were able to pressure it and ultimately to decapitate it. So Jim Senegal created a company that not only had the ethos of salt price, it had the integrity, the structural integrity, necessary integrity, necessary to resist. It was built with what I call a governance fortress to protect it from outside attacks. And that special combination, a company that is high character, trustworthy, and structurally strong is the kind of company we should all aspire to build.

Dana: Being in Washington, I go to Costco at least twice a week and see them. You talk a lot in the book about financial gravity and, and these investors and influence. And as you said, there's a whole bunch of case studies that you mentioned in the book about the negative impact. You also, um, mentioned, though, that through the long term, it's really not a competition, that the financial gravity, you should be able to use it and work with it to make everybody successful. Right? That's a, um, one of the important parts here.

Eric Ries: Yeah.

Host: So.

Eric Ries: Okay, so let's just start talking about financial gravity, okay. Because I think this is one of the things that is very difficult for people to understand about this. Um, when I, ah. You ask people, like, about some company that turned to crap, okay. Like, we all know these. I'm m. Like, name names. We know tons of companies that, like, used to be all like, rah, rah, don't be evil. And now you're like, whatever happened to that? Right? It's like, that's extremely common. So we asked, well, like, why did it happen? People would be like, well, it's the almighty dollar. Just because they got big, they scaled, you know, whatever. That's just. It's. People act like it's inevitable, like, gravity. It's as if, like a bridge collapses and you ask an engineer, why did the bridge collapse? And like, well, gravity. You know, it's like, yeah, no, duh. Yes, you're right. In some very technical sense, the reason the bridge collapsed is because of gravity. It is sitting on a planet orders of magnitude larger than it, and that is not gravity. Good. But that doesn't really answer the question because of course, why didn't it collapse last week? And more importantly, why did this bridge collapse and these 29 other bridges didn't collapse? So what's weird about this feeling of inevitability that we all, all experience every day is that we also know there are exceptions. I mentioned Costco because that's one of the companies people routinely cite as an exception. I was, someone was telling me the other day this incredible story about, they were explaining that only family run companies, um, can resist this pressure. And they were naming the family run companies that have been able to kind of stick with integrity over many generations. And at the end of their kind of long rant they were like, oh, but also Costco. They're uh, like, well, Costco's not family run. Why is Costco the exception? They're like, yeah, I don't really know. But for some reason they are. And it's funny in every industry that you find these outliers like Patagonia in retail or, you know, or REI or Vanguard in finance or Novo Nordisk and Pharma John, uh, Lewis Partnership in the uk, like there are these well known exceptions that we all like. Some part of our brain knows this company, like Novo Nordisk has been going strong for a hundred years without this issue even while another part of our brain says this is an inevitable part of capitalism. So one of the kind, uh, of the double mystery of the book is one, why does it happen? Where does financial gravity come from? It is basically a, uh, mechanism of unconscious values transmission that is driven by our financial system. And once I learned to recognize it, it gave me superpowers. Once you see this force in action, you learn to, you will, you will stop being distracted by surface phenomenon. Even things as important as vision, business model, strategy, culture, these are the surface things we observe about an organization. Underneath are these physical forces that act on it and warp its structure unless it is built to be sufficiently strong. This is when I said before that I thought management was the most important force in the world.

Host: Ha.

Eric Ries: Management, uh, is nothing in the face of these deeper forces. And the double mystery though is if these forces are so powerful and overwhelming, how can there be exceptions? And what can we learn about those exceptions? And when you start to study the exceptions, you will notice a very bizarre pattern. Every single one, without exception, every single one violates almost every best practice we've been told are necessary for companies to thrive and be efficient in a global market. And that starts to peg the question, well then what's up with these best practices? If the best companies don't follow them, what makes them the best?

Dario: Uh, thank you so much for walking us through this. And I like the Costco example. My wife took me to Costco on our third date, um, and explained me the special meaning of Costco in the US Retail market. Um, and yeah, it makes it so, um, it makes it so relatable. Like on Costco employee batches, you see how long they've been there and how often do you see employees staying at the retailer for more than 10 years? Because often there is no reason to do that with Costco as an example, maybe there's a few other brands where that's similar the case if you look at that weird love for best practices that these incorruptible companies don't have. Um, like often we see also security, privacy, uh, being something that companies go very fast at corrupt on because it's the thing that if nothing happens, successive if nothing happens. So if you don't do it, probably nothing will happen for a while. It's like, I don't know, yesterday you didn't get hacked, tomorrow you wouldn't get hacked. Like this company, like Cloudflare that really figured that out, that put that security element on that on their top list of their priorities. Have you seen companies that take things like security or maybe even more privacy as uh, part of their incorruptible strategy to make sure that no matter what happens.

Eric Ries: Exactly. Many, many years ago I wrote a blog post called the Curse of Prevention because this just drove me crazy. In an ROI driven culture, to advocate for something that it doesn't happen is impossible. And, and the flip side is, and if you ask people how come you never listen to me? I'm trying to, I'm m trying to help you prevent you from having a catastrophic problem. They'll be like, well, how do I know that? You're like, everyone says that kind of stuff, right? And it's like, it's as if you were like, everybody, a meteor is going to hit our office on Saturday. Oh, uh, what do we do? Everybody wear tinfoil hats. Okay, quick, quick, quick. Everyone got the tinfoil hat. Okay, Saturday comes. It worked. No meteor hit the building. I guess now from now on you off to wear the tinfoil hats. People see that as a power grab. I'm telling you of things you have to do. You can't verify if they really are necessary or not. Therefore, like, I'm suspicious, right? So I kind of see it. I see both sides. And the issue fundamentally is any value in an era of shareholder primacy. If you like, if you read the experts on shareholder primacy and people always accuse me of making this up, like I'm exaggerating, but I assure you the quotes are in the book. I'm not making this up. Um, they will basically say, like, for example, before we get to security, let's talk about safety first. Safety is the general category. The security is a subspecialty, uh, of. Yeah, if you swallow a pill made by a for profit company, you are literally betting your life that they think it is more profitable for their investors to keep you alive than for you to die. People are like, come on, man, that's really unfair. I'm like, read it, read the documents. Governance experts routinely say that companies not only can, but should only consider externalities, AKA you, insofar as it benefits their shareholders. That is what counts as a best practice today. So, of course, security, safety, scalability, like any form of quality is the first to be sacrificed because what does it matter? The house doesn't collapse today. So, and you think about these managers who have been raised under these best practices. They learned it in business school. They were told this is societally useful to enact these best practices, you don't have, you have no moral accountability for it because you're helping society by doing this. Of course, they also get told that they're supposed to lobby to have the rules changed as much as possible. So there's a massive contradiction in this way that this is taught. They, in their experience, they get promoted. So they cut costs, they fire security researchers, they ignore the recommendations, they like, create all these massive problems. They get promoted before the problems come to light. So from their point of view, it works. Everything improves in the short term, they're on to the next job before the bill comes due. Um, that's because, like, ROI is a fundamentally flawed metric. Because the costs of doing the right thing are tangible, but the benefits are intangible. So that's something we have to like if we're going to build an incorruptible company. One of our most urgent tasks is to figure out a way to confront that reality, making the intangible tangible and to establish rules that are not subject to this kind of ROI calculation.

Host: So I have two questions in that case. Right? Like, first of all, have you seen it changing over the last few years? Like, I've luckily worked in teams where There was never a cut in security, um, and we've always been able to luckily do the right thing. Um, but I feel like there's more awareness in the industry of cyber risk, of quality, of all those things as the world becomes more digital. And then I guess the second question is, um, if you're building this company, I mean, doesn't everybody have to make security and safety now part of their core ethos? Isn't that sort of a non negotiable now? And how would you do that?

Eric Ries: Oh, I think it absolutely is. I think it's extremely shortsighted not to. But again, I want to, I want to recognize for people how hard this is for most managers. They are being told to nominally pledge fealty to these principles and they generally start out being sincere about it while they are being subtly influenced by this gravitational pull to cut corners. And um, uh, Jim Senecal, the founder of Costco, calls it, um, doing heroin. Okay? He literally calls it doing heroin. You do it, you cut the corner one time and your stock price goes up, something good happens. But the problem now is that improvement is now baked into your future forecasts. That's the new baseline against which you're going to be judged. Again, if you don't cut the corner again next quarter, the benefit you got last quarter won't be there. So you have to do it again and again and again. It's like an autoimmune disorder. These companies are hollowing themselves out from the inside. So just to be concrete, and this can sound very abstract, let's talk about Cloudflare for a second because they're one of my favorite stories in the book and obviously very well known in your community. So what I like about Cloudflare is they were very allergic to the idea of a mission statement when they started. Matthew Prince, like he was a Harvard mba, he was like, someone was like, what's the mission of Cloudflare? He would just be like f off, you know, like, no, we're putting a firewall in the cloud. It's not that complicated. It's a good idea. We, uh, don't need to like dress it up in consultant speak and have values and mission. He was like very against all that stuff. So none of that stuff. But the funny thing is when I talk about having a purpose or a mission for a company, I'm not talking about the mission statement. I could care less, less that there's a mission statement. Matthew was actually a very purpose driven leader. There were a bunch of situations in the early days of Cloudflare where he was kind of forced to confront are you going to do the right thing or not? In fact, I remember one story he told me about, um, a bunch of pro democracy activists are getting hacked by nation state actors who are trying to drive them underground. They can't keep their website up and they're begging every big tech company in Silicon Valley for help. And all these massive companies are like too afraid to get involved because there's nation states involved and, you know, who knows what the consequences will be. So tiny Cloudflare is like, we'll do it. We'll just, we'll put ourselves into the harm's way of nation state level hackers to defend you, even though you are customers on our free tier who pay us no money. Like there's no reason to do that, except it's the right thing to do. And they just did it. So they did that kind of stuff all the time. And anyway, after a couple years of this, they're having lunch one day and one of the engineers says, you know, the reason I like to work at club there, I feel like it's the first place I've ever worked where we're just making a better Internet every day. And everyone on the table say, oh yeah, better. Excuse me, uh, bless you. Making m a better Internet every day. And so someone asked Matthew after, you know, and that phrase starts to circulate inside the company. Someone asked him, hey, is that that butterfly meme? Like, is that our mission statement? He's like, no, we don't have a mission statement. Shut up about that consultant stuff. Like, he was very resistant. But eventually it kept catching on, catching on. Everyone's like, no, I think this actually is our mission because mission purpose, these things are emergent properties. You don't just decide to have a mission. You have to be the mission has to be embedded m in the thing. So Cloudflare discovered their mission to make a better Internet. And eventually they did the same thing with their corporate values. In fact, even today, one of Cloudflare's, I think their number one value on their list is to be principled in their decision making. So this is a really magic combination. The really long term, high concept mission aligned with human flourishing and the principled ethos of decision making. So everything's going great. Everyone knows Cloudflare is a freemium product. Now. This is back in the day before web encryption was universal. So the number one feature that would cause customers to upgrade was SSL encryption. And this was very logical because as I'm m sure everyone Listening to this knows SSL encounters cost money. In those days, it required extra computational hardware to like do the encryption, the cryptography stuff. So it was like, very logical. This is a desired feature of enterprise customers. It drives them to upgrade. And it's logical. Customers don't mind that this behind the paid tier because they know it has hard costs to the company. Therefore, that's how we do it. So one day Matthew's having conversation with a young engineer in his office and he says, excuse me, but, um, is it our mission to make a better Internet? Matthew's like, huh, well, wouldn't an encrypted Internet be a better Internet? Uh, uh-huh huh. Well, isn't us charging money for encryption preventing people from making a better Internet by having a. And he's like, uh huh. So shouldn't we give encryption away for free? Now, any of you who've ever been a middle manager in a big company have had this meeting where some idiot comes into your office and is like, hey boss, I have an idea. Let's give our product away for free for no reason. And your job as a middle manager is to be like, thank you for your input. Always love to have your buy in, but let me redirect you to the carpet. Strategy, right? Like, not gonna do that. So everyone who hears this story is primed for Matthew to be like, no man, that's our number one feature. That's how we make money. That pays your salary. Get out of my office. But the way Matthew described it to me later, he said, once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. So he was just like, yeah, you're right, let's do it. And what's so interesting is it wasn't like they could just flip a switch and do this. If they had just flipped a switch and made it free, they would have gone out of business instantly, would have bankrupted the company. It really was very expensive to do. So he drove the team. I don't remember if it was for weeks or months. Like, they worked really, really hard to figure out how do we make this thing economically viable? And they had to. They figured out what's called a contra deal where they traded bandwidth and services to, uh, the CAS to get their certificates. Basically for a lower cost, they built, um, all this technology. I mean, they were writing hand coded, assembly level stuff to get the cost of doing the cryptography down as low as possible so that only a few servers could run all the traffic. And they had a board meeting about it. And the board's like, you're going to do what they go, we're going to give away this feature for free. And they'd be like, isn't that our number one converting feature?

Dario: Yeah.

Eric Ries: Are you worried that our conversion rates might go down? They're like, yeah, we are worried about that. Now, just like, imagine being in this board meeting. I want you to really think about this. The board could have been like, okay, but why don't we just take all those cost savings and pocket the money? It'll make our margins go up. Free margin for no reason. Because we teach MBAs that higher margin is good, more margin the better. But it's funny, we also, in the disruptive innovation class, we also teach people Jeff Bezos's maxim that your margin is my opportunity. So which is it? Are margins a source of strength or a source of weakness? All price understood that excessive margins are a source of weakness, not strength. Um, they're a sign that you're exploiting your customer. Don't do it. Anyway, Cloudflare didn't fall in this trap. So here's what happened. They released it to great fanfare. This feature is now free. The conversion rates actually did go down. And most companies would absolutely have panicked and pulled the plug at that point. But not Cloudflare. They said, okay, our goal is not to make more money. Our goal is to do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. Now, the chips fell in the way of people trust Cloudflare a lot more. And so their top of Funnel increased by 10 times. So they were more than compensated for their loss of conversion rates. And today, Cloudflare is a $70 billion company powered by the trust they earned that day. So I really feel like this is a critical thing like most people imagine. Like, a most security conversations are of this form. Isn't this simply the right thing to do? Principled. Why, like, shouldn't we protect our customers? Data, shouldn't we protect them and go out of our way to make sure that this bad thing doesn't happen to them? And it's so easy to just be like, not M this time. M. Most of the time, we'll do it, but not this time. But the key. Clay Christensen once said that it's easier to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. Just committing that this is how it's going to be is the key to making sure that you do it consistently. And then it actually saves you so much time. Now we don't have to have all these ROI spreadsheet meetings, which are a waste of time anyway. Sorry, we just don't do it. Sorry. That's the kind of company we are.

Dana: Uh, we did a whole episode on like, for product managers. How do you figure out how to charge for security features? Because it is, uh, slippery slope and a lot of people, a lot of companies don't have the mission statement or the ethos to support making the decisions that actually benefit the customers versus drive the revenue. Um, you talk about cloudflare kind of getting to that point, but in the book you talk about a company that actually, very timely, started with all of these concerns and they actually started a company to try to address that. And that is Anthropic and, and Anthropic recently in the news with making really hard decisions. But it seems like these hard decisions are paying off because people really like what Anthropic is doing. So can you talk about your involvement with Anthropic and how they kind of started and um, how they protected themselves so they could make these hard decisions?

Eric Ries: Yeah, 100%. Listen, for the record, I do not take any credit for Anthropic success, okay? All credit to that team who has done amazing work. I played only a bit part in the story, but I am very, very. Excuse me. I'm very proud of the bit part that I played because I was very happy that I got to meet them right after they left OpenAI and we had the same conversation we're having now on this podcast about the need to have an ethos and to protect it. And they took it really seriously and they really built a lot of structures into the company that are designed to protect them. Um, the most public of which is the Long Term Benefit Trust. So their board of directors, the for profit company, is actually overseeing by, um, a set of outside trustees who are AI safety oriented. It's not a surprise that Anthropic gets all the best talent in the industry. To me, it's not a surprise that even enterprises trust them with their data more than other vendors because trustworthiness is baked into their DNA from day one. Now, what's interesting to me about their recent kerfuffle with the Pentagon, and I want to be super clear again, for the record, Anthropic is not the main actor in this drama, okay? This is mostly a story about government overreach and about unprecedented demands being placed on a for profit American company that had never been done before and they were in an absolute, no win, impossible situation. So I agree that people of all good, good faith, people of many different persuasions can disagree about what. What they should have done, you know, and people be like, I wish they had done this. I wish they'd done that. Okay, fine. But nonetheless, I think we can say, objectively speaking, that Anthropic did the right thing. I know. As soon as I say that some people are like, are you saying that they're the morally superior angels touched by God who never made any mistakes in their right? How dare that. I can name 10 different things they've done wrong.

Host: Me, too.

Eric Ries: Okay. Um, I'm in the data set that they illegally train their models on. Okay, like, so I'm not saying they're perfect by any means, but we can still say right and wrong doesn't mean absolute right or absolute wrong. Like, if I say a company did the wrong thing, I'm not saying they're run by Satan. I'm just saying that they did something that wasn't right. What does it mean for a company to do the right thing? Well, for a company to do the right thing, we have to say, um, this is somebody who acted consistent with their own values. So there can't just be any values. If their values are malign, then it's not the right thing to do it. But if you have values that are broadly consistent with your vision of how to advance human flourishing, and you have the strength to stick up for those values even when it costs you money, people will admire you, even who disagree with the decision you made. So I know a ton of people who actually don't think they would have preferred Anthropic didn't do this. Who switched their accounts from OpenAI to Claude anyway? Because they just felt like the opportunism compared to the principled stand meant something to them. You see, the same thing at Costco, by the way. Costco recently had a big kerfuffle where they were under an attack for their DEI policies. Other companies, DEI has become very unpopular recently. Other companies have performatively abandoned their dei, uh, policies with the same performative, like, lack of grace that they embraced them in the first place. They're just, you know, they're opportunistic. Costco was like, look, when we thought, when this was popular, we thought it was a good idea. Now that it's unpopular, we still think it's a good idea. We do what we do. You don't like it, don't invest, we don't care. But we don't shift with the wind. And they had a big shareholder vote about it. An activist investor forced them to have a shareholder vote, and they got 98% of investors voted with them on this point. Now you're telling me that, remember, Costco has millions of retail investors in every conceivable political environment in this country. You're telling me that 98% of Costco's investors are woke up? Give me a break. People voted with them, even who disagreed with them, because they admired their principled stance. So this ability to stand up for what's right is extremely rare these days. Now remember, Anthropic gave, uh, up, in addition to going up against, like the largest government on the planet, they also gave up a $200 million contract. So, like, it's very rare for any company these days to be willing to give up any amount of money for any reason. They're so greedy. So the fact that they did that was a big deal. Obviously they couldn't have known all the benefits they would reap. You know, they didn't know Claude was going to go to number one in the App Store the next day. Someone sent me a video. By the way, the sidewalk around their office was full of chalked up messages the next day. And believe you me, if I tell you that a San Francisco tech company has had their sidewalk out there outside their office chalked, most of the time, it is not saying, thank you, we love you. Unbelievable.

Dana: Good job.

Eric Ries: It's usually not, uh, the kind of thing we can say on a podcast like this. Okay, so they did, in fact reap all these tangible benefits, but they couldn't have known in advance that they were going to. Just like with Cloudflare, you have to be willing to have the strength and the principled ethos necessary to do the right thing and then trust that the consequences will follow.

Dana: But they were also constructed to be able to make those decisions. Right? Like, that's what you talk about in the book, is how you position these companies, structure them, um, so that they can make these really hard choices.

Eric Ries: We want them to have the strength to be able to do it. Now look, last, last, last press reports I saw. Claude is on track. Anthropic is on track to have the fastest revenue growth rate of any startup in the history of our economy. No one has ever, ever, ever had a growth ramp like this. Not Google, not JP Morgan, not Standard Oil. Nobody has ever grown like this company is growing. And if you ask people why, they'll say things like, well, they have a more efficient inference. But then you say, but why? Like, oh, because they have better talent. But why? Well, because all the really good people want to work for the good guys. Why? Because they have this ethos. But ethos could be replaced, right? Like, why? Uh, but no, they can't be replaced because people see the structure enables this good stuff to happen. People will say, well, but they have superior product. Why? Well, their product development just seems to be having unbelievable velocity. Why? Because they have better talent. Right. Everything always comes back to the same. All the stories people tell about why it's going well always come back to. This is the place that people want to work. This is the place people want to buy from. This is the place people want to invest in. Because this thing is like a, uh, uh, magnet for all the best people. So I don't, I haven't found their success surprising. People sometimes find it confounding. How have they been able to beat out all these bigger companies? How? They didn't have the. They didn't even have the head start. How are they able to come from behind? But to me, this is a principle I call harder is easier. If you do the work upfront to establish the right ethos, to establish the structure with integrity, yes, it's a lot of work. But if you do that, it makes the other things in business that people normally say are too hard a lot easier.

Host: And maybe because maybe some people are listening to this today and they're like, wow, this is amazing. We just heard Costco, Cloudflare, anthropic. But what if I want to make it practical? Let's say someone is considering to start a business, right? Um, how should they think about their incorruptible DNA before they even start? If they don't have an ethos, should they then not start the company and do something else? You talk in your book that you also understand that bills need to be paid sometimes. So sometimes you have to make hard choices. So if you're listening to this and thinking about maybe doing a company, uh, what would you tell someone?

Eric Ries: Yeah, this isn't a reason not to start a company. It is because actually most people who, when I call, most people who build for a living have what I call the builder's intuition. They kind of, in their heart, they understand that there are better and worse ways to make money. And the best way is to create net new value in the world and capture some of it for yourself. What, uh, Tim O'Reilly calls create more value than you capture. It's a very simple idea. Every, every person listening to this who has, of a builder persuasion is like, like, what are the other ways? Obviously, but unfortunately, in our economy today, There, um, are very, very many ways to make money without creating any value at all, including many ways that destroy massive amounts of value. We've already talked about several and in fact many of those ways of making money. Just so you know, our grandparents and great grandparents not only would have called them like, morally dubious, they literally would have been crimes because we have legalized many ways of value destroying making money. Here's the problem. Most builders, although they carry this intuition in their heart, they have been taught a formalized set of definitions about profit, about what it means to build a company, about what it means to be a for profit company, what it means to serve shareholders, blah, blah, blah, that is at odds with what they really intuitively believe. So if you're thinking about starting a company, I'm not saying you don't be like, oh, I can't start the company till I find out what my ethos is. It is in building your company. You will discover your ethos. Remember, strategy, mission, purpose. Just like with Matthew Prince, these are emergent properties of the superorganism you propose to birth. Entrepreneurship is closer to mothering than it is to ownership. We own slaves. We birth organizations. Okay? The organization is not your slave. It is your creation. So what you need to do, all you need to do if you want to build this organization, to have it be incorruptible, is you have to pay attention to that intuitive understanding, and you have to nurture and protect it against people who will try to talk you out of it. And those people are persuasive. Silver tongue mother.

Dario: Right.

Eric Ries: They will try so hard to make you feel it's not serious. You know, that's, that's a nice to have. It's kind of a hippie thing. It's whatever, whatever insecurity you have, they'll go at you. That's fine for a technologist, but business people don't think that way or whatever nonsense. They will try everything until something works. These people understand class solidarity like you wouldn't believe. They tag team, they work together, they want to make you feel crazy, but you're not crazy. You have the right of this argument. And my goal with this book is to arm builders with the language and the concepts they need to fight back. I don't try. You'll notice if you read the book carefully. I never tell anybody what they should do. I do not try to convince anybody to make the world a better place. If you're a sociopath and you just want to make money, I got nothing to say to you. Good luck Let the. Let the chips fall where they may. And call me. Call me when you're old, when you're rich and miserable, and tell me you can rub my face in it if you want. I don't care. My goal is for people who do understand this, who have this as a first principle, that they want their work to, in fact, be of service, to be able. Have literally had the tools they need to protect that desire.

Host: And there's one thing which is interesting. You said it's more like motherhood or, uh, mothership than running a company. Right. Uh, I once spoke to a very famous Dutch entrepreneur, and I asked him about, you know, what about exit strategies? Exit strategies? Like, I have, like, seven children, and, you know, some will exit the house at 30, some will exit the house at 16. I don't have children. In order to get them out. Right. You have a company, you journey with it until it's mature enough for you to part. And this is also. Yeah, maybe. Maybe getting a company is more like raising, uh, raising a kid than. Than actually it is.

Eric Ries: If you talk to founders who've been at it for a while, they all say this. Everyone has it. Like you. I don't. People say it in board meetings, but in the drinks after the board meeting that night, we always, like. We talk about this all the time. It's like this thing is alive, it's special, it's vibrant, and it's not 100% in our control. This is the part that makes people nervous. It's a bit like Frankenstein and his monster. It's like, well, we're sitting with a CEO. I tell this story in the book, um, who had all the control of his organization on paper. I mean, he owned it. He owned a huge chunk of it. He was the, uh, unquestioned leader. He had founded it. He had every kind of control you could want, want. And he was really frustrated because he couldn't get it to do what he wanted. And it's like its ethos had diverged from his ethos because he didn't have the right tools necessary to bind it. We're trying to bind an organization to our values, trying to inculcate them deep, deep in those structures. So, yeah, if you've never studied the science of emergent intelligence, if you don't, if that's new to your listeners, then they're, uh, in for a treat because it's really wild. And of course, that's all the citations are in the book. This can sound metaphysical, I know, but it's not. It's Actually like has a very rigorous scientific pedigree. The idea that organizations have emergent intelligence, they have character, they have their own ethics. And in fact in one study the researchers were able to prove, they were able to measure organizations ethical character and prove that the ethical character of an organization actually predicts its likelihood of having compliance violations in the future. But the ethics of the individual people who make up the organization is not predictive of that future. The organization has a character apart from the character of the people that make it up. If you've never really grappled with that fact, it's kind of scary. And obviously with, with the generative AI and AI agents and all this stuff, this issue is right back on the front burner of public consciousness. Because organizations and the transformer architecture are both instances of the same class of thing. They are both emergent intelligences.

Dario: I think one of the questions that people currently, because there's so much dynamic in the market, as you say, like earlier you mentioned, uh, anthropic that has just attracted so many talents. Um, how do people who want to work for companies that are more robust that they can believe that they have incorruptible approaches, how can they challenge their potential future employers or also do their own homework to figure out or they embarking with a company that has the resilience or a company that uh, doesn't have that resilience.

Eric Ries: Oh, I'm really glad you're asking because it's one of the, one of the most important pieces of career advice I can give you is to align yourself with an organization that has this structure. It's much, much, much less likely to betray you and it's much more likely to be commercially successful. One of the biggest surprises for many readers is all the evidence in this book that this way of working is well studied. And we have the proof that it is in fact a competitive advantage over conventional ways of working. So actually every story in the book can be read this backwards way. This is one of my uh, big reveals. Spoiler alert. If you read to the end of the book, you will get to see this reversal that a story that is nominally. I always tell stories from the founder's point of view because I'm a founder, what can I say? But when I give founders the advice that um, employees are more loyal to companies that behave this way, that's also an employment guide. Um, customers are more loyal and have better retention rates if you are trustworthy. But that's also a shopping guide and of course the returns for investors are superior. That's helpful to fundraise funders, founders who are trying to raise money. But if you're investing money, like, for example, for your retirement, hey, there's free money for you if you will abide by these principles. So what's interesting to me is how many people feel so helpless about this. They feel like they have to take whatever job they're offered. They have to just, uh, acclimate to whatever company culture they find themselves in. And they don't feel comfortable advocating for their own beliefs. So I'll give you. I'll give you a story. I was asked by someone recently who was going in for a job interview. They had heard me talk, and they said, hey, I really want to. I want to work in an incorruptible company. I think that's gonna be good for my career. That's gonna make me. I'm sleep better at night, but how am I gonna find one? And they were like, give me something I can do in my job interview to help me figure out if they're incorruptible or not. But. But keep in mind, they gave me the caveat. Keep in mind, not courageous. I don't want to do anything that requires courage. Can you still help me? And I was like, yes, I absolutely can. I admire activists. I admire people that are willing to take a stand. Obviously, I've done it myself, but, like, not when I was the age of this person. You know, it took me a while to learn. I understand being not courageous, being afraid you won't be able to support your family. I get it. I'm sympathetic. I said, here's your. Here's your plan. You're. No courage required. I felt like a no bake cookie recipe. No courage required. Uh, interview recipe. At the end of the interview, when they ask you if you have any other questions, I want you to ask if the company is mission driven. Just ask, is this a mission driven company? Ask it in the most innocent way you can. Person's gonna say, yes.

Dana: Okay, good.

Eric Ries: Be, like, cool. How do you know? And they're gonna say, oh, we do so much good stuff. We take care of our customers.

Host: We.

Eric Ries: We throw an awesome conference every year. We take them all out to dinner. Whatever they say, we'll get free beer on Fridays. Who knows what they'll say? Let them talk. And then at the end, just be like, oh, that's cool. Is that what it says in the corporate charter, too?

Dario: Just ask.

Eric Ries: Uh, now if they say, how dare you ask such a thing? Like, oh, sorry, I didn't know but is it? Now, I guarantee you, unless you're working in a very small number of companies, the answer to this question is I don't know. I actually don't know. Most companies have a very lofty sounding mission statement, but their actual corporate mission in the document says something like the ACME Corporation is hereby incorporated to pursue. And there's a little fill in the blank like a mad lib and it'll say any lawful act or purpose. Now unfortunately, in our modern economy, this is, we uh, live in a very degraded time when that simple statement is widely interpreted to mean maximize shareholder value. So, okay, so if you have a nominal purpose to help people, but an actual purpose to maximize shareholder value, this yawning chasm between the two will eventually become a huge problem. Don't work at a company like that if you can to afford. But even if you decide to work there, just the fact that you ask the question. You can't imagine the extent to which modern companies are obsessed with your behavior. You think you're powerless, but these companies are every bit as addicted as like a teenager on Instagram or a cigarette junkie. Okay? In our modern era of surveillance capitalism, every decision you make is somebody's okr. Okay? There's some middle manager somewhere who's getting paid a bonus to get you to make that decision or its opposite in a lot of cases, many, many people. So if you think no one's watching, if you think it doesn't matter if you choose the ethical option or not, if you choose to work at the good company or the bad, every choice you make ripples out in gravitational waves through our economy. You don't have to join a secret meeting, you don't have to learn the secret handshake. You don't even have to engage in collective action. You as an individual person, simply speaking your values out loud. Already tremendous power. And in this case I was actually, I've been in the room. I've been part of a lot of hiring processes over the years. And those of us who've been involved in uh, a well run hiring process understand that it's somebody's job to make sure that every question that a candidate asks a hiring manager in an interview, the company knows the answer to and the hiring manager knows the answer. So if you ask a new question that's never been asked before, they're going to have to find out the answer. Well, this is so interesting, this one. They're going to have to ask their boss and her boss and her boss and next thing you know, they're discussing it at the board level now. That's one person asking the question. What if two people ask the question? What if 10 people ask the question? Next thing you know, the CEOs like, oh, I have the tools I need now to advocate for putting this in the charter. Because now, look, guys, we're getting. Candidates won't come work here. They're asking us about this. We got to do it right. Like, you're exerting pressure, and you didn't. You had no courage. You didn't say, uh, hell, f you, I won't work here unless you. You just asked a very simple question. If you know what the right question is to ask, you can. It's like the lever that can move the world. So part of my goal in writing this book is to arm every person. Whether you are a founder or a leader or middle manager or a junior person or a student or just a customer or whatever, everyone should be armed with knowing the right questions to ask. So the next time someone wants you to give you their trust, you can find out if they've really earned it.

Host: Thank you so much. And I think that's a really great, uh, you know, final quote to end on if next time, if someone wants to have your trust, um, see if they earn it. And, um, we've talked almost for an hour, Eric, which is almost double what we normally do.

Eric Ries: Oh, thank you.

Host: Thank you so much for joining us and giving the time.

Eric Ries: Um, my pleasure.

Host: I've learned so much. I've learned about your new book, Incorruptible. I've learned about the concepts in it and how the world is completely different and how these companies that have these ethos actually are better companies, and that there's science, scientific proof behind it. I've learned how to think about it, uh, if I ever want to start a company, how to recognize it, and that I should speak up and sort of express my values. And I was happy to hear that you considered security and privacy and all these other things that we work for, work on, um, as part of any ethos, basically. Um, and that they're, unfortunately, also often the first ones to go when the rubber hits the road to much. So thanks again for coming. Congratulations, uh, uh, on your new book. I really enjoyed, uh, reading it, and it made me think about a lot of things. And, um, yeah, to those of you listening, thank you so much for listening, uh, to the inverted podcast. As always, um, keep an eye out for your users, for your customers. Saving one is worth it. And see you in the next one.

Eric Ries: All right. Thank you all so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for listening.