What Eric Ries Got Right.. and the One Thing I Think He's Still Fighting Uphill

A lot of people close to me know how much I’ve listened to Lenny’s podcast over the years. It’s one of the few I actually make time for.. not just background noise, but sit-down, take-notes, send-the-link-to-someone kind of listening.

So when Lenny dropped his most recent episode with Eric Ries, I cleared my schedule.

If you’re not familiar with Eric Ries, he wrote The Lean Startup.. arguably the most influential startup book of the last 15 years. The build-measure-learn cycle, the minimum viable product, the idea that you don’t predict the future, you test it. If you’ve worked in product or post-sales at a SaaS company in the last decade, his thinking has shaped how you work whether you know it or not.

His new book is called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. I’ve already preordered it. I cannot wait.

Here’s what I took away from the conversation.

Eric’s framing is simple and devastating. The thing that destroys great companies isn’t usually competition. It isn’t a bad product. It’s their own success.

The more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher it.

He calls it financial gravity.. this force that no one controls but everyone obeys, that slowly drags organizations away from what made them worth building in the first place. Quality gets cut. Corners get rounded off. The things that made the product special get sacrificed at the altar of the quarterly report.

He shared a really good story I keep coming back to: he was out to dinner with a friend who took one bite of the food, picked up his phone, looked something up, and turned the screen around. The restaurant had been taken over by private equity. He knew from the food alone. The quality was different and because someone else came in and changed what made the quality great.

Governance is near and dear to my heart. It’s one of the reasons I’m in the process of getting my AI Governance Professional certification.. AIGP.. because I see this becoming one of the defining themes of the next five years.

Every week I’m working with clients on AI initiatives, I see versions of the same problem Eric is describing. Not at the board level. At the team level. The AI tool that got pushed through because it looked impressive in a demo. The workflow that got built because someone had bandwidth, not because it solved a real problem. The initiative that got approved without anyone asking what outcome it was actually supposed to move.

The governance problem isn’t just a Novo Nordisk or an Anthropic problem. It’s a every-CS-team-trying-to-figure-out-AI problem. And the answer is the same whether you’re a $100 billion company or a five-person post-sales team: you need a filter. A principle. Something that sits between the idea and the action and asks whether this is actually worth doing.

Harder is easier. This is the leadership principle I found most useful. Eric’s argument is that being principled.. genuinely principled, not just mission-statement principled.. pays off in ways that ROI-based thinking can’t capture. Trust compounds. Customers who trust you stay longer, try your new products, and forgive your mistakes. Teams that trust their leadership move faster and make better decisions without being in the room.

The Cloudflare story is the best illustration of this. A junior engineer walked into the CEO’s office and said.. if our mission is to make a better internet, shouldn’t encryption be free? Most leaders would have said no. Matthew Prince said “let’s figure it out.” They gave SSL encryption away for free, their top-of-funnel grew by an order of magnitude, and Cloudflare is now a $70 billion company. Harder is easier. The principle paid off.

The ant story. This one has stayed with me. Eric described research where one ant cannot solve a complex spatial puzzle, but put a thousand ants together and they solve it.. in a way that looks, genuinely looks, like intelligence at work. But with humans, adding more people to a problem makes it worse unless the humans are carefully aligned. That’s the whole game. That’s why mission-aligned companies move faster. Not because they’re smarter. Because everyone’s already agreed on what they’re doing and why.

The governance structure. Eric made the case for Public Benefit Corporation status.. a two-page filing that legally commits the company to a stated purpose beyond maximizing shareholder returns. Anthropic did this from the beginning. So did Patagonia. So did Novo Nordisk, over a hundred years ago. He argues, persuasively, that this structure is not a constraint on growth.. it’s a prerequisite for durable growth. Anthropic is the fastest growing company in history. They’re a PBC. The data doesn’t lie.

Quality as a canary. Eric pointed out that the first things to get cut when financial gravity takes hold are always the same: safety, performance, quality, design, innovation. And the insidious part is that you can cut all of them and nothing bad happens immediately. Trust is like that. You can betray it and the customer won’t even notice right away. By the time they notice, you’re in a very different place.

I agree with everything Eric says about integrity and ethos. Completely. No reservations.

But here’s the thing I keep turning over.

His framework assumes that the desire to do things for good is present.. and just needs the right structure to protect it. And I think that’s true for some founders. Dario and Daniela at Anthropic. Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia. Marie and August Krogh at what became Novo Nordisk. These were people who genuinely wanted to build something good and needed the structure to protect that intention over time.

But what about the companies where the desire to do good isn’t the starting point? Where the ethos was never really there.. or was there once and got slowly replaced by something else? Eric’s structures are brilliant at protecting an ethos. I’m not sure they can install one.

We have quite a road to get there. Because the governance structure only works if someone wants it to work. If the people at the top are optimizing for extraction from the beginning, a PBC filing and a mission guardian aren’t going to stop them. They’ll find the workaround.

I think the honest answer is that this is a culture problem before it’s a governance problem. And culture changes slowly, painfully, and usually only after enough people have been burned badly enough to demand something different.

I don’t say this to be cynical. I say it because I think it’s the real work. And Eric’s book is a crucial part of that conversation. But I wanted to name the gap between the framework and the reality.

As I think about my own consulting practice.. the AI workflow design, the post-sales strategy, the frameworks I’m building with clients.. Eric’s conversation reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

The human side of this work cannot get lost.

Every AI initiative I help a team build, every framework I design, every workflow I architect.. the question underneath all of it has to be: does this make the people using it better at their jobs? Does it make the customers on the receiving end feel more taken care of? Does it create more value, or does it just create more speed?

Speed without quality is just getting to the wrong place faster. I’m building my practice around the idea that the goal is never the tool. The goal is the outcome. And the outcome has to be something worth building.

Eric’s invisible leader concept resonated with me here. The idea that the most consequential decisions get made when no manager is in the room. That what you stand for has to be encoded into the culture so deeply that it guides behavior without supervision.

That’s the standard I’m holding my own work to. And it’s the standard I’m bringing to every client I work with.

I’m genuinely excited about Eric’s book.. Incorruptible comes out May 26th and I’ll be reading it the moment it lands. If the podcast was this rich, I can only imagine what the full manuscript contains.

And I’m equally excited about what I’m building here.

Starting in June, I’m launching a paid Friday tier for this newsletter.

Free subscribers have been getting the story, the framework, and the high-level thinking every Monday.. and that’s not changing. Free will always be valuable. That’s a promise.

But paid subscribers starting in mid-June will get the layer underneath. Every Friday. The actual builds. The technical detail. The workflows, prompts, and Claude skills you can take directly into your own work. The gotchas I don’t cover in the free version.

The reason I’m doing this is the same reason Eric wrote Incorruptible. I want to build something that’s worth building. Not just a newsletter.. a resource that actually makes post-sales and CS teams better at their jobs. The paid tier is where that gets real. I also want to thank those of you who have reached out and already pledged that you would support this shift. If it was not for you, I probably wouldn’t have the courage to do it. :)

Founding member rate is $5/month and locks in permanently. It goes to $7/month at launch.

If you’ve been reading and finding this valuable.. this is your moment.