Eric Ries: belief

Transcript context

…So maybe it's just a final tactic. Say an early stage founders listening to this, they're like, "Oh, shit I got to really do something here." What are say three things they should do in the next week or two? Okay, here, let's just do the really easiest things. First of all, if you haven't raised money yet or you've only raised money on safes. Okay? You can do absolutely whatever you want. So do not waste this moment. Everyone's in such a rush to get big, such a rush for the next thing, but you have a precious, precious moment here. The founders who have already raised their series A or they're in pre-IPU, the founders that you envy that are ahead of you, it's more of a pain for them. They got to go get investors on board. They got to go... They need to do it. Okay. I told you the next best time to plant a tree is today. So they still have to do it, but you have an incredible privilege. Just please, please, please do it. Because here are the basic things I think are really easy to do that are super low cost. Be a public benefit corps, do the file. But that's so easy. And write a mission there that is something you really will feel good about. And the way the test for if you wrote the right thing is try to brainstorm with your co-founder. You don't need to spend like 10 weeks on this, spend an hour and just adversarial prompting. Okay? Can you think of any way you could make money while violating this statement? And if you can, would you be happy or sad in that scenario? If you'd be sad, write it into the thing. Don't ever be a situation where you're rich and miserable. Write it down. Okay. Easy. Second thing that's super easy, we didn't get a chance to talk about, I call it the director's oath. This came up obviously because there's this big fight going on between Anthropic and Figma and a reporter I text just got reported, reported on the idea. Because it was like, "What are our responsibilities in these weird situations?" It's actually really tricky. Every company's calling me being like, "Are you saying I can't have an AI person on my board? Because having an AI person on my board seems really dangerous." But I'm just like, "You know what's really dangerous? Not having an AI person on your board." So yeah, everyone's kind of stuck. What do we do? It's impossible situation. We need to have, just like we have doctors that have a Hippocratic oath, first do no harm. Why don't we have that for directors? It's insane to me. Directors control, make far more consequential decisions than nurses. So why do we hold nurses to a higher standard than directors? No. So we can wait for us to standardize on an oath for everybody, but you could implement one right now. You could just write it into your corporate charter, "Everyone has to do this. It's a precondition of being on the board." And then the third thing is I'm going to presume, again, for founders, we'll talk about non-founders in a second, but for founder, I'm going to presume you've already got what are called founders preferred shares. If you don't know what that is, you need to ask an LLM to explain it to you. n-founders in a second, but for founder, I'm going to presume you've already got what are called founders preferred shares. If you don't know what that is, you need to ask an LLM to explain it to you. And just say, " Eric said founders preferred shares could potentially make me personally an extra billion dollars someday. So can you explain to me why?" Type that prompt and read what it says. You need to understand the economics of what are called founders preferred shares. So I'm going to assume that you understand that and you've already done it. If you haven't, that doesn't count on my bill of extra things you needed to do because you need to do that anyway for personal reasons. But if you have that, then that's the logical place to do things like founder control, extra votes, board votes for board control, stuff like that. So talk to your lawyer about what are called mission protected provisions. If your lawyer's kind of being a drag or you don't like having to pay them by the hour, I actually helped start a law firm just because this drives me crazy. So there's a law firm called Virgil. They'll be happy to help you and they don't charge you by the hour. This is not the main thing that they do. They mostly do AI assisted back office acceleration, which is also very cool. But anyway, make sure you have somebody you can talk to about it. Okay? And then after you've figured out which of those things you want to do, then imagine yourself in the seat of an investor saying, "It sounds like you're a greedy SOB. You have all this power for yourself. You're like a power hungry emperor. Why do you want to be emperor for life?" So you don't want to be emperor for life. Right now we kind of have this dichotomy between what I call investor controlled companies and founder controlled companies. And everyone's like, "You got to pick one or the other." But neither alternative is very good. What we want to create are what I call mission controlled companies. So a mission controlled company is one where the mission itself has sovereignty. And so if you're feeling a little greedy about grabbing all this power for yourself, that's the time to do something like the Anthropic LTBT. It's very easy to implement at the early stages because you don't need a nonprofit. Let's say you're a want to be Novo Nordisk, you don't actually have to boot up the nonprofit right now. All you have to do is write it into the charter the way Anthropic did. Just say, "10% of the equity is hereby pledged to a nonprofit foundation and 1% of future revenue. The foundation gets a board seat," or whatever you want to say. Those things are really easy. Just write them into your charter, fire and forget and then boot it up later, but make sure you have the right to do it. Now, those are the bare minimum easiest things in the book to do. A total piece of cake.…

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