Eric Ries: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 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 this is actually the way AI companies are operating now. I appreciate you saying that. And it is funny how every wave there's a backlash and somebody writes the article, "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, "Well, 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. And it's funny to me, one of the most important aspects of it that I think stands up really well, and it's been 15 years, is that so many of these AI products that leaving the models and the underlying technology aside, these specific products that have taken the world by storm, you can really tell that the AI labs themselves did not know they were going to be as popular as they turned out to be. Obviously ChatGPT, they had no idea. Claude Code, Cowork. These were small experiments in the grand scheme of things. They weren't the companies like, "This is our big bet. Let's go." And that's just so classic that that's a universal aspect of product development, that you do not have the ability to predict the future. And when you pretend, you get yourself in trouble. If you hold everything like a hypothesis, you get the benefits of the scientific method. It's pretty helpful. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally, every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. You have a new book out called Incorruptible. It's a very different, very different book from The Lean Startup. It feels very personal in a lot of ways. The way I've heard you describe the combination of The Lean Startup and this new book is The Lean Startup was about helping you build a successful company and Incorruptible is about helping you protect what you've built. I want to start with that second part of protecting what you've built. What is it that you need protection from? What's this kind of corruption that you talk about that founders run into?…

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