Eric Ries: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Yeah, we all know this force. In the book, 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. Now, sometimes we lose control of them because we get fired. We get ousted from our own company. Sometimes it happens because we're like Frankenstein and his monster. It starts to become malign or bureaucratic or frankly evil and we can't figure out how to stop it. And all kinds of other ways. I had a front row seat at this. I've been helping people build companies now for a long time. I've helped people create unimaginable amounts of wealth for themselves and for society. And I'm really proud of the work that they've done. I'm really proud of the bit part that I played in so many of these companies, and yet I've also seen this darkness. And it's not just founders getting fired, although we're obviously, we're going to talk about that. But the other day, I was out to dinner with some friends. We were not at home. We were away from our usual spots. And so someone said, "Oh, there's this restaurant. I haven't been there in a couple years, but it's really good. Let's check it out." We go, we sit down at dinner. They take one bite of the food and then they're on their phone and we're like, "Dude, you're being rude. Why are you on your phone?" "It's just one sec, one sec. Yep. I thought so." He turns it around. "I could tell that this restaurant got taken over by private equity. I could taste it." And I've told that story a bunch of times now, and so many different people have told me, "Oh yeah, I know what restaurant you're talking about." And then they name like 12 different restaurants. So what's going on that you can taste the ownership structure of a company in the food? How many people had a famous brand that they love get ruined? I tell hundreds of years of these stories in the book, all kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No. Their very success became a liability because the more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher. Wow, that's a very visceral example. I think about vital eggs as a great example of this. It was in the news, I don't know, on Twitter, TikTok a while ago. It's the eggs that we've been getting forever. It's like pasture-raised, organic.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.