Eric Ries

Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange · 1 appearance on the record.

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authorfounderexecutivehost@ericries ↗LinkedIn ↗theleanstartup.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author best known for pioneering the Lean Startup methodology and writing The Lean Startup. He is the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and co-founder of Answer.AI.

9statements → 2claims → 2claims resolved → 4.11/5average certainty → 2.22/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 21said about them ↓

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 1 opinion · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Eric argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Ries: Facebook bought a VPN app to track competitor usage

“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 10:59 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

How they sound: speaking style how? →

261 words/min while actually speaking · 1.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Eric Ries: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 13 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,067 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Eric Ries is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host 2/10

setup questions received 53%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 11:31“I'm really intrigued, because you spoke about blame there, we discussed KPIs earlier, and it all kind of brings back to the accountability element, and one that always really troub…” ▶ 15:24“Do you need the unbundling of financial budgets then within large corporations to allow for this small scale micro innovation within subsectors owning their own budgets?” ▶ 9:42“Can I ask, at what point is the inflection point where the requirement to alter that structure and maybe insert the missing function of entrepreneurship exists?”

What they said9 What others said21 Episodes1

Everything Eric Ries said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Ries: Companies without a dedicated entrepreneurship function are in trouble

“Most companies don't have entrepreneurship as a function, and they're in trouble.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 9:38 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Assertion Supported

Ries: Facebook bought a VPN app to track competitor usage

“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”

Insight

Eric Ries: Most corporate organizations lack processes to be true meritocracies

“We say that we're a meritocracy. We say that good ideas can come from anywhere, but we don't mean it. We don't mean that good ideas can come from anywhere because we don't have a process for capturing them and for testing them rigorously. We just hope that the…”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 15:09 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Insight

Ries: Entrepreneurship is chaotic individually but manageable as a portfolio

“My view is that entrepreneurship itself is very chaotic and unpredictable and confusing, but entrepreneurship as a portfolio activity, you know, like what VCs do is totally manageable.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 7:39 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Assertion Partly supported

Ries: Most companies use Alfred Sloan's 1920s GM matrix blueprint

“Most organizations today are built to a blueprint that was perfected really in the 19 twenties by Alfred Sloan when he was the CEO of General Motors.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 4:37 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Insight

Eric Ries: Career equity outweighs financial equity in companies over 100 employees

“Once you get past 50 or a hundred employees, the fractional ownership that people have, certainly once you get to a thousand employees, the fractional ownership people have is going to be dwarfed by their future career prospects.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 12:32 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Insight

Eric Ries: True corporate innovation requires updating promotion and compensation policies

“Companies say they're serious about innovation, but if they have not changed the promotion and compensation policies to match, then they're not serious about it.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 19:56 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Insight

Ries: Company culture is learned muscle memory from past accountability decisions

“I think culture is the way that we work when no one tells us how to work. It's the artifact and kind of the learned muscle memory of the past process and accountability decisions the company made.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 21:37 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

Disclosure

Eric Ries initially published his Lean Startup blog anonymously

“And so, you know, I actually initially started blogging anonymously.”

Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 3:26 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure

The other half of the tape: Eric Ries's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 21 times in 12 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7 Garry Tan 6 Mike Maples 2 Matthew McCall 1 Josh Hannah 1 Jeff Lawson 1 Eric Ver Ploeg 1 Ann Miura-Ko 1