Eric Ries

“Do not build it right. Build a culture of building it wrong. Do not, build it right, presume some level of success. I love Eric Ries. We've had great debates. I, I'm in the same spirit, but that word viable is actually hurtful because viable also means hope of…”

“Too many teams Waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”

“I think in the long run, people who invest now in craftsmanship, in the understanding of software principles, architectural principles, artistic principles, whatever the thing is, are going to be so much better off. They're going to wind up being like incredib…”

“Speaking of someone who's in the training data without any of us being compensated, by the way, which I think is atrocious.”

“What's really held up, like, a lot of the techniques and the specific tactics from Lean Startup are a little dated now. I mean, you know, Groupon is a case study. Like, it's old now. It came out in 2011. But I think the principles have held up really well, and…”

“I think fundamentally like using resources well is an eternal entrepreneurial virtue. So even the people that are overfunded, a lot of them run into trouble because now you don't have that that reality kind of barking at you all the time to make sure that you'…”

“When the founders of Anthropic left OpenAI, so what is that, like three or four OpenAI crises ago? I can't track. But anyway, it's like hard for me to keep track, but anyways, like it's been a rough, you know, it's been a rocky road. When they left, like I was…”

“There was a big meta study of like 55,000 companies with various levels of employee ownership, and they found that employee ownership exhibits dose response. Like, 10% ownership is better than 50% is better than 10, a hundred percent is better than 50. Not jus…”

“So I think you're going to see a lot of companies who actually sincerely believe in this possibility, realize that we have to enlist our employees in it. It's essential for our business. We're going out of business. If we don't do it, we need to be allies with…”

“I actually think we've been misled by a whole package of what are today called best practices about how companies are to be built, structured, and governed. That are frankly value destroying.”

“On the contrary, LTSC is still going strong, and they made, we actually made money last year.”

“So I feel like Lean Startup, we created so many companies worth protecting, but we didn't give them the tools they needed to actually stay in control, to actually protect the trustworthiness of the thing that they made.”

“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 gold in the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.”

“People used to tell me Costco was an example that wasn't protected so much so that like, I was surprised to learn that it was embodied in a governance fortress.”

“The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a seventy billion dollar company today.”

“If you're serious about being mission driven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission. That's the audit we have to do.”

“This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech, we're making great progress on the technical alignment problem, but we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem, which is that we've known since the development of Conway's laws…”

“Corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence, the same scientific principle that makes the transformer architecture work and appear intelligent. That same principle …”

“As a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.”

“He really describes also, like, a software engineer's mindset and how they get it wrong, where the solution is to build new features, where he really is introducing this, like, new way to build something”

“I can remember where I was when Jeremy told me, by the way, he doesn't think the company will ever need more than 12 employees. And I was like, oh sure, you mean like this month, you know, but it's like, no, over its entire life.”

“I'm working on a new book. It's not announced yet. So don't look too, too closely what this is, but the book is called the incorruptible. It'll come out next year.”

“The lean startup by Eric Ries talks about how you don't need to actually build anything. You can put a landing page, you can send traffic to it. And based on that, you know, you can figure out what to build. I don't think that works anymore. I think that it's …”

“And he actually raised something like a hundred million dollars to start this. I think Andreessen Horowitz funded it, and a bunch of other-”

“You need to take your old idea. You need to bring it to town square. You need to shoot it in the head. And I was like, what? And he's like, your team is going to be so confused unless you explicitly tell them that, Hey, all the shit I've been saying for two ye…”

“It's why we called minimum viable product a product, not an experiment or a test or hypothesis. Like we wanted to remind people that although we are removing features and we are de-scoping in order to get learning, we're still trying to build something that is…”

“I built a stock exchange, literally the same regulatory category as NYSE or NASDAQ. I spent 10 years of my life getting the regulatory approval to do it.”

“Like, so many of these companies collapse, first they collapse morally, and then they collapse you know, financially, and it's actually worse for investors in the end.”

“The ESG movement has been a total failure. You know, from my perspective, because Philip Morris has great ESG scores.”

“And it turns out that those questions have just become like really acute for AI companies. So, so because of my work on governance, I wound up meeting with and getting to work with some of the top AI companies.”

“We at IMV, we ship product 50 times a day on average at a time when people were like lucky to be doing it monthly if they were really advanced.”

“That is what it's called when you change the strategy, but try to have Fidelity to the vision that we, it needs a name because we do it all the time.”

“When you make something put out into the world, on the one hand, you don't have any control about what happens next. And yet I do think we bear a certain responsibility about was it in fact net positive, but was it helpful to people?”

“When I was a consumer of books, I hated it when authors would come out with a second edition that would destroy what was beautiful about the first edition, including the mistakes. Because like in their attempt to put disclaimers on everything and make everythi…”

“It took us 10 years to build the MVP for LTSC.”

“First time founders especially are usually very stubborn about this and they don't want to do it. It's like, look, you tell me what you believe. I don't have to be right. And I want to just double check that you're right. What, by however we do it.”

“First, the first tip is write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP, cut it in half, and cut it in half again and build that.”

“The thing I learned is that if people are having trouble coming with MVP, the problem is usually upstream in the chain of deductive reasoning from the vision down to the MVP. It's like usually people are just not super clear on what do I want to learn, and it'…”

“The number one lesson of the scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn. And so if you set yourself up in a position where psychologically you can't admit that something didn't work, you can't learn.”

“Like, there's nothing that was a faster career accelerator than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you got fired over it.”

“Far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie undead company that you hate, but you can't leave.”

“Oftentimes the vision is discovered more than chosen in these stories.”

“If you're asking whether you should pivot or not, you probably know the answer already. That's the first thing to just like straight up say, we will, like people call me sometimes. They're like, I want to know if I have product market fit. Like, well, the fact…”

“My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career, and to really get into it. Like, tell me the story of how you learned the best practice, like how, you know, whatever, whatever, and you …”

“The most important thing you have to do in a product is make trade off decisions. And if you just let people make their own trade off decisions, it's totally different. It's really difficult to have any kind of coherent design like thrust. And so the idea is l…”

“And it's actually, there's not that many things it can be. Like, it might be because you gave them a synthetic notification, like, hey, please come back to my product, and they did. It could be because some kind of organic notification took place, like, that i…”

“One of my new investing rules is by the time the bubble gets to New Haven, Connecticut, it's a little bit towards the tail end of things.”

“It's not about low cost. It's about efficient use of proceeds.”

“And people are like, well, Jeff Bezos thinks long-term. I'm like, ok, but then you study the history of Amazon. That's a very unusual, singular situation that's unlikely to ever be repeated in history.”

“If companies are not governed for the long term, then they're worth less money. They're distracted. People are playing the beat and raise game. They are distracted from their fundamental mission of serving customers. Therefore, they're worth less money. Theref…”

“So we have principles around certain compensation instruments that companies can't do. And generally require companies to disclose how they've created interest alignment between executives and their long-term investors.”

“Our allies, the people we spend the most time with, are asset owners, even more than asset managers, who are absolutely left out of the roadshow process, the IPO. I mean, I, the people we talk to, who I think are the best investors on the planet, the most long…”

“I tried for almost five years to give this idea away for free to the incumbent exchanges. I didn't want to build a stock exchange. It's a real pain. You know, it's a lot of work. That's not what I want to do with my time, but I couldn't get any of the incumben…”

“Eric is working with a lot of folks in DC to think about this concept of, he calls it the long-term stock exchange, but again, similar idea, which is how do we incent both management teams and employees, as well as incent shareholders to kind of think longer t…”

“We are now living through a time where you can rent the means of production, which means that if you want to test an idea, if you want to start something in your dorm room at Harvard, You know, just because you started small doesn't necessarily mean it can't s…”

“If you make those tools available to other people so that you don't have complete control, if you turn it into a platform, if you give people open access, the sum total of the creative power that you unleash when you do that means that you have a smaller piece…”

“A forecast is accurate only to the extent that it is an extrapolation from a long and stable operating history.”

“Since my definition of entrepreneurship is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty, then you are an entrepreneur no matter what it says on your business card.”

“There are real honest to God entrepreneurs just as visionary, just as exciting to work with inside some of these large organizations as you walk down the street here in Silicon Valley.”

“The idea that you're going to act like a startup or have internal startups is like almost to the point of cliche here. And yet most of the companies that I meet that have that as a plan, there's no plan. They don't actually know how to make it happen.”