Eric Ries
Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange. On 10 shows, 11 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
10shows
11appearances
219statements
52resolved
37supported
4contradicted
71%fully supported
61said about them ↓ Everything Eric Ries said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ries: Foundation-owned companies are 6x more likely to reach year 50
“Companies with this structure are six times more likely to live to year 50. 10% versus 60% probability.”
Ries: Only 20% of venture-backed founders remain CEO three years post-IPO
“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”
Ries: Novo Nordisk foundation intervention created over $500B in shareholder value
“The trustees of the nonprofit foundation once had to intervene to protect the for-profit from this exact temptation to want to sell it out. And I won't get into the whole story. They did the right thing in this case because they had the legal power to do so. T…”
Ries: Standard corporate charters legally bind boards to accept higher buyout offers
“According to the legal documents, you yourself signed your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing you've already put in motion. A rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.”
Ries: Cloudflare is a $70B company because of free encryption trust
“The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a seventy billion dollar company today.”
Ries: Corporate values are lies without an enforceable operational apparatus
“Google report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparat…”
Ries: Shareholder primacy is only 40 years old
“For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the eighties, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great grandparents thought it w…”
Ries: All major AI labs are Public Benefit Corporations
“Most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's Anthropic most famously of all.”
Ries: Anthropic rejected a $200M military defense contract
“They turned down a two hundred million dollar contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government.”
Ries: Founders preferred shares can potentially yield an extra billion dollars
“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 like personally an extra billion dollars someday.”
Ries: Both founder-controlled and investor-controlled company models are flawed
“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 mi…”
Ries: Human alignment, not technical alignment, is AI's top unsolved problem
“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…”
Ries: Answer.AI will never need more than 12 employees in total
“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.”
Ries: Vibe coding lulls users into letting AI think for them
“That really is like, to me, the number one thing I've learned from this and all forms of vibe coding and all the things that I've played with is that it's just extremely easy to get into this kind of like soporific state where the AI is doing the thinking for …”
Ries: Prospects are weak for AI wrappers to train proprietary models
“I do think some of these vertical specialized wrapper companies, they might be able to use their wrapperness Build up customer relationships, collect proprietary data, you know, I don't know, train their own models, build their own new thing. That is theoretic…”
Ries: Facebook buried internal scientific research proving its products cause depression
“Facebook even commissioned the scientific research to find out if their product makes people depressed. And then they found out that it does. And they were like, oh, better bury that. Instead of take it seriously and do something about it.”
Ries: The ESG movement is a total failure due to flawed ratings
“The ESG movement has been a total failure. You know, from my perspective, because Philip Morris has great ESG scores.”
Ries: An MVP is the most efficient test of a hypothesis
“MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether the hypothesis is true or not?”
Ries: Cut your planned MVP feature list in half twice before building
“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.”
Ries: Founders debating if they have product-market fit do not have it
“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…”
Eric Ries: AI is fundamentally a management technology
“At the end of the day, AI is a management technology. It, like, the thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences.”
Ries: In near future, AI will eliminate middle-management summarization needs
“So it's actually be really easy, you know, not in the not too distant future. It'd be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me, everything my company is doing. And You won't need, like, tons of middle managers to do that for you or just, you'll …”
Ries: Mission-aligned founders prioritizing human flourishing will steamroll competitors
“We're gonna have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are gonna just, they're gonna steamroll.”
Ries: Standard Silicon Valley incorporation articles compel selling to highest bidder
“Believe it or not, if you got, if you went to a fancy law firm and they filed for you the standard articles of incorporation that are used in Silicon Valley, most governance experts upon reading those documents would say you have a fiduciary duty to say yes.”
The other half of the tape: Eric Ries's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 58 times in 34 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Rob Walling 6Garry Tan 6Scott Cooper 5Jeremy Howard 5Greg Isenberg 5Mike Maples, Jr. 4Alistair Croll 3
Statements about Eric Ries, by other people (3)
Isenberg: Lean Startup landing page validation no longer works in AI era
“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 …”
Kupor: Eric Ries is collaborating with policymakers on Long Term Stock Exchange
“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…”
Andreessen recommends 'Lean Startup', 'Hard Thing About Hard Things', 'Zero to One'
“The Lean Startup book by Eric Reese is very, very good and that book should be read front to back. Second is, ah, Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, I can't recommend too highly. And the third is Peter Thiel just wrote a book called Zero to…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 21
Startups For the Rest of Us 8
the a16z Podcast 7
Lenny's Podcast 5
Latent Space 5
the Startup Ideas Podcast 5
Capital Allocators 4
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 3
2026 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 14 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- Answer.ai & AI Magic with Jeremy Howard
- Mike Maples Jr. - Identifying Startup Pattern Breakers (EP.406)
- Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll
- Episode 700 | Playing the Long Game
- $1M Startup Trends For 2024, With Michael Karnjanaprakorn
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on 3 Key Breakthroughs Startups Experience in Success, The Rise of Angel and Operator Funds, Multi-Stage Funds Re-Entering Seed Investing and The Insight Development Framework
- Episode 496 | " The Press Cover Expectations. Don't Compare Yourself to Slack or Zoom"
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- 20VC: Why The Current Crop Of VC Does Not Understand Design, Why Product Market Fit Is A Liquid Not A Solid & How Graduates Can Optimise Their Career for Personal Development with Steve Vassallo, General Partner @ Foundation Capital
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: eShares' Henry Ward on Why Portfolio Theory Is Wrong? Why Investors Will Never Take Market Risk & Why You have To Have A Line of Sight To A $Bn Outcome
- 20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Does Not Work, Thesis Based Investing Is Sceptical & Partners Mostly Stay Together For LPs
- 20VC: What Is Core To The Best Investor - Founder Relationships, The Biggest Risk For Founders In The Early Days & Why EQ Is The Most Important Trait For Managers with Jack Altman, Founder & CEO @ Lattice
- Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers · Y Combinator
- How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups? – Jeff Bussgang and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Garry Tan on The Biggest Takeaways From Advising 700 Companies @ Y Combinator & Why Now Is The Golden Age For The Early Stage?
- 20VC: Why The Best CEO's Are The Best Capital Allocators, How You Can Build A Business In A Space You Are Not Passionate About & When Is The Right Time To Put The Pedal To The Metal with Josh Hannah, General Partner @ Matrix Ventures
- 20VC: The 4 Required Powers For A Startup To Be A $500m Business with "The Most Powerful Woman in Startups", Ann Miura Ko, Co-Founder @ Floodgate
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eric's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 2 | 70 | 62% 13/21 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 34 | 50% 1/2 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 23 | 60% 6/10 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 MIXERGYLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 18 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Mixergy → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 17 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
 TBPNLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 13 | 100% 4/4 | full record on TBPN → |
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 10 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 9 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Founder & CEO, Long-Term Stock Exchange | 1 | 4 | — | full record on Latent Space → |