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: Danish foundation-controlled companies financially outperform conventional public peers
“I was reading a research paper the other day that studied some of these, I think it was in Denmark, foundation controlled companies versus a level matched public companies that are not foundation controlled. And they found the foundation controlled companies o…”
Ries: LTSE Requires Boards to Track and Publish Stakeholder Metrics
“So we require companies to, at the board level, identify a committee of the board who has a fiduciary obligation to identify who the company's key stakeholders are. Identify what are the effects that you want to have on those stakeholders, then have the compan…”
Ries: Corporate bureaucracy and slowness at scale are choices, not inevitable
“I have become a believer that even that the bureau, that the bureaucracy and slowness and kind of ossification that we take for granted as a result of scale is not an inevitable development, but it's a choice about the systems of management that we use.”
Ries: Enterprise CEOs cannot name anyone accountable for continuous innovation
“I ask these CEOs that I meet with all the time, who's in charge of making sure that that happens? And they don't know. There's not, there's nobody in the organization they can point to for accountability on that score.”
Ries: Companies without a dedicated entrepreneurship function are in trouble
“Most companies don't have entrepreneurship as a function, and they're in trouble.”
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: 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…”
Ries: Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust appoints corporate board directors
“Their company is governed by something called the long-term benefit trust, which is an outside set of trustees that are not like a vague advisory board or like remember the trust And safety counsel that that Facebook famously had and The totally ignored. The L…”
Ries: Every Transformer Paper Coauthor Left Google to Commercialize Elsewhere
“And if you look at the coauthors of that paper has a ton of coauthors, not a single one commercialized the transformer at Google. They all, every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere.”
Ries: Standard Corporate Best Practices Are a Value-Destroying Mess
“And I basically think today's best practices are a value destroying mess.”
Ries: 19th-century corporate charters were voided if companies only pursued shareholder wealth
“And in fact, in the 19th century, to convert a company from a mission of doing any specific thing to just, I'm just going to enrich my shareholders, would have been seen as a crime. And your corporate charter would be voided.”
Eric Ries: Generating code with AI causes skill atrophy and 'dark flow'
“When you're using cloud code to create artifacts, you are actually causing skill atrophy in yourself. You have gone from the flow state of building stuff into what we call dark flow, which is the state you get into when you're using a slot machine.”
Ries: Training AI models on uncompensated human writings is atrocious
“Speaking of someone who's in the training data without any of us being compensated, by the way, which I think is atrocious.”
Ries: Investor-dominated companies underperform due to financial market pressures
“Investor dominated companies really underperform. Precisely because we have this financial system that pull, has this gravitational force that pulls companies down into mediocrity or worse.”
Ries: Flawed governance nullifies all other startup decisions over time
“If you don't get the governance of a company right, no other decision you make will matter in the long run because you won't be the one making it.”
Ries: Meta-study of 55,000 companies links employee ownership to revenue growth
“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…”
Ries: Companies will need to ally with labor to successfully adopt AI
“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…”
Ries: Standard startup best practices are actually value-destroying
“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.”
Ries: Costco's Kirkland brand is larger than Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble
“Costco is so big that its house brand, Kirkland Signature, if that was a standalone company, it would be bigger than United Airlines, Procter & Gamble, or Coca-Cola.”
Ries: Early Governance Choices Protect Multi-Decade Startup Longevity
“There are actually choices we can make as founders, and especially choices we make early that can change the trajectory of the company so that, as you say, its longevity could be measured in decades and centuries, not quarters.”
Ries: Twilio fired Jeff Lawson despite revenue growth since IPO
“So at the time he was fired, the stock was down like 80% from the peak. And it's like, oh, well case closed. But if you measure from the IPO or even from the pandemic peak, revenue was up. It's like, did the business go down? Was revenue down? Was there some k…”
Ries: Polaroid never invented another major product after firing founder Edwin Land
“Polaroid used to be an R&D powerhouse, had like, 1500 research scientists on staff. Steve Jobs, like, loved that company, admired them so much. When Edwin Land was fired, he called it the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Yeah. And like, they never invented anoth…”
Ries: Making shareholder value the primary goal degrades product quality
“Everyone who's ever studied this and looked at it seriously understands that shareholder value is like the exhaust that comes out of the engine. When you take the exhaust pipe and put it in the intake and make that your explicit goal, now you don't stand for a…”
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 → |