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: Incorporating as a PBC is an absolute must-do for founders
“I think PBC is an absolute must do and kind of like an utter no brainer of all the things in the book. It's by far the easiest thing. If you want to pick one thing to do, it's the easiest thing to do. It's a two page legal filing in Delaware.”
Ries: Dual-class voting structures fail when companies need capital
“Dual class is defeated all the time. I give a bunch of examples in the book, like, you know, the stock price drops. Everyone panics. Founders forced out anyway, because at the end of the day, like having the votes is not the only thing that matters. There's a …”
Ries: FTX bankruptcy's Anthropic stake exceeds the entire fraud value
“Apparently the stake that the bankruptcy has of those shares is worth more than the whole, than all of the entire fraud by a lot.”
Success, not competition, destroys many leading companies
“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.”
Ries: Foundation-owned companies are 6x more likely to reach age 50
“There's a whole branch of academic research that has shown, for example, companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts.”
Ries: Foundation-owned companies generate superior return on invested capital
“We, they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.”
Ries: Philip Morris wrote down $900M within three years of buying Vectura
“Philip Morris spent 1.1 billion pounds to buy Vectora. Within three years, they had taken a nine hundred million dollar write down and disposed of the company for peace parts. It doesn't exist anymore”
Ries: True mission-driven companies can only profit by fulfilling their mission
“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.”
Ries: Google settled two lawsuits over violating 'Don't be evil'
“Google has been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge and they've had to settle both lawsuits.”
Ries: Anthropic board members are appointed by non-equity safety trustees
“Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. So they do not have a financial incentive in its growth.”
Ries: Corporations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence
“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 …”
Ries: Leading AI firms are not backed by legacy SaaS and social VCs
“So you see like a number of the leading AI firms are not funded by the leading venture firms from the SaaS or social media eras.”
Ries: AI founders tend to be older and more sophisticated
“And you also see just, it's a difference in the kind of founders that are doing this.
They tend to be older.
They tend to be a little bit more sophisticated.”
Ries: AI wrapper startups are not inherently bad businesses
“Many of these rapper startups are dimes in front of the steamroller type businesses. And the key to the parable is it's not bad. People are acting like rapper startups are bad. It's not bad. Just, you have to really understand the strategic situation that you …”
Ries: Why the minimum viable product was intentionally named a product
“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…”
Ries: Companies that collapse morally eventually collapse financially
“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.”
Ries: AI accountability agents will avoid the uncanny valley problem
“I don't think we're gonna have an uncanny valley problem here. I think these things are actually gonna feel very good when it praises you. You're actually gonna feel good. You're gonna want to get it right.”
Ries: Mainstream adoption of AI coaches requires solving data trust
“Getting early adopters for this is gonna be easy stuff. There's early adopters who are gonna love it. The issue to cross the chasm here is how can I build something that, that normal people would feel is trustworthy to have such an intimate relationship with m…”
Ries: Lean Startup won by default because legacy methods had few defenders
“We charge onto the field, and no other army ever came to charge us back. Like, it just, we won by default because the people who were doing it the old way didn't really like it or want, like, it was very few defenders of the old way. Like, very few people came…”
Eric Ries: Creators bear responsibility for whether their work is net positive
“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?”
Eric Ries: Lean Startup explicitly embraces vision alongside experimentation
“Lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and, you know, it, whatever. It's just like, I'm, I read it in somebody's book that, that they're li…”
Ries: Second book editions ruin original works by over-qualifying arguments
“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…”
Ries: Quality cannot be defined without knowing the customer
“Quality is defined by the customer. And if we don't know who our customer is, we literally don't know what the word quality means.”
Ries: Writing bad code for speed backfires via future firefighting
“Compromising that in the name of going fast is stupid, right? Like write crappy code. You spend more time firefighting than you do writing code in the future. So a certain amount of craft is just about keeping your options open. And actually it's very much lik…”
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 → |