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: Forcing founders into 'success theater' distracts from product execution
“And I think every ounce of energy we force visionaries to put into success theater is an ounce of energy they didn't put in to making their vision a reality. They didn't put into serving customers.”
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.”
Ries: Anthropic Founders Left OpenAI Over AI Safety Dispute
“I met the Anthropik team when they first left OpenAI, and they, you know, they left over a dispute With OpenAI over you know, exactly how to pursue the question of AI safety.”
Ries: FTX Implosion Auctioned Anthropic Shares to Unaligned Investors
“Huge chunks of Anthropic stock were sold at auction to any investor who wanted them, including people who are super, super unaligned.”
Ries: Trustworthiness is one of the most underrated business assets today
“I think that that courageous stand that they took, again, leaving aside the politics of it, just looking at it from a pure business perspective, Is an example of a very savvy business strategy that sees trustworthiness as an asset, like a business asset that c…”
Ries: Most founders are naive about founding documents allowing their removal
“Most founders are hopelessly naive about this point. They think that they're in control of the company, and they're always so betrayed when they find out that their own founding documents basically say that they can be removed at any time. And they don't reali…”
Ries: LLMs may be the best teaching technology in history
“And what's cool about LLMs I think is not that they're artifact generating machines. They're okay at that, but like take them out of their distribution and all of a sudden you're in big trouble, but they're incredibly good teaching machines. There may be the b…”
Ries: Human creative writing begins when AI rates a draft 10/10
“When the AI says it's 10 of 10, now our work, now the work begins. See people stop there, but no, now we have reached the limits of its training data. Now it's time to actually do the creative act of writing”
Ries: Correcting LLM errors in-chat increases likelihood of bad outputs
“And that has to do with the mechanics of the attention mechanism. As the contracts gets larger, you're literally spreading the attention over more and more and more data. But also, it's learning from all the bad examples it gave. So it's actually much more lik…”
Eric Ries: Lean Startup tactics are dated, but core principles hold up
“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…”
Ries: Overfunding makes it easier for founders to delude themselves
“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'…”
Ries: The economy rewards cost-cutting while ignoring downstream brand damage
“We've built an economy where people are routinely rewarded for cutting costs, but never held accountable for the downstream brand and quality consequences of that.”
Ries: Long Term Stock Exchange petitioned SEC to end quarterly reporting
“And the thing you gotta know is, is Long Term Stock Exchange, the company that I founded is the one who filed the petition last year. To the SEC to switch from quarterly.”
Ries: PBCs give boards legal cover against short-term investor pressure
“All PBC does is give the CEO and the board the legal cover To pursue long-term value creation in the face of hostile investors.”
Ries: Anthropic's founders consulted with me on governance setup
“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…”
Ries: Alternative business structures control roughly 5% of global GDP
“The point that I was trying to make in this book is not so much that we need to copy Mondragon or any particular company, but rather collectively, these are called alternative structures.
Control something like five percent of world GDP.”
Ries: AI prompting best practices become obsolete within months
“The durability of these so-called best practices is so short, like the prompting tools and guidelines and context management, like stuff, stuff that we were writing about six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago is now completely wrong.”
Ries: The Long-Term Stock Exchange was profitable last year
“On the contrary, LTSC is still going strong, and they made, we actually made money last year.”
Eric Ries: Lean Startup Failed to Give Founders Governance and Control Tools
“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.”
Ries: 19th-century corporate charters never specified maximizing shareholder value
“If you look at the 19th century, like companies that were created and you read their charter, none of them say maximize shareholder value. That would have been considered a crime.”
Ries: Anthropic created a perpetual purpose trust at Series C
“I think it was a series C when they finally established this thing called the long-term benefit trust, which is not a nonprofit foundation. It's actually what's called a perpetual purpose trust, which is a different legal category, but the same idea outside tr…”
Ries: AI labs launched ChatGPT and Claude Code as small experiments
“These specific products that have taken the world by storm, you can really tell that the AI labs themselves did not know they were going to be as popular as they turned out to be. Obviously, ChatGPT, they had no idea. Cloud code, co-work, like these were small…”
Ries: Costco is protected by a governance fortress
“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 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 → |