The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 70 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ries: Johnson & Johnson covered up asbestos in baby powder for growth
“Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson & Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder. And covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth opti…”
Ries: Shareholder primacy theory fails even at maximizing shareholder returns
“The investor centric view of corporations, what's called the shareholder primacy theory of corporations is just wrong. It's wrong. Even if all you care about is maximizing returns for shareholders.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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…”
Ries: Respect for craft increases the necessity of testing everything else
“Having a respect for craft, for design, for perfection, that increases the need for experimentation and testing for all the other stuff.”
Ries: Standing for principles to the point of firing accelerates careers
“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.”
Ries: Running out of money and declaring bankruptcy is a venture system feature
“Like, one of the genius things about it is, like, at the end of the day, you do run out of money. The thing, you're forced to declare bankruptcy, that's actually a really positive feature of the system.”
Ries: Philip Morris receives high ESG scores
“Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores. It's absurd.”
Ries: Mission governance is always considered too early until too late
“One of my main takeaways of that entire process is that it's always too early until it's too late.”
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.”
Ries: Steve Jobs prioritized skip-level meetings with key culture carriers
“Steve Jobs very famously would host, have skip level meetings. He wanted to meet not with his direct subordinates. He didn't care. He wanted to meet with the torch bearers throughout the organization.”
Ries: The most consequential organizational decisions happen without managers present
“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.”
Eric Ries: Corporate governance questions have become acute for AI companies
“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.”
Ries: IMVU shipped product 50 times a day on average
“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.”