Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Eric Ries: Why Investors Destroy Your Business (And How to Stop Them)

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

I founded, sold, and exited an 8-figure business. Now I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribeListen to the audio version of the podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyThe "Golden Goose" Trap: Why Investors Destroy Your Business (And How to Stop Them) | Eric RiesYou build a business. It works. It makes money. Then, you bring in investors or sell to Private Equity.And they immediately start tearing out the exact things that made you successful in the first place.They call it "professionalizing." You call it watching your baby die a death by a thousand cuts.Eric Ries, the legendary founder of the Lean Startup movement, calls it corruption. And in this episode, he explains exactly why it happens—and how to build an "incorruptible" company that they can't steal from you.We cover:Why standard Silicon Valley "best practices" are actively destroying value.The "Golden Goose" trap that catches 99% of successful founders.Why keeping your options open is the worst thing you can do for your company's future.How to spot the "Torchbearers" in your organization (and why you need them in a crisis).The truth about AI, Claude Code, and why this is the greatest time in history to start a business.If you've ever worried about losing control of the thing you built, you cannot afford to miss this.Links:• Get Eric's new book, Incorruptible: https://incorruptible.co• Follow Eric on X: https://x.com/ericriesThis is the way.HanleyThis show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And then from that moment until the day that I exited, they did everything they can to destroy that business. I feel like we do not really own the organizations. We birthed them. So we've actually legalized huge swaths of non-value-creating money-making in the name of market deficiency. If you build something really valuable, the more gold in the goose, the greater the temptation will be to steal it from you. The market does not reward value creation. It is easier to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. The best time to build structural. defenses is when you don't need it's always too early until it's too late the interesting thing about AI is and you probably know this as well or better than I do is that for all the doors that it opens

the hardest part is knowing which ones to close or which ones not to open in the first place totally because it opens all the doors yeah it's true oh my goodness so all right that being said anything relevant timely like you know just a story that's going on, something that's on your brain that you're like, man, I'd love to work this in or tie this concept or this story into what we're doing today, anything like that? No, obviously, there's a lot of AI stuff that the book prophesied, you know, and said it was going to happen and is happening like right now as we're, as it's playing out. So that's been kind of wacky. You know, so how do we talk about that kind of stuff? But not, we don't have to make it a current

events. Yeah, no, no. Because you have all the time it comes out, you know, who knows what the situation will be. So, yeah, I'm totally down. Perfect. No, that's great. I always just like to ask because, you know, I see my goal is trying to search for and tap into the places that you're the most passionate about talking about today. So sometimes that's just because Oh, yeah. That's not what it was when we originally set it up. Yeah, that can happen. All right. Eric, man, I appreciate your time so much. I know you're busy with getting the book out and it's phenomenal. I was obviously a huge fan of the lean startup. And I've used that for a couple side quests. use it as a roadmap as a side quest and I would be lying if I said I haven't taken the

PDF and put it into my open claw and said, hey, when we do little side quests, use this as a first pass filter. So I appreciate all the hard work you put into that. And now easy. You've now made it for me to train my open claw to be as brilliant as you are. That being said, the part of incorruptible that grabbed on to, like I grabbed onto, that was very personal and relevant was this idea and you bring it right out in chapter one it's just like the this kind of mystery of the golden goose this idea that we're creating these companies and that somehow our relationship to investors our relationship to how we structure our business is taking this thing that we built that's valuable that you

kind of taught us about in the lean startup and and now like you even say it right like you you taught us how to build something worth protecting but not how to protect it I had this experience. This was my most recent startup. I built this business and I know we don't know each other that well, but I built a business that was like I had been mulling it through in my head for almost 20 years. And then I put it into practice. And then it started working really, really well.

And two years in, we get kind of an offer. I can't refuse from a PE company. And then that moment until the day that I exited, they did everything they can to destroy that business. And I basically watched my baby like die through death through without. cuts. I know I'm not unique. How do we make sure that this does not happen as often as it is happening or in a perfect utopian world ever again? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for sharing the story. And I know that in business, we tend to talk about these things in a very clinical way,

you know, the loss of the money, the loss of employment, you know, the surface level outcomes. But I also want to honor the fact that this is like a deeply personal and painful thing. And you said it. Like we joke about, oh, my startup is my baby. But I don't think that's a joke. Like, I feel like we do not really own the organizations we create. We birth them. So entrepreneurship is more like mothering than it is like ownership.

And therefore, it's really very painful. And look, I get the general public is not thrilled to hear stories right now about people who got super rich and are super miserable. You know, like, wow, wow, wow. I get it. We live in a time of rising inequality and a lot of economic hardship there. But I think it is important that we reckon with the human costs of these decisions because not only are they economically ludicrous, but also they have a human toll that is far higher than people realize.

And not just for the original founder, but for every human being, these organisms touch. So I call the book incorruptible because I think what you describe as a form of corruption. I understand it's not legal bribery or embezzlement. Like, I get that. Today, our notion of the word corruption is very narrow. But our grandparents and great-grandparents did not see corruption that way. They had a much broader understanding of acts which are corrupt.

And in fact, I would go further. I would say that many ways of making money in our modern economy, our grandparents and great-grandparents would have seen not just as morally questionable, but a lot of them would have been outright crimes. So we've actually legalized huge swaths of non-value-creating money-making in the name of market deficiency. So what I call the book, it's funny, I just sent the book to a political scientist for comment.

And she was like, look, this sounds really interesting, but as a political science, I just want to tell you, I'm very skeptical of the claim that anything can ever be made incorruptible. You know, come on. Surely you mean less likely to be it. And I was like, well, you could judge for yourself.

Read the book. I actually think it is possible to make this thing that we're talking about stop happening. Like, not just that it doesn't happen that often, but we actually could make it, extinct. It relies on a very specific set of fundamental forces, but also human practices that are all messed up. And one of the biggest shocks I had when researching and writing this book is I've always had this intuitive sense that a lot of our so-called best practices seem kind of weak to me.

Like, it was like, really? Those are the best we could come up with. But I didn't really know. I'm like, well, I'm sure somebody a lot smarter than me figured this practice out and it's there for a good reason. Well, actually, so many of the best practices we teach people in business that I used to teach people are not only, like, inefficient or, you know, kind of suck, but like are actively value destroying. So what's incredible to me about this is although we live in a time of tremendous cynicism and skepticism that anything good can ever happen, we have the data, the case studies, and the communities of the practice necessary to adopt these practices that the research shows are both more value-creating, but also less likely to fall to corruption.

So I actually think, although this book is kind of depressing because it has all this bad news in it, ultimately the message is a positive one that we do have the tools we need to craft and live in a better world. It's funny how ideas or concepts that are associated with what I would say you just described was preparation, right, preparing ourselves, creating a moat against corruption, right? and the preparation that that takes, right? You got to dig the moat. You got to fill the moat with water.

You got to put little sticks in there. You got to put the holes in the castle where you shoot the air. I mean, those are all things that when you're doing them, you hope you never have to use them. Right? You hope you never have to use these tools. And that, you know, in this case, in our analogy, the corruption never approaches the gates. But if you're not prepared for it, so it's interesting to me that we would view this concept as negative when really it's a positive defense against that negativity.

It's actually the opposite force to the corruption. But if you don't do the pre-work, right, then the corruption just comes right on it. Rushes right in, rushes right in. What's fascinating to me is, I wrote this blog post God many years ago called the curse of prevention, which is like if I tell you that like a doomsday scenario is coming,

like, oh my God, a meteor is going to hit our building. And you're like, oh, no, oh no what do we have to do and i'm like if you all wear tinfoil hats the meteor won't hit the building and then the day passes and i'm like see it worked you know everyone's like oh thank you for teaching us how to win the two like right like we we're used to the idea that anyone who can claim to be preventing some far off calamity can get you to do kind of anything and i think that that skepticism again well earned but makes us a little bit naive when there's an actual problem that needs actual preventing. And it's really fascinating to me. Like I live in Silicon Valley. I work with all the

famous Silicon Valley people that you know. And they very often, like they preach a philosophy of bold contrarianism. That's like, that's like maybe the most fundamental idea in the venture ecosystem in Silicon Valley. Then in order to make money as an investor, you have to be both non-consensus and right. That's the classic two-by-two matrix developed by Andy Radcliffe, the OG of benchmark capital. Anyway, so they're like really obsessed with being non-mimetic, contrarian, non-consensus, and yet you put those people on your board or you even just get their advice about how your companies should be structured. And like these bold contrarians will be like, now listen, you don't want your structure to be too different from anybody else. That might make it

hard to raise money. I don't know. Investors might not like it. I don't know. Seems a little weird to me. And it's like so fascinating that we're preaching this like swash buckling ethos of the lone individual super genius founder. But then as soon as you're like, hey, but what if I want to commit myself to a path that customers, employees, investors, and my community can trust. And therefore, I'm willing to take some future possible scenarios off the table. They're like, oh, man, you shouldn't do that now. You want to keep your options open. And I was just talking to someone who was like, talking to one of their investors,

they basically were like, look, what about the option to convert my customers to soil and green and eat them? Surely we can agree that that's not an option we want to keep on the table. And they invest, no joke there person we're talking to was like, look, I really think it's better to keep all options on the table. That's how you maximize value. So I think we've kind of lost the plot about what are we doing here? Like what is the purpose of a corporation?

Why do we build them? And why should anybody trust someone who's doing that? I think the issue of trust is one of the most recurring topics in the book. And as you say, as we see with this mystery of the golden goose, because trustworthiness is the most underrated, undervalued asset in all of business today. People who get this, people who understand how to build an organization, that's worth something. They stockpile it.

They build like, I can visualize like a huge bank vault full of this incredibly precious substance. And then they're shocked, just shocked when someone tries to steal it from them. And it's like, whoa, buddy, if you build something really valuable, the more gold in the goose, the greater the temptation will be to steal it from you. So you better be prepared.

So a big part of the book is just for the next generation of entrepreneurs to stop being as naive as frankly we were and the people that taught us were about what is coming for you. if you actually manage to build something worth protecting. Do you think there are more people coming after startups, builders today in a corruptible manner or less the same versus, say, the initial boom in, we'll say, the 95 to early 2000s, or even in, you know, the kind of secondary digital wave that happened in like 2018 to 2015?

Like, do you think it is steadily increased? Has it just changed? Has it always been the same? Like, where do we kind of stand versus these other eras? Yeah. First of all, it is getting worse. And what's happened is nothing like nefarious.

It's just we've lived through the rise of financialization, especially over the past century, where financial transactions have come to dominate almost every sphere of human life. To the point now where people have a hard time imagining that there ever was a time when we viewed there as being non-financial spheres of influence, right? Our grandparents really would have seen social.

institutions, political institutions and financial institutions as basically independent spheres. We still have the term the public sector versus the private sector, but that term has become totally meaningless. My most kids today are like, the what? Isn't it just one mega financial system? Yeah. That's the world that we live in. First of all, it wasn't always that way.

So it is important to recognize that this is getting worse. There was no, you know, that what we call private equity is a relatively new business model. So many of the best practices I talk about in the book, I always ask people when I'm meeting them for the first time, you know, like if I'm on Zoom or something, I'll be like, hey, is there a window where you are? Okay, look out the window. If you can see a tree, I can see many trees right now at my window. If you can see a tree, you're probably looking at something older than these ideas. Okay, these are not like bedrock foundations of capitalism, but very recent ideas that have been kind of like a civilization scale experiment that I think we can now call the verdict on and say it's

been an utter disaster. But the fact that it's getting worse doesn't mean that it's a new problem. And in the book, I traced the history of this back at least 200 years. I think we could go back further, but the documentary record gets harder and harder than further back you go. That basically this phenomenon of what I call enlightened capitalism, that somebody has the idea that, you know, for example, if you treat workers better than you have to. If you invest in quality, the capitalism has had a longstanding issue with quality

because quality is an expense. You pay it up front, as you said before. Like if you have to do the work ahead of time before you reap the benefit, it can be hard. So the importance of quality, the importance of craftsmanship, the importance of equality, of fairness, of treating people well, and of acting in a trustworthy manner. Throughout the generations, entrepreneurs have been rediscovering that this is a huge source of advantage.

I tell the story of Robert Owen, who figured this out in Scotland in 1800. Okay, this is not like some new idea. People discover it, and they have a three-part analysis in their mind. They say, oh, if I can prove that this alternate way of working is superior, competitively superior in a commercial setting. Then, because capitalism is about competition, the market rewards value creation. Therefore, my ideas will spread.

People will copy them. And it will be like a new technology diffusing through our society. And as a result, like, I'll be a hero. Everyone will celebrate me as someone who helped found a new, better, more efficient way of working. And therefore, those who oppose me will actually be, through their obstinence, contributing to the data set that shows. shows that this new way of working is better.

And ultimately, the data will win out. So that idea seems so logical because, you know, we all have been indoctrinated to the idea that the market rewards value creation. And it just happens to be, empirically speaking, wrong. It's one of the oldest and biggest fallacies of all time in business. The market does not reward value creation. And over the centuries, what we see is person after person after person who figures this out, proves that it can work, and then the gold.

and goose gets utterly butchered. And they're devastated. And, you know, I tell a bunch of these stories. Robert Owen died basically penniless and completely dejected. You know, the founder of SAIC built one of the largest employee-owned companies in the U.S. at their peak, I think they had 40,000 employee scientists making $5 billion of net income. Like, it was a huge enterprise. And his board utterly betrayed him, kicked him out of the company, took the company

public and just fully ruined it. It was incredible the devastation that they wrought. not for any particular reason just because they could. And, you know, I tell the story of him, I tell the story of Whole Foods. When you read interviews with these people after this happens to them, they always say the same thing.

Like, oh, I guess I trusted the wrong people. Should have put different people on my board. Like they see the failure as personal, which, you know, we're entrepreneurs. Of course, we take everything personally. But they are blind to the systemic pressure that made that outcome basically inevitable. And so what I want to do is educate,

like I said, the next generation of founders to just to know this history and to be prepared to resist it using tools and techniques that, as I said, are well established and well proven. So I've been following and reading about Jason Freed and DDAH a lot lately. They've both been doing a lot of podcasts. That kind of brought them back into my mindset. And then I started reading the books again and digging into them. And just thinking a lot about how they were able to stay, they've been able to stay private,

been able to continue to build. Obviously, very long time horizon, a time horizon that would never suit VC, PE, or any kind of investment capital. And it's a very unique case. And we hold them up on a pedestal to a certain extent, I guess depending on what circle you're in, etc. But obviously they've built something of value. They're very unique individuals.

They view the world very uniquely. Is that a proper case study? Is what they're building and how they're building it, like the goal? or at least a version of the goal that we should be shooting for, if we care to retain control and maybe a positive and fulfilling relationship with this business baby that we create, or is there a better model? So I want to be really careful.

First of all, I try hard not to comment on other companies, unless I really have a lot of detailed knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes. That's fine. Yeah. But I know them and I know what you're talking about. And look, definitely one potential solution to this problem, to stay private. And if you talk to Dave Wharton,

who created the Evergreen Institute, sorry, the Tugboat Institute, they do something called the Evergreen Certification, which is like a standard for companies that are explicitly designed to stay private forever. They tend to be closely held, family-run companies, super purpose-driven, no outside investment allowed. That is one way.

Certainly one way to avoid investor-driven corruption is to not take any investment. And I tell a lot of stories in the book of companies that manage to get to quite unsignificing a significant scale with no investors. Okay. So people sometimes are like, see, problem solved, no investors. But I think that is unrealistic as a plan for two reasons.

One, some companies need investors. Okay, like investors are not bad. We need investment. Investment is a lifeblood of our economy. And to cut them out entirely, I think is really sad. In fact, the fact that we've gotten to this point where so many great companies view taking investment itself as a form of corruption is an indictment of our shareholder primacy-led world where actually shareholder primacy is causing investors to miss out on most

of the growth available in the economy. So it's been a big disaster from that perspective. But there's a separate issue, which is, okay, then how do we handle succession? My goal is not just, like, I think if you want to have a company that lasts for you for your lifetime, you know, keep staying private, having complete control over it, tying its fate to yourself as what I call the mission guardian, that's effective. But what happens when you want to retire? Or what happens if you just, you don't want to do it anymore?

I know so many founders who are just utterly trapped, they can never really read. really quit. They're basically indentured servants to this thing that they built. And yes, maybe it makes them rich. Yes, maybe it's very fulfilling. There's a lot of good things about it. But nobody should be trapped. No one should be forced to do it. So the book is not just about how to resist pressure from investors, but how to create what I call the architecture of institutional longevity. What is necessary to build that really strong ethos, that corporate character that is not tied just to an individual leader? And then how do we protect it through the generation? And then how do we protect it through the generations. How do we solve the problem of succession? How do we bind future managers

to be consistent with our values? And it's interesting. I start the book with a lot of discussions about investors. And then they kind of recede for a lot of chapters. And they don't come back until, from my point of you, the way I wrote the book, I was like, look, until we build an organization that is strong enough, we don't know. When we bring investors on, we're just rolling the dice about what's going to happen. But once we build a sufficiently strong structure, then it can become safe again. to have really productive partnerships with long-term investors where both parties are genuinely better off. And I think because we have these examples of companies

that have managed to do this and last for centuries, like we know it can be done with the right structure. And so a lot of the book is really just helping people get over these myths that we have become so addicted to, the myth that corruption and bureaucracy, malignancy is like an inevitable outcome of scale or of age, the older a company is, the more bureaucratic, it's going to be

the less likely you can trust. It's like we have a lot of these, like, stories that we've told ourselves because we see it all over the place that, you know, and that investors can't be trusted. You know, but I know a lot of founders who feel like when they lost control of their company,

it was to their own employees, not to their investors. So like, there's a lot of ways to lose control of your company. We're dealing with Frankensteins here, like, right? You can easily lose control of the monster if you don't know what you're doing. But once you have the right structure, the level of alignment

and kind of magnetic attraction, like kicks in. And then it is possible to do things that today most people would consider to be impossible, including, as I argue in the later chapters, to build a company that is by definition incorruptible. Is the trap speed? Is it the belief that you need this money?

I mean, I got buddies who, most of which have fallen into some of the traps that you describe in the book. And almost all of them, it was speed. And in my case, it was speed, right? I know, again, you don't know my story specifically, but what happened was I was building a technology company and technology-driven insurance agency. National, all 50 states in 2021 were the fastest small commercial agency in the entire country bootstrapped on a $35,000 budget. So we're doing well.

I had made a deal with my spouse at the time that if she would allow me three years of not taking an income and she made enough that that was okay. in eight years I could get her an eight-figure exit. That was the deal we made, and we are executing that mission to a T, mind, quite, quite proudly to a T. She has a midlife crisis, decides that our marriage is something she no longer wants to be a part of. And about just over a year and a half into that three year, I'm not taking a salary. She's out. So now I am left with no income and no ability to extract.

revenue or income from the business because I've literally structured in a way where I put every dollar back because we had this plan. So now I am scrambling, full tilt scrambling, because now I need money somehow. And ultimately found, like I said, this deal that at the time seemed too good to be true because it was. But I blew past so many of, I'll call them the filters that you put into the book because speed was so at that time, I had to get money. It was like, I should be thinking about this more,

but I also need to pay for the apartment that I'm renting. You know what I mean? Like, and off we go. So I guess one of the questions that that kind of hit me is, is the mindset, some of the things that we need to be maybe emotionally dealing with as founders or as, you know, founding members of a team that are maybe,

making these decisions to think about taking on investment. We'll approach that one first before employees, right? Like, do we need to hit a certain level of preparation? Do we need to have a certain group, like pass this through multiple people? Or is it just, you know, kind of that strong man philosophy of let's just hope you're a great decision maker, you know, but a gal, you know what I mean? I don't mean strong man like strong like gender. Yeah, I know what you mean.

I know what you mean. I know like, let's just hope you're the, you're the one who can navigate through it, you know. Yeah, yeah. boy, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. And listen, I thank you for sharing the ups and downs of this because I think it's just so important for entrepreneurs to be honest with each other about like what happens, the real world consequences of this stuff.

I don't think speed is actually a problem in itself. What happens is there are a class of investors who really enjoy negotiating with high leverage. Okay, so like if you put yourself into a low leverage situation, there are people who will take advantage of that. But even, I tell a couple of these stories in the book, even if you're in that kind of situation, there are tools that you can use sometimes

to nonetheless end up with a really strong structure. It's just, it's really difficult to reach for them when you're feeling like, almost like you're being coerced, right? Like you need to make rent, you need to like pay for your kids' healthcare. You need to pay for, like, pay for, like, it's at a certain point, transactions become non-voluntary. And one of the key ideas in the book is that corruption swiftly follows anyone who breaks the moral logic of capitalism,

which is that when a transaction, is fully informed and fully voluntary, that is the transaction that magically creates value because both parties are better off. And anyone who violates one of those two criteria, they can make money, sure, but we can't know if they're actually creating value. In fact, that's a path,

a lot of times a path to destroying value even while you're making money. So, but another idea, so that's kind of like when you're in the crisis moment, your life is very difficult. But I will tell you one story just to give people a little bit of hope. This is like a completely crazy story to me.

And everyone knows Patagonia today is just like behemoth of environmental activism. But they were a really, like really crazy company in their early years and spent a lot of time trying to figure out like how to run a business with these really, really intense values. Which, by the way, we're originally about like product quality before they were ever about environmentalism. That was kind of an outgrowth of this obsession with product quality. So anyway, when they became environmental activists, they gave a lot of money away every year, you know, in nonprofit grants. They just thought that was an important part of their ethos as part of what they promised to their customer. And in the 90s, in early 2000s, they went through a terrible time of over-expansion. They got greedy.

The outsourcing boom was on. They outsourced all this product to, you know, Asian factories and stuff. And they kind of like lost the quality focus in pursuit of growth, like a classic corruption story. And all things really came to head. The company almost went bankrupt. They realized they're a mistake. They had to do a layoff.

They laid off 20% of the staff. They still, to this day, call it Black Wednesday. Like, they really felt really bad about it. But they had to do what they had to do. and they had to get a bank loan to restructure all their debts. They had to basically do a restructuring of the business. Everyone was like, well, just take outside investment. We'll do a recap, but they refused.

They were worried that that would lead to corruption. So they were negotiating with banks. And the banks came in and they were negotiating, negotiating and negotiating to get their loans restructured. And eventually they get, I think it was HSBC or somebody, to agree that they'll assume the debt, they'll restructure it, and they start working on our restructuring plan. So this is like your classic.

Like it's an emergency. The company's on the brink of death. They have absolutely no leverage. They have to do what the bank says. Everyone knows this, right? So that they get the deal almost done. And the bank's like, look, okay, we're on board. We'll do the restructuring.

We'll do the thing. But just during the time of the restructuring, okay, while you're spending the money from this loan, you have to suspend your nonprofit grants. Because come on. And I just, this is such a fascinating story to me. Patagonia said no deal. You're like, no. The purpose of this loan is to save Patagonia. And if we don't, if we're not who we are at the end of it, we'd rather just go bankrupt now.

And I wouldn't have the courage to do that. No way. You know, like, to me it's such a crazy show. Like, you're risking everything for what? For this, like, abstract principle? But I think people misunderstand this as courage or like Cajonis. When actually, to them, this was just, we have these principles. The business is just an embodiment of this ethos.

So there's simply no business without the ethos. So we'll never sacrifice. We won't sacrifice it. It's not available. And they said no. And the bank had to, and they put, the bank must have been so surprised. No one ever does this.

But it put the bank in this situation. Like, look, call the loan or do it our way. If you call the loan, you're getting nothing. So it was like, it was some way, like turn the leverage around on the bank and the bank relented. Now, they had a lot of other things going for them, including a bunch of employees and customers and even former employees and invent, like tons of people who are like, we'll give you a loan.

We're like, we're here for you. We'll do what it takes to make this happen. I tell the same story. Something very similar happened to the early years of Whole Foods. It was like massive flooding one year in Austin. And their original store was flooded with like three feet of mud. All the, everything was destroyed at a time when they had no investors, no nothing. It should have bankrupted the company for sure.

And yet like their customers like came in on a volunteer basis and helped them bail out the store. Their bankers gave them. Like what people said to them see backwards, they're like, oh, well, if you're really special, then you get these special things happen to you, instead of realizing that having these commitments is what makes these companies special, which sometimes allows them to escape these traps. But one more thing.

That's what happens in the crisis moment. But one of the other really most important ideas in the book is a principle I call, it's always too early until it's too late. The best time to build structural defenses is when you don't need them. As you said, the moat, when you're building a castle, you don't wait until someone's seaging you

to build a moats too late. You need to build it ahead of time. And this is the biggest problem I see founders run into is because if you talk to most lawyers, investors, investment bankers, any of these experts and you just be like, hey, I want to think about protecting myself in this kind of far-office scenario. They'll be like, don't worry about that.

Go get successful. To build up leverage, you could always do it later. It would be a lot easier to do it later. And then next thing you know, something unexpected happens, like what happened to you. And now you're having to do it in a crisis. It's much more difficult. So I actually think the best solution is to think about this stuff from the beginning and set it up when it's easy.

It's so easy at the beginning. You can write whatever you want in your corporate charter. So to me, the battle is mostly about having founders know that these tools exist so that they can reach for them in advance. So yeah, that can make life a lot easier. It's funny. I'm listening to the story about Patagonia and what came to my mind was like it's the mamba mentality. you never negotiate with yourself, right, once you make a decision. I mean, that was, I did not appreciate Kobe Bryant when he was alive.

And I have, you know, I appreciate him as an athlete, obviously, in his, but I didn't appreciate his mentality. And then after he died, I spent a lot of time watching interviews that he had done, especially post his retirement because he did a lot of interviews. He did, he's a, I think Emmy winning, not Emmy, Emmy, TV. he made a kids documentary series or something that like won an award you know he did all this stuff and people would ask him like how did you translate you know you're a bestselling author you got it's not an Emmy but it's one of the movie yeah yeah and you know you did all these other things

and he and he comes back to this idea of this mamba mentality which is what you're describing which is once you make a decision in this case part of our mission is this charitable non that's part of who we are. Like to him it was I get up at 3 a.m. and work out every day, right? For basketball. Okay. Once you make that decision, you don't negotiate with yourself. You can negotiate with other people, but you don't negotiate with yourself once you make a decision. And that is so incredibly difficult to do, especially, and this is why I love what you're talking about, about do it early, because the more voices there are, the more people are trying to get you to start negotiating with yourself. Well, Eric, you said,

but, you know, really is incorrupt. Maybe the book shouldn't be titled incorruptible. Because can you defend that? Like, if someone were to come to, could you really defend? You know, now you're starting to ask yourself all these questions. You're like, nah, like I decided that this is what it was. And I believe it, and it's non-negotiable. And you can say whatever you want.

And, you know, the interesting part about that is after I was acquired, you know, going back to the kind of of the story that I have, it's, you're, this was the part when I was going through your book that I'm, like, reading this thing. like kicking myself at the whole time thinking, God, where, you know, God dang you, Eric, why don't you write this book five years ago

and I started my company because literally I'm watching you drive the things that happened, you know, because once, so I had this special, special, I had this very unique process for the insurance industry that allowed us to scale as fast as we did. There were a few core ideas that I had contrarian views on that we implemented in what allowed us to be successful.

And to your point about, about best practices in particular. The minute I lost control of the company by selling it, the corruption, it was like it couldn't wait to get in. All of a sudden I started having best practice meetings or meetings that they called professionalizing your business, which essentially meant taking all the things that made us special,

tearing them out and putting things in that made us look and feel like, other business in the country. And here's the part that I think founders don't, that when I now talk to founders, I share this story with them and try to help them see is, look, they're going to change your business but have the same expectations as when they bought you. So what they were saying to me is we want to see the continued trajectory that you had when you were this unique thing, doing things a unique way that allowed you to separate yourself. Yet we're going to tear all that stuff out, put all this generic, you know, shit corporate stuff in, but

expect you to still hit those exponential results, which became almost impossible. And now you're living in this situation where you feel like completely handcuffed. It was like, I don't understand. Like you bought me for this, but you're trying to make me this, but you still want me to hit this target. I don't, like physics doesn't allow that to work. And I guess my question there is you find yourself in this situation. You haven't, you, you haven't read incorruptible, one, because it's not out yet. But you're still. standing in this situation, is there a way back out? Can you pull the rip court and say, okay, I've gone down this corruption path. I'm looking around. I don't like where I am.

Maybe it's because of investors. Maybe it's because of employees, decisions we made, compromises we made that we shouldn't have. Can you fix it? Like, is this fixable? And how deep down the rabble hole can you be before it's not fixable? Yeah. I wish I could say it's always fixable, but the truth is sometimes it's too late. I mean, like, people get in these crisis situations and sometimes it finds out it's too late. But here's what I think is really hopeful about that. It's never too late to try.

And just like a, like we fetishize vision so much in the startup world for good reason. Like so many companies, you know, that was the initial spark, the seed, an individual person had some kind of insight that, you know, sometimes I think we sometimes we over fetishize that it's the founder who had the insights. Huffington's often just as likely to be an early employee or sometimes even a lead customer. You never know.

But like the spark had to come from someone. This is kind of the same thing. Like the first step, no matter where, no matter how doomed you think you are, the first step is just to be like, where do I need to get to? And do I have the courage to open my mouth and say, this is where we need to go? And this is not just true for the founder. I don't care if you're a board member, founder, investor, employee, foreman, factory worker. I even, I was talking to someone the other day who was going in for a job interview.

And they had, they were one of my early test readers for Incorruptible. And they were asking me, like, I'm just a lowly person. I'm desperate for a job. I'm out of work for a little while. I want to get a job. Surely I have no power. What can I do? I said, hey, no worries.

And they're like, and I'm not courageous, okay? I'm like, I'm not that kind of person. I was like, you don't need to be a superhero, but can you do the following? Can you do this? In the job interview, when they ask you any questions, ask them if they're a mission-driven company. Just ask. If they say yes, they say no, obviously go get a job somewhere else. You know what you want for me? But like, if they say yes, they're going to say yes, ask them how they know. Just like, oh, tell me about that. And the person will be like, oh, yeah, we're a great

place. We have drinks on Fridays and we have free yogurt in the fridge or whatever they say, you know, or maybe they'll say something really inspiring. Like, oh, yeah, we're all true believers in this cause or what do you hear what they have to say. And then the, oh, that's cool. Is that also our legal mission? Is that written in the corporate charter? Just ask. You don't have to say anything. that you think it should be, just ask. And you're going to get one of three answers. They're going to say yes. Of course it is.

You're like, oh, cool, can I see? Or they're going to say no. And you can be like, oh, that's odd. Why? The person you're talking to, they probably don't know why. You're going to force them to go ask someone else. They're going to ask, believe me, you ask them. They're going to ask their boss.

Hey, boss, what's it? He's not going to know either. He's going to ask his boss. And she's going to be like, I don't know. No one's ever asked us that question before. And it is not uncommon for a lipple, ripple like that next to you know they're having a meeting at the board of directors about it. Does anyone here know what our actual corporate purpose is?

Or the third possible answer you might get is, I don't know. Isn't that interesting? Huh. I'm going to make a note to ask someone about that. And you just dropped a little ripple in a pond or you've just dropped a pebble on the top of a mountain. Can I guarantee it will become an avalanche that will do a lot of good in the world? I can't guarantee anything.

That's how it works. But just that first step of like you, since you know where things need to be, you can start to ask questions. Now, as you get braver and more courageous, you can say things like, oh, that would make a big difference to me in choosing whether to work here or not if I knew. And believe me, every time you make a choice

is one of the most important ideas in the book comes at the end. Every choice you make in our modern world, because we live in the age of surveillance capitalism. So every choice you make is somebody's OKR. I don't care how minor it is. You think nobody's watching. You think nobody knows.

I guarantee you. every choice you make, somebody's got a metric they're trying to optimize that you just showed up in their report. So you don't have to do, you don't have to go to a secret meeting, you don't have to join a union, you don't have to necessarily, you can do those things if you want to. If you want to amplify collective action, God bless, go for it. But just by yourself, you choose to do the thing or you don't do the thing, that choice causes gravitational ripples that like a pond surface radiate out from you. So now going back to your question of, is it too late. Let's say you're a founder and you're in a really, really dire situation like you're

describing. And it can feel like, man, mission is now a nice to have. And investors, I think when investors become board members, they're trained, unfortunately, to kind of treat mission, like the dessert you get after you eat your vegetable, no longer the vital thing that is the reason they invested in the first place. So you go, okay, I'll just compromise a little bit to get through this crisis or whatever. But like Great Clay Christensen said, It is easier to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. And that's what popped into my head when you're talking about Mamba mentality. That like, what you have to negotiate and decide every time, it's just exhausting.

And so if you're just like, no, if we're going to make a turnaround, if we're going to get through this crisis, the only way is if everyone is truly committed to the thing that is going to galvanize our whole team to make it through. And therefore, we have to do the thing. Sometimes you're going to get laughed out of the room. You might get fired. The thing you fear it may happen. I promise you nothing.

No guarantees. But sometimes, and I've seen it, sometimes just speaking that into existence can cause people to be like, oh, really? Is that one of the options? I never even considered it. So, yeah, I think educating people about the magnetic pull of a profound mission-driven company, of aligning a mission with human flourishing and with having a principled ethos, making honest, high-integrity decisions.

Like there's this package of actions or character traits that if we reach for, no matter how dire the situation, my experience has been, it gives us the power we need to accomplish sometimes seemingly impossible things. That Clayton Christensen quote, it's really tough to swallow. I mean, I believe it, 100%. It's just a tough one to internalize because what immediately makes you start thinking about is all the places where you negotiated with yourself and moved away from the principles that

in your quiet moments, you decided wanted to be part of either who you were personally or who you wanted to be as, you know, involved in a business. And, you know, that can create a lot of self-doubt. And I see, you know, when I'm dealing with, you know, I deal with a lot of early stage founders, mostly in the insurance industry, but a few others, there's this sense of like, even if they've done something spectacular, obviously you get the few who are born with or somehow had ingrained in them a level of self-confidence that oftentimes borderlines on delusion,

which, yeah, it happens. If manageable, can be a superpower, right? No doubt. But I think most of us are always managing some level of self-doubt. And, you know, when we're, I guess, how do you coach, talk, advise, when they are in these low, you mentioned low leverage,

low leverage negotiations. When you know you're in a high leverage spot, even if you generally have self-doubt, most of the time I think you can navigate through that. But it's these more low-leveraged situations where combined with a level of insecurity or self-doubt, seemingly you are very open to suggestion and often suggestion that is not in your favor,

or at least not primarily in your favor. How do you recommend that founder or executive, et cetera? How do they manage that situation? Is it finding a good mentor? Is it going and getting a consultant? Is it bringing in your executive team, et cetera? Like, how do you navigate that particular situation? Because that seems to be more and more the case.

It's super hard. And I think we should name the emotion of shame that a lot of people feel when they feel like I was supposed to be the Goliath who protected this thing and now I've been like and now I failed. And the problem is that investors and a lot of advisors and bankers stuff, like they encourage this magical thinking. They want the story to be all about you. So when things are going well, like I tell the story in the book, I never forget one of these founders I talked to who came to be very concerned about this stuff. And I gave him a bunch of advice and he was really shook by what I told them. Because I was like, look, you're going to take this company public and you're about to get utterly

screwed. Okay, just I need you to understand what you're up against. And he called his various advisors and bankers and lawyers and CFO and everybody and they were like, oh man, Eric's such a downer. If he really believed in you, if he saw what a visionary you are, he wouldn't talk like that. And he got me back being like, you know, sorry, we're covered. This is, this is, that's the advice for normal companies, but we're special. He didn't last even six months as CEO post IPO. His company is now like completely destroyed. And I don't feel good. I wasn't like, oh, told or so, I was like, this keeps happening. I mean, I feel like I'm like the Cassandra who this keeps happening to.

I tell people what's going to happen. They don't believe it. So the key, first thing you got to do is you got to figure out who in your life, in your team, in your, in your cap table, just who in your life are what I call torchbearers? Torch bearers are people who are there for the mission and they don't care about other stuff. So like, they will be a real, in good times, they can be a real pain because you're like, I just want to do this easy, quick thing.

And they're like, but what about that mission? And you're like, God damn it. You just like, right, like get out of my way. Like, they could be a pain in the butt. But when you're in a crisis, that's who you need. So you need to pay, I would just, I watch people in a crisis like a hawk. Who is actually sincerely committed to the mission and who is either looking out for themselves or like trying to make me feel bad so they can get something.

Like, you've got to pay attention. And a lot of fancy people, the most famous, fancy, bigest name, people are actually like the worst. Even though they seemed great when they, when they, you can just feel the, I remember meeting with this one investment banker who is just a genius at sales and I felt like by the end of the meeting I was like this is like the most selfless person who just he just loves technology for its own sake the fact that you know the fact that he's a banker is almost like he's a little bit embarrassed about it he's not trying to make money he's trying to change the world and I walked out of his office being like this guy's basically like mother Teresa and like only once the charismatic

like magic spell faded a little while later I was like wait a minute what did we actually talk about and what what did he ask me to do I was like going back I was like wait hold on hold on a second like i i got totally i was completely boned so like yeah i see why people go with him and trust it like it's just like he was really good at it i was like wow this is a presence so you got to pay attention to that kind of stuff figure out who are the torchbearers and then in a crisis you have to circle the wagons of those people and just figure out like who is actually actually here to defend the mission that we're on and you can tell right away the people who are like i don't know if they give you vague objections like people not like it or what about this like you know

Are we going to make any money? It's just like the concerns that are on their mind, the things that are keeping them up at night. They're not, and it's not a criticism. Like some people need money, okay? I'm not, does I'm wrong with that? I'm just saying they're not torchbearers. The torchbearers are people who are like,

this is their irrationally committed to this thing. And those are the people you need to be able to go to for advice in these crisis moments because they're the only people who are actually going to put your long-term interest ahead of their own. And so, again, if you wait for the crisis to happen before you seek those people out,

that could be tricky. But I'll give you an example. Like, here's the best practices we teach people can be really antithetical to this. So a very common idea you hear that comes out of White Combinator in places like that is that startup should not have advisors. If someone is prominent enough to be an advisor, they should just be an investor, right? Because they're like, why would you, why give them equity for free when they obviously can pay for it? So don't let them talk into free equity, only have investors, which I totally make a certain

amount of time. I understand the logic of it. But also what you're saying is never have anybody on your side of the ledger on your cap table. No common shareholders, but you, everybody else you get advice from needs to be a preferred shareholder. It's like, wait a second. So everyone I go to advice is going to have class solidarity with the preferred investors? Really?

Is that really a good idea? Like it seems so reasonable on the surface. And then in a crisis, you're like, holy shit, who can I talk to who's not a preferred shareholder? I've got nobody. Only my employees. and I want to freak my employees out. So I really believe, I'm a huge believer in cultivating relationships with people, whether they're formal advisors or not, you know, figuring out which of your employees really,

really, really understand this. And like, Steve Jobs was famous for this. He would conduct what he called, well, I think other people called it skip level meetings. I don't know what he called it. He would just, he would have these meetings with people down in the org chart to drive his executives crazy. But like he understood a lot of his executives, they're not there for the mission. They're there to be a big time executive at Apple Computer.

It's pretty sweet job. You get paid really well. You get all this social capital. It's like it's an amazing job. And they're good at their job. He's not like, I'm not, it's not that he didn't like them. He hired them. But he didn't really want to hear what they had to say.

He needed to talk to someone who actually knew what the hell was going on and who actually was there for the reason of belief in the mission, the ethos, the product, whatever it was. So surround yourself of those people, know who they are so that you can go to them at Christ. I want to finish our conversation today because I just wouldn't be doing my duty as, a podcast host here if having you on I didn't ask you this question so all of what we've talked about today but framed in a world where with a $20 a month Claude code subscription you can spin up your own business and it feels like there's less moats and there's more information and there's 10 million companies being started every single day and uh you know everyone's got a side quest

and a side hustle and a side insert, whatever buzzword, you want to put on additional jobs and projects. In a world seemingly that's only moving faster, right, with AI, with information, in a place where it's very hard to distinguish good advice for bad advice. I mean, I talk to a lot of what I call normies, and I don't mean that derogatory at all. I just mean normal human beings who don't think about the stuff that you and I think about every single day at the depth that we do. Totally. Civilians, yeah.

Yeah, civilians. Yeah, when they're starting businesses, and I'll throw a few of these kind of thoughts, maybe not exactly the same that the way you put them here, but just some of the thoughts we've discussed today in front of them have no clue. And if they do, oftentimes you find they're using just standard, very surface level best practice information. As a first step, how do we parse through this to make sure that we're not stepping on some of the most easier common landmines as we begin, as we begin our journey into starting maybe our first side quest business. We've been a plumber all our life and we want to start a plumber's CRM app that we've had in our head and we want to go do that. Oh, yeah.

The person you just described, this is like the greatest time ever for such things. It's amazing. So I have been a big believer for many years now of first principles thinking. And the reason, and other eras, it's been harder for me to explain to people why. It's always just seemed intuitively right to me. That at the end of the day, copying tactics, listening to advice, like you never really know if it's going to work for you.

But if you study underlying principles, you can reason about what's supposed to happen. You can make predictions. So I think a lot of the problem we have today is people are like, follow this technique and then you'll get rich. So then people are like, I don't know, so-and-so followed the technique

and he got rich, but so-and-so other person followed the technique. He didn't get rich. So is it true or not? Like, we have very coarse-grained ways of thinking about these things. And I'm like, hey, man, better to take a more scientific approach. Like try to understand what the underlying principle is

and then see if you can apply it yourself. And not just look for, you know, people are like, if it works, it means I'll become an instant overnight millionaire. No, that's not how it works. The reason why Lean startup has had staying power, when a lean startup was written 15 years ago now, I think the reason it has staying power

is it was derived from these more eternal principles. And so people are able to make predictions about what's supposed to happen. And then you can evaluate what actually happened compared to what's supposed to happen. And you'd be like, oh, okay, yeah, I didn't become an instant millionaire, but I did learn a lot. I did get better. You know, like, it makes very concrete predictions, and the new book is the same way.

So in AI, it's the only way forward. I can't tell you how many so-called best practices we've seen come and go. I've been really in the revolution from the beginning. So I'm like, I'm not a civilian. I'm really deep in with these guys. I know all of the major players. And I, you know, I have started an AI research lab. And I've worked with a bunch of the big companies too.

So I spent a lot of time with AI and I know the scientific papers and everything. But even I, and people who are way deeper than I am, have a really hard time predicting what's going to happen. So we've been through already multiple waves, just in the last two years, at least 10 different waves of best practices that were like absolutely the best for a minute and are now discredited. So if you're like, oh, okay, I found the solution. All you have to do is like do prompt engineering.

All you have to do is do agent. Like whatever thing you think, oh, I just discovered this thing. First of all, you didn't just discover it. Okay, millions of people are discovering at the same time. And second of all, it's not some internal best practice. It just happens to be a thing that is working right this minute. So it's much better off to try to understand the technology in a deeper way. What are the principles that are driving this technology?

What is it capable of and why? And it's funny. People are like, that sounds like you're having to grapple with like postmodern philosophy. It's like, yeah, guess what? All those questions about the self, about language, about intelligence, about seeming these really arcane things. It seemed like they were not important at all to most people. are now the most practical areas of study in the world.

And so many business outcomes are going to hinge on questions about whether language is intelligence or intelligence has some more capacity beyond language. I think that's exciting and cool. If you're someone who likes learning and self-improvement, like what an excuse to go deep into these fundamental questions. But for people who are like, oh, that doesn't sound good to me, I hear you. There's another path.

And that is try to get hands on with the models themselves. So I strongly recommend, like, there's all these, companies you can buy AI enhanced whatever vertical for you, don't buy that stuff. If you have to, fine. But like as much as possible, try to get access to the underlying models. Claude or chat GPT, Gemini. The underlying models are available about 20 bucks a month. We're not talking about some massive investment. Learn how to use Claude code or anthropic cowork. Those are my personal favorites at the moment. But if you want to use codex or any of these other interfaces that get you direct to the model, if you want to learn how to use an open source model, whatever. There's a lot

of ways you can go about this. But whatever it is, try to spend some time with the model, try to understand its capabilities. And there's a couple of tips I would give you. First thing is, these models are teaching machines. Like, your mental model for what these things are, it's like your most verbose and overconfident friend who, like, loves some obscure thing that they're super into. But it's everybody's friend, every person on the planet who loves to talk and talk and talk and talk about the thing that they know a lot about. Whether they're right or wrong, they'll still keep talking. That's what we're talking. So ask it. Have it. Have it. teach you things. Have it build a curriculum for you. Have it ask it if your understanding is correct,

especially with the more recent models, especially like things like the high thinking, new models from Anthropic. They're very good at teaching. So use it for learning, not just for making artifacts. And the second thing is try to get a sense, not just of its strengths, but it's severe limitations. This technology is very good at some things and horrendous at others. And the challenge we all have to deal with, it's called dark flow. in the, this is a term that comes from the psychology of gambling. People who play slot machines, if you put them in an MRI machine, it's not that different from people who are like having tremendous creative output,

like flow at work, so like a great poet or a writer, like in that moment of channeling the divine, you know, muse, their brain is lighten up kind of the same way as a person playing a slot machine. So it's very easy for vibe coding and all these tools to become a slot machine. And you're just like, not thinking at all. I just like, ooh, monkey, do my work for me, right? Like, make this thing for me. it for me, make it for me. And as soon as you catch yourself in that pattern, you've got to break it.

These things are super addictive and super dangerous in that way. Because if it's doing the thinking for you, then you are adopting its weaknesses. And remember, it has one of its most dangerous weaknesses, just like your friend who's overconfident. It has the ability to convince you of any plausible sounding thing, whether it's true or not. It's just insanely good at that because it's a language model. It's not a truth model. It's not a reasoning model. Deep down under all the way, we add reasoning and facts and cert. We add all these stuff to it. But if you go down what is this thing at the base base layer, it's the same base crap hardware we carry around back here too.

It's just a language processing engine. It's trying to produce tokens that sound plausible. So as long as you understand those weaknesses, play with the actual technology. And remember that if you try today, you may feel like you're too late, but for the vast majority of the human population, they've never even heard of this yet.

So you're actually super, super, super early. But don't let it operate you. you got to learn to operate it. Guys, I can attest to the addictive nature of this because I have been building and destroying things over and over again with clawed code and open claw. And I just find it to be fascinating. For someone who, for whatever reason, could never figure out code.

I'm sure if I gave it more of a college try, I could have eventually figured it out. But it's fairly obvious to me fairly quickly that fingers on keyboards coding was never going to be my superpower. But holy shoot, what this thing can do for you when you can articulate a problem, articulate what you hope the answer could be, and are willing to do the research to find the tools, skills, plugins, you know, etc.

that can help you get there. Man, it's a wonderful time to be alive. Eric, I appreciate you so much. The book is incorruptible. We'll have links to the book. We'll have links to your website. Do you have a favorite social media where people can follow along if they're not already someplace to send them? Oh, sure. Yeah. I'm on all the usual platforms. I probably post myself personally most to blue sky these days.

But I'm also on Twitter, you know, LinkedIn, everywhere else you'd expect. And for latest, people want the latest updates. You can join the mailing list at incorruptible.co. We have a whole bunch of special offers and cool events and stuff happening for people who are fans. So if you want to come hang out in our community, just go to incorruptible.co. where all the layers will be. Guys, whether you're watching on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts, scroll down, I'll have those links, sign up for the newsletter. I appreciate you so much. I know the book's going to be amazing, and thank you so much for your work, my friend.

I appreciate it. Thanks for the kind words. This was a great conversation. Thank you.