Founder's Story - AI Made MVPs Instant. So Why Are Most Startups Still Losing | Ep. 401 with Eric Ries

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Daniel and Eric Ries explore the collision of Lean Startup thinking with the AI era, why “anyone with a credit card” can now access world class tools, and why that democratization also creates brutal competition. Eric argues fatalism about AI is dangerous because we still have agency, but only if we build civic infrastructure and accountability. The conversation then pivots into Incorruptible, where Eric documents a 200 year pattern: mission driven companies discover a better way to build, then still get ruined at the peak of success through bureaucracy, extraction, and misaligned incentives. Key Discussion Points Eric says AI is an extension of macro trends he’s written about for decades: access to the means of production is now cheap and global, which makes entrepreneurship more open than ever.  He challenges the assumption that making one step faster makes the whole process easier, because entrepreneurship is adversarial and competitors and incumbents get the same acceleration.  Eric explains why he’s skeptical of fully unsupervised agents for mission critical work: reliability breaks down as tasks encounter out of distribution scenarios, so humans-in-the-loop matter.  He introduces Incorruptible and the idea that governance is a design problem, not a vibes problem, describing companies being “surgically deboned” as they grow and optimize for extraction over value.  Eric breaks the “double mystery”: if mission driven capitalism is more profitable, why do companies still get ruined, yet a few outliers like Patagonia and Costco resist the pattern.  He argues it’s “always too early until it’s too late” to protect mission, and recommends structural moves like writing purpose into the corporate charter and designing boards and protections early.  They discuss alternative liquidity and longevity structures beyond a classic exit, including foundations, ESOPs, employee ownership trusts, and purpose trusts, citing examples like Eileen Fisher and Patagonia.  Eric reframes the word “exit” as part of the problem and shares research suggesting many founders regret selling one year later, questioning what success is for if it destroys what mattered. Takeaways AI makes building easier, but it also makes everyone faster, so the advantage comes from judgment, focus, and designing systems that can outlearn competition.  If you want to protect mission, you have to encode it structurally, not just culturally, because the gap between stated purpose and actual incentives will eventually swallow the company.  “Exit” is not the only path to liquidity, and founders can design for longevity with structures like ESOPs, purpose trusts, and foundation ownership.  Agentic AI is powerful when humans stay the driver, but dangerous when accountability is impossible and reliability becomes probabilistic.  The earlier you build protections, the easier they are, because governance becomes exponentially harder to change once scale and incentives lock in. Closing Thoughts Eric Ries helped define how modern startups ship products, but this episode shows he’s now focused on something deeper: how great companies survive success without betraying their purpose. In an AI era where building is cheap and truth is noisy, the real edge becomes institutional design, clarity of mission, and the courage to structure a business that outlives you without losing its soul. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every couple years there's like lean startup is dead. AI is going to be so dominated by this MVP thinking. And the acceleration, we've been predicting this for a long time. Like for $20 a month or $200 a month, you're accessing these like world-class transformative technologies. And you can use that to build products to release and deploy and compete with the world's largest company. You get accelerated and you get faster, but so do all your competitors. What can founders do besides exiting or selling? This is a classic wrong thinking.

So what we need to do is think about what I call the architect. of institutional longevity. And the first thing we have to do is... Eric, it's great to have you today. I read the lean startup. I don't know if it's like 15 years ago, 14 years ago. Crazy, right? Like how time flies.

And obviously the MVP is the thing that stuck with me. And I've since every business, I've really gone into like, I need to only start with the MVP. It doesn't have to be perfect. I need to get it out there. Nowadays, with vibe coding, I mean, AI can basically create an MVP in five minutes. How validating is this for you since you basically wrote the playbook on this?

Oh, that's nice of you to say. Yeah, it's funny because for 15 years, but it has been 15 years since the book came out, people have been every couple years, there's like lean startup is dead. This new trend means we don't need the lean startup. And people are not really writing that for this wave because it's just so clear. AI is going to be so dominated by this MVP thinking and the acceleration, we've been predicting this for a long time. So to me, AI is an extension of the macro trends I've been writing about for 20 years now that what the communist, what Karl Marx used to call the means of production,

right? Like the power flows to those who control the means of production. Well, we live in an era where anybody can access the means of production as long as you can have a credit card. So the idea that like for $20 a month or $200 a month, you're accessing these like world-class, transformative technologies and you can use that to build products to release and deploy and compete with the world's largest companies, I think is super exciting. So on one end, you have this democratization like you're saying, that like anyone around the world that has $20 a month can basically create something that can compete. On the other hand, you also have a lot of people now that will create massive competition and possibly drive the cost down. What do you think about that? Well, you know,

So it's interesting. From the point of view of an individual entrepreneur, this is great. These tools are great. But people always assume, this is a classic wrong thinking, people always assume that when a substep of a process becomes more efficient, therefore the overall process becomes more efficient, or even the whole industry becomes more efficient, but not necessarily because many processes are adversarial. So yeah, you get accelerated and you get faster, but so do all your competitors.

And it's worse this time around because not only does every person with an idea have the same acceleration that you do, but also every incumbent has the same tools, too, that truly is no differentiation. And the pressure of unincumbent to adopt AI is really intense, whether they actually do it or not. So we'll see whether like net net, it will take a few years to really understand the impact of these tools on entrepreneurship in general. But my personal feeling is just to be extremely bullish. Even when this hype cycle passes and the current bubble bursts, I still think the infrastructure that is laid will create lots and lots and lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Because there's this whole thing around jobs and what's going to happen. Are you pessimistic or optimistic for the future now that AI has been, at least generative AI has been advancing like every five seconds, something new comes out. Oh, it's exciting. If you're an entrepreneur, you can't help but be optimistic about things like this. But there's plenty to worry about both in the short term and in the long run. And I think it's really important. People tend to engage in fatalistic thinking with AI, making predictions about what will

definitely happen. And it just, as a result, people forget that we actually have a lot of agency over what happens. And if we don't exercise that agency to have oversight, accountability, what I call in the new book, civic infrastructure, like build out the institutions that will make sure that this technology actually serves for the benefit of all humanity. Like, there's no guarantee that those things will happen. My optimism comes from my belief in the power of entrepreneurs to create the new institutions that we so desperately need.

I mean, I'm so excited. Like you said, somebody on a small island. in Asia can create something that somebody sitting in San Francisco in Silicon Valley, they can create the same thing at the same time using the same app. And I don't know if we've ever, maybe Shopify, you know, I don't know if we've ever really been there where these tools can do this at the cost that almost, you know, millions or if not billions of people can afford. So let's go to, there's obviously this race of AGI.

I know you've co-founded answer.a.i. How do you see this? It's like an AI gold rush in itself around like everyone's chasing AGI, but I know you're looking at this differently. Yeah, well, I get asked, I've been doing a lot of lectures in universities and in the university setting, I always get asked by the students, is it a bubble or is it a transformational technology? And I always say like the old meme, why not both? So like, clearly it can be both. We've in history, seen many situations. Like you have like the tulip bubble kind of bubbles, but there's also like the telecom bubble. You know, we laid out tremendous amount of fiber in a bout of irrational exuberance during the telecom bubble, but all that fiber is being

used today. So one of the ways that societies build needed infrastructure, especially at times when you have kind of institutional and governmental dysfunction, as we obviously do right now, sometimes you have to build the infrastructure through these irrational moments. So like, yeah, are we building, you know, is all these data centers investments like actually going to pay off? Is there going to be fraud? Is there going to be some of these companies revealed to be, you know, kind of more like a WorldCom or Enron? For sure.

I think we really have to be prepped for a lot of financial fraud. When this much money is flowing this quickly, you're going to see bad stuff. But the underlying technology is genuinely useful. And I try to get away from phrases like AGI. Even AI, I think is very misleading because, like, you know, diffusion and LLMs are two totally different technologies. And I think one of the things I think is really misunderstood about LLM. the famous paper that established the transformer, the technology that makes LLMs possible is called attention is all you need.

And that's, that was a really important breakthrough. But I think people don't understand is that attention is all you get. That's, that's only one mechanism that makes LLMs go, which is the attention mechanism. And so a lot of what we call artificial intelligence, part of the reason why people can't even agree about what it's capable of doing, is it's very sensitive to how well you can focus its attention. And if that's starting to sound a little bit like, human beings, then you see the problem. Like just because you have intelligence on the planet doesn't necessarily mean that intelligence can be harnessed and used for anything useful. It depends a lot on the details of the context. And so I think we're going to have to relearn a lot of civilization

scale lessons that we had to figure out with corporations and organizations and humans in their power relationships. Like all that stuff is going to have to be figured out in this new, in this new world. Now, at Answer AI, we have a very contrarian view. If we're ultimately, if it's, if it plays out. Our view is that we should not use LLM as a human or creativity replacement, but only as a creativity augmenter. So everything we do is designed to have humans in the loop and maximally increased human capabilities, so that when you use these tools, you become a super learner and your ability to learn, to grow, to develop new skills is amplified. And we have seen situations where like a small team can, using these tools can do the work what used to require

a large team. And in some ways, be more effective than a large team ever could because the communication overhead is so much more compressed. So yeah, we, we're very bullish about our approach, but time will tell if our contrarian bet pays on. Have you used Claudebot? Have you played around with this? Or what are your thoughts on like leveraging AI where basically like we'll take over everything for you and do things? Yeah, again, part of our contrarian view is that we're not super bullish on agents. Part of the issue with agents, it was two really like fundamental issues. One is a lot of researchers who like are a little closer to the code than the people making all the headlines really don't think agents can work. It's not it's not just like they're not

working right now, but that there's like a fundamental problem and it has to do with the reliability of each of the sub-steps. So so yes, we're seeing agent like behavior like work most of the time, some of the time, but like for a lot of mission critical applications, first of all, it has to work all the time. And as you get into real into real world situations, agents more and more and more likely just probabilistically speaking to encounter situations that are out of their training data and they can become super dumb, super fast in ways that people find very confusing and counterintuitive. But that's not that it's not because I'm not like an anti-agent, you know, hater because I don't think AI can do autonomous stuff. I use, you know, the tools that we've built

at Answer AI. Like I have basically a custom rig for all of the repetitive tasks that I have to do in my life and it's exceptionally powerful. But calling it an agent, I think, is misleading because in every one of the tools that I use, I as the human being and the driver of the process. So I have complete shared understanding with the LLM about what's going on. I can see everything that it sees, it sees everything that I see. And when it makes a mistake or when I make a mistake, we have an opportunity for mutual learning and correction. That's really difficult when the agents are running unsupervised. So the people who are kind of running 10,000 unsupervised agents, you know, there's going to be some cool stuff come out of that,

but there's also going to be a lot of surprising disasters as we get into situations where there's fundamentally not possible to have accountability over what happens. And that's quite scary. That's why I have not got, I'm not going to go out and get the computer. I'm not going to use it yet. For some reason, when you talk about it,

I can't help think about the Matrix and, like, the agents and the Matrix. And it's a fascinating world. Like, it's incredibly fast moving. And your new book that has just come out incorruptible, and you talk about, governance as a design problem. Can you explain why you why why now is this book so important? Well, thanks for asking. You know, I've been at this a long time now and I've helped a lot of people create a lot of companies hundreds or maybe thousands at this point and make a lot of money,

have a lot of success. I'm very proud of everything that we've accomplished, you know, as a startup movement to bring new companies to life and to democratize access to companies. But there's a dark side to it and an underside to it that I think is really quite sad, which is I've also watched. watch a lot of these companies be ruined. I call it in the book them being surgically debone. And if you look at these big, big companies, they get larger, they start to get more bureaucratic. They start to get lame, you know, I don't know what the right word is for it, but they kind of succumb to what we call in Silicon Valley. We call it Big Co disease, where they're just putting out the same press releases. They become very focused on quarterly returns. They're just, they're more

interested in serving themselves than serving customers. And it's really sad. And now a lot of times that happens because the founders lose control of the company. You know, they get ejected, they get taken over. You get private equity involved. But a lot of times, even if the founder has control, they still lose control of it because the culture and the ethos, that the character of the company deviates from its intended purpose. So this is an actually like surprisingly large problem as I started to dig into it.

Like I obviously have encountered it in my own life personally. But when I started to really understand the history of how we got here and the scale and scope with this problem, I felt like, oh, no, we had to try and do something about it. Do you think it has to do with as they grow, they lose sight of the mission that they originally had or the people that they were serving? And now, like you're saying, they're just kind of like appeasing the board or appeasing the investors. What do you think happens?

Yeah, that is the pattern. And it's a double mystery. So in the book, I document over 200 years of this phenomenon where people discover a new and better way to do capital. You know, they are the mission-driven, purpose-driven way of building companies. There's like reams and reams and reams of academic data that shows that that is the source of competitive advantage. That's actually a more profitable way to build companies. And then because everyone understands the logic of capitalism, it's moral logic, is that if someone finds a better way, others will copy.

So better practices defuse into the economy through the force of natural selection because the market selects for value creation. except that's not what happens over and over and over again decade by decade by decade generation after generation those same and those same founders who figured out that more enlightened way get betrayed and their companies get destroyed often at the very pinnacle of their success it's like a natural law it happens like clockwork and in the modern world this is accelerating this used to be something that happened like a couple times a decade now it's happening a couple times a year maybe more. And a lot of people are familiar with like their favorite consumer brand get ruined by private equity. For example, I've had this experience myself and it was just, I just saw someone

did a video about it. And I'm blanking on who's video it was. They were talking about going to dinner with a friend, and a friend for lunch at the, at the friend's favorite restaurant. They hadn't been there in a while. They go in there and that friend's kind of looking around like something's a little bit weird here. And they sit down, they get their food. The friend takes one bite and pulls out their phone. It's like being kind of rude, like looking at somebody with their phone. It's like, dude, we're having lunch. Why are you looking at your phone?

He's like, oh, sorry, I just had to check at this restaurant have been owned by private equity. And he like, turns the phone around. He's like, I could taste it. I could taste the change. The service was a little bit worse. The decor has got a little shabby and the food just doesn't taste right. And I've learned that it has a taste.

So we're like, we've been taught that this is like an inevitable thing, right? As this, companies get bigger. They become more bureaucratic. As you say, they lose track of the mission. They become more interested in appeasing the board, more interesting in appeasing. But if it was a natural law that that always happened, there would be no exceptions. And yet there are these exceptions. In almost every industry, there's one like outlier company that for whatever reason this is not happening to.

Think about like Vanguard and financial services, Patagonia in apparel, Costco in retail. Why can there be exceptions? Like, why does this happen at all? If the moral logic that we've all been taught about capitalism was true, if the market selects for value creation, this should never happen. Yet it seems to inevitably happen. But if it's inevitable, how can there be exceptions? And that double mystery is what really drives the book, trying to both answer the question of why this happens,

but more importantly, answer the question of how can we intentionally design organizations to resist this phenomenon. So when you, it sounds like this normally happens when a company gets to a certain size. What can people do in the beginning? And obviously, I know it's not always controllable. Like you said, at some point, you might exit the company. You might go IPO. And you might do things where you're not totally in control anymore like you were when, you know, when you started the company or for the first few years, what can people do maybe in the beginning to try and set themselves up or set the company up so it doesn't go that route?

Yeah. So one of the really important ideas in the book is that it's never too late. You always can do something to move in this direction no matter how big. And anytime someone tells you that a certain thing is inevitable, you have to look on that with great suspicion. So people say, yeah, well, sure, if it's small, sure if it's private, sure if it's this. But I tell the story in the book of companies that are literally like massive public companies with massive valuations that don't seem to have this problem. Costco is worth $400 billion.

Nova Nordisk is one of the other examples in the book. Their evaluation was recently greater than the GDP of Denmark. These companies are truly, truly massive. And they're structured differently. They have an unusual structure every single one of them. So the good news, though, is that it's just easy. to do the stuff, the earlier you do it. So I say in the book, one of the lessons of the book is that it's always too early until

it's too late, if you ask your lawyers, ask your investors, ask your bankers, like, hey, should I focus on mission? They always like pat you on the head and be like, yeah, yeah, that's like a nice to have, you know, you can worry about that later. It's too early to worry about that. And then one day, it's too late to worry about it. That's basically what happens over and over and over again. It's pathetic.

So the earlier you can start, the easier it is. For example, like one of the most important simple ideas in the book is that you need to write the company's purpose into the corporate charter because most founders, when they create a company, they're trying to make a company to do something. And yet most corporate governance experts think that the purpose of a corporation is just to maximize returns for shareholders. So if you actually believe that your organization is a living, breathing thing with an actual mission, you need to write that down.

If you don't write that down, you will not be able to defend that mission over time. what happens is the gap between your stated mission and your actual mission starts to grow. It's like a chasm that opens, opens, opens up, and eventually it swallows you. So there's some simple things like that in the book that are very easy to do. Some of them require like a simple legal filing. Some of them just require to structure your board properly. But then some other things in the book are more complicated, you know, that actually have to do with changing the relationship with investors, changing the cap table,

changing the org structure. And then the other thing I really think is important is we have to see the story. structural protections as going hand in hand with the operational commitment. So it's really a two-step process to first build something worth protecting and then to protect it. A very common mistake people make is they think there's a magic bullet, a silver bullet. It's like, oh, I got dual class shares. I got founder control. I'm a PBC. I got this. I got that. Therefore, I'm safe. I'm invincible. And it's like, no, you have to see it like a whole suit of plate mail armor. Yeah, your shoulder paldrons are invulnerable. Good job. But what if you

stab somewhere else. So we have to see it as like an integrated system of protections that starts on the inside, making the company truly trustworthy and then to protect that trustworthiness as it grows. Do you have an example of a company that excites you because of the turnaround? Maybe they fell into the trap and then they were able to come out of it. And the reason I also ask is I feel like companies are doing something very interesting on social media. like duolingo has an incredible social story that they I'm not saying they had a turnaround but the whole social story or it's like let's say gen z or gen alpha they make a trend on TikTok and now that company is like propelled back like mustard or whatever it is now they're like propelled

I know that's not a company but you're like it's something that's propelled back into like notoriety again yeah yeah it is these there are I mean the Turnarounds definitely do happen. And in the book, I tell a bunch of stories about companies that converted structures that, you know, had one structure and converted to another. You know, one of my favorite stories in the book is Eileen Fisher, the fashion company. She tells this great story. You know, she has an amazing rags to riches story. You know, she was, her family viewed her education as a waste of money. Only her brothers got to go to school. And, you know, she had to like build this thing from scratch by herself. And then, and the company was really successful, she was kind of on the

standard path that we know leads to corruption. She was going to do a road show. People were saying, you've got to take your company public. You've got to do all this stuff. And she tells this story of being at a roadshow meeting, you know, a conference with all these bankers and looking out at this sea of dudes wearing suits. She's like, first of all, no one in this room wears my clothes. No one's room cares about fashion. Like, what am I doing? And then because it was such a hot company at the time, various companies were trying to take it over. And she recounts this meeting with a CEO of a certain company that was trying to buy them. And she's like, explain to me what is your what's your goal in buying my company? Like, why do you want it? And they were like, oh, because we have a 10%

growth target and we can't hit our growth target without it. And she just had this epiphany that the path that she was on was a path that was about what people could take out of her company, not what they could put in. So it's this like difference between extraction and value creation is all the transformation stories are like that. So she decided not to sell the company. She decided not to take it public and to convert to what's called an ESOP employee ownership system, feeling that the people that work there and create the value should be the ones who have the ownership. That's one of many of the structures that we talk about. I feel like there's almost a dichotomy of entrepreneurship. You want to build something. You want to change, but you also need to exit possibly unless you're looking at,

you know, long term. But I have to, in my experience traveling, like in the U.S., most of people are thinking about exiting. If you go to Asia, most people are thinking about like long term, like passing it down through many, many generations. And we've had, we had two founders on recently. One grew his company to a thousand stores exited. And when I asked him about the company, he does not want to talk about it because he does not like the direction they went and they want no, they want nothing to do with him. We have another one. She exited to a very large company and then they've come on they've taken it to a billion dollar plus but they still consult with her and she still sees it as like part of her baby yeah yeah like this is these really wide

gaps of it but like how do we look at this as founders like should yeah yeah fair or should we not care about the business in there's no way not so there's no way not to care so you know anyone who claims that they can exit a business that they bill with their blood sweat and tears and not care is just a flat out line I don't think it's possible but I don't like the word exit The word exit to me is like part of the problem. We have constructed a system where in order to gain liquidity and in order to have like successful succession, we have to liquidate the company. That is insane. That makes no sense.

There should be other ways to solve those specific problems. And in fact, there are. And we can talk about the solutions. But like first thing is to just set like to set exit as the goal is going to set yourself up for heartbreak. Now there's a great study that was done by an organization that works in this area. about what happens to business owners one year after they've sold their company. So one year post exit, they did a survey. And I think it was like 75% of them regret selling.

It was a crazy high number. And you're like, what is the point of this? If we're making all these moral compromises along the way to get the company to be super big, and then we finally cash out and then we're miserable, what was it for? And believe me, I know a lot of very, very wealthy people. And a lot of them seem very, very unhappy to me. And you can see it on social media. Like a lot of them are having a very public mental breakdown right in front of all of our faces.

Like it's just so obvious that they need to be the hero of their own story and they're not. I don't want, for everybody listening, I don't want that for you. I want you to sleep well at night. I want you to feel like you created something that is truly a force for good in the world. And you can be proud of until the day you die. And your kids can be proud. When they read about, when they read your Wikipedia entry, they're not going to be like, he did, he worked on the tobacco industry. Like, oh, man, that's my embarrassing.

ancestor? No, you can be, they can be proud of what you did. And we have stories in the book of founders who have managed to do this to gain the liquidity that they need and to support their family and do all the good stuff that an exit supposedly offers, but without destroying the thing that made the exit possible in the first place. Yeah, I'd love to hear what are these liquidity events. So, so when somebody searches my name in 100 years on AI, an AI gives the answer of my Wikipedia, it's going to say something different. But yeah, what can found a, do besides exiting or selling? Yeah.

So what we need to do is think about what I call the architecture of institutional longevity. Like what does it mean for an organization to be able to survive? And the first thing we have to do is to realize that that cannot be the project of an individual person. The need to exit is driven by human mortality and human disinterest. Some people eventually probably don't want to be an indentured servant to their company for their whole life. They want to be able to leave.

In order for that to happen and for the mission to remain it, retain its integrity, we have to be able to transition those values, that commitment, that mission, from generation to generation of managers. And that means that the mission has to be encoded, not in posters on the wall, but in deeper, more structural commitments. That's the first step. The second step, then, is to just do the mechanics of how to do the transition. So, like a very common structure that I tell the story in the book of a company called Grunfos. If you have running water in your town, you probably have Grunfos to thank for this. They make most of the water pumps in the world.

And the founder, this is now three generations ago, the original founder had this idea to build this company. And he didn't want to sell it. He didn't want to exit. And so he instead created this structure where he donated a huge chunk of his ownership of the company to a charitable foundation, which now oversees the capital structure, the infrastructure of Grunfos. He had the insight that he didn't want the company to be destroyed.

But he also didn't want to burden his children and descendants with being like tied to this company for life and having to manage it. Anyone who's watched Succession or what knows any like family businesses up close, like this can go real bad, real fast. So instead, he made a provision where the foundation has the majority ownership in the business and has the responsibility for both doing charitable works, but also for doing capital allocation for the for profit company. They are governed by a board of trustees with 12 people, four employees, four members of his family, and for outside experts that has like a very strict criteria for who who's eligible to be on the foundation board. And he set aside some of the equity in the company for his family. So his family

is well taken care of. I don't I don't think anyone can complain about the economic reality that he created for them. But they don't have the and those who want can serve on the board of the foundation. So he has a way for them to honor his legacy and to be part of it. But there would never had to be a like a massive liquidation of the company. And it's a source of great advantage to them. one option. There's a lot of new options being worked out today in which the profits of the company can buy out the founder overtime. It's called a seller-financed employee ownership conversion using something called an ESOP or an employee ownership trust. There's a bunch of cool new things going on there. And then there's what Patagonia did, which is using a purpose trust,

something called a perpetual purpose trust to accomplish the same thing. I just met the team at Taylor's guitars in San Diego. I've ever seen like a high, you know anybody who's really into guitars, Del No, Taylor guitar is one of the best guitars in the world. I have several. And they converted to employee ownership using an ESOP because they wanted to make sure that the craftsmanship, like the idea that this musical instrument is an artistic craft, be maintained at the center forever. So there are these alternative structures.

The funny thing is that most of these alternatives, people are going to hear me and be like, nonprofit foundation. What is this hippie nonsense? Like what? How come I never heard of that? If it was such a good idea, how come I never ever? heard of it. And this is a question I want every reader to contemplate. Why haven't you heard it? Isn't that interesting? Because it turns out each of the techniques I just mentioned is backed by reams of academic

research. And almost everything you think you know about these structures is wrong. So most people will be like, well, but if I exit to a nonprofit foundation, I'm going to lose my edge. Right. Like I'm not going to be globally competitive anymore. We're just going to like sit in our butts and people have this impression that that's going to lead to financial underperformance. But guess what? But this has been studied. There's enough of these companies in the world that it's been studied. We know for sure that companies that are structured this way have better return on invested capital. They have higher longevity by a lot, something like six times better longevity numbers.

But they have better financial performance. They perform better on obscure financial metrics like Tobin's Q, for those who knows what that is. So there's like a lot of evidence that these are actually superior structures. And the fact that you've never heard of them, I think, should make you suspicious of the way you're getting your information about these most fundamental. questions about business. Well, I think the number one problem is they haven't read incorruptible. Well, that's right. That's right. That's the idea. That's the problem. We haven't had this book yet to read because I know you've been writing it. I think you said it's over 400 pages. Like, we're going to learn a lot. We needed this book. And yeah, I always find it interesting. It's kind of like building wealth.

Like when I talked to really wealthy people, I learned so much about things, but I'm like, why didn't school teach me though? Like, why did it? Why is it a secret? Why is it a secret? But you know what? Now I think with people like yourself writing incredible books with AI, like we have so we have so much information. I hope things will change. Final question, Eric, we wrote this book, Unlimited Possibilities. And I want to know what is your unlimited possibility moment. And it's the moment in life where you realize that the ceiling that you thought was there didn't really exist. Oh, yeah. Gosh, I've had a lot of those moments in my life. I've been very fortunate. Look, I've been a very, very privileged person. And I can remember the first

time that I found out that you could get paid for computer programming as a kid. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Like it completely changed my idea of what my future might look like. Because up until that point, I did, I could program computers for fun. I didn't know it was like a job you could do. I thought a job would be some kind of boring drudgery thing you adults have to do. Like I had this very different impression of like what my possibilities were economically. Once I understood that computer programming was like something that could be valued by society. just my weird hobby. And I feel like I had the same moment when I was like, wait a second, I don't have to go work at a mega company. I can start my own company, really. It felt like I'd been

given the cheat code to life, you know, and I feel like it's happened to me several times, where it's just by thinking from first principles, by following your, you know, just trying to be truth seeking and trying to really just see what is possible, not accept the received wisdom. I feel like that has led me to incredible place. I love that, Eric. I went to school for computer science, but I dropped out year two because I realized I didn't want to be a computer programmer. But I appreciate your time. I mean, lean startup, like you said, I think millions of people and businesses have been impacted from that book, more than hundreds or thousands. I know for my life, it's something I've lived by, but incorruptible.

That's out now in May. I mean, what an incredible book. I, again, like as an author, but I'm not really like a good writer. But as an author, though, so much work. People don't realize, like, how much energy and time goes into a book. And then all of a sudden, it's done and you have this thing with paper and words on it. But by the way, your book is, like, even the cover is amazing. Like, I want to put it, like, on a coffee table.

But I hope everyone gets the book now. Eric Reese, it's incredible to have you on the show. I learned a lot today. And I just want to thank you for being here on Founder's Story. Thanks very much. Thanks for having.