Eric Ries

I'm very proud of the people who have

who have done that successfully.

And yet I have also been keenly aware of the dark underside of this whole thing, the human costs.

And when I say that, people instantly think they know what I'm talking about.

And it really depends on what their background is, what I'm talking about.

Is it the mistreatment of employees and the burnout?

Is it the loss that those founders feel themselves when the creation that they made, they lose control of it and it becomes something that they come to hate?

Is it about the environmental or community effects of our environment?

There's so many things.

It's funny.

I say the negative effects.

Everyone thinks they know what I'm talking about.

And my thesis in this new book is that all these different downsides are related.

It's not many different things, but one central error that we have made that we need to undo.

I struggled with this a lot because I think part of the problem in our modern world is we've lost the ability to name things properly because we're so afraid of saying anything that might offend anybody else.

And I just felt like this is what our great-grandparents would have called it.

If they could see all the different ways we have invented in our modern world,

of making money without creating any value at all, many of those practices they would have seen not just as morally dubious, but like quite a few of them would literally have been crimes in our grandparents' time.

So I feel like one of the changes over that period of time is we have just narrowed our sense of the word corruption.

Now we think it only means embezzlement or fraud, but I think it should be, we should embrace an older, like more thorough understanding that it really involves any behavior in which people are making money without creating value.