Become Incorruptible - The Truth Behind Successful Businesses | Eric Ries - E700
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
44 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
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Why does Eric Ries argue that ruthless, exploitative business practices are a myth?
Since 2008, companies that have been given a rating of bad governance have outperformed those rated as having good governance in the stock market. So yes, I've been a consultant and I've been an investor and I've been an advisor and I've been an author and I've been a repeat author and I've been a founder. I've founded other things. I've been a co-founder. I've been an adjunct person helping other people realize their dream. And I and I've had my share of success and my share of failures. Nothing I've done is become Facebook. Okay. So people sometimes are like, Why should I listen to you? You're not Mark Zuckerberg. I'm like, hey, no problem. One of the biggest myths in the world is that ruthless, exploitative, anti-human business practices are more profitable than the alternative.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on Success. I'm Jeremy Al, venture capitalist, Sierra founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000. Members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesdea.com. Stay well and stay brave. Yeah, Rick, excited to have you on the show. I'm a big fan for many years of book. Starting out as a founder and for many years teaching as a a junk professor, uh I was using a book to uh teach the course materials.
That's really great. Thank you so much for saying so. And thanks for your teaching.
So many founders really intuitively understand what you're saying about iteration, speed, velocity. And it's just mind boggling to me that the school is still very much focused on that. Ready, aim, fire. And it takes six months for you to plan it out. Mentality. So Eric, please introduce yourself. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Hi everybody. I'm Eric Reese. I'm author of the Lean Startup. That's how most people know me. I took over my life, but also have been a founder, repeat founder myself and uh written a couple of books and working on a new book that uh I'm excited to talk about too.
Yeah, so fantastic. So I think we're gonna go through this chronologically and go back to the beginning. We just Why did you decide to write the first book, Lean Startup? You know, was it because you were like, this is a brainwave as a framework that came up or how did it come about?
I'm a computer programmer. So I'm like a software guy from way back from when I was a kid, really, programming computers. And I was in college during the dot com bubble. That's how old I am. So I got into entrepreneurship at a time when the best practice for entrepreneurship was nothing more sophisticated than like, have a great idea. Question mark, question mark, question mark, make a lot of money. We really didn't know anything about what we were doing. There was no popular discourse about startups. There wasn't a lot of online content about it. Just it wasn't a thing yet. And so we didn't know what we were doing. And I came out to Silicon Valley after I graduated and wanted to really learn entrepreneurship from the very best of the best.
And I basically discovered that although there was an incredible apprenticeship system in Silicon Valley, that there was an incredible amount of accumulation. Wisdom and lore about startups, it wasn't really systematic. So when you would ask people for advice about what to do in a given situation, they would always be able to tell you, well, Steve Jobs did it like this, or Bill Gates did it like that, or your famous person. This is how Mark Benioff famously faced that situation. But I found that always very unsatisfying because I was like, well, what if I'm not Steve Jobs? Then what? What if what worked for him then? Was that really gonna work for me now? Like I found those stories. Is very unsatisfying.
And meanwhile, I'm trying to run a startup where I'm trying to put a new set of principles into practice. I was trying to get people to be more iterative, more scientific in their decision making, to go faster, be more efficient, and more humane.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Eric Ries argue that ruthless, exploitative business practices are a myth?
0:00–5:06
2
How did the idea for “The Lean Startup” originate and what problem was it solving?
5:06–10:29
3
What lessons from the Lean Startup apply to today’s AI‑driven startup boom?
10:29–16:29
4
Why did Eric shift from engineer to global author and how did that change his influence?
16:29–21:15
5
What surprising findings about corporate governance did the research for Incorruptible reveal?
21:15–26:02
6
How do alternative ownership models (co‑ops, employee‑owned firms, trusts) create lasting value?
26:02–31:53
7
Why does Costco’s low‑price model succeed without exploiting customers or employees?
31:53–36:32
8
What does Incorruptible say about the future of company governance in the age of AI?
36:32–44:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
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