#259 - Why Good Tech Companies Go Bad, and How to Stop It - Eric Ries

[00:02:02] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello guys. Welcome back to the new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. I’m very excited today to have Eric Ries today with me in the podcast. For those of you who are in the startup area, you might know Eric. He wrote a book The Lean Startup in 2011, you know, so long time ago now. And he’s coming now with a new book called Incorruptible. So today we are going to talk a lot about the new book, why he wrote it. So Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Ries: Oh, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:31] What Two Mega-Trends Make Lean Startup More Relevant Than Ever?

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I wanna start maybe in the beginning by talking about your Lean Startup book. I think you wrote it, quite some time ago, 2011.

Eric Ries: Yeah, 2011, that’s right.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. What have you seen still relevant and what have you seen changing from what you wrote back then?

Eric Ries: Gosh, you know, the most important thing by far that has not changed is that we see two mega trends that has been driving the world as long as any of us have been in the workforce. One is the democratization of the tools of production, the means of production like Karl Marx used to say. Now anyone who with a credit card can rent those production capacities and have the same facilities that the world’s largest companies have and compete in the same global market. That is a really remarkable change, and since I wrote those words in 2011, we have seen nothing but an increase in that trend practically every day.

And the second trend is partly being caused by the first trend, but also has exogenous factors too. It’s a massive increase in the uncertainty that faces organizations. If you tell me you wanna make a forecast for what’s gonna happen in the future, that used to, you know, we used to think that was pretty funny, but now it’s getting really, really difficult. And of course, especially when we are the ones trying to create something new, obviously forecasting’s not gonna be very easy because we’re intentionally trying to create a disruption or a change. So I feel like that is the, you know, that’s the baseline against which all lean startup techniques have to be judged.

[00:04:03] What Is the True Purpose of a Minimum Viable Product?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think uncertainty definitely is getting much, much stronger lately, right? So be it in the economic situation, political and all that. So you, in your book, you actually introduced this concept MVP, right? And also build-measure-learn loop. Yeah. Do you think that is — because when people talk about MVP, right? There are so many different variations, definitions on, of, on how they interpret that. Maybe if you can remind us what is MVP in this era, and how should we build?

Eric Ries: Sure, we can go through all the key concepts. So first of all, yeah, the concept will look very different by different era, because the technology is different by era. Just so people get a sense of this, when I first coined the term MVP, like the concept, not even the term, I didn’t even know what to call it when I first started doing it. I remember talking to engineers back then on my own team who worked for me. I said, guys, I think we should do an A/B split test to really measure at this feature we’re working on actually matters to customers. And people would look at me and say, why? It’s like a direct marketing technique. What does that have to do with engineering? Engineering is about building the thing which is specified, and all these sort of techniques are about finding out of the thing which is specified is a good idea to specify in the first place. Which normally we say, well, that’s just the domain of product management. No. No. If we build something that nobody wants, it’s our own fault. They can’t blame it on product managers or anybody else.

So minimum viable product, the idea is if you have a business plan and the plan says on this date, we’re gonna build this cool feature. You know on this, we’re gonna build this product, okay? Then the business plan gives rise to a product specifications document, product requirements document. I hate the word requirements. The laws of physics are required. Everything else is optional but product requirements document. Technical requirements document, release plan, you build all these plans and then go, what if one of the plans, one of the assumptions behind the plan is wrong?

So I’ll give you an example. I once built a product, many years ago. Software product, downloadable on the internet. You download it on your computer and then you would run it. And I remember sitting there with one of my co-founders. This is an early stage company. We’ve been working on the product for months. And we decided we would do a usability test. First for, you know, to learn more about customers. So we bring someone in, my co-founder recruited somebody. Brought someone in for the usability test, we sat them down at the computer. And we said okay, it’s time for you to download the software. And they stared at the website like, huh? And we’re like waiting for them to do anything, and they’re just sitting there paralyzed, And we said, you know, you need to download. They’re like, I’m trying. It’s like, trying? You’re not doing anything. You’re just sitting there. They’re like, stop abusing me, I’m doing my best. What’s the problem? I can’t find the download button. Now the whole screen is just a picture of our product and a gigantic sign, a gigantic — there’s a button, a HTML button as big as we could make it, but with a nice graphic, not just some crude, you know, gray button, no, beautiful 3D rendered rounded corner button. And we said, well, would you considered clicking on that button right there? They said, that’s not a button. Well, would you like to try clicking on it? See what happens. You’re like, oh, I never do that. You know, with computers, if you don’t know what’s gonna happen, it’s too dangerous to click on anything.

So our product had a 0% conversion rate, like nobody could even figure out how to download it. And we were sitting there, I remember that, get that. I was like, get the customer. At the end of the, at the end of the usability test, it went really badly. I turned to my co-founder, I’m like, you idiot. Fire that customer. How did you find me? There’s 6 billion people on planet Earth. You found me the one person too stupid to download our software. Like get me another one. Second customer comes in. Same thing happens. Third customer comes in, same thing happens, and now I’m like, but how do we know that’s a statistically significant sample, right? Like it’s just so obvious once you look at the data. So we had spent months and months and months on this product, but nobody was using it, nobody could even download it. So eventually we figured it out and eventually we fixed the landing page and we fixed the value prop, and months, months later we got it all to work.

But after we pivoted, we changed the value prop so much that most of the product we had built, those first six months we threw away. And I, as an engineer was like, wait a minute, I follow the Agile Manifesto. The unit of progress is a line of working code. It promised me that if I followed that approach, I wouldn’t create so much waste in my development process. And yet I committed the greatest waste of all, building something that nobody wants.

And eventually it occurred to me kind of in the dark of night when I was like, wait a second. If the whole point of this six months led to my software being thrown away, then what value did I contribute as the software engineer, the person whose code was thrown away? And I was like, oh, no, no, no, it’s okay, it’s okay. I realized, to make myself feel better, when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel of excuses you need to make for why you failed, you could always say, but we learned something valuable. My code, my blood, sweat, and tears created this learning opportunity. Whew, I’m okay. And then the next night I woke up again in the middle of the night and I said, wait a second, wait a second. If my goal these past six months was to learn this very specific thing about customers, why did I need 4 million lines of code to do it? Couldn’t I have learned it a little bit sooner? That was like, well, but we would, you know, we didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know, so I guess it’s okay.

And the third night, I couldn’t sleep at all, because I said, wait a second, that’s true. But since the thing, the specific experiment ultimately that revealed the problem — because remember, our problem was not just a bad download button, but the whole value prop was wrong. If all it took to develop that knowledge was a single webpage, why did we need any code at all? Could a web designer have provided as much value to the company as me, the Chief Technology Officer? And my gut fell out of me. I was like, oh my God, my identity as a software engineer is to write code, to make product. How can it be that my work has no value? And that’s when I realized, oh, we have to, we need a whole different discipline for how we talk about value in a uncertain environment. So instead of building plans upon plans upon plans, we build a minimum viable product. MVP. The smallest, simplest version of the product that is necessary to learn what we need to learn. Now sometimes the MVP is still large. It could be small. Different MVPs, different industries. Obviously today with AI and vibe coding and everything, the cost of running MVPs, of course, very different than before. But at the end of the day, what matters is not the tactics of how to generate the MVP, but rather the strategy. Why do we need to do it? We need to do it because ultimately the most important thing you can find out in a company, in a startup, in an uncertain environment is, are your assumptions correct? And if they’re incorrect, well, do you wanna find that as soon as possible so that you can pivot? What is a pivot? A change in strategy without a change in vision.

[00:11:04] Has AI Actually Made Building Software Cheaper and Better?

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. Very nicely put, you know, the way, the thought process, how you came up with this idea. You mentioned something about the AI. I think we all know AI these days in software development is booming, right? The cost of product, producing software is very cheap now. And also software development cycle seems to get more rapidly. And interestingly also, any idea that people come up with, maybe other people can also copy that within a few days. So how do you think about these change with the AI revolution?

Eric Ries: Well, look, I think we’re a little bit hasty to say that the cost of developing software has gone down. Some kinds of software, certainly that’s true. But I would say the cost of making a cool demo has gone down a lot. But the cost of deploying production level code, especially in a mission critical environment, I think we still have a lot to figure out there. Because what’s happening is the volume of code that we are producing is a lot higher, but the quality of that code is quite low. And in a lot of cases, the people creating the code have no idea how it works. They’ve never even looked at it. So if there’s a problem, they’re utterly incapable of solving the problem, except by asking the AI to solve the problem for them. But the problem is, the reason there’s a bug in the code, most likely is because the AI has gotten itself out of its training distribution, out of the zone where it actually knows what it’s talking about. So it’s not gonna debug very well out of that training distribution either. So we see a lot of those kinds of issues.

So I think whether or not this technology winds up being good for entrepreneurial situations depends a lot. Of course, the generating of MVPs is much simpler. So, and I do think, I think these tools are also very good teaching machines. So they’re very useful for helping you think through your leap of faith assumptions. Like a lot of people struggle with that. Like, you know, ‘cause you fall in love with your idea, ask, you know, ask Claude to give you a post-mortem on why your startup failed. Most… Why your startups most likely to fail, all the things you should keep you up at night, like it can really be good for that kind of stuff that maybe would be too taboo for a human being to tell you. But beware, these machines hallucinate. They’re sycophantic. They are fundamentally driven by the training distribution. So you gotta be, you know, you got, they have to be used really appropriately carefully. But yeah, whether they’ll make a net increase of entrepreneurship, you know, make it better for entrepreneurs or not on average, depends a lot on a bunch of factors. Yes, you got a lot of advantages as an entrepreneur, but so does every other entrepreneur who’s competing with you. So you know, whether we actually see a net gain, I think remains to be seen, although I’m pretty optimistic about it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think still kind of like early in this AI revolution. So many people have different opinions. Some even say we don’t need software engineer, we don’t need, I dunno, product manager. We don’t need like, every, seems, every role seems to get disrupted. So I think it will be interesting to see how it goes.

[00:13:41] What Two Stories Inspired the Book Incorruptible?

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe that’s time to go to your new book, right? So you wrote this book Incorruptible. So maybe in the first place, what led you writing this book? Because if I read it from your introduction, right, it seems like actually another continuation from Lean Startup, which is the other perspective that founders haven’t really thought about. And you open up with a story in the first chapter that I find it really touching me. So maybe if you can share why did you come up with this book?

Eric Ries: I am sorry. Sorry, which story were you talking about?

Henry Suryawirawan: The professor…

Eric Ries: Oh, the professor! Yes, yes, yes! One of the first stories in the book, yeah. So this was a very strange thing that happens to me, okay. I live a very odd life ever since I wrote The Lean Startup 15 years ago. Basically, every day of my life, somebody comes to me and asks me for help starting a company. It’s the most common phone call I get, and sometimes they have an existing company that they want to help revitalizing it or they wanna help it grow faster. Sometimes they want me to help them raise money. Sometimes they have a big public company and they want help with innovation. But if you had a histogram of all the phone calls I have, a lot of them, a huge chunk are people who want my advice running a company. And the professor was no exception. Now I have his permission to tell his story, but I used the name the professor to protect his identity ‘cause you know, it’s sensitive. He was at a, he was a tenured professor in a university lab working on a really exciting, but also very dangerous technology that had to do with AI and bioinformatics. So easily, you know, kind of thing where you could easily create a breakthrough miracle cure or maybe something quite dangerous.

So he was having this problem. When he would talk to investors, they were very gung-ho about the technology. But when we talked to potential employees, they were very nervous about it. And the employees would say, okay, this sounds really good, but how do we know if I leave my tenured lab to join you on this crazy quest? Because this is gonna take multiple years of R&D to get there, very obviously. So if we go spend years of our lives doing this, how do we know that at the end we won’t wind up building something evil, right? Like what if somebody tries to use this to make a bio weapon or create a new pandemic or something? Can you assure me that that won’t happen? And he was like, of course. I can definitely assure you. I would never let that happen. My intentions are so good. And they’re like, that’s not gonna do it. Aren’t we a for-profit company? Uh-huh. Well, what if in the pursuit of profits we realize we can make a lot of money? You know, imagine we go around like Dr. Evil and we blackmail everybody saying, if you don’t give us all this money, you know, we’re gonna create a super illness in your country or whatever. Like are you sure we won’t do that? No, no. I, would never, I’m a virtuous person. He was like, okay, but what if, what about, aren’t we gonna bring on investors? What would the investors pressure us to do? He is like, don’t worry, I’ll resist the pressure. And I’d be like, look, what if they fire you? How do we know that you’ll be the one running the company? He was like, uh-oh, what is the answer to that question? Like, ah, I don’t know.

So anyway, he was like very frustrated. So he would go then meet with his investors and be like, hey, I’m getting these concerns from my employees. I wanna figure out what are the good answers to these questions. And they would treat him in such a condescending way. And they’d be like, oh, you must not be very serious about business then. And he realized, he told me he realized talking to these investors that they basically would be perfectly happy with that outcome. Everyone makes a billion dollars but, you know, something really evil happens, something really uncomfortable happens. Anyway, so he was really grappling with what to do. And at the same time I was talking to him, I was also talking to a friend of mine who was going through the opposite end of his entrepreneurship journey.

So, whereas this guy was just beginning, my friend had been an entrepreneur for 10 or almost 15 years, I think — had built a huge company and taken it public, had made unbelievable amounts of money for its investors. And I was saying, look, I gotta get off the phone because I gotta go to this event. We have this event in his honor. And you know, it’s a very cool thing and people have flown in from all over the country to be there. I even saw, like I was watching people go into the venue. I saw someone, I was like, oh, there’s people here who that founder had had to fire over the years, flew back at their own expense to come back to this event for him. He was like, oh, respect. That’s the kind of company I want to build one day. You know, high integrity, whatever.

And I was like, oh no, you’re not hearing me, dude. Listen, this isn’t a party. We are here to mourn the loss of something. They’re like, what? Loss of what? He’s like, he doesn’t work there anymore. This is a wake. And when I called it a wake, he was like, oh my God, did somebody die? I’m like, no, nobody died. It’s fine. He’s like, oh, is the company going bankrupt? No, company’s fine. He’s like, what’s the problem? And I was like, I was struggling. Like how do I explain to him what the problem is? The problem is despite having made all this money for his investors, the investors wanted more and they had summarily fired him. And all these people, I think, I might’ve been the only non-employee at the event that night. It was all current and former employees coming here to like pay their respects to this guy who had built this beloved company with them. And he could, none of us could really put our finger on what we were mourning. Would’ve been lost exactly, like the company’s fine. Like, you know, even that I have the new CEO they appointed after they fired, it was a perfectly fine person. And he’s a friend of mine. Like also, like what’s the problem exactly?

And in retrospect, I realized the problem was once a company can be decapitated by its investors like that, how can you ever really trust what it says, right? Who knows what might happen next. What if the next CEO makes a promise that the company will be a good citizen and will treat his employees well? Well, maybe that person will be fired. And I explained this to the person who was calling me the professor, and he was like, oh, no, is that gonna be me someday? I told everybody that I could control this thing. I told them I’d be in charge and then I get fired and then it become.

And I was like, well, there’s good news, bad news. The good news is I do think what you want is possible. Like I can help you and I will. Not right now, ‘cause I gotta go to this party, but you know, let me call you back tomorrow and we’ll figure it out. We will get this figured out. But the bad news is you’ve already taken some first steps in the wrong direction. You are actually on track to lose your company as much as my friend lost his, and I don’t want that for you. But are you really willing to do the hard work now of getting back on the correct path? And that was the beginning of a partnership that he and I forged to get his fledgling company onto a new and better path. So I gave him tremendous respect that he, you know, he was willing to make the changes that were needed, even though they were not easy.

And this is what the new book is about. He asked me that night, he’s like, is it possible to build an incorruptible company? And I was like, yeah, it is possible. But most people think it’s impossible. Most people think that the corruption that we see everywhere in our economy today is inevitable. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just, it’s a matter of size or scale or bureaucracy or age, or whatever. As if companies are senescent and they just die for no reason. But if you look at the data, that’s absolutely not true. And in fact, most of us in our lives have had the experience of interacting with outlier companies that seem to resist this magnetic pull, this gravitational pull of our financial system. So the book is about why that happens and what we as founders, but also as leaders, as board members, as customers, as employees, as technologists, as builders, what can we do to resist this pull.

[00:20:38] What Is Financial Gravity and Why Does It Corrupt Even Good Companies?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, So I think it’s very fascinating, right? Because I think all startup founders or whoever that builds, right, initially, they will have good intention. I think most of them, right. I assume. So building with a great vision and all that. But sooner after the company starts to get bigger and you get VC money and all that, right, so sometimes it gets more tricky. Yeah. And what you mentioned, right, sometimes the founders themselves can be sacked and, you know, replaced by somebody else due to the investor’s pressure. So I think the more that you also outline in the book, right, the stories of different companies, I think it gets kind of like normalized the way I see it, right? It’s like kind of normal to see this kind of behavior. What do you think drive this, right? Is money the main motivation of all this? Or is there something else? Because I believe everyone has a good heart. But in the end, how come it turned out differently?

Eric Ries: Yeah, yeah. There — these are not personal dramas. I think that’s one big mistake we make when we analyze these stories. These are not personal dramas. People — Like yes, there are people who make mistakes. Yes, there are people who have bad intentions. It happens. But most of the pattern that we see, I say in the book that if the play, if the characters change, if the actors change, the script change. Like if every aspect of the play changes and yet the play stays the same, then something else is causing the alignment behind the scenes. Lemme tell you a different story. So this was a modern story about a, about the professor and a friend of mine. This is from the modern internet era. We go back before the internet era and tell you a different story.

I wanna tell you the story of a guy named Sol Price. So just so you get a sense of the history of this problem, Sol Price is the father of modern retail. For those that don’t know, he created something called FedMart. FedMart is the reason why Walmart is called Walmart, okay? It’s an homage to FedMart. And in 1954, I think, he was a lawyer. He decided to start this company, leaving the law behind. So he became an entrepreneur after being a whole career as a lawyer. And when you’re a lawyer, you have what’s called a fiduciary duty to your client. You put the client’s interest ahead of your own, Sol Price had the same idea. It’s like, oh, if I’m a retailer, I must be, my client is my customer. And so he would, he thought he had a fiduciary duty to the customer. He said that was a clear hierarchy of fiduciary duties. First, customer. Second, employees. Third, investors. Always investors last. The exact opposite of what we teach now as the best practice in our economy. So FedMart was a huge success. Customers love shopping there. They trusted him. They would drive miles out of their way to go there. He had investors. He took the company public. Everyone made a lot of money. But as a public company, he kept feeling like his investors were constantly pressuring him to compromise his principles. Raise prices, cheat his employees, you know, do all this bad stuff, just fa- in the pursuit of faster growth, faster growth, faster growth. So to avoid all that, he took the company private. But the new investors were the same. They were like, they wanted faster growth. They wanted best practices. They wanted conventional retail and he didn’t want to do it. The fight was brewing for years. And finally one day in 1975, just like my friend whose party I was telling you about, he showed up for work one day and the locks on his door had been changed. He doesn’t work there anymore. And so he, like he didn’t understand what had happened to him, right? It was like, I built this company from nothing over 20 years and you kicked me out on the street. So what happened? Well, the investors got their way, just like in the parable of the man who killed the golden goose. They got their way, they got Sol Price out of the way, they pursued faster growth, conventional retail practices, and within seven years they had driven the company into bankruptcy. Think about how many private equity takeovers have this exact same story. I mean, we live this all the time in our economy.

But it doesn’t really make sense. Think about it. Why would investors want to destroy the golden goose? Wouldn’t they have been way better off if they had just let it go? No. They could not let it go. So, Sol was humiliated, he was defeated, he was fired. He took two weeks off to nurse his wounds. And then he decided, you know what? I’m back at work. So two, after two weeks, he went back to the same office building where FedMart headquarters was. He leased the office upstairs and he created what was called The Price Company, ultimately leading the company called Price Club, which now today most people don’t remember the Price Club. But when I was growing up in San Diego, the Price Club was a major local fixture. One of the people that left FedMart with Sol to go to Price Club was a guy named James Sinegal. He had worked his way up from stock boy to executive and he and Sol built Price Club together until James Sinegal decided to branch out on his own and start his own company. And for a number of years, Sol ran one company, James ran another company. But after a while, the two companies merged. The merger of those two companies created a company you’ve probably heard of called Costco which today has a $400 billion valuation. So FedMart’s investors lost out on quite a bit, quite a bit of value creation by being so greedy.

So this story sounds personal. Sol was the naive founder, the investors were the greedy villains. But I don’t think that’s right, because year after year after year this keeps happening. I think the issue is not so much greed as a force, I call financial gravity. The temptation, the pressure we all feel to adopt the values of our financial system, which today are very exploitative, very extractive, very much growth for its own sake, I would say a cancerous set of values. So when companies enter into this gravitational field, they unconsciously drift towards the preferences of what the system prefers, and unfortunately most of us are like Sol Price. We may be great at running a company, we may great at building technology, but we are naive about these forces and we do not take the proper steps to protect the things that we have built.

[00:26:29] What Is Surrogation and Why Do OKRs Become Dangerous False Proxies?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, when I read the concept financial grativy, I think, wow, I think that’s the kind of like right way of putting it, right? Because there seems to be this force that keeps pulling these founders, these companies, you know, into making the same mistake, right? I think we have heard, you know, in the news, for example, right? A company that did a lot of layoff, massive efficiency in order to boost the stock price. And they seem to kind of like focus more a lot on the short-term thinking rather than the long-term thinking. And this leads to the kind of like the metrics, right? Because in so many different companies, right, they have metrics to actually improve values for the stakeholders, right? And also not doing a big mistake, like a compliance thing or getting into legal trouble, right? So you mentioned in the book also this is very dangerous in terms of false metrics. So many companies having this kind of OKRs within their organizations now. How can they do better? Because these metrics are so common these days that people just seem to, you know, opt for it whenever they build a company.

Eric Ries: Yeah, unfortunately, this is super common. People, they set up a company and then the metrics become a surrogate for the thing itself. And in the academic literature, this is called surrogation. You know, for example, in the 1970s, there was a, the White House commissioned a survey of consumer sentiment in America. And one of the things they found out was something like 40% of Americans are frustrated with the customer service they get from big companies. And that number was so high, it was like a national scandal and there was press coverage and whatever. It kicked off the modern professionalization of the customer service function. So over all these years, billions of dollars have been spent on call centers and customer service professionals. We’ve developed rigorous metrics like average hold time to measure if service is getting better or worse, and we always see that it’s improving. And what’s the result with a couple years ago that somebody repeated the survey and now 80% of Americans are frustrated with customer service. So we have spent billions of dollars on customer service while making the service itself twice as bad. Why? Well, the metrics became a surrogate for the thing itself. Average hold time became what Seth Godin calls a false proxy. So you can make average hold time go down by improving customer service, but a much easier way, a cheaper short-term way is to make people frustrated so they hang up. Try to get them not to call at all. Don’t solve their problem, but just be rude. That gets people off the phone super quick so the metric improves without the thing itself improving.

That problem is endemic across almost all of the organizations I work with. They have adopted a set of OKRs that don’t measure the most important things. So, for example, a marketing guru, Rory Sutherland, talks about how when people cut costs, they get rewarded for driving the cost down, but they’re never held accountable for the corresponding loss of quality. Or I was just talking to a security researcher in the cybersecurity space and they were talking about how when there’s cost pressure, the first thing to go is all the security and privacy settings because, you know, it’s like you cut that stuff and you don’t get hacked the next day. So in the short-term, everything’s fine. It’s like you’re managing a forest and you’re like, ooh, I can make my quarterly targets by cutting down the trees. Yes, you can for a while until eventually the thing collapses. And that’s what’s happening. We’ve built a management system that tends to hollow out companies until they are an emaciated shell of their former self.

[00:29:55] What Is the Blueprint for Building an Incorruptible Company?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think false metrics definitely is something to think about. So you come up with a new governance framework, right? So for people who want to build an organization differently so that they become incorruptible, what is the solution that you’re proposing?

Eric Ries: So I’m gonna give it to you in the abstract, but then — and we’ll talk about some stories — but I want to caution everybody that this is not something you take lightly, okay? Like there’s a lot of details in the book. Like, do — you don’t learn accounting from some guy on a podcast in five minutes, you gotta learn the discipline from the underlying thing. So do be careful. Okay, so the…

If you look at the FedMart story, what did Sol Price bring to the table? He brought something I call ethos, an interlocking set of operational commitments designed to make sure the company would stay true to its values and do the right thing. So for example, his competitors sometimes would try to undercut him with what’s called a loss leader strategy. So they would take a product that was very popular at FedMart and they would sell it in their store below their own cost to drive customers away from FedMart. And to them the idea was if they could drive FedMart out of business, then once he was gone, they could jack the prices back up and they could make a lot more money. So every time they would do this, Sol would post signs in his own store saying, oh, these guys have a cheaper price. You should buy the product from them instead, right? So he was like, I’m a fiduciary to the customer. That means I do what’s in the best interest of the customer. It doesn’t matter if they buy the product from me or not.

So those kinds of operational techniques to pay above market wages, to treat people with dignity, Sol was an early opponent of segregation. He did all kinds of stuff to try to do the right thing. That we call that the path of ethos. Having the company have a certain kind of character, a certain kind of ethics or integrity to it. And again, this is not just a moral thing. Companies that are structured around a sense of purpose outperform. This is a financial benefit. And you know it. If you’ve worked in technology, you know, if you’re an advocate for quality, man, isn’t life hard? You know, constantly people go, what’s the ROI of doing it right? What’s the ROI of adding tests? What’s the ROI of this? ROI of that. That’s like, oh my God, it’s just the right thing. Stop asking me that question. But unfortunately in most organizations, the return on doing the right thing is invisible, but the costs are tangible. So we tend to ROI, stack rank them to the bottom. Okay.

But that wasn’t enough to protect FedMart. Ethos by itself is never ever enough. Because why does ethos work? Like why are companies that are aligned in this way so powerful? Why do they raise money at lower rates? Why do they have higher customer loyalty, higher employee retention? Every kind of metric that can be measured has been measured and found these companies outperform. Why? Because they have the most valuable but underrated asset in all of business: trustworthiness. People trusted FedMart because it was willing to sacrifice for their benefit. The problem is, if I have a big pile of this very valuable asset called trustworthiness, the more successful my company is, the more of this asset that I have, the more valuable I become as a target. This is the thing I try to teach in this book. The more golden the goose, the more higher the temptation to butcher it. If you stockpile trustworthiness, if you have success, you are going to have somebody try to steal it from you. Now luckily for Costco, Costco has had people try to steal its integrity many, many, many times. But James Sinegal was there the day FedMart’s turned on Saul and he learned the lesson. So Costco was built with what I call a governance fortress, a set of governance structures that insulates the company from outside pressure. As a result, Costco is not just a good company in the sense of having a strong ethos like Sol Price. Costco is a strong company capable of resisting pressure and resisting temptation, and this combination is the key. I call it The Blueprint in this book. The combination of ethos plus integrity equals incorruptible.

[00:33:53] What Is the Invisible Leader and How Does It Keep Company Culture Alive?

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So very interesting when you mentioned about ethos, right? Which is like, kind of like the purpose and the mission, maybe some people said, right? And also building trust. I think we all know we want to, you know, associate ourselves with a trustworthy brand, right? But sometimes in the mix, you know, of economical situations and all that, things might change, right? And I think like what you mentioned, right? People many time gets tempted, you know, in a company that grows so big. I think this becomes diluted, right, when more people coming, especially from the outside who doesn’t necessarily embody those culture, those ethos that you mentioned, that trust. How do you actually suggest founders to actually build this kind of ethos for everybody in the, you know, in the company, right? The employees, the people who are in the workforce, the operations, when they deal with customers. Is there a way such that you can maintain this ethos?

Eric Ries: So this is actually very difficult. Most leaders fail at this test. Even ones who do a good job of this in their lifetime often fail the test of succession. I’ve been talking about investors canceling or destroying a company. But a lot of times the destruction comes from within. The cancer can start anywhere. Sometimes it’s a board betrayal, sometimes it’s simply a hapless leader who can’t figure out why his organization or her organization doesn’t reflect her values. Why? To solve this problem, we have to go back to a pioneering management theorist from the 20th century who has been utterly and totally erased from history. Her name was Mary Parker Follett, and she was a total gangster of the 1910s and 1920s. She was like super cool, a contemporary of Frederick Winslow Taylor. She was so far ahead of her time, by the way, that if I quote to you various things that she wrote in 19 like 20, and I told you it was someone who was writing today on TikTok or something, you’d be like, man, that’s cutting edge. Okay. That’s how far ahead of your time.

To give you a couple of my favorite examples, she wrote about power with rather than power over. She said that subordinate and superior alike should obey what they, she called the law of the situation. They should work together to figure out what the situation requires and obey that. She said the role, the responsibility of a leader is to create other leaders. But her most important concept is something she called the invisible leader. And she used to confound her contemporaries. They must have thought she was so wack. She would go around and she would say things like this, Mr. Roundtree, the owner of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory, is not the leader of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory. And people would be like, lady what? His name is literally on the door. It’s called, his family has owned this chocolate factory for a long. Like if he’s not the leader, who is? She says, I’m so glad you asked. Mr. Roundtree is a very effective leader, but his people do not follow him. Instead, he is really skilled at instilling in his people a sense of common purpose. And this common purpose, rather than Mr. Roundtree himself, is their invisible leader.

And this is such a critical concept because leadership has to happen in an organization in many, many, many situations where no manager is present, so there’s no one who can tell people what to do. A customer calls in with a complaint. By the letter of the company’s policies, they’re not entitled to a refund, but the person on the phone is like, but we really should just give this person a refund. Are they empowered to do that? Will they understand in their heart that it’s the right thing to do? Or will they be like, sorry, sir, nothing I can do. And now we have an unhappy customer going and telling everybody what, how unjust we are, you know?

So I’ll tell you a concrete story of a company that has a really strong invisible leader. It’s called HEB. It’s a grocery store in Texas. HEB is, so if you meet anybody from Texas, ask them about their favorite grocery store, it’s gonna be HEB, and they’ll go on and on and on and on about how awesome it is. It’s like you can’t make them stop. And it’s funny. People in Texas all wrongly assume that the HEB stands for Here Everything’s Better. Even though, actually that’s not the name of the company at all. HEB is just the initials of the founder’s son. Anyway, one day, I think it was 2020, 2021 there was a massive ice storm in Texas. And people who are shopping in an HEB store, the power goes out. And I mean, hard out, not like temporary glitch. The power’s out, the backup generators are out. The point of sale system is completely inoperable and nobody can pay for anything. The whole store goes up in a collective groan, like, oh no. Why is everyone so upset? Did I mention it’s an ice storm? Why are people in an HEB grocery store in the middle of an ice storm? They’re stocking up on survival provisions to survive the storm. Now they’re not gonna be able to get it. Now they’re in big trouble.

The store manager goes to everybody, says everybody, everybody can have your attention? Everyone just take your cart and go home. Take everything in it. You don’t have to pay. People start breaking down in tears of gratitude, like what an incredibly cool thing to do. I tell this story, it’s like, oh, that’s a funny story. I guess that must have been a really brave store manager, you know, to risk the wrath of corporate. ‘Cause there was no phones, there was no way to get in touch with anybody. The whole grid is down because there’s an ice storm, okay. No this is not a story about a courageous individual. This was completely par for the course at HEB. The company drills for this kind of situation, not for an ice storm in particular, but they understand in an emergency, their responsibility is to take care of their customers first, and then they work out the details later. And there’s a bunch of stories like that. During the eggflation crisis a few years ago, they sold their eggs for months below cost because they understood that the inflation thing was temporary and their customers would really appreciate it. Many of their customers are low income. And they said publicly, they said, our job is to be a shock absorber when there’s an economic shock in Texas. So they just, they understand this ethos, not because some far-off leader tells everybody what to do. Because over time they have inculcated this understanding that the ethos affects every employee.

[00:39:56] What Governance Structures Can Shield a Company’s Mission from Financial Gravity?

Henry Suryawirawan: Very inspiring to hear such stories, right? When people do the right thing. And it seems against the economical pressure and all that, right? So one thing that for sure, right? When hearing this situation, I’m sure the investors somehow, somewhere is asking, why do you do this, right? Why do you not increase the price, you know, get more margins and all that. And you mentioned in the early conversation that founders can get kicked out. So how do, can, how can founders actually protect themselves now? I think maybe this is the structure that people need to think about, right?

Eric Ries: Yeah, okay, So let’s actually get into it because, first of all, why? Investors are like, why would I gonna give money away for free? I want highest. Like if you take a business school in the morning, you take a class on finance, you’ll learn that margin is the most important thing in business. And the higher the margin, the better. High margins is everything. High margin means, you know, higher stock price, better multiples, better compensation. High margin is everything. Although interestingly, in the same business school, if you take a class on innovation in the afternoon, we will teach you Jeff Bezos’s famous dictum that your margin is my opportunity. So, which is it? Is margin a source of structural strength or a source of weakness? I say weakness. Sol Price understood that he capped FedMart’s margins at 14%. He would never mark up an item more than that, no matter what the prevailing margin was in the industry. Costco follows that rule to this day, although it’s 15% for Kirkland Signature.

In any event, so we have really good evidence. It’s not just anecdotes, okay? Obviously, look, Costco is making a lot of money on low margins, okay? A lot of money to be made on low margins. It’s not just anecdotal. Companies that don’t squeeze every dollar for themselves outperform. Companies that have the structures we’re about to talk about outperform. And when people hear this for the first time, they’re like, that can’t be right. I even put this in the book. Someone once, someone wrote me this exact point. They were like, look, if it was true that mission-driven companies outperform, then just by Darwinian natural selection, that’s what we would see all over the economy. There would be nothing but mission-driven companies because everyone knows the market selects for value creation. And what’s so interesting about that argument is it has, it sounds scientific. It has the clean like scientific pattern of natural selection. It just happens to be 100% wrong. The market does not select for value creation. And the reason I tell so many stories in this book about mission-driven companies who are destroyed by the market, not rewarded by the market, is to help us as builders stop believing a fairytale. This is not how the market actually functions.

So what can we do about it? Good news. There’s a lot of techniques in this book, a lot that can protect companies and founders and boards and leaders insulate them from these pressures. I won’t get into all of them now ‘cause a lot of them are arcane corporate governance things, but just give, I’ll give a couple ideas. One is there’s a set of techniques I call constitutional governance that allow us to write the mission of the company directly into the charter. So many companies say they have a mission statement. But their legal charter says something totally different. So even though they say, we’re here to improve patient outcomes, the charter says they’re just trying to maximize shareholder value.

Well, which is it, buddy? Which is it? So instead of allowing this gulf to open up, we say let’s bring them into alignment. I believe it’s something called the Director’s Oath. I think directors or boards of directors. Directors on boards should have to take an oath of office. So just like we’d require for public servants, like the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take, pledging to use their discretion under the law to advance the mission. But most importantly are the voting and board protections that allow us to make like not just knee jerk reactions, but to have more considered deliberation. I’ll give you one more example and to do it, I’m gonna tell you one more story. I think we have a few minutes, yeah. Okay.

So in 1920, I think, a woman named Marie Krogh, was diagnosed with diabetes at a time when that was a death sentence. Diabetes was a fatal illness with no known cure. She didn’t mope about it. She herself was a doctor, one of the first women doctors in Denmark at the time where she lived. And her husband was named August. He had just won the Nobel Prize. So he had asked her would she come with him on a lecture tour of North America. So even though she had a fatal disease, she came with her husband to North America. And they went and met all these, you know, he was lecturing in all kinds of university settings and having all these dinners in his honor. And during one of the dinners, she’s sitting next to another scientist at a table. And the other scientist tells her that in Canada, these crazy scientists have figured out how to create synthetic, how to create synthes, how to synthesize insulin for the first time. Insulin being, of course, the cure for diabetes.

So she convinces her husband that they should extend their stay in North America, go to Canada and visit this research lab so they could see this cure for themselves. They get there, they’re blown away by what they see. And they ask the Canadians, can we license this technology from you and bring it back to Denmark? Everyone involved is keen to do it because of course she has diabetes, but also her aspirations not just to cure one person, but to cure many. But they have an issue that they talk about. They said look, we don’t feel comfortable with someone who owns and manufactures a lifesaving medicine to just be a regular all for-profit company. It doesn’t seem right to us. Because, look, if I make a lifesaving cure for you, it’s fine for me to charge you money for that. Of course, I charge you a fair price. You’re happy to pay it. It’s lifesaving. But what if I get a greedy idea one day and I say, ooh, you know what? I have your lifesaving medicine. Can I just charge you whatever I want? You gotta pay me everything you own, right? It’s the opportunity for exploitation. This was generations before Martin Shkreli. They understood the danger of seeing science as anything other than a public trust.

So the deal they made with the Canadians is they would go back to Denmark, but the new company that they built, it was called the Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium, would be built as a non-profit parent company that has science as a public trust, as its mission that owns a for-profit subsidiary, that is called an industrial foundation in the literature. So it’s a for-profit company. It just has this governance structure where the non-profit acts as its defender. Now industrial, a company with an industrial foundation can still take outside investment as Nordisk did. They can still go public today. What’s now called Novo Nordisk is a publicly traded company. It trades like ten million shares a day, I think, on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s a huge company with lots and lots of investors. But this foundation has the final say. It protects the company as its mission guardian.

And what’s so powerful about this idea is that many of the problems we’ve been talking about, like what happened to FedMart, what happened to Johnson & Johnson or Whole Foods or Boeing, all these companies that have fallen into corruption. People have tried the same nonsense playbook at Novo Nordisk to try to corrupt them, but for some reason it doesn’t work. In fact, one of the stories I tell in the book is so preposterous you’re gonna think I’m exaggerating when I tell you. But actually this is not, this is not a supposition. This is not like, I’m not exaggerating. It is the truth. There is a story in the book about the time that the nonprofit trustees of the Novo Nordisk Foundation intervened to stop the for-profit company from doing something that in the end, created more than $500 billion of shareholder value.

So next time someone tells you that, oh, a non-profit, they are not serious, they are not good guardians of shareholder value, they don’t have skin in the game or whatever. Just be like, is 500 billion enough for you? And the next time someone tells you they’re gonna structure their company, it’s just a regular old best practices Delaware C-Corp, you could ask them this question. Just say, yeah. oh, who gave you the advice? You’re like, oh, I got this great idea. I got a great lawyer. My guy’s really great. Oh good. Well, I got these great investors. They told me this is the best practice. I talked to my bankers. I talked to my who — I’m sure all those people are very smart, very well credentialed, but you could ask them this one simple question. You could say, okay, that’s cool, but are you sure you’re smarter than a Nobel laureate? Because August and Marie Krogh worked this out in 1920, and it has lasted all this time, more than a hundred years of absolutely indomitable success, powered by this structure. So that the industrial foundation is one of several approaches, what I call mission guardianship, mission protection, you know, a way to create a mission-controlled company that are explored in the book. And of course, not every company is, not every technique is suitable to every company. So you do read the book and find out, but that is the basis.

[00:48:27] Why Does Anthropic’s Unique Structure Give It a Competitive Advantage in AI?

Henry Suryawirawan: So after you shared that story, right, it reminds me of these AI hyperscalers. You know, the story of OpenAI, Anthropic and maybe some other hyperscalers, right? What do you think would happen? Because we can see in the news, it’s quite interesting as well, right? How, for example, OpenAI started as a non-profit now becomes profit. And what do you think the danger of these AI companies?

Eric Ries: Yeah, well Anthropic is one of the case studies in the book so people can learn the story for themselves. I happen to tell that story ‘cause I know it well ‘cause I was there and played a bit part in the story. Although I take no credit for their subsequent success. They obviously, all credit to the team and their incredible technology. When people talk about Anthropic’s lead, you know, it’s really quite remarkable that Anthropic has come from behind. You know, one of the latest entrants actually among the major, major players here yet to be in the lead. People often say, well, why are they in the lead? They’ll point to things like, well, they have superior inference costs. But if you say, well, why is that? It’s like, well, ‘cause they have superior talent. Why is that? Oh, ‘cause the best people wanna work there. Why? Because they’re trustworthy. Why? Because they have this unique structure.

That’s the whole point of setting up a unique structure. If you say, well, actually they’re ahead because they have better product velocity. They, you know, they have Claude Code is like way better developed than some of its competitors. Well, why is that? Oh, I guess ‘cause they have better talent. Oh, I see. Well, and some people like, well they have superior focus. Why? If you keep why? It always come back to the same basic thing, that two component strategy of an ethos. They have an ethos of AI safety. So everyone who wants to feel like the good guys in the AI world, they wanna go work at Anthropic. And they have this structural protection that prevents them from being corrupted from the outside. They have structural integrity. Those two things together mean that they are able to harness the power of that trustworthiness.

Now, when I say that Anthropic does the right thing, I’m not saying they always absolutely never make a mistake. They’ve made many mistakes. I could criticize them for lots of things. The point is simply that like when they get into a fight with somebody, like, think about the recent conflict they had with the Pentagon. Even though the stakes were enormous, first of all, they had to give up a $200 million contract plus endure the bullying of the largest and most powerful military on the planet, they nonetheless were able to stick to their principles. And so when we say a company did the right thing, I think it’s very important to realize that the right thing doesn’t mean absolutely right. I know many people who disagree with them about what they should have done and yet still respect them for having been true to their principles in the same way we see with Costco recently got into a big controversy but they stuck to their principles. Even people that disagree with those principles can respect someone who is true to themselves. And I think that is the element that we really need more of in the AI world.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, very fascinating looking at all these AI companies, right. How they navigate the changes, navigate the kind of like the complexities of what is happening. Especially also AI is a technology that seems to like change the world so much these days, right. So I think, definitely, hopefully we don’t…

Eric Ries: It’s part of the story. People very naturally see AI as dangerous, as well as seeing its potential. So it’s been like, I think a lot of people just very naturally organically have said, look, we can’t have a repeat of what happened in social media with AI. That’s too dangerous.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, hopefully we don’t see an evil company that turns AI into something that is bad, right?

Eric Ries: Yeah.

[00:51:43] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So Eric, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Learned a lot. I highly suggest people to read the book, right? At least have a good understanding of how you become incorruptible in all your venture, right, building company, building organizations and all that. So I have one last question for you to wrap up this conversation. I call this the three technical leadership wisdom. Just think of it like advice you wanna give to the listeners. Maybe if you can share your version today, that would be great.

Eric Ries: Yeah. Three, okay, three wisdom. Okay. One. Number one. If somebody gives you feedback, that is telling you something about them, not something about you. I really wish someone had taught me this earlier before I spent so much of my young life getting into fights with people. When someone gave me feedback, I used to think that their feedback could be objectively right or objectively wrong, and that it was a personal attack on me and I would wanna fight them back. But as a, as I’ve gotten older, I realized, no, the feedback is helping me understand. And someone says, your product sucks. That doesn’t mean my product sucks. That means they don’t like it, they don’t understand it. Yeah So it’s very important to understand feedback is just a way of gathering intelligence about the world. It doesn’t tell you anything about yourself. That’s definitely one piece of wisdom that has helped me a lot.

What else would I share in that category? Another thing I learned this from a devoted CTO, Todd Park, actually, this is from the book. It’s a very simple idea. Whenever you do the right thing. So whenever an employee of an organization sacrifices in defense of one of its values, for example, do the right thing for a customer, we do the right thing for employee in a situation where we didn’t have to and it has some cost, that is making a deposit in what I call the culture bank. It’s how we build strong culture companies. We tell lots and lots and lots of stories inside the company about times that this happened. If anyone does the reverse, that’s a withdrawal. Most companies are constantly making deposits and withdrawals left and right so that they maintain a steady balance. The best companies follow what I call the Todd Park rule. It’s very simple. Never make withdrawals. Only make deposits. And everyone reacts the same way. No, that’s too hard. You can’t ask me to do that. But why? Clay Christensen before he died, he said it is easier to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. If you just say, this is the crisp, clear rule, you never have to have a meeting about it. You never have to look in another spreadsheet wondering if it’s the, if it’s ROI positive due to the — just one thing at a time. So I feel like that is a very wise piece of advice that was given me.

And the last piece of advice, I’m gonna go a little bit further afield. I don’t know how many of your listeners will want to follow me down this road. But at the end of the book, if you, if anyone buys a book and reads to the end, then you’re truly, you’re truly my hero, thank you for doing that. ‘Cause I spent a lot of time on this book and I really want people to read it. At the end of the book, I talk about how we tend to complain about the economic system that we live in, and we feel very powerless in our company, in our job, in our society. We say things like, man, I just feel stuck in traffic all the time. And then one of the ideas in the book is that you are not in traffic. You are traffic. Traffic can only be caused by lots of people together, congesting the road. And every person is both a victim and the perpetrator of the thing itself. Well, this is true for all of our economic arrangements.

So every story, I know some of your listeners are not founders, are not board members, are not really even leaders in their job. That’s okay. This book is still for you and here’s why. Every story can be read upside down. I tell you a story that Sol Price, you know, produced tremendous loyalty in his customers. That can be a guide to being a founder, but it also tells you something about where you should shop. Shop where someone is worthy of your loyalty. I tell you that mission-driven companies have higher employee retention, but this is also a guide about where you should want to work. I had someone come up to the other day and they asked me for advice. They said, how can I use these principles in my career? And they were like, I want to be in a mission-driven company. I want to get a job, but I need a job so badly. I’m so worried I’ll be unemployed. Can you help me? I said, yes. Look, if you, it’ll be better for, not only better for the world, way better for your career if you can find a mission driven company to work at. And I’ll give you some questions you can ask to figure out.

But here’s the interesting part of it. He said, okay, okay. I want all that, but just so you know, I’m not courageous. So can you give me some tips that don’t require any courage at all? I don’t, I’m not an activist. I need to eat. I don’t feel comfortable standing up on the table and yelling at everybody about being mission driven or whatever. I was like, no problem. To wield power in our age of surveillance capitalism, you do not need courage. You don’t have to attend any meetings. You don’t have to learn the secret handshake. You just have to realize this one simple truth. In the modern world, thanks to surveillance capitalism, every decision you make is somebody’s OKR. Out there in the world, some middle manager somewhere, they are being paid a bonus to get you to do the thing or not do the thing, whatever the thing is. That means every action you take is sending ripples out into the universe, shaping things in ways you can’t possibly imagine. So he’s like, okay, well then what do I do?

I say, okay, here’s what you’re gonna do. At the end of your job interview, they’re gonna ask you, hey, do you have any questions? And you’re gonna ask them a question. You’re gonna say, oh yeah, is this a mission-driven company? And they’re gonna say, yes. ‘Cause come on. Who would say no? Of course they’re gonna say yes. You say yes. Oh, great. How do you know? And they’re gonna be, oh, we’re such a great company. We save the environment. We do volunteering on the weekends. We have free beer on Fridays or whatever. I don’t know what they’re gonna say. Something, they’re gonna say something. Whatever they say, be like, oh, great. Again, perfectly innocent, don’t criticize, don’t judge. Just ask. Interesting. Is that also in the company’s charter? You’re just asking. I’m just curious. Now I almost guarantee you the answer to that question is going to be, I don’t know. I don’t know. Most people have never thought about this. Most employees have never seen, most CEOs have never looked at their own company charter.

Now, by the way, company charters are a matter of public record. If you have a friend who’s a lawyer, just ask them for help. You can pull any company’s charter. You can just read it. You could find out what the actual legal purpose of this company is. But anyway, what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna leave the interview and they’re gonna say, sorry, we don’t know. You’re like, okay, that’s fine. But here’s the thing. Remember I said every decision you make at somebody’s job. If you’re in a modern company, I guarantee you it is somebody’s job to make sure that every question that candidates ask in an interview, that the person interviewing knows the answer. This is gonna go on a list. Someone’s job will be to find out the answer. They’re gonna ask their boss, hey boss, what is the answer to this question anyway? She’s not gonna know. She’s gonna have to ask her boss, who ask her boss. Next thing you know, they’re talking about it at the board level. And you know what? I’ve been in board meetings where this kind of thing comes up. Hey board, I’m the CEO. I see I have all this power, but in our job interviews, people keep asking us this uncomfortable question. I think we should do something about it. Talent’s our most valuable resource. Who knows? Maybe the CEO really wants to do that. And you’re giving them silent ammunition. That’s if one person asked. Now what if two people asked? Now, of course, if you get more courageous, you can take more bold action, but just these simple, simple acts are tremendously powerful. You have that power. You should learn to wield it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. Very powerful and lovely, you know, advice for all of us. So thank you for sharing that. I think it’s really powerful.

Eric Ries: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Right. Bye for now, Eric.

Eric Ries: All right. Thank you so much.

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