For more than a decade, Eric Ries has been one of the defining voices in startup culture.
The Lean Startup became required reading across Silicon Valley, shaping how founders build products, test markets, and scale companies. But in his new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Ries shifts from product strategy to something much deeper:
Why do successful companies eventually betray the very thing that made them great?
And more importantly:
Can founders stop it from happening?
After speaking with Ries on the Ignite Podcast, one thing became clear: this is not another “culture matters” business book. It’s a direct attack on the modern incentives driving corporate behavior.
His argument is simple but uncomfortable:
Most companies don’t fail because they lose.
They fail because success turns them into targets.
The Core Problem: “Financial Gravity”
Ries introduces a concept he calls financial gravity — the pressure organizations feel to conform to the priorities of whoever controls capital.
At first, companies exist to solve problems.
Then they scale.
Then the incentives shift.
Leadership meetings become dominated by conversations about quarterly expectations, analyst reactions, margin optimization, growth rates, and stock performance. Over time, the mission slowly becomes secondary to financial engineering.
According to Ries, this doesn’t usually happen because founders are evil.
It happens because the system rewards extraction.
The most striking part of the conversation was his claim that many executives don’t even realize the shift is happening while it unfolds. What starts as “just this quarter” becomes permanent institutional behavior.
That observation explains a lot about modern business.
Why products degrade after acquisition.
Why beloved consumer brands suddenly become unusable.
Why tech companies increasingly optimize for ad revenue over user experience.
Why healthcare systems maximize billing efficiency instead of patient outcomes.
Why companies that once felt mission-driven eventually feel hollow.
Ries argues these aren’t isolated failures.
They’re structural outcomes.
Why Costco Matters More Than Most Startups
One of the most compelling stories in the episode involved Sol Price, the founder of FedMart and later Price Club — the precursor to Costco.
Price believed retailers had a fiduciary duty to customers. He capped margins, paid employees well, and even told customers when competitors offered lower prices elsewhere.
That level of customer trust created enormous long-term value.
But investors hated it.
Eventually, Price was forced out of his own company. FedMart collapsed within years after leadership prioritized extraction over trust.
But Price started over.
That second company eventually became Costco.
Ries uses Costco as an example of a company with what he calls structural integrity — a governance system strong enough to resist short-term pressures.
The point is not that Costco is perfect.
The point is that incentives matter more than slogans.
Every company says it cares about customers.
Very few build structures that protect customer value when financial pressure arrives.
The Founder Trap
One of Ries’ most controversial claims is that founders routinely misunderstand what it takes to preserve a company’s ethos.
Most assume culture transfers automatically.
It doesn’t.
A founder can personally value innovation, craftsmanship, or long-term thinking while simultaneously building systems that reward bureaucracy, fear, and short-term optimization.
This explains why so many founders eventually lose control of their own companies — even while technically remaining CEO.
As organizations scale, employees stop responding to the founder’s intentions and start responding to the incentives embedded in the system.
That distinction matters.
Because systems outlive charisma.
Ries argues that governance structures — board composition, voting rights, ownership models, incentive design — shape company behavior far more than motivational speeches or culture decks.
That may sound abstract, but the evidence is hard to ignore.
Many iconic founders were eventually removed from companies they created.
Steve Jobs.
Edwin Land.
Numerous venture-backed CEOs after IPO.
According to Ries, most founders dramatically underestimate how vulnerable they are once external capital gains influence.
AI Makes This More Dangerous
The conversation became especially interesting when discussing AI.
Ries believes AI amplifies existing organizational incentives.
If an organization is extractive, its AI systems will likely become extractive too.
If a company prioritizes trust and long-term alignment, AI can strengthen those advantages.
This is why he frames AI primarily as a governance problem, not just a technology problem.
Consumers and enterprises are increasingly dependent on AI systems that control workflows, data, recommendations, and decisions. That creates enormous asymmetries of power.
The companies that win long-term may not simply have the best models.
They may be the companies people trust most.
That distinction could define the next decade of technology.
A Different Definition of Profit
The most radical idea Ries proposes may also be the simplest:
Profit should mean creating net new human flourishing.
Not merely maximizing extraction.
He argues that many activities modern finance treats as “profitable” actually destroy value once externalities are included — whether through degraded trust, environmental damage, addiction mechanics, monopolistic behavior, or institutional decay.
You don’t have to agree with every part of his framework to recognize the underlying tension:
Modern markets often reward short-term optimization even when it undermines long-term value creation.
That tension increasingly defines tech, media, healthcare, finance, and AI.
And founders are caught in the middle.
Why This Conversation Matters
Startup culture spends enormous time discussing product-market fit, growth loops, fundraising, and scaling.
Far less attention is paid to what happens after success.
Ries is arguing that governance itself may become the defining competitive advantage of the next generation of companies.
Not just better products.
Better structures.
Stronger incentives.
More durable missions.
Companies capable of surviving success without becoming corrupted by it.
Whether you fully buy the thesis or not, the question he raises is difficult to ignore:
If your company became massively successful tomorrow, would its incentives still align with its mission five years later?
Most founders probably assume the answer is yes.
History suggests otherwise.
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Chapters:
00:01 — Intro: Eric Ries Returns to Ignite
00:40 — Why Good Companies Go Bad
02:16 — Good to Great vs Incorruptible
03:10 — Financial Extraction & Corporate Decline
06:53 — The Long-Term Stock Exchange Experiment
08:33 — Financial Gravity Explained
10:26 — Why Founders Succumb to Short-Term Pressure
14:16 — The Moment Companies Become Corrupted
14:48 — The FedMart & Costco Story
19:35 — Why Markets Reward Extraction
22:47 — Shareholder Primacy vs Mission Primacy
25:04 — Organizations as Emergent Intelligence
28:13 — Ethos vs Company Culture
31:34 — Why Founders Lose Control of Their Companies
36:24 — Governance Mistakes That Destroy Companies
40:10 — Jeff Bezos, Amazon & Long-Term Thinking
43:20 — Leadership, Profit & Human Flourishing
48:32 — Mission-Driven Business Models
49:11 — Does Human Flourishing Break Capitalism?
52:34 — Blueprint for Building Incorruptible Companies
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:31):
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we’re thrilled to have Eric Ries back on the mic. He is the creator of the Lean Startup Movement and now the author of his upcoming book, Uncorruptible, Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Thanks for coming back on, Eric.
Eric Reis (00:01:45):
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Congrats on the show. I love it. Yeah. It’s growing and thriving. Great.
Brian Bell (00:01:49):
Yeah, thanks. It’s always great to have guests back on, especially when they publish books. It’s kind of like my favorite type of podcast. So tell me what this book is about. It’s not really about how to build companies. My understanding is it’s why companies we admire inevitably betray their mission and what it actually takes to prevent that. Maybe you talk to me about what the book’s about and why you wrote it.
Eric Reis (00:02:09):
Yeah I’ve noticed because you know I’m a big believer in feedback as you might have heard so I had 600 people test read the book they generated more than 10,000 comments so I have a really good sense of like how people respond to the book and I was able to really track like I could tell the book was getting better as I was writing it I apologize to all the test readers of the first version it was really grim, sorry. I did my best. Anyway, that’s how you make it better. And I noticed there are basically two kinds of readers for this book, what I call the why readers and the how readers. They’re right there in the subtitle. First of all, there’s people who are like, why does this keep happening? Why are every company I admire eventually turning how come like when private equity takes over my favorite restaurant I can taste it what’s up with that why is this happening and then the how readers are company builders are leaders and board members and founders and even investors who want to know like we don’t need another manifesto about how our economy is messed up we got plenty of those the real question of this book is how how do you build an organization that is incorruptible that people try this shenanigans on it and it doesn’t work because it’s strong enough to resist so yes it is in some level a company building book But now challenging not just the like product building or strategy level topics like in lean startup. Instead, now we’re getting at what I think of as the underlying structural forces that affect how companies behave and the governance and structure. that determine how strong or weak a company is, which I feel like is a way of thinking about companies that many, many people have not yet encountered. But once you see it, you’re not going to be able to unsee it because we talk about companies as great, but I want to ask, they might be great right now, but are they weak or are they strong? It reminds me of the- Strong companies that will endure.
Brian Bell (00:03:44):
Yeah, it reminds me of the first book I read in business school 25 years ago in Business 300 at University of Washington, Seattle. It was Good to Great. It was like the first book we read. So I mean, you’ve probably read that book and studied it. And what is this book kind of contributing to the business literature that kind of either disagrees with Good to Great or kind of builds on some of the philosophy of that book?
Eric Reis (00:04:06):
yeah yeah yeah the the the ellipsis in the subtitle is actually a good to great homage that’s not we don’t we don’t do that anymore but it’s a bit of a throwback just because I wanted to give my my tip of the hat to to Jim Collins yeah yeah so so this is a book about not the companies that fail because they messed up it’s about the companies that fail because they’re successful one of the biggest things I think we don’t teach leaders in our economy today is that the more successful an organization the more valuable.
Eric Reis (00:04:47):
Not just private equity in restaurants, but like when private equity buys nursing homes, they cut nursing staff for returns. Patient mortality rises 10%. There’s a NBR working paper that showed that. When they buy hospitals, they cut clinical staff. ER deaths rise 13%. My favorite is that when people buy a sports team, if they operate it in an extractive way to maximize profit, the research shows that they will have the lowest quality team and the smallest fan attendance. Increasingly, we’re not customers customers, citizens, fans anymore, patients. We’re a resource to be mined. That’s how we’re teaching people to practice business. And what’s so interesting to me about this is if you talk to people now and say, why is this happening? Most people are like, oh, it’s just inevitable. That’s just, that’s capitalism for you. You know, I should talk to young people. That’s capitalism.
Brian Bell (00:05:34):
It was so crazy, right? I mean, the Fortune 500 turnover over the last hundred years. You used to get into the Fortune 500 and you would stay there for a half century.
Eric Reis (00:05:43):
And now the turnover is- The average lifespan of companies has fallen dramatically. The average holding period of stocks has fallen dramatically. And the average tenure of executives has fallen dramatically. So we are in an era of disposable organizations being led by temporary managers on behalf of absentee owners.
Brian Bell (00:06:01):
What are we doing?
Eric Reis (00:06:02):
And then we’re like, gosh, why is trust collapsing? No kidding. But what’s so strange is that these ideas are new. Our grandparents were very allergic to the idea of making money without creating value. In fact, it’s one of the most ancient teachings about economics there are going back to Aristotle and beyond in almost every religious tradition that there are better and worse ways to make The good way is to create net new value in the world and then capture some of it for yourself. Every other way is not just morally suspect, I think is corrupt. Many of the ways that people make money today, whether we’re talking about betting markets or like all kinds of legalized gambling or like taking companies over to destroy or kill them or called killer acquisitions. I could go on and on and on and on. In our grandparents or great grandparents’ time, not only would those things have been seen as corrupt, they would have been illegal, would have been crimes. In the 19th century, just to give you a sense of how far things have changed in just a hundred and some odd years, in the 19th century, if you tried to take over a company that made a specific thing, in those days, companies were not seen as just about maximizing returns to shareholders. Every company had to be incorporated with what’s called a beneficial purpose. You had to say, this is a company designed to make a railroad. And you had to, in your application to form
Eric Reis (00:07:11):
Ignite Insights
Eric Reis (00:07:26):
to buy. But secondly, if you did succeed and take it over and you tried to change the corporate purpose from make a railroad to enrich my shareholders, that would have been considered a crime and the courts would give you the corporate death penalty. They would void your charter because you’ve gone beyond the scope of what is authorized. So this is not some like newfangled idea. In some ways, this is just a restoration of the ideas that have dominated since the creation of the Joint Stock Corporation until very, very recently.
Brian Bell (00:07:55):
And you’ve had a front row seat at this because you’ve been involved in the inception of the long term stock exchange, as I recall. Maybe you could explain like that was trying to get at this problem in a structural way, right?
Eric Reis (00:08:08):
Yes. Short answer to your question is yes. Yes. I have been at this. I’ve had front row seat to this for 15 years now. We sort of came out 15 years ago. I have helped hundreds or thousands of companies be formed. I mean, I’ve lost count at this point how many founders I’ve helped. And I’ve seen this process by which the thing that made the company worth investing in in the first place gets lost goes by the name of mission or purpose in the book I call it ethos the character of a thing can be lost not just due to outside pressure of course you know private equity is a frequent villain but not like sometimes just when a company goes public sometimes just when And the founder loses control, even to his employees. Brian Chesky very famously said he felt like he was losing control of Airbnb, not to his investors. He had dual class control, they couldn’t do anything. But he lost it to his employees because his employees were in the grip of these best practices. And this is something that I think is just, it’s an epidemic in our society. We have financialized everything. So every kind of organization, like not just for profits, but nonprofits, NGOs, unions, journalism, everything is coming under the sway of these, this kind of best practices monoculture. that is about extraction and exploitation rather than about creating value. And yeah, I tried to do something about it. I built this thing called the long-term stock exchange. Still going, making money, trading stocks, listing companies. The first attempt to really change the listing standards by which public companies are judged. And interestingly, we’ve been in the news recently because you may have seen the headline about that the SEC is thinking of eliminating quarterly reporting.
Brian Bell (00:09:31):
I did see that, yeah.
Eric Reis (00:09:32):
That’s the LTSC petition. Wow that that decision making process was initiated by a petition that LTSC filed with the SEC so I really believe in taking matters into our own hands as builders we have to we can’t just sit back and be like oh the economy sucks these rules suck no we have to we have to take it in hand to change them but this book is not so So much about LTSC style change although that is discussed especially in the later chapters it’s primarily about what we who build and lead companies can do today right now there’s not a single technique in the book you have to wait for the revolution okay everything is something you can do today to protect what makes a company special from people who would try to take it from it’s amazing so you and
Brian Bell (00:10:08):
in the book you argue corruption it’s not necessarily about bad people it’s more structural
Eric Reis (00:10:13):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:10:13):
Which is a strong claim. So what is that mechanism that forces good companies to go bad?
Eric Reis (00:10:18):
In the book, I call it financial gravity. It’s one of the underlying fundamental forces that acts on organizations. And it’s the psychological pressure that we all feel to conform to the values of those who have more than we do, because we want something from them. So if you ever see a company go public, I talk to a lot of CEOs who are taking companies public as part of my work at LTSE. You ask them, what’s the biggest difference before and after the IPO? They all say the same thing. Everyone’s watching the stock ticker. In product management meetings, all of a sudden people say things like, well, the market might not like it. The word might does a lot of work in these sentences. You see it in startups. VCs might not like it. We might not be able to raise money. You talk to VCs of these bold contrarian VCs on your board. You tell them you want to do something related to mission protection. They’ll be like, I don’t know. I’m okay with it, but other investors might not like it. It’s like, I thought you were a bold contrarian. Now I have to be just like everybody else. Like, what are we doing here? What happens is there’s this ghost. who’s a secret participant in every meeting whispering in your ear, I don’t know, they might not like it. Now that’s different than finding out what investors actually like. The might does a lot of the work here. And if you want to understand the mechanism, this is an evolutionary instinct that we all carry. You cannot turn off any more than you can turn off your eyes dilating in the dark. What happens is, have you ever watched somebody meet a celebrity for the first time or hang out with a billionaire for the first time? It’s happened to me. it is so gross they become obsequious they’re like they can’t help themselves if you ask them afterwards did you intend to act like that they’ll always be like no they’re a little embarrassed about it why were you such an obsequious but well I just I don’t know what’s going on unconsciously is you’re like gosh this super rich
Brian Bell (00:11:53):
person likes my idea yeah that was like me on our first podcast I was like kind of starstruck because I read your book you know almost 20 years ago oh god it was like oh my god I’m interviewing Eric you know
Eric Reis (00:12:04):
Well I had no idea so you hit it you hit it well yeah but but a lot of people really don’t and it’s right it’s like very obvious so what’s happening is like people are unconsciously always calculating what’s going to help me get ahead in the future what’s going to help me raise money get the promotion whatever it is
Brian Bell (00:12:19):
that I need you see it like your boss conforming to the financial short-term goals of the system rather than keeping the mission at heart
Eric Reis (00:12:27):
And we know from the psychology research that consistently enacted actions eventually become internalized as values. So you start out by saying, I believe in quality over everything, but because the values of our financial system tend to preach short term extraction over value creation, over quality over patient health or safety or whatever else. Over time, you start to unconsciously feel like those things are unaffordable luxuries. And you have to, you have no choice but to compromise just this once to get ahead. Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, calls it like the corporate version of taking heroin.
Eric Reis (00:12:57):
He tells a story that in Costco- Or crack.
Eric Reis (00:12:59):
Yeah, he’s like literally if we raised prices 3% across the board, we would double our net income overnight and nobody would notice. But the problem with that is once you do it once, you got to do it again because that becomes a new baseline against which you’re judged for future growth. Andrew Mason the founder of Groupon told me this unbelievable story when they took Groupon public you know the whole thing about Groupon for those that don’t remember was like a one email a day they have a special deal of the day you know of something you really loved you get the special email you all sign up for the group thing and you get the discount so they went public on the power of one email a day it was a very simple business model very effective extremely fast growing business once they were public people kept coming into his office and they’d say you know what would perform even better than one email a day two emails a day and at first he’d be like no no no our whole thing is one email a day but he they wore him down over time they kept coming with these spreadsheets showing him the ROI and they’d be like let’s just do the experiment let’s just try it MVP whatever people like very easily forget that the point of the experimentation is to
Eric Reis (00:13:58):
Ignite Insightsights
Eric Reis (00:14:18):
what if we did three emails and next thing you know they’re emailing people too often and the business collapsed he felt powerless in the face of this because he didn’t have the tools he needed to defend his ethos and explain to people why we’re doing it this way even though it’s not ROI maximizing this is the danger of this era of business best practices that leave us blind to the things we need to do to maximize our long-term value creation
Brian Bell (00:14:43):
And in the book, this is the moment of corruption inside of a company, right? Where the visionary, the founder succumbs to the pressure of, okay, maybe it’s worth a test or just this quarter so we hit our numbers. Maybe you could walk us through what that actually looks like in the boardroom, in the kind of the e-staff.
Eric Reis (00:15:02):
Yeah so there’s these moments maybe maybe let me illustrate with the story just to kind of bring the whole thing together okay because I think that sometimes these things can go very abstract like corporate purpose and profit and whatever is very abstract let’s get it super concrete let’s tell let me tell you the story of a guy named Saul Price I don’t know how many of your listeners know the story anymore he’s kind of fallen out of the business lexicon but he used to be very famous because he’s the father of modern retail he invented the big box warehouse format of retail but before he became a retailer he was actually a lawyer And he told the story this way. He said, when I was a lawyer, I learned that I had what’s called a fiduciary duty to my customer, to my client, a person who I serve. So we all want that from our- There’s agency, yeah.
Eric Reis (00:15:41):
Yeah, we all want that. Anytime we’re in an agency relationship with somebody, we want them to put their interests before ours. So when he became a retailer, he asked himself, who’s my client? The customer is my client. If I’m a discount retailer, my job is to look out for the well-being, the financials, financial well-being of my customers so he took that really seriously in the new company he created called Fedmark which if you’ve been in a big box retail store recently you will recognize it intimately right no frills big warehouse large quantity limited selections low price he practiced what are called capped margins every item marked up exactly 14% and no more and employees very happy to work there paid above average wages all the stuff you want from a business He was so committed to his fiduciary commitment to customers that when competitors would undercut him on price, he would post signs in his own store saying, hey, don’t buy this product from me. You can get it cheaper down the street. So as a result, customers trusted FedMart and they would drive miles out of their way to shop there because we’ve all had that experience. When you shop with someone you trust, you don’t have to think too hard about it. You trust you’re not being ripped off. That’s the kind of place it is. Everything met there, you know, his personal quality guarantee, everything at a fair price. So this powered FedMart to tremendous expansion. It eventually went public. But as a public company, he felt this gravitational pressure, investors constantly on him to corrupt. he wanted low prices and high wages investors always wanted low wages and high prices but Saul unlike a lot of founders he was completely uncompromising he was just one of those people that would not corrupt you couldn’t talk him out of it it defended his ethos at every turn drove investors crazy so to avoid all these problems he decides to take the company private which he does the new investors unfortunately are just the same they are captured by the same financial gravity so as a public company he had the same problem as a private company has the same problem one day in 1975 after Saul has been building FedMart for more than 20 years into this huge retail success story he comes into work one day and the locks on his door have been changed he doesn’t work there anymore
Eric Reis (00:17:35):
The board fired him because they were like, this guy is in the way of our faster profits. They wanted faster growth. They wanted retail best practices, not this distinctive, bizarre thing that he was doing. So what happened to FedMart? Will you be surprised to learn that within seven years it was bankrupt? Of course not. Because by betraying the promises that it had made to its customers in pursuit of faster growth in the name of profit, these investors literally enacted the parable of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. But what happened to Saul Price? Well, like a classic entrepreneur, like many of the people we know in common, he took two weeks off and then he was back at work. He actually leased the office upstairs from FedMart headquarters and created a new company he called The Price Club. When I was growing up in San Diego, the Price Club was a local fixture. That’s where we shopped for all kinds of stuff. And FedMart was already a distant memory. However, most of your listeners will never have heard of the company Price Club. And that’s because one of the people that left FedMart to go to Price Club with Sol was a guy
Eric Reis (00:18:28):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani You may remember him from our early discussion about Costco. When Jim Senegal left the Price Club to form a new company, he called it Costco. And actually the company that people today refer to as Costco is actually the result of the corporate merger between the original Costco and Price Club. So Saul Price’s ethos still powers that $400 billion giant to this day. But what Jim added, if you think about like the book Incorruptible is basically the story of Saul Price and Jim Senegal in one package. The ethos of Saul Price, the uncompromising commitment to be a fiduciary to the customer, to build a trustworthy organization. But what Jim added was what I call a governance fortress. He understood that because this corruption is so prevalent, because financial gravity is so powerful, he needed to build an organization that was strong enough to resist I call this organization with structural integrity Costco can make and keep its promises because if you come at the king you best not miss they have the tools they need to
Brian Bell (00:19:26):
resist incredible yeah I didn’t I did not know that story so I mean if this pattern keeps repeating like why hasn’t the market figured it out like why haven’t we figured it out as private equity leader VCs and uh and investors and just we just haven’t been able to figure this out this is one
Eric Reis (00:19:43):
of the most important questions you can ask because we assume that if it was true that mission driven purpose driven companies outperform in the marketplace then by Darwinian natural selection that’s what we would see the economy would be populated with those companies and the extracted ones would lose yet that’s not what we see So we all conclude, therefore, the extractive way of business must have an advantage, a competitive advantage. But this is wrong. We’ve made an error. We’ve assumed without evidence that the market rewards value creation. That’s the Darwinian pressure. And although you could build a market that rewards value creation, we know how to do it. Today’s market absolutely does not. And so Founders are increasingly naive about this point. In every generation, I show 200 years, literally I have a chart of 200 years of these examples in the company going back to the 19th century of founders who thought that by discovering this more enlightened way of capitalism, the market would reward and spread as if they’d invented a new technology. And yet every single time Investors outside pressure finds a way to dismantle these companies at the very moment of their success because this is the naivete. Success makes you a target. It doesn’t just give you freedom and power. It makes you worth capturing.
Brian Bell (00:21:05):
so founders who and then you also succumb to financial engineering well yeah of
Eric Reis (00:21:09):
course because it’s just it’s just so convenient it’s a way to make a quick buck care about the consequences you can make a quick buck this is done in the name but our modern ideology is called shareholder primacy the theory is that this system of maximum
Eric Reis (00:21:21):
Extraction Benefits Shareholders but it honestly doesn’t and we have the data for it now like we’ve been at this long enough that we can see the evidence that this is bad even for shareholders that when shareholders get locked into kind of a it’s almost like a prisoner’s dilemma where since they think every other investor
Eric Reis (00:21:35):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani So we don’t have like we can break out of this trap.
Eric Reis (00:21:38):
It requires First, before investors change their behavior, first founders have to change their behavior. Leaders have to change their behavior and reject the governance best practices that we’ve all been taught. One of my favorite factoids in the book, there’s a study that shows this is now not an insignificant sample. Since 2008, among all public companies, companies that are rated to have bad governance have outperformed companies rated to have good governance. So what are we doing? Where do these best practices come from? Why are people so enamored of them when they consistently destroy value?
Brian Bell (00:22:18):
And is it just the quarterly structure where the finance people get in and they’re like, hey, if I can just juice earnings this way in this kind of PE ratio, then this next quarter I can get a nice little 10-20% bump in the price of the stock and then I can make a really quick buck, I buy some options and then I can even juice the returns even more. So it just turns into a financial engineering exercise instead of a value creation exercise.
Eric Reis (00:22:43):
What’s sad about it, if you look at the data for public companies, if the CFO or the CEO have stock options vesting in a given quarter, R&D spending will be lower. Think about how big the data set of all the public companies, think about how big the magnitude of that effect must be to show up in an
Eric Reis (00:22:59):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani And I think that’s a good question.
Eric Reis (00:23:13):
short term in its orientation. Quarterly guidance destroys value. Independent boards destroy value. The whole notion that the ESG movement has been selling, that we should score companies on three dimensions, environmental, societal, and governance, is absurd because the governance scores are negatively correlated with the environmental scores because today good governance means shareholder primacy and shareholder primacy is incompatible with the kind of long-term investment that’s needed to build sustainable technologies. So I think we’ve kind of made a civilization scale. I would even say we are past shareholder primacy.
Eric Reis (00:23:53):
We’re now an extraction primacy. And it’s time to get rid of that. I would recommend we make a quick pivot to what I call mission primacy and start recognizing that companies that are built to do a specific thing are more valuable in addition to having all kinds of better positive externalities.
Brian Bell (00:24:12):
So one of the most interesting ideas in the book is that organizations become super organisms with their own will.
Eric Reis (00:24:18):
Can you explain what that means?
Eric Reis (00:24:19):
Sure. This sounds very supernatural to people who are hearing it for the first time, but actually organizations are humanity’s first artifact.
Eric Reis (00:24:42):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani And if you’re encountering it for the first time, you should look up something called the Piano Movers Puzzle. Of course, I have links in the book. Piano Movers Puzzle is my favorite demonstrations of emergent intelligence. And here’s what it did. The researchers set up an object that’s kind of like an eye beam. Long side and a short side Connected by a middle bar It’s a rigid object And the task is to move it In between a narrow space Like when you’re moving a couch Through a stairwell Requires a very precise set of movements To get this thing through the gap It’s quite difficult Hence the piano movers puzzle That’s what it’s called
Eric Reis (00:25:13):
So they gave this task to ants. Now, a single ant cannot solve this problem, but a single human can. But what about groups of ants? Well, it turns out the more ants you add to the puzzle, the faster the ants solve the puzzle. And if you watch the video, you will see the ant swarm acting like a person. You can watch it try stuff. It looks just like the person solving the puzzle. That is because the ant swarm, the ant colony has emergent intelligence. It has an intelligence that does not exist in any ant. That’s a well-known finding that this puzzle didn’t prove it. This is just a great demonstration and it makes a really cool video to watch. The more important finding for our purposes is that groups of humans also exhibit this emergent property. A group of human beings is an emergent intelligence in itself and scientists have been able to show
Eric Reis (00:26:02):
That the resulting object, the organization, has a character, it has an intelligence, it has skills and weaknesses that are not present in any individual human. In one of my favorite studies, researchers were able to show that companies have an ethical character that can be measured. The ethical character of the company predicts future compliance violations better than knowing anything about the individual ethics of the individual employees that work there. So it’s a collective phenomenon. I personally think this means that organizations are literally alive. That’s how every founder I know thinks about their organization. We don’t own companies. We birth them. Entrepreneurship is closer to motherhood than it is to slavery. These things are not our slaves that we command. They’re beings that we nurture. And just like with any living creature, the health of the thing cannot be commanded it can only be cultivated so we as leaders have to start seeing our job in building one of these beautiful things as nurturing it to have healthy strong you know strong bones and the inner desire to do the right thing as we
Brian Bell (00:27:06):
define it it’s fascinating so you know if the company becomes its own organism then who’s actually in control is it what we call culture company culture
Eric Reis (00:27:15):
Yeah, I tried really hard to avoid the word culture in this book because just people that’s so vague. So I use the word ethos instead. Ethos is an ancient Greek word that Aristotle used to mean the character of a person. Well, an organization has an ethos. So go back to FedMark. Saul Price had an ethos. But he was able to instill that ethos into the organization such that employees knew what the right thing to do was even when he wasn’t there. And actually the reason it took seven years and not seven months for the investors to destroy it is because the employees fought them trying to preserve the ethos as best they could. I was going to say something else. To understand why this happens and therefore how to control it, we need to borrow one more idea from the past. There’s a thinker named Mary Parker Follett. who was completely erased from management history. She was a contemporary of Frederick Winslow Taylor. And although he went on to become super famous, she was erased from history. You can take your best guess as to why that happened to him and not to her. But in any event, if you read her writing now, Rediscovered in the 90s. Her writing is so incredibly contemporary. You would think it was written like last year. It’s amazing. She wrote about power with rather than power over. She had something she called the law of the situation. She said, it’s not that the superior commands and the subordinate obeys. No, both the superior and the subordinate together obey the law of the situation. They discover together what the situation requires. She said, the responsibility of a leader is to make more leaders. Come on, you’re telling me if you read that on LinkedIn today, you wouldn’t think that was some business leader talking writing right now.
Brian Bell (00:28:44):
Yeah, 100%.
Eric Reis (00:28:45):
But her most important idea is what she called the invisible leader. She would confound her audiences by saying stuff like this that they thought like Yoda level, like what is she talking about? She would say things like this, Mr. Roundtree, the owner and CEO of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory is not the leader of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory. People would be like, lady, what are you talking about? I mean, his family has owned this factory for a long time. His name is right there on the door. He’s not the leader. Who is? She said, no. He is a very good leader for that factory, but that’s because he’s exceptionally skilled at instilling in his employees a sense of common purpose and the sense of common purpose rather than Mr. Roundtree himself is their invisible leader. And if there’s one takeaway I
Eric Reis (00:29:28):
Ignite Insights Ignite Insights
Eric Reis (00:29:43):
is so powerful it has to be powerful to override people’s actual personal instincts so when you realize that the people are not following you they’re following their sense of common purpose we can then ask the much more important question which is of course how do we cultivate a strong culture company a company where the purpose is aligned with what we want it to be and how can we make that durable so it sticks over time rather than being tied to our personal leadership as long as we’re there
Brian Bell (00:30:08):
So why do founders consistently lose this ethos, transference, this, even if they’re like still technically running the company, is it just because there’s just so much pressure from the financial engineers and they just eventually succumb or like why do they lose control?
Eric Reis (00:30:23):
There’s two mistakes that you see come by. I tell a bunch of stories in the book about founders whose company is out of control. They literally are not able to command the thing that they built. And in fact, I know a lot of founders who’ve left. They leave their company because they’re like, I give up. This is not the kind of place I want to work anymore. And in fact, if you read the stories about founder mode, like read all the interviews that people have done about founder mode, they’re all like, the stories are all structured like this, like the company has all these middle managers and all these processes and it’s just like, and so the founder has to go in there and fire everybody and be like, no, we’re going to get back to the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you never see asked in those stories, well, who hired all those people in the first place? who established all those bad procedures, right? The founder is creating conditions that he himself comes to loathe and has to seize control back. So you can see even in that story, there’s an understanding that the company does not automatically reflect your value. So the mistake is first, a lot of people assume that their ethos will become the company’s ethos. So if I’m a bold innovator, the company will be a bold innovator. not necessarily if you don’t cultivate it carefully the company can become very conservative and afraid even if you’re very bold and then you wind up in these situations I tell one of these stories in the book I’ve seen it hundreds of times if you ask people to tell you the story of entrepreneurship like
Eric Reis (00:31:36):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Eric Reis (00:31:51):
We need to make a product. To make a product, we must have resources. To have resources, we must have a business model. That business model, we must have a strategy. For that strategy, we must have people. For people, we must build a culture. Anyway, and to then, we build this thing and we offer it to customers. The market validates. our intuition we have product market fit and that’s the role that customers play in our society aren’t you glad that they exist yeah but there’s actually an opposite story you hear sometimes it goes like this the market has a need for a dry cleaner or a florist or a social network or whatever the market has a need the need summons customers to want to buy that requires a product to be built for a product to be built we need employees when we have employees we must have coordination we need managers to have managers we must have a strategy and a business model and a da da da da da da
Eric Reis (00:32:36):
So somebody in the end has to be the kind of the person who got to take credit for this whole phenomenon. Somebody has to be the person who’s like the final decision maker. So this person, the person who privatizes the work of the market. who privatizes the social gains is called the entrepreneur. In this story, entrepreneurs are basically villains who capture social value for themselves. If you ever hear someone say abolish billionaires, you’re someone who attacks entrepreneurship as a vocation, they are in the grip of this story. The weird part about the story is that if you look at the levels of the story, they’re exactly the same, but inverted. So one begins with the founder and ends with customers and the other begins with customers and ends with the founder. It’s the same story told backwards. And in fact many founders, their own executive team is a story two team. They say they admire the founder, but actually they secretly in their hearts, they think this company was always going to be created. See, they weren’t there when the company wasn’t already a success. they can’t remember the struggles to them the company as a monopoly a natural monopoly over the thing that it does so when the founder says hey guys it’s time to pivot we got to go all in on AI or whatever the founder expects them to be like boss you were right when everyone
Eric Reis (00:33:51):
I’ve had the interviews with them when the founder’s not there. They were like, well, maybe he just got lucky. Maybe we shouldn’t go on this crazy quest because we’re going to be giving up
Eric Reis (00:34:06):
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Eric Reis (00:34:21):
Ignite Insightsights
Eric Reis (00:34:36):
So give us the characteristics of the standard governance. What does that mean?
Eric Reis (00:35:03):
Yeah. So I was like, listen, this company had no protection for the founders. So standard governance means one share, one vote. Whoever can borrow the most money, can buy the most shares, can have the company do whatever they want. There was no mission protection at all. The company was a standard Delaware C Corp. The charter said our purpose is to maximize shareholder value. The company had all these investors who had been longtime partners who were all planning to exit. And they had brought on bankers to run the IPO for them. The bankers had given them these beautiful RFPs full of all these awesome brand name investors who they’re going to bring into the IPO. What they didn’t tell them is that the data shows that the majority, I think it’s 75% of IPO allocated investors are gone within two quarters. so he did this huge roadshow all the investors being like I see into your soul this is the kind of company I want to back all these people were long gone he was really worried after I told him how vulnerable he was but then he talked to his bankers and his lawyers and his VCs and his team his CFO his GC and he came back he’s like you know what they told me they said Eric is such a downer
Eric Reis (00:35:58):
If he really believed in your vision, he wouldn’t talk to you like this. You’re the exception. So he’s like, never mind. I’m not doing anything different. Now, what happened to him? So he could have done something different there. Well, he could have. There’s a lot of things he could have done. Even after the IPO, it wasn’t too late. But the easiest time, it’s always too early until it’s too late. So the earlier, the better.
Brian Bell (00:36:16):
That’s why he’s probably...
Brian Bell (00:36:18):
And before you even raise venture capital 5 or 10 years ago
Eric Reis (00:36:32):
And what’s funny is that, of course, when we see these these dramas, we tend to tell them it’s personal dramas.
Eric Reis (00:36:47):
if you read the stories about this founder they’ll be like he was flawed his business model was flawed it’s like what was so flawed why did you invest first of all second of all even if it’s true that he made mistakes and I’m sure he did did he really deserve so little grace five months really he built this company up from nothing over many years five months at least Saul Price they gave him you know a couple years five years
Eric Reis (00:37:09):
Yeah, but five months. But the worst part about it, you see this over and over and over again. Founder makes a mistake. You see this with Edwin Land at Polaroid. You see it, you know, just like think about when they fired Steve Jobs. The founder makes a mistake. You say, we must have accountability. Fire the founder. Okay, great. But then you don’t actually
Eric Reis (00:37:24):
One in five
Eric Reis (00:37:46):
What are we doing? Everyone thinks they’re the exception, but guess what? You’re much more likely to be in the 80% than the 20%.
Brian Bell (00:37:51):
What did Jeff Bezos do? Because I remember he had letters to shareholders and stuff. He said, hey, we’re going to lose money for a long time, so be okay with that. We’re going to run in the red for a long time, and we’re going to do things that look weird in the short term.
Eric Reis (00:38:06):
He did a lot of things right, but he also got incredibly lucky. First of all, the thing you got to remember is that in the era when Amazon was created companies went public a lot sooner Amazon was
Brian Bell (00:38:15):
public like three years after being founded had like a 400 million market cap I
Eric Reis (00:38:19):
think yeah it was like and raised a relatively small amount of money in its IPO by modern standards yeah so that was a huge thing secondly he was very I think he did well you got to give him credit for he was extremely consistent with his day one letters from the very beginning he really made sure that only investors who understood what he was up to were bought in. He had a very supportive board. He was smart about that kind of stuff. And he just was very clear, if you come at me, we’re not changing, okay? But the most important thing is that he raised a gargantuan amount of money right before the dot-com bubble burst, right before. So yeah, a bunch of runaway. So when everybody else was getting crushed and nobody could raise any money at all, Amazon was flush with cash. And so, of course, he was able to cement his leadership, prove he had the runway to prove that the model worked. And then once it worked, you know, then it was OK. But I wouldn’t say necessarily that Amazon’s our best case study to study because, first of all, it’s very idiosyncratic. No one’s been able to replicate the Jeff Bezos playbook since then. but also Amazon has its own problems because in the pursuit of growth at all costs think about the like incredible human harms that they’ve had in the fulfillment centers and stuff like I think that ultimately is harming the Amazon brand in a really profound way and you just think about what Amazon could be before you know If you’ve read the Cory Doctoral book, you know about inshittification. Amazon’s like one of the big offenders here where if you search for anything on Amazon recently, you get like 20 pages of sponsored results. It’s actually really difficult to get to the first result. And there’s actually research. I forget now, Tim O’Reilly told me about this research, but I forget who did it. There’s research that shows that by Amazon’s own algorithmic rankings, they are pushing you towards the suboptimal product for you. They actually know which product would be best for you, but they don’t show it to you. They show you the worst product. And it’s just like that’s what’s happening at Google. That’s what’s happening to Amazon. It’s happening to a lot of these tech companies where they just can’t resist the allure of the extra money. But again, what does Amazon need the extra money for? They’re just addicted to it for its own sake. They would be creating far more value if they could actually get off that treadmill and restore their leadership principle supposed to be to put customers first. How is it customers first to sell me the product that’s not best for me? Saul Price would be shaking his head if he was still around.
Brian Bell (00:40:25):
Jeff Bezos is probably shaking his head too. So if organizational behavior is emergent and it’s not commanded, it kind of emerges, what does that imply for how we think about leadership? How do we think about leadership?
Eric Reis (00:40:35):
Yeah, so the book is kind of half about the leadership operational challenge and half about what we think of today as governance, the structural challenge. On the leadership side, the most important thing we have to do, and this is going to sound radical to some of your listeners, but it’s actually very practical. We have to do it. We have to commit to a definition of what it means to make a profit. This sounds like everyone’s like, what are you talking about? Everyone knows how to make a profit. Oh, really? I’ve done this exercise with many, many leaders. You say, okay, well, you tell me what it means to make a profit.
Brian Bell (00:41:01):
What?
Eric Reis (00:41:01):
I take revenue minus expenses. That’s profit.
Brian Bell (00:41:03):
Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. I’ll show you my P&L. That’s my E&L.
Eric Reis (00:41:06):
Yeah, exactly. I take a $50 piece of wood. I make a $200 table. I make $150 profit. Oh, good. Excellent. Okay. But let me ask you some questions. Is a Ponzi scheme profitable? Uh-oh. No, why not? Oh, I’m like, we took in $200 in revenue. We only had to pay off $50 to the Ponzi. Is that $150 of profit? No, no, no, no, no. Because eventually the costs will come due, right? Eventually. Meaning if I create value, But I defer the liability. That’s not really profit. I’m just offsetting the revenue minus cost. I’m offsetting part of the formula in time. That doesn’t count. Okay, right. But then what about a toxic waste dump? I’m going to have to clean it up eventually. Is that profitable? People would say, oh, I guess not. I guess not. You work through all those examples, you realize a lot of things we call profitable today really aren’t. Okay. what about what in economics they call negative externality what if I dump pollution in the river and people downstream get sick now imagine I get away with it in all these scenarios imagine I always get away with it is that profitable people if they think about it will be like no it can’t be profitable because although the costs of the dumping are not borne by you they are borne by somebody so just like before we were displacing cost in time now we’re displacing cost in space we haven’t really created net new value so no But what if I created an online marketplace for murder? Murder for hire, okay? Is that profitable? People really want to say no. But if you push, you say, why is it not profitable? They say, well, it’s illegal. I know, but what if I made so much money that I could
Eric Reis (00:42:32):
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
Eric Reis (00:42:48):
but the human life is worth a lot more than $200 so you’ve destroyed one of the input factors of production simple right and just saying like remember I see a kid with a lemonade stand who’s like I made $20 today but they used $80 worth of ingredients to do it right like that’s not profit so that’s just a kid’s table if I take if I steal a $200 piece of wood and I make $100 table out of it I haven’t created $100 of profit I’ve destroyed $100 of value so if our the problem you see in these examples is that we as builders we carry around an intuitive understanding of what I call the builder’s intuition that the best way to make money is to create net new value and then capture some of it for yourself but we also carry around in our head a formalized definition of profit that’s a lot more rigid and over time what we see is these two definitions diverge and then eventually gets us into trouble so the way to solve that problem is just say you know what we as builders we get to decide what profit means for ourselves and so I propose the definition that profit is the maximization of human flourishing nothing more nothing less and anyone who
Eric Reis (00:43:43):
You are a business revolutionary whether you
Eric Reis (00:43:58):
at odds with our dominant finance-driven business culture. So by declaring that we’re going to maximize human flourishing, you not only fix these bugs that infect companies, you also create new opportunities you otherwise would miss. You miss other opportunities. For example, although negative externalities feature prominently in critiques of the profit definition, the bigger loss by far is our inability to see positive externality. things like trustworthiness Saul Price understood that to be trustworthy requires you to follow a principle I call harder is easier in the short term you got to do things that score as ROI negative because the costs of being trustworthy are tangible but the benefits are intangible So we as leaders, if we declare that this is our purpose to maximize human flourishing, we define for people operationally, here is our definition of human flourishing. Here’s how we measure it and reward it. Then here’s our fiduciary commitment. Here’s who we’re going to measure and who we’re going to be loyal to. the people we would rather die than betray and then last we create a condition I call mission drive we make sure that our business model is engineered in such a way that we can only profit by achieving the mission no other form of money making will ever tempt us if you put those pieces together you build an incredibly strong company
Brian Bell (00:45:13):
I love that so you make you make money from the mission fundamentally it’s not just about hey can we can we squeeze an extra dime here in the next quarter it’s hey through our mission and through human flourishing beyond the four corners of our company. I think another way I’ve heard it described is sort of like ecosystem value where you think about a company like Microsoft and one of the most successful companies in history but it created a ton of value outside of Microsoft because you could build on their operating system.
Eric Reis (00:45:46):
So much more value than they ever captured for themselves.
Brian Bell (00:45:48):
that’s right yeah and so you you think about companies like that where they just create so much more value than they’re they’re actually capturing um you could argue whether or not that’s maximizing human flourishing or not but I guess critics would probably say that sounds nice but it breaks capitalism why are they wrong
Eric Reis (00:46:05):
they’re the ones breaking capitalism and I got the I got the receipts to prove it so yeah I won’t do the whole history now because I know we have limited time but This way of thinking about capitalism is so recent. It’s like younger than the trees in your local park. And we have the evidence that shows it is breaking the fundamental premise of capitalism. And the way you know is like this. If you study the history of capitalism, and I mean, go back, read Milton Friedman, read Bastiat read Adam Smith read Joseph Schumpeter read even even John Locke go back all of these people whenever they’re pressed on the question of is capitalism a moral system or not they always like fall back they’re like digging for excuses like well it does this the moral bedrock of capitalism that you hit eventually is this simple idea that when people transact if the transaction is fully informed fully voluntary and uncoerced then both parties are better off when this happens it’s a bit of a magic trick you literally create new wealth that didn’t exist before because both both parties are wealthier than they were before what’s incredible about that
Eric Reis (00:47:09):
What’s astonishing about that is that that wealth was not stolen. It was generated. But notice the preconditions. It has to be fully voluntary, but an addict cannot consent. It has to be fully informed, but if I deceive you, then you weren’t. It has to be uncoerced and how many economic transactions today are from rent seekers or through monopolies or through every kind of coercion you can imagine. So I say that when builders have this intuition about creating value, they aren’t rejecting capitalism. They are the ones defending it. and the people who are trying to financialize everything and make everything into this productive, extractive system, they’re the ones who are causing capitalism’s collapse. Interestingly, Joseph Schumpeter predicted that this would happen in the 1930s. He said one day capitalism will turn
Eric Reis (00:47:57):
Ignite Insights
Eric Reis (00:48:20):
how he could foresee that in the 1930s I have no idea but we’re now living in his
Brian Bell (00:48:24):
prophecy incredible so I know we’re short on time but I mean I could talk to you another two hours on this topic I mean really what are some final takeaways I mean a lot of founders and VCs listen to this podcast they’re growing their companies you know how should they you know what’s the blueprint for them
Eric Reis (00:48:40):
Blueprint is really simple. Just remember path of ethos, path of integrity. Saul Price and Jim Senegal, build something worth protecting and figure out how to build it with structural integrity. You know, we talk about financial gravity. Now imagine a bridge collapses. and I ask you, my engineer friend, why did that bridge collapse? If you say gravity, I’m gonna smack you. It’s like, come on. Yeah, I mean, yes, technically the reason it fell down is because of gravity, but that’s no answer because first of all, it didn’t fall down yesterday, but there’s still gravity, but also there’s 50 other bridges in the world didn’t fall down why this one to study why something collapsed we have to understand the fundamental forces that act upon it we understand load and wind load we understand shearing and tension we check the bolts we’re like oh look all the metal bolts have been corroded and they fell apart that’s why it collapsed because from that understanding we can then say how do you build a bridge that won’t collapse better use stainless steel this time my number one piece of advice to founders is go looking for the equivalent of stainless steel what are the corporate practices what are the the governance structures and the operational disciplines that have that incorruptible character to them and don’t take my word for it about the book is loaded with research but like ask around look around don’t just take for granted that the people you’re talking to the best practices they’re offering you are actually any good for a lot of them we have evidence that shows they’re quite terrible
Brian Bell (00:50:01):
So we’re living through a huge platform shift with AI, right? And how do you think AI either helps this problem or makes it worse or is benign?
Eric Reis (00:50:11):
Both. AI is an amplifier. So just like I said, you know, corporations are are the first AIs on this planet. So they have the same architecture as the transformer. They’re fundamentally emergent intelligences, but the generative version is way faster and way more impactful. So whatever problems you had before, you’re going to have the much, much, much, much worse with AI. But on the other hand, whatever strengths you have can be much, much, much better. In the book, I talk about the structure of Anthropic and the story of how that company came to be. And part of why Anthropic has had the strength to resist when other companies have fallen already into temptation is because I think in part because of its structure. So yes, I think there’s a lot to figure out with AI, but I think fundamentally AI is a governance problem. In AI they call the alignment problem, which is like how do you get the AI to align to human values has a deeper problem behind it, which is how do you align the aligners? We want AI to be aligned to human values, but which human values? If the company making the AI is extractive by nature, the software it makes will be extracted by nature too. We’re already starting to see that in these products. But if you look at the polling on AI, customers and enterprises both Desperately want trustworthy vendors. They want to buy from someone they trust because your relationship with an AI vendor, it’s like a life-saving medicine. Think of the power. If I have a life-saving medicine that you need from me, I have tremendous power over you. If you have all my data, if you are in all my workflows, I have a dependency on you that is really equivalent. And so I think the AI companies that are going to win in the long run are the ones that can prove that they are the trustworthy stewards of this technology. And if the others win, they’re going to provoke a backlash like you can’t imagine that will provoke, I think, a really dangerous and very negative regulatory regime for AI. So yeah, hopefully the good guys win here.
Brian Bell (00:51:55):
So where can folks find more about the book online? I mean, obviously, you’re going to go on the book tour and it’s going to be any place you can buy books, but where can folks find you online and find this book online?
Eric Reis (00:52:05):
Oh yeah please go to incorruptible.co we have links to all the stores that are carrying it which is pretty much all of them plus lots of independent bookstores all across this country who are carrying the book indie bookstores are so valuable as a community resource and they’re under such pressure like if you really want to make an indie bookstores day maybe walk
Eric Reis (00:52:20):
We have readers guides and more importantly for founders, we have implementation guides you might find useful.
Eric Reis (00:52:44):
for many of the techniques in the book. So yeah, do come to the website. We’ve tried to give you every possible incentive to pre-order and to sign up for the mailing list. Much appreciated to those who support the book.
Brian Bell (00:52:53):
Well, I really enjoyed it. The book is incorruptible. Thanks for coming back on. I hope it’s a huge success.
Eric Reis (00:52:58):
Thank you so much. Really appreciate your help.
