Building Companies That Last Without Selling Out with Brian Ardinger and Eric Ries, Author of Incorruptible

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement, and author of the new book, incorruptible, why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric and I talk about the challenges and opportunities of creating incorruptible company, the difference between value creation and value extraction, and how companies like Costco and Patagonia build value by violating conventional best practices. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact, let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Eric Rise

Eric Ries on Incorruptible, The Lean Startup, and Building Companies That Last

[00:01:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Eric Ries. If you followed this podcast, if you followed the world of. Startups and innovation you know of Eric. He's the author of the Lean Startup, the Startup Way, and he is got a brand new book out called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Welcome, Eric. 

[00:01:17] Eric Ries: Thanks so much. Appreciate it. 

[00:01:18] Brian Ardinger: Eric, I'm super excited to have you on this show. I'm surprised we haven't had a chance to have you on before to talk about some of the previous work with Lean Startup and Startup Way, but I'm excited to talk about this new book because it takes off where the previous books let go.

If these books in the past show you how to build or scale new ventures, this book teaches you how to build companies to last without selling out. You know, you open the book talking about by saying you taught people how to build companies worth protecting, but not how to protect them. What did you miss about that first time around and how did this book come about based on what you've learned?

[00:01:52] Eric Ries: Well, thank you first of all, thanks for the kind words. And thanks for seeing it as a continuity, because that's really how it's felt to me. I feel like I've been on this journey now, you know, over the course of my career, and when I look back on it, I think I keep discovering things that I'm sure is the most powerful force in the universe.

So I feel like when I first learned to code program computers, I was like, this is the most powerful thing in the universe. And then I realized that in writing individual programs was nothing, if you could build, you know, technology platforms. And build whole scale, in large scale technology. I was in love with technology from an early age.

And over time as I watched, you know, so many technology products fail, I started to realize that no management is the most powerful force in the universe, right? Human beings make technology, and if you can't manage human beings, you can't do it. And this book came out of my recognition that although over the past 20 years we have gotten so much better at the science of management, and especially thanks to Lean Startup and tools like that. We've been able to really build brand new companies and take them public. Been able to revitalize more abundant old companies and making them more modern.

And yet I always felt like we were up against this other force that was even more powerful than management and what I didn't understand, what nobody ever told me I was, I was coming up as an entrepreneur, as an innovator, is that for mission-driven companies especially, success becomes a liability because the more golden the goose, the more temptation there is to butcher it.

And I got sick and tired of it. I felt like I was feeding one company after another into a meat grinder. Help people create these really wonderful companies and then have them you know, turn into something almost unrecognizable. And I just felt like we need to stop doing that. And so, this book is the culmination of a many, many year journey to try to figure out like, what is this force that causes this and what can we do about it to stop it from turning?

Why Eric Ries Uses the Word “Corruption” in Business

[00:03:39] Brian Ardinger: You label the book about corruption, you know, incorruptible. Why is it more accurate word than like mission creep or bad leadership? What about the word corruption? 

[00:03:48] Eric Ries: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for asking that question because I do think it's something that a lot of people have struggled with, with the book, which is when we say the word corruption, people like think I'm talking about embezzlement or bribery, and of course those things are bad.

But one of the really deep insights that I've had, banging my head against this, I think I always think of that famous Mahler quote, you know, I'm banging against my head against the wall, and the wall is starting to give. That's how it felt to me, like it took me a really long time to understand that these actions that transform value creating economic activity into value destroying economic activity, that actually corrupts the foundation of our entire economic system.

Because when you ask people to defend capitalism, you know, this is going back hundreds of years now, all the way back to, you know, to Adam Smith, let alone Bastiat and Milton Friedman, and you, you name it, you name it. Someone who's made an attempt to give a moral defense of capitalism. We always say that when people are engaged in fully informed voluntary transactions, then both parties are better off, and that is why free commerce ultimately leads to value creation.

And that's like a very logical, very tidy argument. And yet it has preconditions. In order for a transaction to be value creating, it must be fully informed and it must be voluntary. And what we're seeing now in our modern economy is so many ways to make money without creating value. In fact, many of the ways that we consider to be just normal ways of making money are grandparents would've seen as theft, as crimes.

So I think we've kind of gradually lost the plot. And so to me, using a bracing word like corruption and, and naming the book Incorruptible, to me was what is necessary to say, look, these actions are not wrong just because they're immoral or even because they're illegal, but rather because they corrupt the economic logic of our whole civilization.

Value Creation vs Value Extraction in Modern Capitalism

[00:05:36] Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this difference between value extraction versus value creation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the dichotomy between those two and, and where the challenges lie. 

[00:05:45] Eric Ries: Yeah. I saw this incredible video and he was telling this story about going out to dinner with a friend at one of the friend's favorite restaurants. They walked in the door, they sat down, they ordered. The guy took a bite of the food and he, he took, he took out his phone and, and the guy's telling the story. He's like, that's kind of rude, why you taking out your phone? He's like, has this restaurant been bought by private equity? He's like, what are you talking about? He's like, looking you up on his phone?

He's like, yep. Shows in the news article from one bite. He is like, the food is like a just a little worse than it used to be. The service, it just like something's wrong. And when he figured out what it was, boom. Bought by private equity. And so I tell a lot of stories in the book about these companies that are destroyed, like the thing that made them is lost.

Their ethos is lost. Not because they were failing in the marketplace, but because they were successful and therefore worth capturing. And so what I discovered in my work on this is that so many of our modern business best practices are designed to make it easy for people to do this, to make money by taking over or redirecting a company and moving it away from value creation.

We talk a lot in the book about the asset, the incredibly valuable asset, which is trustworthiness. And how organizations depend on this asset and yet don't measure it. They don't track it; they don't husband it. And so, it's very easy to trade on that trustworthiness. You find a brand that's highly trusted, you take it over.

You dupe people, you deceive them. You make them think it's the same thing as it was before, when actually it's not. And that goes back to that moral logic of capitalism. Well, I thought it was supposed to be a fully informed voluntary transaction. Well, if you deceive, then you're not being fully informed.

And if you make the product more addictive. An addict cannot consent. So, we live in an age of disinformation and addiction, and therefore the engine of capitalism is no longer turning the way it is designed to in our moral calculus.

Financial Gravity and Structural Forces That Corrupt Companies

[00:07:33] Brian Ardinger: What finally convinced you that this was like a structural problem rather than one of leadership?

[00:07:39] Eric Ries: I went looking for the answer, the same place everybody always does, leadership, culture, values, mission, you know, like I looked every, I looked like everywhere. And it's like strategy, spent a lot of time on strategy. The problem is that missions drift and founders die, and cultures decay. And if you want to know why, why, why?

When I first understood this, I called the phenomenon financial gravity. Like there's this force that is pulling us down that we cannot defy, and it, I went through a very dark period actually feeling like our financial system has this gravitational effect that's so powerful, nothing can resist it. In the same way that human beings discovered gravity of the fundamental forces in physics first.

We stand on this gigantic planet, so it's always pulling us down. We thought that gravity was the most powerful force of the universe, and it took us much longer to realize that when you do something as simple as stand up, your body generates a counterforce that is more powerful than a planet 10 to the 23rd times larger than you.

I don't know what the, you know, like, right. It's like, think about the disparity being you and the earth, and yet you can defy it as easily as breathing. What is this other force? And I started to notice, these companies that don't follow the script. They're like outlier companies that we all kind of actually know them already.

They're not like some obscure company you've never heard of. In almost every industry you have this like outlier company. Think about like Patagonia or Costco or Vanguard, where you're just like, oh yeah, everyone knows they're the exception. They're weird. They don't follow, and they don't follow Financial Gravity.

They don't exploit people for money. They endure for long periods of time. Scale doesn't seem to bother them. They don't get bureaucratic. And there's like all these weird things that they don't have that happen. I started to really want to know why. And what's crazy, this is the thing nobody believes, these outlier companies basically violate every single one of the best practices that we're taught are the best and only way to build a company.

And once I understood that and I was like, wait a second, if gravity is so powerful and inevitable and there's something we can do about it, there shouldn't be all these exceptions. And then I started to find out there's not just a couple. There are trillions of dollars of these exceptions that are just quietly plugging away, doing their thing every day, defying all these rules, and I just thought, wait a second. This can't be right. Something is deeply wrong here.

The Costco Model: Governance, Trust, and Long-Term Thinking

[00:09:49] Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit more about some of those companies like Costco or Patagonia and how they are different to give the audience a sense of what makes them incorruptible versus others. 

[00:09:57] Eric Ries: Yeah. Yeah. Costco I, I think, is features a lot in the book and is a great story because it's something, a company that people know. Everyone drives by co you know what Costco is, everyone understand, but most people do not understand the vastness of Costco.

It is so much more successful than so many of them marvelously, overhyped companies we see in our daily life. You know, they have a $400 billion valuation, which, you know, that seems, people are like, oh, that sounds like a lot, but you know, these days, a billion here, a billionaire.

The stand on Costco that really blows my mind is their house brand Kirkland, Kirkland Signature. They make more money on Kirkland Signature. Then like almost all other consumer retail public companies, like Kirkland Signature, if it was its own company, would be bigger than Nike, bigger than United Airlines, bigger than Coca-Cola. Like it's a massive brand to do itself, and it's just one of a zillion things that they do.

So Costco, it's funny, if you look at. Business case studies or like, you know, I was watching some business YouTube channel, they're talking about this phenomenon private equity, taking things over and how basically like family run businesses are the only businesses you can really trust because they understand the human relational element of business.

Not everything is just a transaction to them. And then at the end of the video, they're like, oh and also Costco too. It just passed on it. Like, everyone's like, yeah, of course you can trust Costco. They, you know, they do what they say they're going to do. You, they're a trustworthy company.

And if you study, how was this done? It seems almost like a, just a magic trick that no one can understand. So, for example, like very famously, Costco sells this hot dog and soda combo in their food court for a $1.50. They've been selling it for a $1.50 since 1986. In 1986, a Big Mac was a $1.60. Roughly in California, big Mac cost $7 today, so the Costco hotdog should cost a $1.50.

And there's of course the famous story about the time when the COO of Costco asked the CEO if he could raise the price on it. He said, sure, you can raise the price, but I will kill you. Used colorful language and that. Anyway, it's become this like viral thing everyone knows about this hot dog. I was fascinated to learn how hard it.

To keep that price there, they don't just sell it as a lost leader. They've actually worked incredibly hard to keep this promise to customers, and you see that throughout their business practices. So for example, Costco very famously has what they call capped margins. They won't make more than 14% margin on anything. They sell 15% for a Kirkland signature when they're really going crazy.

So they'll sell like printer cartridges and electronic like high-end products that normally have a high margin with them. They don't take that high margin; they just pass the savings on to the customer. And again, this is something that people vaguely know, but the point of this book is to help us reinterpret the things we already know, to see the deeper truth.

So, everyone knows that they do this, but nobody emulates it. You, you won't find a single like strategy textbook. Nobody in that. They teach pricing in universities, business schools, they don't teach. Make your pricing as low as you possibly can. Do Costco style. We teach that margin is a source of strength, and yet we also teach the Jeff Bezos maxim that your margin is my opportunity. Which is, it is high margin, good or high margin, but we're like really confused about these points.

So, Costco figured out this whole system. And then the last thing I'll say about it that's really interesting is they have this ethos, this culture of taking care of customers, taking care of employees. Sol Price, who invented the Costco model originally, he was a former lawyer and he thought whose responsibility as a retailer was to be a fiduciary to the customer.

So, he actually felt like a lawyer, like he has a fiduciary duty not to make too much money, not to charge people too high of a price. So, they've captured this in this company at unprecedented scale. But also, people assume that Costco is safe from private equity and activist investors and all these outside forces and pressures because they have this strong ethos and they make so much money, but that could not be more wrong.

They are also protected by something I call the governance fortress. Costco is a perennial violator of all the corporate best practices that we teach in corporate governance. They have a, what's called a classified board. It's very difficult to attack them from the outside. Their board sees themselves not as maximizing returns to shareholders but being a bulwark against shareholder pressure so that management can take the long-term view.

This is Driven Wall Street crazy for decades, or these famous quotes from Wall Street analysts. One of my favorites was someone said, Costco is taking money that rightfully belongs to shareholders. Investing it in improving the product and customer experience. That's a criticism of Costco. And there was something even called the Harvard Shareholder Rights Project, which spent many years trying to dismantle the Costco governance Fortress.

And my favorite part of this, is that their theory of corporate governance is that the governance protections for management, lead to management entrenchment, they call it and entrenchment leads to poor performance. Now Costco has outperformed the 500 since the day it went public by like 60 times.

Not 60%, 60000%, 60 x versus says like this is one of the highest performing companies of all time being attacked for years, because the entrenchment causes poor performance. So, our entire governance, like way of thinking about corporate governance has become so backwards. We've become confused on these, on these basic points.

And in case people want to know, just to point this out there, there's been great academic research on this point. One of my favorite studies that I cite in the book is that since 2008, companies that have been rated to have good governance have been outperformed by those companies rated as bad governance. So, like we have this shareholder primacy, this idea that shareholders of the center of the universe, that all of our governance practices should be about rewarding shareholders, yet we are adapting practices that consistently destroy shareholder value. Does that strike you as odd? Sure did for me.

How Founders Can Build an Incorruptible Company from Day One

[00:15:31] Brian Ardinger: Let's kind of pivot and talk a little bit more about the founder today. Let's say they're trying to build a company. What are the things that they can do to, you know, they believe in the mission, they understand what they want to do, and ultimately not sell out and build these systems such that it will last. What can they do today to start building that foundation? 

[00:15:48] Eric Ries: Okay, so I really want to warn any founder who's listening to this do not assume that if you just do one, there's like one weird trick. If you do the one weird trick, you're going to be fine. There are two dimensions of this problem that founders have to get right and consistently get wrong.

The first is what I call the path of ethos. Like I was talking about Sol Price and his values. The first thing you have to do is to build something worth protecting. Okay. You can't just assume that if you make yourself emperor for life, everything will be fine. And I've talked a lot about this in the book, and it's very important to understand these details, that human organizations are literally alive.

They're like super organisms unto themselves, and it's very common for founders to lose control of them, like Frankenstein and his monster. Okay, so you don't want that to be you. So that's the domain of operational stuff. Culture. What Mary Parker Follett called a hundred years ago, the Invisible Leader. I talk a lot in the book about how to create a culture, a high-performance culture that leads even when no manager is present.

We have to get that stuff right. We have to establish our corporate purpose operationally speaking and legally speaking. So, you, you know, if you say, look, my goal is to build high quality products. Well guess what? By default, these days you get a corporate purpose, which is to maximize shareholder value, which is it.

And every founder's like, but I want to create shareholder value by creating great products. I'm like, great. You think that's not a very big deal, but you've just stated one of the most radical statements you possibly can. You are already rejecting so much of today's best practices. If you say, I want to serve customers and create shareholder value that way, so many people would say, sorry, too bad.

If someone wants to forcibly redirect you away from that, they can. So we have to establish what is our purpose? We have to make it operational, build it into the culture. But then the second component is that everything worth protecting is eventually going to need protection. I think founders have historically been painfully naive on this point.

So, we have to build structural safeguards into the sinews and bones and what I call the exoskeleton of the company. That's what the book really is about. The bulk of the book is, is actually about the how, not just the why, the how do we accomplish these things, how do we establish the techniques. I'm happy to talk about some of the specifics, but that's, that's broadly speaking, that's the categories of things we have to master.

Venture Capital Pressure, Founder Leverage, and Financial Gravity

[00:18:01] Brian Ardinger: So how would you counsel a founder who says, you know, hey, if I don't take this terms, or I don't take this money from this venture capitalist or whatever, and they're pushing me in this particular direction, I won't be able to survive. How do you combat against that tug and pull that is out there and, and ever present? 

[00:18:17] Eric Ries: I mean, I don't want to minimize it. Financial gravity is very real and it's very powerful. So I talk a lot about the specific techniques in the book. I actually, almost two years I was working on this book, I kept a diary, like a log of every objection that every company I counseled encountered from every actual investor.

I wrote them all down and just like, look, these are all the real objections we have to face. When I looked at the log at the end, and I'd probably put 20 of them in the book, what was really fascinating is very few of the objections were substantive. It wasn't like if you do this, your company won't have high performance, because by the way, we have really strong evidence. The academic research on purpose, mission-driven, mission protection as it relates to performance is exceptionally strong.

Companies that are protected by this structure, I recommended in the book, have almost a six times survival advantage. Six times more likely to make it to 50 years of age compared to conventionally structured companies.

So, it's not some, like, this is not some random theory, okay? We have really strong evidence for this. So, people don't say, this won't work. They always say stuff like, I don't know. I don't mind. But other investors might not like it. I love the word might. It's like, they might not like it. I'm like, well, does that mean they might like it?

Why don't we do it and then take it out if they don't like it? Right? Like, and so a lot of these things actually just require thinking from first principles. Like, does this objection actually make sense? Then do I have the power and leverage to resist it? And founders make mistakes in both of those dimensions.

First of all, they assume that people won't like things that they actually would if they could understand and explain them. Most founders are quite poor explaining why these mechanisms work because we don't have business vocabulary for it. That's why I spend so much time in the book trying to establish such vocabulary.

But then do I have the leverage? Founders have more leverage than they realize, because generally speaking, we live in a world where there are, there's more money chasing too few good ideas. So, founders who actually have the ability to raise money have more leverage than they think. Now, the problem is most founders, statistically speaking, can't raise any money at all.

So we spend most of our lives as founders unable to raise money and we developed this kind of like reflexive, defensive crouch. Like, oh no, I'm never going to be able to raise money. Investors are my superiors. Like, we just kind of feel this sense of inferiority and we don't realize when the switch flips. When we finally get to product market fit, we finally put ourselves in a situation where we can raise money, like we have no clue how much leverage we have. In fact, we're generally like, so suffering from PTSD by that point. 

We don't use the leverage we have, and if we do have leverage, we use it to raise valuations higher instead of protecting the soul of the enterprise. So that's a big part of what founders have to learn if they want to protect what's worth protecting.

AI, Emerging Technology, and the Urgency of Ethical Governance

[00:20:47] Brian Ardinger: The last section I want to talk about is the future. Obviously, things are moving so fast with AI and everything else. What are you seeing when it comes to new technologies and I guess the importance of this particular model? It seems to me that's much more important or would be in an environment where technologies like AI or climate tech or biotech have such more of a societal impact than just, Hey, here's a new app I want to try. 

[00:21:11] Eric Ries: Totally. Part of the reason I was able to write the book now is simply that so many more founders were willing to put these ideas into practice because they feel viscerally that these new technologies are too dangerous to be covered in the conventional way.

I tell this story in the book. I was on a panel discussion at the Vatican of all places, super cool venue for a conference and on the panel with me were like all the leading AI companies, Anthropic, Open AI, Palantir, Facebook, Google, I can't remember now who was on there, like quite a who's who of AI companies.

And then me. I was like, what am I? What am I doing here? But anyway, it's like I have a lot of these record scratch moments where I'm like, well, so there I was at the Vatican having this meeting. Anyway, I looked down the row and I realized, not a single one of these companies has standard governance, not one. Because they all understand that that would be profoundly dangerous, almost to the point of being unethical.

And so in order to attract the top talent, they've all had to make promises that they are going to use the technology in a way that is unencumbered from these pressures. So yeah, I do think as tech, and it's not really about AI specifically, obviously, who knows, this insane AI bubble could pop any minute, but the number of transformative technologies we are capable of building and financing is just so much higher. And that's true in biotech. It's true even in FinTech.

You know, like we're seeing things that can have these really catastrophic side effects. And so we have to get much more mature as a society about governing externalities, about figuring out what it means to make a profit. Like these really fundamental questions that cut to the question of like what does it mean to be a for-profit company? We better get that figured out pretty soon, or our civilization's in major danger.

Public Benefit Corporations and Changing Your Charter

[00:22:41] Brian Ardinger: And then last question is, so let's say most companies are already on a particular path. Haven't thought about creating an incorruptible company from the beginning. Are there things someone can do to start moving in that particular direction or changing the way they are currently structured. 

[00:22:55] Eric Ries: In the book, I thought a lot about this idea that it's always too early until it's too late. So generally speaking, if you speak up at any stage, whether you're a founder, an employee, a customer, anybody, if you ever speak up about these ideas, you'll generally be patted on the head and say, oh, it's too wor early to worry about something like that.

And next thing you know, it's too late. So the most important lesson of a whole book is to take action now. Right now, I don't care. Like even if your IPO is tomorrow, like it's not too late. It's so much easier to do it now than it is tomorrow. Almost every one of the issues in the book are easier to address today than later.

That's true for every stage, whether you're a public company that's been public for one year or 10 years, or a hundred years, it's always easier now than it will be later. It's a little bit like the best time to plant a tree. You know, you wish you'd done it when you founded the company, but the second best time is right now.

So, for example. I tell lot of stories in the book about companies whose official mission statement as they proclaimed it to the world, deviated from their legal mission statement. So, like Silicon Valley Bank famously destroyed itself. They had this mission to support the next generation of innovators or something like that, but their actual legal charter just said. You got to maximize shareholder value.

So, this deviation between their stated purpose and their actual purpose is ultimately for a lot of companies catastrophic. I have hundreds of examples in the book of this dissonance. So, one thing you could always do is just ask, what is our legal mission? State, what is our actual purpose?

And don't be padded on the head. Actually, find out good news, almost all the companies we're talking about are Delaware companies. You know, like every company has a charter file with the state governments. Often Delaware corporate charters are a matter of public record. If you don't know yours, you can go look it up and you will see like the first sentence of the charter will say something like, the such and such corporation is chartered to pursue blah.

Now here's the tricky part. Because of an insane series of legal rulings over the past 50 years, which I tell all this history is in the book, we have come to interpret a charter that says something like, the Acme Corporation is chartered to pursue any lawful purpose or act as meaning maximize shareholder value.

And you're like, well, it doesn't say that. I know. It doesn't say that, that's what those words mean. Governance has translated a bunch of words in ways that people find very, very difficult to understand from the outside. So make sure you actually understand what the charter actually says, and then you can encounter these insane situations where someone has a company that gets acquired by some evil company that they hate.

They're powerless to resist it. You know, and I always ask founders to do this exercise, to actually imagine that somebody like the Mote, whoever you consider to be the most evil company in the world, I'll use Philip Morris, the cigarette vendors, you know? But if you pick your favorite, it doesn't matter who it is, the most evil company in the world shows up and ask to buy your company for a dollar more per share than it's worth.

Are you excited to sell to them? Every founder, every customer, every executive, every board member's, always like, oh God, that's the worst thing I can imagine happening. And yet check your charter. I bet it says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in that situation. So, we have to change that. That, if I could pick, one thing people do is just change your charter for God's sake.

There's something called a public benefit corporation conversion, a PBC filing. It's literally a two page legal filing you can do in Delaware and in like 44 states. It could not be easier to just say, actually, here's our actual mission statement and we're going to put that in the charter. Please don't think that if you just do that, you're safe. That's not, but that's like at least one concrete, simple thing that is an absolute no-brainer. Everybody could do that.

Where to Learn More About Incorruptible

[00:26:21] Brian Ardinger: Eric, thank you for coming on telling us about the book. Tell us about this topic that I think is so important. It's going to be hopefully discussed a lot in the coming days and weeks ahead. If people want to find out more. What's the best way to do that? 

[00:26:31] Eric Ries: The book has a website at incorruptible.co and we have a mailing list where people can get all kinds of behind the scenes goodies and special extras and all the usual stuff. There's a secret chapter of stuff I had to cut out of the book. There's implementation guides, readers, guides. I'm very keen, especially for people who are not founders, to check this book out. Because one of the theses of the book is that people have more power, more influence over organizations than they realize. So all that kind of stuff is all available at incorruptible.co.

[00:26:59] Brian Ardinger: Thank you so much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to having further conversations and love what you're putting out there. Thanks very much. 

[00:27:05] Eric Ries: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, thanks. Thanks for a great interview. 

[00:27:11] Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Today's episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io or if you want to connect with Robyn Bolton, go to MileZero.io, and until next time, go out and innovate.

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement, and author of the new book, incorruptible, why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric and I talk about the challenges and opportunities of creating incorruptible company, the difference between value creation and value extraction, and how companies like Costco and Patagonia build value by violating conventional best practices. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact, let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Eric Rise

Eric Ries on Incorruptible, The Lean Startup, and Building Companies That Last

[00:01:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Eric Ries. If you followed this podcast, if you followed the world of. Startups and innovation you know of Eric. He's the author of the Lean Startup, the Startup Way, and he is got a brand new book out called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Welcome, Eric.

[00:01:17] Eric Ries: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

[00:01:18] Brian Ardinger: Eric, I'm super excited to have you on this show. I'm surprised we haven't had a chance to have you on before to talk about some of the previous work with Lean Startup and Startup Way, but I'm excited to talk about this new book because it takes off where the previous books let go.

If these books in the past show you how to build or scale new ventures, this book teaches you how to build companies to last without selling out. You know, you open the book talking about by saying you taught people how to build companies worth protecting, but not how to protect them. What did you miss about that first time around and how did this book come about based on what you've learned?

[00:01:52] Eric Ries: Well, thank you first of all, thanks for the kind words. And thanks for seeing it as a continuity, because that's really how it's felt to me. I feel like I've been on this journey now, you know, over the course of my career, and when I look back on it, I think I keep discovering things that I'm sure is the most powerful force in the universe.

So I feel like when I first learned to code program computers, I was like, this is the most powerful thing in the universe. And then I realized that in writing individual programs was nothing, if you could build, you know, technology platforms. And build whole scale, in large scale technology. I was in love with technology from an early age.

And over time as I watched, you know, so many technology products fail, I started to realize that no management is the most powerful force in the universe, right? Human beings make technology, and if you can't manage human beings, you can't do it. And this book came out of my recognition that although over the past 20 years we have gotten so much better at the science of management, and especially thanks to Lean Startup and tools like that. We've been able to really build brand new companies and take them public. Been able to revitalize more abundant old companies and making them more modern.

And yet I always felt like we were up against this other force that was even more powerful than management and what I didn't understand, what nobody ever told me I was, I was coming up as an entrepreneur, as an innovator, is that for mission-driven companies especially, success becomes a liability because the more golden the goose, the more temptation there is to butcher it.

And I got sick and tired of it. I felt like I was feeding one company after another into a meat grinder. Help people create these really wonderful companies and then have them you know, turn into something almost unrecognizable. And I just felt like we need to stop doing that. And so, this book is the culmination of a many, many year journey to try to figure out like, what is this force that causes this and what can we do about it to stop it from turning?

Why Eric Ries Uses the Word “Corruption” in Business

[00:03:39] Brian Ardinger: You label the book about corruption, you know, incorruptible. Why is it more accurate word than like mission creep or bad leadership? What about the word corruption?

[00:03:48] Eric Ries: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for asking that question because I do think it's something that a lot of people have struggled with, with the book, which is when we say the word corruption, people like think I'm talking about embezzlement or bribery, and of course those things are bad.

But one of the really deep insights that I've had, banging my head against this, I think I always think of that famous Mahler quote, you know, I'm banging against my head against the wall, and the wall is starting to give. That's how it felt to me, like it took me a really long time to understand that these actions that transform value creating economic activity into value destroying economic activity, that actually corrupts the foundation of our entire economic system.

Because when you ask people to defend capitalism, you know, this is going back hundreds of years now, all the way back to, you know, to Adam Smith, let alone Bastiat and Milton Friedman, and you, you name it, you name it. Someone who's made an attempt to give a moral defense of capitalism. We always say that when people are engaged in fully informed voluntary transactions, then both parties are better off, and that is why free commerce ultimately leads to value creation.

And that's like a very logical, very tidy argument. And yet it has preconditions. In order for a transaction to be value creating, it must be fully informed and it must be voluntary. And what we're seeing now in our modern economy is so many ways to make money without creating value. In fact, many of the ways that we consider to be just normal ways of making money are grandparents would've seen as theft, as crimes.

So I think we've kind of gradually lost the plot. And so to me, using a bracing word like corruption and, and naming the book Incorruptible, to me was what is necessary to say, look, these actions are not wrong just because they're immoral or even because they're illegal, but rather because they corrupt the economic logic of our whole civilization.

Value Creation vs Value Extraction in Modern Capitalism

[00:05:36] Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this difference between value extraction versus value creation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the dichotomy between those two and, and where the challenges lie.

[00:05:45] Eric Ries: Yeah. I saw this incredible video and he was telling this story about going out to dinner with a friend at one of the friend's favorite restaurants. They walked in the door, they sat down, they ordered. The guy took a bite of the food and he, he took, he took out his phone and, and the guy's telling the story. He's like, that's kind of rude, why you taking out your phone? He's like, has this restaurant been bought by private equity? He's like, what are you talking about? He's like, looking you up on his phone?

He's like, yep. Shows in the news article from one bite. He is like, the food is like a just a little worse than it used to be. The service, it just like something's wrong. And when he figured out what it was, boom. Bought by private equity. And so I tell a lot of stories in the book about these companies that are destroyed, like the thing that made them is lost.

Their ethos is lost. Not because they were failing in the marketplace, but because they were successful and therefore worth capturing. And so what I discovered in my work on this is that so many of our modern business best practices are designed to make it easy for people to do this, to make money by taking over or redirecting a company and moving it away from value creation.

We talk a lot in the book about the asset, the incredibly valuable asset, which is trustworthiness. And how organizations depend on this asset and yet don't measure it. They don't track it; they don't husband it. And so, it's very easy to trade on that trustworthiness. You find a brand that's highly trusted, you take it over.

You dupe people, you deceive them. You make them think it's the same thing as it was before, when actually it's not. And that goes back to that moral logic of capitalism. Well, I thought it was supposed to be a fully informed voluntary transaction. Well, if you deceive, then you're not being fully informed.

And if you make the product more addictive. An addict cannot consent. So, we live in an age of disinformation and addiction, and therefore the engine of capitalism is no longer turning the way it is designed to in our moral calculus.

Financial Gravity and Structural Forces That Corrupt Companies

[00:07:33] Brian Ardinger: What finally convinced you that this was like a structural problem rather than one of leadership?

[00:07:39] Eric Ries: I went looking for the answer, the same place everybody always does, leadership, culture, values, mission, you know, like I looked every, I looked like everywhere. And it's like strategy, spent a lot of time on strategy. The problem is that missions drift and founders die, and cultures decay. And if you want to know why, why, why?

When I first understood this, I called the phenomenon financial gravity. Like there's this force that is pulling us down that we cannot defy, and it, I went through a very dark period actually feeling like our financial system has this gravitational effect that's so powerful, nothing can resist it. In the same way that human beings discovered gravity of the fundamental forces in physics first.

We stand on this gigantic planet, so it's always pulling us down. We thought that gravity was the most powerful force of the universe, and it took us much longer to realize that when you do something as simple as stand up, your body generates a counterforce that is more powerful than a planet 10 to the 23rd times larger than you.

I don't know what the, you know, like, right. It's like, think about the disparity being you and the earth, and yet you can defy it as easily as breathing. What is this other force? And I started to notice, these companies that don't follow the script. They're like outlier companies that we all kind of actually know them already.

They're not like some obscure company you've never heard of. In almost every industry you have this like outlier company. Think about like Patagonia or Costco or Vanguard, where you're just like, oh yeah, everyone knows they're the exception. They're weird. They don't follow, and they don't follow Financial Gravity.

They don't exploit people for money. They endure for long periods of time. Scale doesn't seem to bother them. They don't get bureaucratic. And there's like all these weird things that they don't have that happen. I started to really want to know why. And what's crazy, this is the thing nobody believes, these outlier companies basically violate every single one of the best practices that we're taught are the best and only way to build a company.

And once I understood that and I was like, wait a second, if gravity is so powerful and inevitable and there's something we can do about it, there shouldn't be all these exceptions. And then I started to find out there's not just a couple. There are trillions of dollars of these exceptions that are just quietly plugging away, doing their thing every day, defying all these rules, and I just thought, wait a second. This can't be right. Something is deeply wrong here.

The Costco Model: Governance, Trust, and Long-Term Thinking

[00:09:49] Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit more about some of those companies like Costco or Patagonia and how they are different to give the audience a sense of what makes them incorruptible versus others.

[00:09:57] Eric Ries: Yeah. Yeah. Costco I, I think, is features a lot in the book and is a great story because it's something, a company that people know. Everyone drives by co you know what Costco is, everyone understand, but most people do not understand the vastness of Costco.

It is so much more successful than so many of them marvelously, overhyped companies we see in our daily life. You know, they have a $400 billion valuation, which, you know, that seems, people are like, oh, that sounds like a lot, but you know, these days, a billion here, a billionaire.

The stand on Costco that really blows my mind is their house brand Kirkland, Kirkland Signature. They make more money on Kirkland Signature. Then like almost all other consumer retail public companies, like Kirkland Signature, if it was its own company, would be bigger than Nike, bigger than United Airlines, bigger than Coca-Cola. Like it's a massive brand to do itself, and it's just one of a zillion things that they do.

So Costco, it's funny, if you look at. Business case studies or like, you know, I was watching some business YouTube channel, they're talking about this phenomenon private equity, taking things over and how basically like family run businesses are the only businesses you can really trust because they understand the human relational element of business.

Not everything is just a transaction to them. And then at the end of the video, they're like, oh and also Costco too. It just passed on it. Like, everyone's like, yeah, of course you can trust Costco. They, you know, they do what they say they're going to do. You, they're a trustworthy company.

And if you study, how was this done? It seems almost like a, just a magic trick that no one can understand. So, for example, like very famously, Costco sells this hot dog and soda combo in their food court for a $1.50. They've been selling it for a $1.50 since 1986. In 1986, a Big Mac was a $1.60. Roughly in California, big Mac cost $7 today, so the Costco hotdog should cost a $1.50.

And there's of course the famous story about the time when the COO of Costco asked the CEO if he could raise the price on it. He said, sure, you can raise the price, but I will kill you. Used colorful language and that. Anyway, it's become this like viral thing everyone knows about this hot dog. I was fascinated to learn how hard it.

To keep that price there, they don't just sell it as a lost leader. They've actually worked incredibly hard to keep this promise to customers, and you see that throughout their business practices. So for example, Costco very famously has what they call capped margins. They won't make more than 14% margin on anything. They sell 15% for a Kirkland signature when they're really going crazy.

So they'll sell like printer cartridges and electronic like high-end products that normally have a high margin with them. They don't take that high margin; they just pass the savings on to the customer. And again, this is something that people vaguely know, but the point of this book is to help us reinterpret the things we already know, to see the deeper truth.

So, everyone knows that they do this, but nobody emulates it. You, you won't find a single like strategy textbook. Nobody in that. They teach pricing in universities, business schools, they don't teach. Make your pricing as low as you possibly can. Do Costco style. We teach that margin is a source of strength, and yet we also teach the Jeff Bezos maxim that your margin is my opportunity. Which is, it is high margin, good or high margin, but we're like really confused about these points.

So, Costco figured out this whole system. And then the last thing I'll say about it that's really interesting is they have this ethos, this culture of taking care of customers, taking care of employees. Sol Price, who invented the Costco model originally, he was a former lawyer and he thought whose responsibility as a retailer was to be a fiduciary to the customer.

So, he actually felt like a lawyer, like he has a fiduciary duty not to make too much money, not to charge people too high of a price. So, they've captured this in this company at unprecedented scale. But also, people assume that Costco is safe from private equity and activist investors and all these outside forces and pressures because they have this strong ethos and they make so much money, but that could not be more wrong.

They are also protected by something I call the governance fortress. Costco is a perennial violator of all the corporate best practices that we teach in corporate governance. They have a, what's called a classified board. It's very difficult to attack them from the outside. Their board sees themselves not as maximizing returns to shareholders but being a bulwark against shareholder pressure so that management can take the long-term view.

This is Driven Wall Street crazy for decades, or these famous quotes from Wall Street analysts. One of my favorites was someone said, Costco is taking money that rightfully belongs to shareholders. Investing it in improving the product and customer experience. That's a criticism of Costco. And there was something even called the Harvard Shareholder Rights Project, which spent many years trying to dismantle the Costco governance Fortress.

And my favorite part of this, is that their theory of corporate governance is that the governance protections for management, lead to management entrenchment, they call it and entrenchment leads to poor performance. Now Costco has outperformed the 500 since the day it went public by like 60 times.

Not 60%, 60000%, 60 x versus says like this is one of the highest performing companies of all time being attacked for years, because the entrenchment causes poor performance. So, our entire governance, like way of thinking about corporate governance has become so backwards. We've become confused on these, on these basic points.

And in case people want to know, just to point this out there, there's been great academic research on this point. One of my favorite studies that I cite in the book is that since 2008, companies that have been rated to have good governance have been outperformed by those companies rated as bad governance. So, like we have this shareholder primacy, this idea that shareholders of the center of the universe, that all of our governance practices should be about rewarding shareholders, yet we are adapting practices that consistently destroy shareholder value. Does that strike you as odd? Sure did for me.

How Founders Can Build an Incorruptible Company from Day One

[00:15:31] Brian Ardinger: Let's kind of pivot and talk a little bit more about the founder today. Let's say they're trying to build a company. What are the things that they can do to, you know, they believe in the mission, they understand what they want to do, and ultimately not sell out and build these systems such that it will last. What can they do today to start building that foundation?

[00:15:48] Eric Ries: Okay, so I really want to warn any founder who's listening to this do not assume that if you just do one, there's like one weird trick. If you do the one weird trick, you're going to be fine. There are two dimensions of this problem that founders have to get right and consistently get wrong.

The first is what I call the path of ethos. Like I was talking about Sol Price and his values. The first thing you have to do is to build something worth protecting. Okay. You can't just assume that if you make yourself emperor for life, everything will be fine. And I've talked a lot about this in the book, and it's very important to understand these details, that human organizations are literally alive.

They're like super organisms unto themselves, and it's very common for founders to lose control of them, like Frankenstein and his monster. Okay, so you don't want that to be you. So that's the domain of operational stuff. Culture. What Mary Parker Follett called a hundred years ago, the Invisible Leader. I talk a lot in the book about how to create a culture, a high-performance culture that leads even when no manager is present.

We have to get that stuff right. We have to establish our corporate purpose operationally speaking and legally speaking. So, you, you know, if you say, look, my goal is to build high quality products. Well guess what? By default, these days you get a corporate purpose, which is to maximize shareholder value, which is it.

And every founder's like, but I want to create shareholder value by creating great products. I'm like, great. You think that's not a very big deal, but you've just stated one of the most radical statements you possibly can. You are already rejecting so much of today's best practices. If you say, I want to serve customers and create shareholder value that way, so many people would say, sorry, too bad.

If someone wants to forcibly redirect you away from that, they can. So we have to establish what is our purpose? We have to make it operational, build it into the culture. But then the second component is that everything worth protecting is eventually going to need protection. I think founders have historically been painfully naive on this point.

So, we have to build structural safeguards into the sinews and bones and what I call the exoskeleton of the company. That's what the book really is about. The bulk of the book is, is actually about the how, not just the why, the how do we accomplish these things, how do we establish the techniques. I'm happy to talk about some of the specifics, but that's, that's broadly speaking, that's the categories of things we have to master.

Venture Capital Pressure, Founder Leverage, and Financial Gravity

[00:18:01] Brian Ardinger: So how would you counsel a founder who says, you know, hey, if I don't take this terms, or I don't take this money from this venture capitalist or whatever, and they're pushing me in this particular direction, I won't be able to survive. How do you combat against that tug and pull that is out there and, and ever present?

[00:18:17] Eric Ries: I mean, I don't want to minimize it. Financial gravity is very real and it's very powerful. So I talk a lot about the specific techniques in the book. I actually, almost two years I was working on this book, I kept a diary, like a log of every objection that every company I counseled encountered from every actual investor.

I wrote them all down and just like, look, these are all the real objections we have to face. When I looked at the log at the end, and I'd probably put 20 of them in the book, what was really fascinating is very few of the objections were substantive. It wasn't like if you do this, your company won't have high performance, because by the way, we have really strong evidence. The academic research on purpose, mission-driven, mission protection as it relates to performance is exceptionally strong.

Companies that are protected by this structure, I recommended in the book, have almost a six times survival advantage. Six times more likely to make it to 50 years of age compared to conventionally structured companies.

So, it's not some, like, this is not some random theory, okay? We have really strong evidence for this. So, people don't say, this won't work. They always say stuff like, I don't know. I don't mind. But other investors might not like it. I love the word might. It's like, they might not like it. I'm like, well, does that mean they might like it?

Why don't we do it and then take it out if they don't like it? Right? Like, and so a lot of these things actually just require thinking from first principles. Like, does this objection actually make sense? Then do I have the power and leverage to resist it? And founders make mistakes in both of those dimensions.

First of all, they assume that people won't like things that they actually would if they could understand and explain them. Most founders are quite poor explaining why these mechanisms work because we don't have business vocabulary for it. That's why I spend so much time in the book trying to establish such vocabulary.

But then do I have the leverage? Founders have more leverage than they realize, because generally speaking, we live in a world where there are, there's more money chasing too few good ideas. So, founders who actually have the ability to raise money have more leverage than they think. Now, the problem is most founders, statistically speaking, can't raise any money at all.

So we spend most of our lives as founders unable to raise money and we developed this kind of like reflexive, defensive crouch. Like, oh no, I'm never going to be able to raise money. Investors are my superiors. Like, we just kind of feel this sense of inferiority and we don't realize when the switch flips. When we finally get to product market fit, we finally put ourselves in a situation where we can raise money, like we have no clue how much leverage we have. In fact, we're generally like, so suffering from PTSD by that point.

We don't use the leverage we have, and if we do have leverage, we use it to raise valuations higher instead of protecting the soul of the enterprise. So that's a big part of what founders have to learn if they want to protect what's worth protecting.

AI, Emerging Technology, and the Urgency of Ethical Governance

[00:20:47] Brian Ardinger: The last section I want to talk about is the future. Obviously, things are moving so fast with AI and everything else. What are you seeing when it comes to new technologies and I guess the importance of this particular model? It seems to me that's much more important or would be in an environment where technologies like AI or climate tech or biotech have such more of a societal impact than just, Hey, here's a new app I want to try.

[00:21:11] Eric Ries: Totally. Part of the reason I was able to write the book now is simply that so many more founders were willing to put these ideas into practice because they feel viscerally that these new technologies are too dangerous to be covered in the conventional way.

I tell this story in the book. I was on a panel discussion at the Vatican of all places, super cool venue for a conference and on the panel with me were like all the leading AI companies, Anthropic, Open AI, Palantir, Facebook, Google, I can't remember now who was on there, like quite a who's who of AI companies.

And then me. I was like, what am I? What am I doing here? But anyway, it's like I have a lot of these record scratch moments where I'm like, well, so there I was at the Vatican having this meeting. Anyway, I looked down the row and I realized, not a single one of these companies has standard governance, not one. Because they all understand that that would be profoundly dangerous, almost to the point of being unethical.

And so in order to attract the top talent, they've all had to make promises that they are going to use the technology in a way that is unencumbered from these pressures. So yeah, I do think as tech, and it's not really about AI specifically, obviously, who knows, this insane AI bubble could pop any minute, but the number of transformative technologies we are capable of building and financing is just so much higher. And that's true in biotech. It's true even in FinTech.

You know, like we're seeing things that can have these really catastrophic side effects. And so we have to get much more mature as a society about governing externalities, about figuring out what it means to make a profit. Like these really fundamental questions that cut to the question of like what does it mean to be a for-profit company? We better get that figured out pretty soon, or our civilization's in major danger.

Public Benefit Corporations and Changing Your Charter

[00:22:41] Brian Ardinger: And then last question is, so let's say most companies are already on a particular path. Haven't thought about creating an incorruptible company from the beginning. Are there things someone can do to start moving in that particular direction or changing the way they are currently structured.

[00:22:55] Eric Ries: In the book, I thought a lot about this idea that it's always too early until it's too late. So generally speaking, if you speak up at any stage, whether you're a founder, an employee, a customer, anybody, if you ever speak up about these ideas, you'll generally be patted on the head and say, oh, it's too wor early to worry about something like that.

And next thing you know, it's too late. So the most important lesson of a whole book is to take action now. Right now, I don't care. Like even if your IPO is tomorrow, like it's not too late. It's so much easier to do it now than it is tomorrow. Almost every one of the issues in the book are easier to address today than later.

That's true for every stage, whether you're a public company that's been public for one year or 10 years, or a hundred years, it's always easier now than it will be later. It's a little bit like the best time to plant a tree. You know, you wish you'd done it when you founded the company, but the second best time is right now.

So, for example. I tell lot of stories in the book about companies whose official mission statement as they proclaimed it to the world, deviated from their legal mission statement. So, like Silicon Valley Bank famously destroyed itself. They had this mission to support the next generation of innovators or something like that, but their actual legal charter just said. You got to maximize shareholder value.

So, this deviation between their stated purpose and their actual purpose is ultimately for a lot of companies catastrophic. I have hundreds of examples in the book of this dissonance. So, one thing you could always do is just ask, what is our legal mission? State, what is our actual purpose?

And don't be padded on the head. Actually, find out good news, almost all the companies we're talking about are Delaware companies. You know, like every company has a charter file with the state governments. Often Delaware corporate charters are a matter of public record. If you don't know yours, you can go look it up and you will see like the first sentence of the charter will say something like, the such and such corporation is chartered to pursue blah.

Now here's the tricky part. Because of an insane series of legal rulings over the past 50 years, which I tell all this history is in the book, we have come to interpret a charter that says something like, the Acme Corporation is chartered to pursue any lawful purpose or act as meaning maximize shareholder value.

And you're like, well, it doesn't say that. I know. It doesn't say that, that's what those words mean. Governance has translated a bunch of words in ways that people find very, very difficult to understand from the outside. So make sure you actually understand what the charter actually says, and then you can encounter these insane situations where someone has a company that gets acquired by some evil company that they hate.

They're powerless to resist it. You know, and I always ask founders to do this exercise, to actually imagine that somebody like the Mote, whoever you consider to be the most evil company in the world, I'll use Philip Morris, the cigarette vendors, you know? But if you pick your favorite, it doesn't matter who it is, the most evil company in the world shows up and ask to buy your company for a dollar more per share than it's worth.

Are you excited to sell to them? Every founder, every customer, every executive, every board member's, always like, oh God, that's the worst thing I can imagine happening. And yet check your charter. I bet it says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in that situation. So, we have to change that. That, if I could pick, one thing people do is just change your charter for God's sake.

There's something called a public benefit corporation conversion, a PBC filing. It's literally a two page legal filing you can do in Delaware and in like 44 states. It could not be easier to just say, actually, here's our actual mission statement and we're going to put that in the charter. Please don't think that if you just do that, you're safe. That's not, but that's like at least one concrete, simple thing that is an absolute no-brainer. Everybody could do that.

Where to Learn More About Incorruptible

[00:26:21] Brian Ardinger: Eric, thank you for coming on telling us about the book. Tell us about this topic that I think is so important. It's going to be hopefully discussed a lot in the coming days and weeks ahead. If people want to find out more. What's the best way to do that?

[00:26:31] Eric Ries: The book has a website at incorruptible.co and we have a mailing list where people can get all kinds of behind the scenes goodies and special extras and all the usual stuff. There's a secret chapter of stuff I had to cut out of the book. There's implementation guides, readers, guides. I'm very keen, especially for people who are not founders, to check this book out. Because one of the theses of the book is that people have more power, more influence over organizations than they realize. So all that kind of stuff is all available at incorruptible.co.

[00:26:59] Brian Ardinger: Thank you so much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to having further conversations and love what you're putting out there. Thanks very much.

[00:27:05] Eric Ries: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, thanks. Thanks for a great interview.

[00:27:11] Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Today's episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io or if you want to connect with Robyn Bolton, go to MileZero.io, and until next time, go out and innovate.