Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

The guest discusses the challenges of being in a company that won't die, emphasizing the negative impact on mental health. They also talk about the lean startup methodology, misconceptions about it, and the potential impact of AI on product development. Eric Ries reflects on his work on the long-term stock exchange and his involvement with AI companies, as well as the impact of his ideas on startup culture. The speaker reflects on their initial expectations of leading a revolution with their ideas, but instead found that their ideas became widely accepted and integrated into the culture. They discuss the importance of validation through the impact their book has had on individuals, rather than seeking external recognition.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The speaker emphasizes the importance of customer feedback and experimentation in the startup world. They discuss the challenges of creating a minimum viable product (MVP) and the need to understand customer needs. The podcast also touches on the psychological defense mechanism of denying failure and the challenges faced by founders of failing startups. It highlights the importance of recognizing when a company is not going to succeed and the mental health crisis among founders.

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01:00:00 - 01:30:00

The podcast explores the concept of pivoting in startups, where a change in strategy occurs without a change in vision. It emphasizes the importance of self-discovery, learning from failure, and making trade-offs in the process of building a company. The conversation also touches on the impact of AI on organizational values and the need for ethical action in the face of uncertainty. The guest provides advice for founders considering a pivot, highlighting the importance of self-awareness and decisive action. The potential of AI for summarization and its implications for management are also discussed.

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01:30:00 - 02:00:00

The podcast explores the importance of trust, moral responsibility, and ethical implications in tech companies. It emphasizes the need for organizations to embody their promises and prioritize human flourishing over profit. The speaker advocates for a new movement in the industry that focuses on creating companies centered around human well-being. They also discuss the significance of proper governance structures and protections for non-employee stakeholders. Examples of companies with alternative corporate governance practices are mentioned, challenging traditional shareholder primacy theory.

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02:00:00 - 02:14:13

In this episode, the podcast hosts discuss their favorite recent movie or TV show, share their favorite interview question, and recommend a well-made humidifier. The guest talks about their favorite life motto and a concept they thought would gain more popularity. They explain the idea of engagement loops and emphasize the importance of seeking truth and being open to new ideas. They encourage listeners to explore the concepts of Lean Startup and embrace change and innovation.

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people act like you're having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen to you and like man

that's not even in the top 10. Like it's bad. I mean, I've done it. It's awful. Okay. It's really bad,

but far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie undead company that you hate,

but you can't leave. Have I met people like that? And like, we're having a mental health crisis

among founders that's like not talked about enough. You know, people started talking about like the

downside mental health risk, obviously the stress of being a founder is hard, but like look what's

happening to the people that are so-called successes. Like when you build a company and you

sell it out and it becomes something that you find abhorrent, like, yeah, maybe you get rich,

but it's not good. And so building a company you hate that becomes a maligned force in the

world, you know, that you have to go pretend you weren't involved with or like you feel

complicit in what like that's way, way worse. And I wish more founders would take that more

seriously early on. Today, my guest is Eric Reese. If you're not familiar with his work,

I would be shocked. He is most famous for creating the lean startup methodology and movement and

also his incredibly influential book, The Lean Startup. He also coined more terms and concepts

that are part of the tech culture than anyone I could think of. He currently spends his time

advising founders and startups, he was a former founder and CTO, and currently is the founder

and executive chairman of the long-term stock exchange. This is now my favorite episode of the

podcast and I can't wait for you to hear it. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground,

including the current state of the lean startup movement, where he sees things heading, what

Eric would redo if he could do it over again, misconceptions about the methodology that frustrate

him most, how AI will likely impact product development and startups, how to think about

MVPs correctly, when to pivot and when to stay the course, also how to build a business with

values that are aligned with human flourishing. Also, tons of amazing stories and lessons,

and there's just so much gold in this conversation. And so with that, I bring you Eric

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slash Lenny. Eric Ries, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. This just feels very surreal to have you on the podcast. It feels

like a surreal experience. You're such a legend in product and in startups, and I'm just really

excited to get to learn from you and for listeners to get to learn from you. And my first question,

just what are you up to these days? I know you work on the long-term stock exchange. What else

is going on in Eric Ries' life? Yeah, you know, if you can believe it, the lean startup came out in

2011. So it's been a little while now, and it's been such a crazy ride. And basically every year

since it came out, I keep thinking, all right, that's the end. Surely that's enough. And just

each year, it gets crazier and crazier, and new things come my way. So yeah, I definitely,

you know, I'm building the long-term stock exchange at LTSC, I'm sure we'll talk about.

And, you know, I spend a lot of time still with founders and with big companies, X, you know,

trying to answer their questions about how to build companies in the right way. Obviously,

been sucked into a lot of AI stuff of late, as everybody is. And one of the interesting things

that actually surprised me is I spent a lot of time, the last 10 years, working on the issues

of governance and corporate governance and how companies should be structured, not really with

an eye towards technology in particular, but just, you know, with long-termism and humanism really

at its core. And it turns out that those questions have just become like really acute for AI companies.

So because of my work on governance, I wound up meeting with and getting to work with some of

the top AI companies that's been really interesting. But yeah, I feel like I just, I go where the

issues that are on people's minds go and it kind of pulls me into new and really interesting things

all the time. Amazing. Okay. So I'm going to want to talk about all those things as we get into this.

Something I wanted to mention is I feel like people don't give you enough credit for how many

core concepts of startups and product building you've either invented or popularized. So what I

know, obviously lean methodology, then there's the term MVP, then there's the term pivot.

And then also, I think A-B testing, customer development, continuous deployment, vanity

metrics as a term. I'm guessing there's many more. And then the long-term stock exchange.

And I think the theme I get from this is there's a lot of first principles thinking

that you've done. And so just a couple of questions here. One is, did you think you'd have this much

impact on startup culture and language? And then just where do you think this comes from,

this first principles thinking that you seem to be really good at?

Well, first of all, thank you for saying all that. That's giving me too much credit,

but I like the idea that it's going to balance out the too little credit I not

necessarily get somewhere else. That's great. You know, no, I mean, that's your question. No,

I didn't know this was going to happen. This is so embarrassing to admit now, but just to give

you a sense of how different the world is now than at the time of the financial crisis.

I was so embarrassed to be blogging that I didn't put my name on the blog. I published it

anonymously because it's like, it wasn't a thing that people didn't. People told me it would be

career suicide. And there were so few startup bloggers at that time that like the top three

all reached out to me personally because they saw it in their referrer logs on their website.

That's how little traffic they got that like when a new person started writing about their thing

and linking to them, they were like, who is this guy? What's going on? It was a very different,

it was a very different time. And I had just finished a startup. I had left a startup that

was being successful. And I had this reputation among VCs that I could make engineering teams

be super naturally productive. I had like the magic pixie dust. And so they would ask me to

come in and work with their teams. And I would be like, no, listen, honestly, I'm not that special.

What's nothing to do with me? It's just, you know, that this framework, I have these ideas that

are helpful on a team if they adopt them. And they were like pat me on the head and be like,

yeah, kid, I'm sure that's great. But can you please bring the magic pixie dust to my company?

You know, anyway, and I would go and have these meetings and I'm not making this up.

People would yell at me in the meeting, I would get yelled back, I would be like asked,

not very kindly to leave. And I'd be like, I don't understand what are you yelling like,

why are you mad at me? You asked me for this meeting. And they'd be like, what I'm like,

I'm just telling you what I witnessed with my own eyes that we at IMV, we ship product 50 times a

day on average at a time when people were like, lucky to be doing it monthly if they were really

advanced. Remember, like it wasn't that long ago that we put the year the product came out in the

name of the product. It tells you what cycle times used to be that was considered normal and people

were like, that's impossible. That could never work. And at that time, I wasn't even propounding a

theory or anything. I was just explaining what I had seen and people couldn't couldn't believe it.

And so I had this great idea. If I write some of these stories down, then when someone asked me

for these me, I was doing these meetings all the time. I didn't understand the way Silicon Valley

worked at that time. I didn't understand why this was happening to me, having these meetings. And I

tell write the story down and then I'll send people the essay. And if they think it's crazy,

then we don't have to have the meeting. I won't get yelled at. Like that was really as far ahead

as I was thinking at that time. And then, you know, it basically took over my life. And I was

being asked to speak up if people really wanted to unmask the anonymity, who is this person?

And so I came clean. I identified myself and started writing and speaking and working with

companies. And it just it became it became a whirlwind. The first principle is part of it. I

just I don't know. I've always been wired that way. I feel like maybe I'm a failed scientist.

Like I wish I was actually good at chemistry or something. I could have actually been a real

scientist. But I always really had a respect for the truth for scientific thinking. That was

a big cultural value that I was raised with my parents or doctors, you know, just definitely

part of my upbringing. And I was really into reading stuff that that worked that way. So it

was very natural for me, I felt like as I had success as an entrepreneur, I wanted to know why

does this work. And what people give me advice, you know, all the advice used to be of the form

that Steve Jobs once did this thing. So if you do it too, you'll be like Steve Jobs. And it's like,

well, he also wore the black turtleneck. Is that is that also part of the like what

helped me understand why does it work? And is it still appropriated? And does it make sense for

that industry or not? I didn't like these just so stories. And I realized looking back, I didn't

have this understanding at the time, but looking back, I feel like first principles thinking it

really has two components that people pretend are one thing. And it's more one than the other.

A lot of my work is just descriptive. It's not actually telling people what to do. It's simply

giving a name and a concept to a thing that already happens. Like that's the funniest part in the

early wave of criticism against lean startup, people were very angry at the idea that I was

saying that a startup is an experiment. Like you can't treat a startup like an experiment.

I was like, well, you can treat it however you want. But it is an experiment. People are like,

well, I don't think it, you know, like people don't like the concept of pivot. There's still

this anti pivot people, anti MVP people ever once in a while come out of the work still

to complain about it. It's like, well, I'm not telling you that you should pivot. I'm just saying

like that is what it's called when you change the strategy, but try to have fidelity to the

vision that we it needs a name because we do it all the time. And even when we don't do it,

we talk about doing it and we can't reason about it. And we can't. And so that like this is

descriptive part. And then that's the real work, honestly, is just saying like, what is it? Like

to me, the big question from the beginning was like, what is a startup really? Why is it so

different from a big company? Why is why did none of the best practices that I learned in my career

work? It wasn't just like a survival mechanism, I want to know. And then once you've identified

what it is and laid out the the original principles of like what you're trying to do,

the prescriptive parts are just a matter of deductive logic. It's like, well, okay, given that

we've made this hypothesis, like what is that? What are the implications of that? And of course,

the prescriptive parts are important because that's how you learn whether your hypothesis is correct.

So that's the other thing I think people don't appreciate people. We will call me a first

principles thinker, which I love that there's a big compliment, but I feel like it conjures up

for people this idea that I like sit in a cave for years and years and like conjure up the magic

idea. It's like, no, I wish people had all the outtakes of all the concepts I've tried. At least

start up without my first try, the conceptual vocabulary was not the first time I got it right.

It came through a lot of trial and error, a lot of trying to figure out what works and doesn't

work first in my own career, my own work, then trying to give advice to other people and trying

to translate what worked for me to see what would work for them. And then to answer the questions

that I thought were the natural ones, under what circumstances does it work and when would it not

be appropriate? What predictions does a theory make that we could then go see if we're true or not

true? And then the kind of the bigger picture thing is like, what are we really doing here?

Like, what does success even look like? And so like that, I think is the thing we all really

grapple with is, you know, it's very easy to come up with a theory or a method or a process that

produces the maximum of something. But then it's like, what is that? Is that thing good? You know,

is that actually helping us accomplish some kind of goal? And so that, you know, I think that

first principle thinking is very helpful for that too. But yeah, I don't know, I guess I've, but to

really answer your question, the truth, true answers, I don't know. I was just, I've just always felt

like I was wired that way. I have a love of ideas and want to know why things work.

So to me, a couple of takeaways from what you just shared, one is just your wire to think in

a specific way of thinking very logically, scientifically. I have a similar feeling where

someone tells me a story, like the way I started writing partly is people kept asking me questions

about how Airbnb did stuff because they're building their marketplace. I'm like, here's what they did,

but who knows if that was the way to have done it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Did they succeed

because of that or in spite of it? Let's dig into the lean startup method and methodology.

Feels like we haven't heard an update on just like how things are going, where it's going,

this how popular it continues to be. I'm curious, just what's your sense of the state of the lean

methodology and the lean startup movement? It's an interesting question. You know, we used to do a

lean startup conference every year and then I stopped because of COVID and we haven't resumed yet.

So it was like, we used to have an annual opportunity to bring people together,

assess the state of things, hear the latest updates and stories. I really feel the lack of it.

I miss it. We tried to do online versions, but it just wasn't, it didn't feel right to me.

And that's partly, you know, it's COVID and the thing that our world has been going through

the last years, but it's also partly, I didn't understand what it would be like to start a

movement until I'd actually done it. And I just, I remember the first conferences we did, the first

events we did had the feeling of a religious revival. People were like, we've got the new

thing, we're going to stick it to the man. And I really thought, okay, my job is going to be to

lead these hordes into battle. I really had like a martial metaphor. I used it just a second ago,

combat of ideas. I was ready for like the old ideas are going to like fight us to the death

and we're going to win it. And it's not like that at all. We charge onto the field and no other army

ever came to charge us back. Like it just, we won by default, because the people who are doing it

the old way didn't really like it or want, like it was very few defenders of the old way. Like

very people came out and said, actually, no stage gate is actually still the correct product idea.

And you've, you know, you've got it wrong. It just, it never, it never happened. And in fact,

in the high, the fancy startup people went from dismissing it as like, totally pointless

to complaining that it was overhyped and over before ever passing through the intervening

stage of finding out what it was. That was really interesting. I'll never forget like tech crunch,

like had an article this is years and years ago about how like lean startup is overhyped. And I

was like, you haven't even talked like that's about the first entry point to talking about it.

I was like, could you, could you at least learn to use the word pivot correctly and then,

then criticize it for being overhyped? Is that all possible? So it went from like insurgent

revival to just the default thing that people did, even the people that disagree have to carry

the meme in order to criticize it. So it's, it's, it was fascinating to find myself on the other

side of this thing. And, and you know, when I would meet young founders coming into the industry

for the first time, and they're like, seems obvious. And I'm like, what was only five years ago

that people thought this was like, crazy, so crazy, they're yelling at me. Now you think it's

obvious, like it's really interesting to have something go from controversial to obvious.

And you know, and of course, like tons of people who were really opposed to it at the beginning

came back, you know, now they say that they knew it all along and they were my big, you know,

just you see, you see how it changes people's minds. So it's hard to generate that religious

energy and excitement around something that everyone views as obvious. And it really was

hard for my just because it's an ego matter, I want the validation of the winning and the this.

And I realized at a certain point that like, the victory is not that this fancy company,

you know, used it or whatever, like the victory actually is in the stories that people tell me

about how the book was helpful to them. And that's, that's really, that's the whole ball game,

we don't have to do no one, no one had to lose in order for us to win. You know, there's not

people with some used to, I don't do this, people don't do this as much anymore, but occasionally

someone still who wants to like make a fight between lean startup and agile or agile and

design thinking or this and that. And you know, I tried really hard if you look at lean startup,

it is full of citations and connections to Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and design thinking

and customer development and DevOps and software craftsmanship and every everything I could find

is I really wanted to show how these things work together. And then we went through a phase where

people wanted, wanted me to like make it into a religion for real. People used to write me and say,

so and so on the internet is writing about lean startup and they're wrong, you need to make them

stop. It's like, what, what power do you think I have to make someone stop writing? And I think

they can write whatever they want. And then the other thing that people said was, well, lean startup

is about this particular set of practices. If someone finds a new practice, they're a heretic and

need to be excommunicated. And it's like, guys, no, no, no, we, I wrote extensively in the book,

did you read? It's a scientific theory, which means that, that whatever works is lean startup.

So if someone comes up with something new and it works, we can't be threatened and upset about it,

we have to adopt it. Well, when you have that attitude that whatever works is the thing that

like the truth is what matters and like people's quiet moments of helpfulness, like that's,

that's our metric of success. It kind of takes the like hype and drama and, you know, stuff that

drives like press coverage and what takes it all out of it. And I don't miss it at all. Like,

I think it's, I feel much happier doing that than I ever did when we, when I used to travel a lot

and do a lot more public stuff. And I think partly again, partly the changes COVID and not, you

know, conferences went away for a while. So it was like a quiet, quiet time. But I feel like it's

actually been really amazing. Like that's what victory looks like. It's not about they don't

throw you a parade and say the thing and even though people who are your critics just don't

grumble about it. But like at the end of the day, the new entrepreneurs who come in just take for

granted that this is the conceptual vocabulary of entrepreneurship, and then they do with it what

they will. And I've learned to really, you know, appreciate that as much as my ego of course likes

to get into fights with people. It's like, no, that's actually that's that's better. And that's

what winning looks like. Yeah, it's so interesting that it's just you've done so well in communicating

these ideas that it's just become part of the culture. And people don't even think about, oh,

Eric Rees came up with all these things. I also feel like people push back at you on the things

they disagree with. And then they never give you credit for like, the things that work great. It's

only like, Oh, no, MVPs don't work anymore. Yeah, yeah, people once a year at least, someone still

writes to me and says that they we should have used a different term for MVP that the misconception

the misconceptions around MVP are driven by the choice of the term. I always write them back and

say like, please tell me the better term and popularize it. And I'll use it. It's a great idea.

Like, I'm more aware of the limitations than anybody else. And I'll tell you another thing

that I think people don't appreciate. I know everyone wants to be a thought leader these days.

It's like a disease. When Clay Christensen died, you know, I knew him and admired him a great deal.

And, you know, his endorsement of my work was like one of the most important, like for me,

like from the old guard of management thinkers for him to say that it was worthwhile was like

really a big deal to me. And yet, there was this big debate is now a little bit older now about

whether he's responsible for all the bad things people have done in the name of disruption.

And the first part of me is like, that's an outrageous slander on clay, like that's so unfair.

A bunch of tech bros like use disruption as a code word for all kinds of dumb stuff has nothing to

do with his theory has nothing to do with his work. It's like, have they even read the work, man?

So so I wanted to like I was one of his defenders, you know, and especially after he passed, I was

feeling I was very emotional about it's not fair. But then the more that I've sat with it, the more

I thought, gosh, maybe we are a little bit responsible for the things we put into the world.

And it's terrifying because of course, you can't control what people do. You can't control like

people, a lot of people are willfully ignorant. Whenever someone says something where I'm like,

gosh, five seconds on Wikipedia, and they could have found out the truth about the thing they're

talking about. So, you know, we live in an era where ignorance is optional. That's cool.

But also a little bit scary. So like, I think taking on that responsibility, this is true for

anyone who makes a product, I think it's not actually unique to authors at all, when you

make something put out into the world. On the one hand, you don't have any control about what

happens next. And yet I do think we bear a certain responsibility about was it, in fact,

net positive, it wasn't helpful to people. And so I try it's like part of what motivates me to try

to really get it right. And not just get it right for my own satisfaction, but get it right as

evidenced by what happens when people use it. And that's why I mean, that's why testing and

experimentation is like such a big part of my life and my theory. But to me, that's how we

we square the circle of our responsibility in a highly uncertain world is you go find out what

happened when people use the idea. And if it's not right, you know, even out even after their

misunderstandings, it's still not right, then you've got to make it better and find a way to

communicate it more clearly. So it's kind of an eternal challenge, but I think an important one.

Along the same lines, is there a misconception of

lean startup or any of the other things you put out that you just kind of really frustrates you

that just is a recurring misconception that people just continue to get wrong?

You know, I wrote an article, God, five or 10 years ago, I can't even remember how many years

ago it was like top misconceptions about lean startup. And it was like, number one, lean means

cheap. So you're doing these sort of I mean, you're not raising money. It's like, that's,

that's not true. And then, you know, I'll kind of remember what they are. And they're all still

prevalent, you know, like nothing's changed. I could write that same article today. It's like

lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary,

you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima. And, you know, whatever,

it's just like, I read it in somebody's book that they're like, that's what lean is about.

And I was like, man, did I forget to write it in the book? I was so gaslighted that I went,

I actually went back and cracked open a copy of lean startup. And I was like, on what page do I

address this? It was like on page nine in the introduction, the first things in the book,

I was like, okay, I did say it. So like, that's pretty common, you know, that turn the crank

thing about optimization, that's pretty common. And then like pivots, people perennially misunderstand

what a pivot is. And like, what, again, whether that's a descriptive or a prescriptive thing,

you know, it's is really tricky. And so, you know, like, it's like, those are, I feel like at this

point, people are just being willfully ignorant. It's like, it's okay to criticize lean startup,

there's no problem, it doesn't bother me, I think you should, it's good to do this,

healthy to do so, but like to just trot out those same old things, you know, it doesn't.

I'm like, what are you like, how does that advance the state of the art? And how does that help

entrepreneurs in any way? And it's like, and I'm not even really sure what they're trying to

accomplish by doing that. That's the thing that I've grown confused about is like, what is the

purpose of this discourse, other than just to kind of be reflexively contrarian, I don't know.

Get some likes on Twitter, flash X. Maybe you're right.

So along those same lines, so you wrote the book 12 years ago, if you could go back

and change something in the book, is there something that you would want to change?

Oh, man, I would, I would change everything about it. It's why actually why I won't let myself do it.

When I, when I was a consumer of books, I hated it when authors would come out with a second edition

that would destroy what was beautiful about the first edition, including the mistakes.

Because like in their attempt to put disclaimers on everything and make everything more nuanced,

you'd like totally lose the thrust of the argument of the thing they were trying to do and their

own, you know, like becoming famous, like really messes with you psychologically. So like, you

don't, you don't want to expose your readers to that, like, oh, go get therapy, don't, don't

make me don't like destroy the thing that made your book amazing. So like as an author, of course,

I think so many elements of it could be, could be improved. The one that is the most glaring to me,

well, I guess there's two, I'll mention two, just, just because they're relevant. One is,

I'm a little embarrassed as a chapter in kind of towards the end of the book, where I talk about

the scaling of lean startup. So it's like, okay, you've, you've had success now. What are the

principles for which, how do you scale up a big enterprise now, you know, that has many lean

startups within it and stuff like that. And I don't think I wrote anything wrong in that section,

but I really cringe to read it now because it's so blind and just like, step one, do this, do that,

like, you know, it makes it sound so easy. It's so simple. And of course, like, I've subsequently

written a whole book longer than lean startup, just to illuminate those principles and explain how

they work in real life, because I actually had the privilege of getting to go do that with companies

of like, really extraordinary scale. So I'm a little embarrassed now to be like, I made it sound

so easy. I hate to, I hate to mislead any entrepreneurs into thinking any part of

entrepreneurship is going to be easy because that's, it's just setting people up for a

disappointment. And the other funny bit is, you know, that meme on Reddit, the Star Wars meme,

where Anakin Skywalker says, I'm going to change the world, and Padme, it's like, for the better,

right? And then pause, and she's like, for the better, right? I feel like that is like the meme

of our time for the tech industry. Like, every company was about changing the world. And

we forgot to ask for the better. I always just took it for granted that our goal was to make

the world a better place. Like, that's how those values I was raised with. That's what I thought

we were doing. And I was railing about it for a while. I got really, I would get depressed.

And remember, don't be evil. And there's been all these moments in the tech industry where it

seemed like we were going to really do something extraordinary. And then just like the things

that these companies become is so depressing. And I was like, well, I at least made it clear

and then I was like, did I? Again, I actually went back and reopened the book. And I was like,

did I tell anybody that they should change the world? And if I did, you know, I assume I specified

for the better. And it's actually right there in black and white, like right in the introduction,

these start up one of the lights, like a throwaway line, you know, this is the technique that will

give the entrepreneurs tomorrow the tools they need to change the world. Period. And I'm like,

no, I should have said for the better. I didn't know I had to say it. I thought it was obvious.

I thought we all agree. So I kind of feel like that is also a major oversight. And you know,

I'm making light of it now, but like it's had catastrophic consequences. Not really. I think

I don't like lean startup has led people in that way. I think it has much more to do, you know,

with other with other social forces. But like, but I feel bad that I missed my chance to like

take a stand on something that has turned out to be quite important.

So you saw me tweet a call for people to ask questions. Yes, I'm really excited.

So I have a few questions from the audience. The first is around the concept of MVPs, MVPs.

So Kari Sarnan, who is actually on the podcast recently. Oh, great. Founder of Linear had a

question about MVPs. And his question is essentially, if you still believe that MVPs,

essentially shipping very basic versions and iterating is the way to go given

that user expectations have risen a lot in any markets, iOS apps, for example,

web productivity software, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that question because

before I get it, I get it a lot. And also it's important for us to really understand like people,

people think that MVP is about a specific tactic. So like an MVP is like a bare bone stripped down

thing that will crash your computer. But it's not, that's not anything to do with MVP.

MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most

efficient way to get the validation we need about whether my hypothesis is true or not.

And so part of a successful test is to understand what are the demands of customers in our market.

Now, the funny part is people have a real fear of failure in product. I mean, we all have this

deep, deep, deep fear. So the first answer is like, would like, you think user expectations are high

in the iOS app store, you should try like the purchasers of, you know, battery backup systems

for data centers or like people who built deep sea oil drilling machines or, you know, like

jet engine, I've worked with companies where the standards are like actually really high and it

makes iOS app seem like pretty, pretty basic. It was like, okay, nothing blows up if people like

your app. But like even in these really high end industries in really high stake situations, like

the cost of offering someone to buy something that they don't like is really not that high. They

just say no. And like a lot of MVP is just about containing the liability of making a mistake.

So like, yes, one of the things I really encourage people to do is like, go find 10 customers, not

10 million, but like find 10 customers, get them to use the product and have them tell you what's

awful. That's okay. And like, I used to be so upset when I used to launch a product, if customers

would argue with me, like people used to be like, you idiot, I can't believe you lost launch this

product without features XYZ. They're so essential. And I would be like, you're wrong. I did the

right, I got to get mad at them. But then I got a little smarter. And I'd be like, XYZ, you say,

and I'd be like, taking notes, right? I go, interesting. Now, sometimes XYZ would be the

exact next three features of my roadmap. And again, I want to argue with them as I know, I was,

you know, like, I knew that, and I bet you used to be like, Oh, thank you for that wise feedback.

And then when we launched XYZ, they would feel a sense of ownership. Wow, I'm the one who told

them to do that. He would have even done it. But of course, I think we're really afraid of

entrepreneurs. I think we're really honest. It's not that people say you idiot, you didn't launch

without XYZ. People say you idiot, you launch without ABC. And you're like, how is ABC? Never

heard of that. That's how that's the much more common response that I get. Like, let's say, so

let's grant the premise of the question that like, expectations are high. And if we launch an app,

and it doesn't meet people's expectations, they won't like it. First of all, what really are the

consequences of that? In an early part of the startup, we had to do a lot to explain to people

the difference between a product launch and a marketing launch. Like, you know, you can launch

the product to customers without telling anybody that you did that. It's okay, like no one's going

to find out it's not going to be big news. And of course, like when once you're a big successful

company, that's totally different issue where like now you have to put your corporate brand on stuff.

But like if you're an actual startup, nobody cares. So like, it's okay to try it. But like,

the other thing that I think people don't appreciate is that MVP is very flexible.

So if you tell me like, when I work with entrepreneurs, like, listen, I'm sorry,

our customers, the bar is here, and the thing just has to be that good. I'm like, excellent,

and it can't have very many features, I guess, can it? Like, what do you mean? So you just told

me the bar is way up there. So we better do like just the one critical feature at that level of

quality. And then if that works, we'll do the next one. And then of course, like, oh, no, no, no,

I need to do all the features at all the quality. It's like, well, then what are we testing?

It's like, by the time you find out whether that's any good. And look, if you look at the

the pivot stories, I'm sure you found this too, like, very often 90% of the work in the first

version is thrown away, no matter how high, how high quality it was. And in fact, for as an engineer,

that was part of my like original disillusionment with the agile software movement.

That ultimately lean startup is that people promised me that if I followed these best

practices, I would eliminate waste from my work. But if I build something that customers don't

want, that's the ultimate waste. And nobody protected me from that. So I don't really care

how high quality the initial MVP is, because quality is defined by the customer. And if we

don't know who our customer is, we literally don't know what the word quality means. So that's where

I think founders really run into trouble. And everyone's like, well, I'm Steve Jobs on this,

I have the magic taste. And it's like, well, first of all, do you have the years and decades of

failures and experience that that from which that taste derives? Okay, if you do that, I'm like,

I'll give you the benefit of it out. And if you don't, then like, definitely don't rely on that,

definitely do some experimentation, go get those cards. But even if you have the taste, like,

if you're completely right, what can it hurt to double check? Like my view was like, oh,

let's have 10 customers look at it and have them throw up about how it's so horrible.

That at least confirms that we're on the right track. Okay. And then we call it establishing

a baseline when we talk about innovation accounting and the metric side of lean startup.

Let's go find out how bad the situation is right now, so that we can then know that we improve

from it. Because like the thing I actually see from people who in the name of quality will wait

a long time to ship a product, is they ship it with really high quality and nobody uses it.

And now we don't know why. Is it because our idea of quality is wrong? Is it because the value

prop is fundamentally like I feel like building a high quality wrong value prop is nothing to be

proud of. There's no craftsmanship in that. Or is it, you know, like I once had a company that

built a really beautiful product, amazing land, everything was awesome, but there was a

JavaScript error where when you clicked the download button, the signup button, whatever,

it just, it didn't click. So they launched this thing, it had 0% signups. And they're like,

it's a catastrophe. We made the wrong value prop. So how do you know from one experiment

you can never know you have to be willing to do a series of experiments. And the again,

the logic of MVP is just products take time to build like the best products in the world.

Everything takes time. I don't think it takes a month a year. You're like AI will mean I could

build any product I want and you know, instantly, but like it's not instantly, it's going to take

time. So during that time that the product is under construction, there's going to be some

moment in time when you have half the product, just logically speaking, you first have 10%.

So when you have half the product, let's have customers use half the product.

Well, it doesn't cost you anything extra. You had to do it. You build a natural experiment anyway.

Have them use it and tell you it's only half as good, or it's unusable because it's so bad.

Excellent. Good. But the startup literature is littered with examples of people where less is

more, where the crappy small thing they did turned out to be more valuable than the competitor.

And I'll just give you one example, one of my favorites. I come from 3D graphics, you know,

and avatars and metaverse stuff, which of course now is bad. It's one of these things that goes

through these hype cycles. And I'm like, are we actually in the hype cycle or in the truck?

I think it's trending up right now.

Is it? Are we trending up again? Okay, it's really hard for me to keep track.

Even while I was working on it, every few years, it was either the future or nobody

wanted to do it. I bet sales of Snow Crash, you probably have that cyclical thing to them,

and it's hot. People read it, otherwise not. Anyway, we built a version, our first version of IMVU,

we built with 3D avatars like in a cafe or in a scene. And the avatars were all anchored in

place because we didn't have the technology called inverse kinematics. We didn't have the

technology that would allow an avatar to like stand up and walk. And you know, when you do

this 3D grab, it has to work perfectly. The feet have to like actually glide along the surface.

And it just, if it doesn't look right, you wind up in the uncanny valley and people find it horrible.

So we're like, can't have that. So we just have the avatars sit there.

And people felt the product was claustrophobic. They would always be like the Sims. Let's me move

around. Why am I stuck here in the chair? I feel that it was a very common thing in customer feedback.

But we were like, we can't afford to do the expensive thing. We couldn't do it. Couldn't do

it. And one day, like as a hack, as like a little demo, I was like, well, just change it so that

when you click in the scene to a different spot, we'll just stop rendering the avatar in the first

place and we'll put it in the second place. So it was like really, we didn't even do the proper

cut. The camera would zoom over there. It was really ugly. I was really embarrassed about it.

I was like, let me just like play around with it and see what happens. And we, we shipped it to

kind of, I was like, this is not, this is below the quality bar. This is like, I just like, I

people, I felt bad as the engineer, everyone involved felt really bad, but we had like committed

ourselves that we're going to try to experiment with stuff. We're going to see what happens before

we can start for existence. We didn't even have a concept of MVP. We're going to try it and just

see what happens. And we shipped it and nothing happened. No one cared. I was like, phew. But

then we used to do these daily tracking surveys. We just sample people and ask them what they

think of the product. And in the tracking surveys, people started to say that IMB was the most advanced

avatar product they'd ever used. We were like, people would be like, we used to be compared

to the Sims unfavorably. Now people are like more advanced than the Sims. And I was like, what does

this mean? How did we get more of like, did we improve our 3D graphics or something? And we

started to do, no one could understand why they were saying that. We used to do customer interviews

and finally a customer was like, oh, oh, it's so great, man. In Inview, when you want to go

somewhere, you teleport. The Sims, you got to wait for the guy to get up and walk around. It's so

annoying. And we were just like, oh my God, embarrassing. And for you, I mean, we didn't do

university kinematics for a really long time. Wow. I love that story. Yeah. Something that I'm

learning as you talk about MVP is that the idea of minimum is very fluid and very context specific.

And essentially, the message isn't build something low quality and simple. It's figure out what is

that minimum bar for your market and product. And just like the message is just build as little as

possible. What are as little as necessary for you. So like, what's so it's fascinating. I mean,

I'm John joking about I've worked on jet engines and robotics and cancer therapies and all kind

of I've worked on stuff. And LTSC me took us 10 years to build the MVP for LTSC. So like, it doesn't

even isn't necessarily mean cheap, low quality. It's just whatever your hypothesis is, whatever

you actually believe is going to work. Let's put that thing to the test. That's all I really want.

When I work with companies like, you know, first time founders, especially are usually very stubborn

about this, and they don't want to do it. It's like, look, you tell me what you believe. I don't

have to be right. And I want to just double check that you're right by however we do it. And then,

you know, once people actually start to turn that idea over in their mind, they often will be like,

well, you know, like, you know, a classic one is like, we can't, we can't sell the thing till we

build the physical equipment. It's like, but do people buy is your product bought in a showroom

where people see the physical equipment? No, they buy it from a brochure. So it's like, okay, well,

how about we send them a brochure and ask them to preorder it. And then then it's like, but I can't

do that. I can't have a crappy brochure. It's like, who said a crappy brochure, right? Like,

we can build a really high quality brochure in a lot like in a tiny fraction of the time it takes

to build the actual machine. And then it's like, well, then what is what are you talking about?

It has really good fonts and it has pretty pictures. Maybe what's your theory, right? Like,

you tell me what do you believe about like, well, actually, what matters is the quality of the

specifications of the equipment in the brochures. Like, now we've got the leap of faith assumption.

Let's go find out. And then like, hold on, but we don't know what those specifications are going

to be. Yes. Like, oh, but I saw this 500 page plan over here. What do you want it to be?

It's like, well, it'd be really great if customers would accept this set of performance

characteristics. Like, well, let's go promise that. Because maybe they'll be like, that's great.

And I'll just I'll give you one example. I was mentioning data centers as a team that sold

equipment and data centers. They had a serious data high end team of PhDs working on research to

make the thing way more efficient. And they're going to win like a Nobel Prize in material

sciences in order to make this product a reality. And they put and I convinced them instead of

playing three years and $18 million. So you don't make the thing, let's go take a brochure,

take it to some customers. And I'll never forget, they took the thing into the brochure,

they took it into customers and customers like laughed them out of the room. And it was like

nothing to do with anything they cared about. It was nothing to do with efficiency where they're

like, this is we would never buy this. And they're like, but you haven't even looked at page two to

see how efficient it is. They're like, we don't pay for efficiency, we build data centers, how much

they cost to operate with somebody else's problem. Right? Like, that's the thing people don't appreciate

is like, these insights are so obvious in retrospect, that everyone's convinced that they

won't, it won't happen to them. When I teach students in lean startup, they're like, this is so

dumb. They do they do one case after another in business school. And they're like, dummy, dummy,

dummy, dummy, dummy, right? Like they're like, I would never make that mistake. And I'm always

like, look, you don't have to argue with me. Just call me back when you get a job. And you make when

you make one of these mistakes, like remember, we had these conversations and go read the book then.

And I guess by random chance, there are some people in the world that just never made a mistake.

Just the dice, you know, you roll enough dice, somebody had the experience that dice came up,

you know, double six is every time. Okay, so there are those people and they,

they give a lot of the advice in the world. But I don't know that necessarily those of us

who have the double six luck should necessarily be following it.

This will be a really good segue to talk about pivots, because again, a big part of your message

is a lot of the work you're doing is just going to go to waste anyway, why spend all this time

building it. But just to kind of put a final point on this idea of MVP, because a lot of

questions came in around just like, what is an MVP? Ben Silverman, the co-founder of Pinterest,

has this quote, he didn't ask a question or thread, but he has this quote.

That makes no sense.

Yeah. And his quote is the hard part about MVP is that you don't know what minimum is,

you don't know what viable is. And so just to give founders who are trying to figure out what that

line is, some very succinct advice, how would you describe just helping them understand here's

how far you should go with your MVP?

He didn't. He didn't say you also don't know what product is.

That's true. I can't tell you how many times a service has turned out to be a product or

vice versa. People embody their insight about customers in the wrong way all the time. That's

super common. That's funny. All the criticisms of MVP are really just people expressing their

frustration with how uncertain startups are. Yeah, it really sucks. This is not a good way to

make a living if you want to retain your mental sanity. If cognitive dissonance,

if you find that painful, like this is not the right job for you, because it's really hard to

hold in your head. I have this ambitious vision. I know what's going to work. I'm going to

do confidence, get everyone together. There's no substitute in this world for a human being

stepping forward and just saying, I am going to make this thing happen. And if you do that,

if you're putting yourself wet on a limb, it's really difficult. It's really hard to admit that.

And I also do not know how to make it happen. That's the truth. Whether you admit it or not,

that's the truth. So we have to just, that's why I say let's just double check.

So simple succinct advice. First, the first tip is write out the list of features that are necessary

in your MVP, cut it in half and cut it in half again and build that. Honestly, if you just do

that, that's really not that bad. The nice thing about MVP is it's one of those U shaped curves

where like, if you get even in the vicinity of optimal, you're going to be fine. And most people's

natural idea of what is necessary is so laughably wrong. People are naturally off by like usually

one or two orders of magnitude, right? Very common for intermediate team that is trying to do 100

times more work than it's necessary to test their assumption. So first thing is just try being

uncomfortably small in the thing that you actually make. And if you're having trouble with that in

the startup way, in the sequel to Lean Startup, I really go through because it's really more for

a corporate or large company audience. I really go through like, okay, if you want to have a process

for determining what to do here, like you should first brainstorm your leap of faith assumptions

that you hear and categorize them this way and select them like this. Okay, now for each assumption,

brainstorm the metrics you might use, you know, select the metric you want, what is your learning

metric and then from their brainstorm MVP score them according to this formula and then like use

that to help people. Anyway, if people can follow that they want. The thing I learned is that if

people are having trouble coming with MVP, the problem is usually upstream in the chain of

deductive reasoning from the vision down to the MVP. It's like usually people are just not super

clear on what do I want to learn. And it's the most common reason is because people don't want to

admit that they don't know. So as an entrepreneur to say that we're going to test to find out what

customers want is really hard. I'll give you an example from my own experience. You know, LTSC,

I said it's taken us like 10 years to get the thing approved and going. It's a really very

difficult product to build. One of the early iterations of it, you know, that didn't work,

we were building on partner infrastructure, which was a very different product back then. I don't

want to get into all the legal nitty gritty because it's kind of dry. But anyway, it took us

six whole months. It took us, you know, time to raise the money, build the team, do a stuff,

you know, get all the lobbyists and lawyers everything in place. And then we had to go

part do this partnership agreement. The partnership agreement itself took like six months to get in

place. And then we had to go to the SEC and get approval. It was like a very complicated

multi-stage process probably took, I think I just described two years of my life, you know,

end to end there. And the whole time I was talking to the team about our goal with this whole thing

is to learn what is actually necessary to get customers to list on our stock exchange.

Our goal is learning. People are like, but I thought our goal was to get this contract done.

I thought our goal was to, it's like, well, yes, but the reason we're doing those things

is so that we can learn whether this is actually going to work or not. And so I remember,

now I never forget during the contract negotiations, people were like, you know,

we got to take an extra week to deal with this point. I mean, we don't have an extra week.

It's like, but this thing's taken two years. What's a one week? I'm like, no, every day is soap,

we have to get the learning as soon as possible. And I was like constantly haranguing everybody

involved. We got to go faster, faster, faster. You've got to give on this point, give people

were walking all over us. We were getting just destroyed in the negotiation. I was like the

weakest, lamest person around just like, we got to raise the money. I was anything to get speed.

Anyway, long story short, we get all the way to the end. We get the thing approved by the SEC staff

and then like we get ambushed. And like long story short, the SEC withdraws their approval

and the whole thing is dead. The partner, you know, we have to break up the partnership agreement.

Everything goes to hell. And I thought the company was going to die. And it was a totally miserable

time. One of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life, I was, I was totally upset.

And then you know, and in retrospect, I can laugh about it because it turns out, of course,

it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it's actually the best thing that ever happened

to me as a lot of certain things are because from that, we were able to pivot into the thing that

ultimately got us, got us approved was the reason I tell this story is every bit of work we did

that went into that partnership agreement for almost two years turned out to be a waste of time.

Because in the end, partnership agreement fell apart. So like if we had won a few extra clots,

our margins would have been higher if we had extracted more fees from the partner,

or like though we would have had less liability, people were always like, well, we'll have the

liability for this and liability for that. And I think about all the things, this thing was hundreds

and hundreds of pages long document. It mattered. In the end, the partnership was never consummated,

no customer, nothing ever happened. And the interesting thing, the reason for the story is

that the people who went through that experience with me were so much faster on the next thing that

we did. It was really amazing to see because they were like, now I understand what you mean.

Most people live very causal lives that have not actually really dealt with this kind of failure

in their business career, obviously, like in their personal lives, they'll have all kinds of trauma

and you know, like I've worked at a crappy company and have a horrible experience, but they haven't

experienced this specific thing where like you are the hero of the hero's journey, you are the

protagonist of the story. And the thing is not just a setback, but you just die, it actually

fails. It's so psychologically damaging that even people that have had that experience,

a psychological defense mechanism is to tell themselves that that didn't happen.

And like, you know it better than anybody, how many startup founders are like adamant that they

didn't ever fail, they didn't pivot, everything's exactly the way they saw it, you know, at the

beginning. And it's like, I've been around enough startups to know how often that is just not true.

But like, we need to tell ourselves that story. But anyway, if you the number one lesson of the

scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn. And so if you set yourself up in a position

where psychologically you can't admit that something didn't work, you can't learn. And that's

like, that really is the essence of MVP. It's just like whatever the catastrophic thing that's

going to destroy your company is going to be, you just want to find out as soon as possible,

so that there's still time to do something about it, we don't just die and move on.

I'm actually seeing this a lot right now. I'm an investor in a bunch of startups,

and so many of them are failing right now. And they built such beautiful products,

such amazing products that they spent like years just like crafting, making so great.

And then it's all, it's all for naught. And there's actually been a theme on the podcast recently

around the importance of craft and design. And I'm curious just to get your thoughts on just when

it makes sense to invest deeply into the craft and experience of a product versus,

you know, the minimal viable product approach. Do you start very simple and then invest

any time? Well, that's, I think that's a great question. People use the word craft to refer

to so many different things. Like, I personally find a tremendous beauty in simplicity. So like,

I would much rather people do one thing extraordinarily well than like 20 things

half-assed, you know, personal. And like, how many products do you use? We were like,

there's like 92 buttons on here of which I only ever press one. Could you have made that button

like have a really nice feel that, you know, I could, I would have sacrificed all this other

stuff. And I mean, I've actually worked on microwaves and refrigerators and stuff with

actual physical buttons and like, even your crappy kitchen microwave that you paid $16 for

a Walmart or whatever. If you've never seen one of those things manufactured, it's actually

incredible. The amount of craft that goes in behind the scenes to wire up every one of those

buttons that are never pressed by a human being is actually really painful. If you start to think

about, wow, that's a lot of human energy being wasted. So the elements of craft, I think are

critically important. First of all, part of craft is perfection. Perfection is an attribute of

quality. And we have to go back to the first thing in order to know what perfection is,

you have to know what the customer believes. You have to know you have to be perfect for some

purpose for some person. Some people will just say, well, I'm just going to build for myself.

And that way I solve the problem. That's totally fine. That's true. If that's you,

go nuts. You might only have a market of one, but you'll be happy. So be it. And there are,

and there are startups like that where it's like, well, I don't care how big my market is. I'll just

build for all the people like me and we'll, and I have a huge tribe, then I'll be hugely successful.

If not, I'll just be an artist doing my thing. I have total respect for that. That's like,

the ends and the methods are totally, totally aligned. Where people get into trouble, I think,

is when they want to use craft as an excuse to not get any feedback. So what I tell people is,

like, first of all, there's an element of crap that is just like, whatever you do,

how are you going to go about it? You know, like, whether you're building an MVP or a fully featured

whatever thing you're doing, like, you know, I'm a software engineer by training, like,

my code is a certain way, you know, I have a certain craft in the way that I write software,

because I think that's the best way and that produces the best outcomes. I will never compromise

that. And compromising that in the name of going fast is stupid, right, like write crappy code,

you spend more time firefighting than you do writing code in the future. So a certain amount

of craft is just about keeping your options open. And actually, it's very much like, favorable to

speed, using like the right, the right primitives, having the right abstraction layers, like using

the right tools in the right way, you having high quality people on your team, like all those things

that you go faster, not slower. And a big part of Lean startup is about helping teams get into

that optimal configuration by acting as a speed regulator, because there's such a thing as optimal

speed, which we can get into if you're interested. But another part of craft is just an excuse for

just avoiding feedback, like making things pretty, that, you know, pretty in the way that I want them

to be because I want them to be that way. And even there, when I meet people like that, people are

just like, sorry, my artistic ethos is this, and we have to be this way. And I'm like, excellent,

then that's not one of your leap of faith assumptions that you're willing to test. So like,

so be it. Don't don't pretend to test it, just be like, I'm not like, we're just going to do it

this way, because that's how we do things. And it's fine. And I think like, that's a big, like

when companies are like a core value, like I'd rather go out of business, than violate my core

value, I also respect that too. But like, then that to me, that means like, having a respect for

craft for design for perfection, that increases the need for experimentation and testing for all

the other stuff. Because we've already invested a huge amount of our energy and force into this

thing that we really care about, well, then the other stuff, you know, like, and do we also have

to do like this fancy press campaign, do we also have to, you know, go put the founder's

base on go boards and put them up around town? Like, is that, are those all part of your craft?

Like, I just feel like people use it as a, as a, as a catchall excuse to do all kinds of stuff.

But I think, you know, the idea that, like, craft is a signal to your customers about the

things that you actually care about, and that that you're going to take care of. It's like,

it's part of making a promise to customer, like that they're going to believe. Like,

if that's your thesis, that doing an MVP that lacks craft doesn't test the thesis.

So I think people want to set up a dichotomy here that doesn't really exist. I'm totally in

favor of that when people have that authentic desire. But I also meet a lot of people that

are just faking it. They don't have taste. They don't have a design ethos. They don't have. So

like, if you don't have that stuff, where are you going to get it from? Well, good news, experimentation

will get you there if you let it, because you will eventually learn the habits of mind, the

patterns of the things that work. It makes sense. I really like that advice of, as a founder, build

the company you want. Like, if you want to build, like, why create a business and a company you're

not excited to be working on. And if you end up failing, like it's on you, that was a big mistake

it turned out. But at least you tried and you're not building a company you don't want to work at.

And then as a product leader, in, I don't know, if you have as much control to build a product

the way you want, but, but try it basically. I always tell people to just get fired for doing

it the way you think is right. Like, there's nothing that was a faster career accelerator

than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you

got fired over it. Like, the people that that magnetizes to you are going to like, you're

way happier. You're going to be so much happier being a place that appreciates that. That was a

big, that was a big career accelerator for me. Not that I actually got fired, but I was willing to

be fired for, for, for my beliefs. And I remember sitting there, I was going to a board meeting

where I was sure I was going to be fired. And I was like, well, I just don't believe in building

products the conventional way. This is like a before lead startup. So I was like, I didn't

even have a language for it. But like, I had a strong conviction that the way I was doing it

was the right way. And I was like, well, just I'll be known as the guy who that got fired for that.

And eventually someone will want to work with me because that's what they want. If nobody wants

that, then I'll go, go find a job in a different industry. Like, I don't want to be an industry

that doesn't like, that's how I want it to be. And I think that people, people don't appreciate

the extent to which people act like you're having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen

to you. And like, man, that's not even in the top 10. Like, it's bad. I mean, I've done it,

it's awful. Okay, it's really bad. But far worse is to be in a company that won't die,

a zombie undead company that you hate, but you can't leave. Who have I met people like that?

And like, we're having a mental health crisis among founders that's like not talked about

enough. You know, people started talking about like the downside mental health risk,

obviously the stress of being a founder is hard. But like, look what's happening to the people

that are so called successes. Like, when you build a company and you sell it out, and it becomes

something that you find a parent, like, yeah, maybe you get rich, but it's, it's not, it's not

good. And I mean, I just the other day, a friend of telling me about a friend of his who sold this

company exited for like, say $300 million or something made a lot of money and committed

suicide, like not that long later, people follow the Tony Shay story, I'm adding new Tony, I was

horrible tragedy, like, what's going on? So I just feel like there are worse things

than having your startup fail. And so building a company you hate that becomes a maligned force

in the world, you know, that you have to go pretend you weren't involved with or like,

you feel complicit in what like, that's way, way worse. And I wish more founders would take

that more seriously early on. That is such an important point and something I see a lot too,

just companies, the founders started that are just like, alive. But they were almost never

going to succeed. And they're kind of stuck. They don't want to shut it down. They don't want to

give money back. What advice do you give those sorts of founders that you feel like are just stuck in

a zombie company like that? It's really hard. I mean, of course, if it's going to fail, you

should shut it down. But everyone's like, but I thought it's always darkest before the dawn.

And it's like, sometimes it is. It's all, you know, what else is really dark, like,

when you're dead, right? So like, what's the day? Everything comes back to I used to tell people

the most uncomfortable laugh line in my early talks about lean startup was when I talked about

the people used to talk a lot about Steve Jobs and the reality distortion field.

And I would be like, okay, you're in the reality distortion field, you're on the flat part of

the hockey stick. How do you know the business plans? I actually lived through this one. There's

a business plan. Business plan says six months after launch, we will have almost no customers

and almost no revenue. And that's when the hockey stick will commence. And I remember being there

in month six, being like, we are on time on budget. This plan is cheap. Everything's happening just

like the plan hockey stick to commence. I'm walking to my watch. And then we just stayed on the flat

part into the far horizon. And people would laugh. And I'd be like, okay, now, if you're following a

startup leader, you're in the real or you're yourself are in the reality distortion field,

and you're on the flat part of the hockey stick. How do you know if it's ever going to stick?

Or you're just going to be, and people will be like, huh? And that's like, that is a really scary

situation. It's like, we all have these moments of doubt. And sometimes the right answer is to

overcome the doubt and go for it. And it's actually part of the genius of the startup system. You

know, the people, people criticize venture financing and all the problems with the Silicon

Valley. And of course, do it to ourselves. So there's plenty of things to criticize.

Like one of the genius things about it is like at the end of the day, you do run out of money.

The thing that you're forced to declare bankruptcy, that's actually a really positive

feature of the system. So a lot of founders just can't do it. But I will say like, the thing I

try to ask people to do is like, take them take really take some time to introspect and just ask

yourself, do you actually want to be here? If you if you could magically wave a magic wand and you

were to start a new company right now, would it be this one? If it's not just there's no indentured

servitude anymore. It's okay. You know, it's okay to move on. And then the question is like, then

there's like, everything moves into a tactical conversation about shut it down, give the money

back, do a really hard pivot into the new thing, you know, it depends a lot on the specific factors

of the situation. But it's, I think we do fact founders of disservice, if we act like this is

easy, or is it I mean, it's just it's gut wrenching. And it's really difficult. And like not to be

too spiritual about this, but like, it, it really goes right to the issue of ego identification.

For so many people, they are their company. And so for the company to die, they also must die,

like it feels like you're going to die. And I think that is like, that's part of the mental

health problem. So like people, you know, as they get older, as they mature, as they have a

spiritual practice, I hope they can learn to dis identify with the company and not feel like

it's so personal so that it is possible for the company to die without them dying. And then

they can take what they learned into the next company or the or into the next pivot or the

next iteration of what it should be. Or sometimes the right thing to do is just to step aside and

let a different CEO take over. Or you know, there's so many ways you can go about it. But as with

any pivot situation, the hardest part is always just to admit the facts as they are. And then,

and then you do it yourself versus like, what is the situation? Is it working? Can't tell you how

often people just can't accept it's not working. And you get investor updates. I how many investor

updates have you ever received where it's like, we're crushing it, everything's going great. And

then very next investor update is we're out of business giving money back. It's like, well,

you had no say your last investor updates that you were crushing it, it was absolutely no indication

there was any problem like, Oh, of course it was an indication, but we're just lying about so don't

be that person. That's actually an amazing segue to where I wanted to move to, which is our pivoting.

So I've done a bunch of research on consumer startups, B2B startups, and the numbers I see,

and I'm curious if you see similar numbers is around a fifth of consumer startups ended up

pivoting to a completely different product and almost half like 40% of B2B companies ended up

pivoting to a completely different product. Does that sound right from your experience?

Yeah, that does sound right. So it's interesting. I used to do this exercise for founders where I

would tell them the story of IMPU two different ways. The first way is one in which, you know,

we got everything completely wrong and just sounds like we were to complete idiots and we had to

pivot so many times. And then I would tell the same story again, but where we got everything right

and we were geniuses and everything that happened vindicated. And then people wouldn't believe me

or like both stories are true. Like, like choosing which elements of what actually happened to

emphasize and where to put your weight, you can tell the story. So like, yes, I would say there's

like the percentage of people that know that they pivoted and then there's another percentage of

people that didn't admit it, but they actually did. And it's really hard to assess from the outside.

I mean, just I know this from having worked with enough startups where I know the outside story

and I know the inside story and they're just really different. I mean, Paul Graham used to boast

about that as one of the features of Y Combinator that the founders they would get to come to the

dinners would tell you the true story of what really happened. And that was critical information

you couldn't get anywhere else except at Y Combinator. And I was like, wait a minute,

is he saying that everyone just lies on stage when they tell the story publicly?

I don't know if that's something to boast about, like you're calling all your guests liars.

And then like, I've hosted a lot of those events. I'm like, oh, yeah, people, people lie on stage.

I see like, so I think part of the problem is just like trying to find out the truth of what

happened is really challenging. But there's another element that I think is interesting,

which is, so you know, pivot is defined as a change in strategy without a change in vision,

right? So we have this idea that the founder has the vision, then they try to figure out how to

make the vision happen, and they find a different way. But like the vision stays constant.

But the truth is a little bit more complicated than that because the founder's vision also evolves.

Founders discover what the vision actually is through the process of building the company. So

again, not to be spiritual about it, but I actually believe that building a startup is in

large part a process of self discovery. You actually are discovering what is true about

the thing that you yourself believe. And partly that's because when we fantasize about the vision,

that we never have to make any trade offs, you know, the product is infinitely popular,

infinitely cheap, you know, everything's great. It's just like, no, no trade offs to be made,

we're real life forces to make trade offs. And then you find they're like, Oh, I have to choose

would I rather have a high end product only for a really rich people? Or would I rather have a

product for this industry or this sector or this group or that group, like it can be, it can be

painful. But also founders learn to talk about the things they care about over time. So I mean,

go on YouTube, if you've never watched the interview with Zuck on his couch at Stanford,

talking about Facebook, it's, it's a remarkable thing. It's just that some college can't come,

college news person was like, just happened to catch an interview with this guy, like at a critical

moment in his life, when he just didn't know what he was talking about yet. And like, now he's

really ambitious. And now Facebook's vision is this really ambitious thing. And people are very

at pains to say that he always had that vision from the beginning. And he talks about it. And like,

that may be true. But you put the documentary evidence exists. And I'll just give you one of

my own stories about that. In one of my companies, we moved offices relatively early on, because we

started on a really, really crappy small office that we moved to a larger space. And I remember

sitting in that office when there was just five of us. And we sat down and we had a meeting where

we expect out what we would now call the MVP, as well as a longer term vision for the company.

And we had this whiteboard, we all of us debated what what features should be in and out and what

should be on the whiteboard. And, and I can remember writing down, I have the, my visual,

my physical memory of writing down the things that were going to be necessary for the company to

succeed in being right. And my co founders arguing with me about not having their perspective,

they're being wrong. And I'm like, good thing. And I'm like, I can, I can, I can do one of

the things I remember telling the story. Anyway, we moved offices shortly after that time. And

that whiteboard was lost. And then years later, we moved offices again, and someone was cleaning

out an old storage closet. And that whiteboard was just happened to have got shoved in the closet.

And someone pulls it out like, what's this? And I looked at it, I'm like, Oh,

that's the whiteboard we used to hang in our main conference room. And it still had

the notes from that meeting are sitting there on the whiteboard. I was like, this is so cool,

historical moment, I'm taking a picture. And then I'm like, wait a minute, this is weird.

It's in my hand, it's recognizably in my own handwriting. But many of the things that I'm

writing there are horrible ideas. I'm like, that's not what I thought back then. I was on the other

side. That's my co founders bad idea. That's not my idea. And I had this realization that like,

it's not just that I learned something through the course of building this company about strategy.

My own understanding of the vision of what we were doing was different. But I don't like the

thing that's so critical to understand is I give into this day have no psychological memory of

having changed my mind about it. I still have the original memory of writing those things on the

whiteboard. And I thought I really thought someone was playing a trick on me at first.

Because what I could witness with my own eyes on the whiteboard contradicts my actual memory

of the thing. And I was like, which of us is right? And of course, I had to admit

the physical evidence got to win out. But I think it's important also to understand how much

that is true. And that's like, again, go back to like, why science is so important? Like, why

do we write our like all the elementary things about science, we write our hypotheses down,

we subject our things to tech, like, we do that because human psychology is so buggy. And,

people who are fighting with their like generative AI, you know, chatbots and stuff are starting

to see like, those are nothing but a reflection of human theory of mind. So like, we're starting

to see it in alien creature that like, wow, our intelligence has all these weird behaviors and

gaps and things. And of course, we want our robots to be perfect. But it's like, well, first look

in the mirror and realize that you yourself carry all those cognitive biases, and you got to put

in place a structure to get around them, or they're going to destroy it. That is an incredible story.

It makes me think about just not like, I think it's exactly what you said,

not only are the stories you hear often intentionally, not accurate, they're true,

and they're kind of a myth that they've been, that have been created, but also you forget

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Terms and conditions apply. So you talked about pivoting, and I never knew this about the term

pivot is that you keep the vision the same. And I actually have this list of companies,

B2B companies in this case, that pivoted. And in their cases, it was very different. And

let me go through them real quick. And I'm curious, what do you call it if they don't

keep the vision consistent? So Segment started as a university classroom lecture tool,

Loom, which just sold for a lot of money. So Atlassian started as a marketplace for

companies to hire subject matter experts. Slack famously started as a game called Glitch.

Box apparently started as a box to put photos and content in on Facebook. And Retool started

as Venmo for the UK. That one I didn't know. I found that out through Twitter, where one of the

YC partners replied and share that story with me because I also didn't know. And I think that's

a good example where no one ever tells you that. That's kind of an important part of the story to

know. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it was a quick pivot. They think they got to YC and they're

like, no, let's do something else. This is why it's so hard to evaluate from the outside. Because

oftentimes, there is a thread of connectivity that from the inside makes sense, why we went from

this thing to that thing. And it's often something unusual. It'll be something like, well, while we

were building the game, we had to do this thing first, because our values were like, you can't

build a game without this thing. And then this thing turns out to be more valuable than the game.

And then you're like, oh, why are we building this game? This is the thing we actually really care

about. So people are like, what I thought your vision was to build a game was like, well, maybe,

but why did they build that thing first? Other people build games without building that thing.

So that's why I say it's a process of self discovery. Oftentimes, the vision is discovered

more than chosen in these stories. And from the outside, it can seem really, really weird.

And part of it is also that some people really need the failure of the first thing

to appreciate what is great about the second thing. I think Segment is a good example where they

tried a bunch of stuff, and then they posted this random thing on Hacker News, and they just blew up.

Yeah. Sometimes it blows up so much, you're like, wow, that's amazing. But oftentimes,

like the new thing will get like 100 signups. And if you'd started with that as your first thing,

you would be like, 100 signups, okay, but if you've done 20 things in a row with zero signups,

man, you're like, God, somebody likes this thing. Like, you know, sometimes your first

trip, sometimes not. And again, not to go back to Facebook all the time, but it's such a famous

story that people know it. You know, in the movie, there's that famous scene where they live in the

house in Palo Alto, and they run into Sean Parker, and he, you know, that's like that. Apparently,

that's that's real. And they really were living in that house. They really were working on faith.

But like, the thing that gets missed from the story is that Facebook's already started at that

point, already being successful. And they're on the break between semesters on the summer.

And Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo, and I forget who else are living

in this house together. And I remember learning, someone told me this story about what they were

actually working on at that time. Was it Facebook? They like, Zuck and D'Angelo had already moved

on from Facebook and decided it wasn't successful enough. And they were like, I forget, one of

them was working on like a system where you could like, use gestural controls on your webcam to

program computers, because he wouldn't get carpal tunnel. It was like, they were sitting on Facebook.

And it was like, the story I think is, I hope I should ask Dustin if this is true. And I believe

Dustin Moskovitz taught himself to program so that he could like, keep up with the demand of

people who wanted to open Facebook at new schools, because the virality was like so insane. And I

was like, wow, you can be even building Facebook and not know. And it's like, people are like, well,

if I told you that story without telling you the name of the foundry, like that's no visionary.

I'm like, no, it's Mark Zuckerberg. No one has ever accused him of having a lack of vision. But

somehow, like this is true. Like, so I feel like part of this is about just admitting the complexity

of these stories is a little bit more is more to the story than you really realize. These are

imperfect people. And the pivot is really about like learning, right? That's to me, like the thing

that matters, you know, the original idea of the pivot was like one foot anchored in the thing, one

other foot moving like from basketball, right? So like anchored in what you've learned and yet

so connected. So like, it was truly a complete shutdown, start over again, nobody and nothing

in common. I was like, that is not a pivot. But that's just actually quite rare. Usually,

there's some critical insight or element of the first thing that is carried over into the second

thing. And if you were there, if you know the story, you'll be like, oh, wow, that makes sense in

retrospect. And again, I think this cuts against our whole idea, like the thing we think it's like

to be a visionary is you just, you know, all the answers you like a biblical prophet who sees the

future. But that's not what it's like. It's really much more about having the courage to see the world

as you think it ought to be. And then dance with that wherever it takes you. And so I think it's

a much more element of courage than of intelligence or anything else. You're so full of amazing

stories, Eric Rees. I never knew this Facebook story. I'm thinking about a founder who is maybe

going through a period of considering a pivot. There's a lot of startups right now just not

struggling, not struggling, but struggling to the 2021 vintage is having a rough time.

Exactly. And so I'm curious just what advice you have for founders that are trying to decide

is this time to pivot? Should we give up? Should we stay the course just any tactical

pro tips? So first of all, if you're asking whether you should pivot or not, you probably know the

answer already. That's the first thing to just like straight up say, people call me sometimes

and like, I want to know if I have product market bit. Well, the fact that you have time to call

me and ask me this question already tells me the answer. If you had product market fit, you would

not have time for this. There's no time for like when it's working, there's no time for naval gazing.

There's no time for any, you just, it's, it's, if you've never lived through a company going through

product market fit, it's such a rush. It's such an insane thing. The whirlwind of it is so amazing

and so horrible at the same time. Like there's just no time for anything else. So if you're not

sure, you're sure. So that's the first thing is just, can you admit it to yourself? Can you do it?

The thing that it's like shut down, like if you admit that it's not working, then like, what do

we do? And like, I really, what I really ask people to do in these situations is like, give yourself

a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better. So like,

classic thing, if you can't agree that it's not working now, okay, can we take six weeks

to try to make it work? It's like, we have this assumption, we're going to try to test it and

we're going to like, instead of working on the 29 other things that we have to do in the future,

can we just spend all of our time 100% on the one and only one thing that matters right now and

just like, go heads down on that for a fixed period of time and see, can we move, is it possible to

move the needle in that thing? Because one of the things that is true about startups when it's not

working is that they're stuck in this, in this kind of law of diminishing returns, or like you just,

you can test yourself to do, you do everything you try doesn't work, then nothing works.

It's like Thomas Kuhn and his theory of scientific paradigms. One of my favorite things that he

talks about is that when an old paradigm is replaced with a new paradigm, it's usually only

because the old people die out and the new people replace them. But he's, but he did a lot of research

into like, why does that happen? It's not that the new people are like magically smarter than the

old people, it's just the old paradigm gets to the point where there's no more experiments to run

that are fruitful. And young, ambitious people want to run productive experiments and the new

paradigm gives them a thing where like every experiment reveals something really amazing and

they just naturally gravitate. It's not actually a formal process of abandoning the old and going

to the new. And that's true here too. Most people are not consciously able to let it go. They can't

do it. So okay, find yourself a paradigm where the, the experiments are productive. Like, I can't

tell you how many startups I've been where they're like, it's up to the right. I'm like, oh, really?

It's like, yeah, at first it was 10%. Now it's 10.5%. Then it was 10.6%. Then it was 10.65%.

You're like, guys, yes, it's up into the right, but it's not what you need it to be

for this to work. It's just so try to get yourself so you'll give yourself a fixed amount of time

on the current thing. If you have to, then if you can't, once you say, okay, the thing's not working,

do we have enough time for something new? Can you give yourself six weeks to try the new thing?

And it's like, you know, if you're a bigger company back, okay, maybe you can't have a whole

company work on it, but like, can we have a team or can we do something where we just, somebody,

at least one whole human being, not a part-time committee, somebody is full-time heads down

or trying to make the new thing work on a deadline. And if you're a small team, and there's only three

of you, can you just put the whole thing on pause for a minute and give yourself a fixed amount?

If it was one weekend, that would be better than nothing. Any amount of, what can you actually

afford? I suppose six weeks, but if it's only one weekend, like, no problem, whatever, like,

what is the new thing you want to do? And just now that you've agreed among yourselves that you're

going to do that for a fixed period of time, everyone go around the room and say, if I could

start this company over again, the thing I wish we were doing was, and no one wants to go first,

but since everyone's going to have to do it, you're like, okay, I kind of wish we were doing

this other thing. Why? Well, everyone say, I'm like, sometimes the first person goes and everyone's

like, I've been wanting to say that same thing for months. And it's like, wait, we all actually

secretly want to do this other thing, but we're all afraid to let the others down. It's like,

that's actually great new. Well, good. Don't mourn the 18 months of your life you just wasted.

Be excited about the fact that you actually are on the same page about the new thing. Anyway,

everyone says a new thing. See if one of them stands out to you. Do that one. If you all agree,

do that one. If you have three things that you're equally excited about, do them in order.

Everyone gets one month. We've got three months of runway left. Well, first month,

we'll do the first thing. Second month, and we'll just see if anything sticks. And then

sometimes we'll do that. And they're like, I'm just exhausted. I just want to die.

If everyone goes around and says that, just give the money back. It's okay. Don't die.

Let the company die. It's all right. And like, when you raise, when you raise too much money

and you got your cap tables all messed up and you, you know, I feel like for our 2021 vintage

brothers, like, and sisters, sometimes you just, you need to try again with the right capital

structure. It's not possible. So like, either recap, like make the structural changes you

actually have to make to give yourself a chance to do something you care about.

You don't have that. What are we doing here? Life's too precious for that.

That is awesome advice. Very tactical, very real. On the point you just asked of,

what would we be doing? Like, what would you want to be working on? I imagine many people

today would be answering AI related products. And this is a good segue to where my next question

is just, how are you seeing AI change the lean approach, product development, the way teams are

run? What are things, trends and changes you're seeing in all of the stuff that we've been talking

about? I mean, we're entering into a really interesting phase of humanity and technology

and civilization. And to know the right answers to those questions requires empirical knowledge

that nobody has. That's what's exciting about it. And also, of course, some people find it terrifying.

I think that what I'm seeing so far is that, first of all, people are afraid of AI, but not

really afraid of AI. They're afraid of corporations with AI. Like AI doesn't do anything by itself.

It has to be embodied and deployed by humans who have bad alignment. And so everyone's talking

about AI alignment. I'd be a little more sanguine about AI alignment. If the company's doing the

aligning, we're better at aligning their human intelligences because, you know, I'm blanking

on who's law it is. I don't always name the laws. The idea that your software comes to reflect the

organization that produces it is somebody's law. Conway's law, maybe? Let's call it Risa's law.

Please don't. I forget who's law. Anyway, that is going to be true on steroids in AI,

where we're training in machine intelligence and we're transmitting values to it. Those are going

to be our organizational values. And tech has severely under-invested and neglected in creating

governance and alignment structures to have those values be explicitly embodied in the

organization, which is why so many of our companies have become disappointments. And so many people

feel betrayed by the companies they themselves help build. It's actually kind of sad. So AI is

going to force us to take those issues seriously, no matter what. The other thing that's interesting

you ask about how it affects the start-up, at the end of the day, AI is a management technology.

The thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences. And if you watch,

watch people struggle to make AI agents work, it's been really interesting to me how often I've

played with a lot of those tools myself. It's amazing how often you program the agent and it

will be like, okay, the job, you know, you give it a task like go take over the world or whatever,

go make a really sensible ice cream stand or you give it any task you want. And it'll be like,

these AIs are programmed to never say no. So whatever you say is like, no problem. And it'll

be okay. First step, write a business plan for taking over the world. And I will spawn a new

agent with a new AI like, okay, your job is to go write this business plan. And sometimes it will

like, you know, go try to write the business plan. But oftentimes it'll like, it'll spawn,

it'll be like the new, the sub tasks will be like, Oh, first thing I need to do is spawn an AI agent

that knows how to take over the world and have it write the business plan. And I'll just, everyone

will just book pass the buck to somebody else or it'll be like, it'll go into an infinite

regress was like, first thing we need to do is research this. And then like the thing that

comes back, and now that we've learned to research that we need to research 10 more things.

Each of those 10 things require researching 10 more. That's like, so many ways to go wrong.

And anyone who's been a middle manager who reads these transcripts will be like,

tell me about it, buddy. Right. I know I was just doing an AI agent. I wanted to write me a 30 day

course, 30 day transcript or a 30 day course for teaching people lean startup. So what it asked

me to do that. And I was like, great, I'll have the AI do it for me. And it was amazing. It was

like, okay, no problem. Day one, what is lean startup? How does it work? Day two topic, you know,

what is an MDP has to work dot, dot, dot continue like this for 30 more days.

You'll have a 30 day course. I was like, yes, because I know that, but could you please fill

out the other 30 days? It was like, no problem. And it spawned a new sub agent. It was like,

given these two as an example, please fill out the other 30 days. And it was like, got it.

It was like, how to do a task in 30 days. Well, first look at these two tasks,

then like create similar things for 28 more days, then return the results. It's like,

no, no, I'm asking you to do that thing. If you ever want the money, Python, no,

can't guard him if he's a guard skit. It's like that. You're just like,

no, it's like, we're not, we're talking past each other. So yeah, I think there's like,

it's really interesting to see how AI, as we learn to understand it, we will be able to develop

different manner. It will like really change management a lot because it changes the individual

span of control quite a lot. It solves one of the most hard problems in management is that in order to

touch a lot of things, we need a lot of hierarchy, because just the expansion factor of each one has

this many reports, has this many reports, this many reports, like that's what's required in order

for us to like summarize a large amount of information. You know, if you have 100,000

employees, they're having 100, doing 100,000 things, the CEO needs to know what's going on.

That's really difficult. You know, so there's this massive amount of human labor required

just to summarize and understand what's happening. Well, AI is really good at summarization. It's

actually one of its main strengths. So it's actually really easy, you know, and not in the

not too distant future, it'll be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me everything

my company is doing. And you won't need like tons of middle managers to do that for you or just,

you'll just know. That's, we don't even know what we would like to build organizations where

those kinds of powers are available to everybody. And I think the last thing is people are very

focused on whether this is going to lead us to utopia or dystopia. And most people have a very

firm conviction about what's going to happen. And therefore what needs to happen now to prevent

something bad from happening. So you have the people who are like, we have to stop pause,

blow up the data centers, because it's going to lead this bad thing. People are like, we have to

have government intervention to prevent research on the thing or to ban open source. But like for

every one of the things somebody wants to do, somebody else is saying, that is actually the

thing that leads to the dystopia, right banning open source is what leads us into like a

corporately controlled, you know, autocracy that's even worse than the thing that you were afraid of.

So a very common question I've been getting from people in the industry who are having like an

existential crisis about what should they do with their life in the face of this AI. And as you say,

all people whose startups are failing, like I want to be working on AI. Okay. For everyone who's got

a grasses greener kind of attitude about that, the people that are actually like doing it and

quitting their job and going to work on AI, the first thing they can find is like, what should

I do that will have a positive effect? It's like, it's actually really difficult to find out some,

you know, like everything I put everything I propose doing, someone's telling me that that's

actually the evil thing to do and vice versa. So the other thing I think it's really important is

like, big part of Lien startup has been for me, it's been just about learning how to deal with

uncertainty in my life. Right. So like, how do you deal from a business perspective? How do you

deal with situations upon uncertainty? And you'd be scientific experimentally be, you know, how

do we just like all these different values that are about coping with uncertainty? And so the

question people are asking me is basically like, how do you take ethical action in the face of high

uncertainty? And so the framework that I've been using I found very helpful and I hope other people

will get something out of it is the aperture of possible futures that AI makes possible is so

incredibly wide. And like I said, it predicting it requires a really deep understanding of a

bunch of empirical questions as far as I can tell, nobody knows the answers to right now.

So given that it's not knowable, what's going to happen? Like, it's not just you don't, you're not

an expert enough, but it's as far as I know, nobody knows. And the people who are most expert are

actively doing the research to try to find out the thing that will help us predict. So you

didn't know you could do about that, you got to wait for someone to go find that thing out.

The thing that makes sense is to pick actions today that make ethical sense in a wide variety of

future scenarios and do those. And what's really interesting is that takes people out of total

paralysis about it into like, there's actually some very clear things that we should do. So like,

whatever your, whatever your doomsday scenario is, we need more transparency right now, right?

Like that's critically important. We need more state capacity. We need more competent leaders.

We need companies who are committed to certain values. Like I just, it changes the way that we

think about these technologies in relation to ourselves as individuals. And that's really my

goal. My work here is just like, how do we get people off the sidelines and into the fight,

like doing things that are actually likely to be worthwhile. And, you know, as I'm talking to you,

I'm like, Oh, it sounds a lot like the idea that most of the work you do in a startup is going

to be thrown away after you pivot. So don't do that work. It's like, it's, it's not really a

special unique insight. It's just taking the same approach to coping with the uncertainty of

entrepreneurship and now applying it much more broadly because everything's about to change.

It sounds like this connects a lot with the work you're doing now around governance and long-term

stock exchange. And I want to get into that. But before I do, I'm curious if personally,

you're finding AI to be useful in some part of your life using a tool, or if there's a more

interesting example of a company using a lean startup approach with AI integrated. Is there

anything that comes to mind of just like something that you've seen to be practically valuable with

some of the AI tooling? When GPT-4 was first launched, I saw a friend of a friend just was

posting a friend of theirs, you know, like a story about someone who was using it for cold

sales outbound right when it first came out. And they had like downloaded a list of, you know,

10,000 Shopify stores with metadata, which I googled, you can like buy that for like a hundred

bucks. And then they just told GPT-4, I wrote a little Python script for each store, GPT-4,

please pitch this store owner something that my like outsourcing company could build for them

and be really creative about it. And then it just, he didn't even read the emails, he just sent them

one after the other. And when the person would reply, he would look in the email to see what

he had pitched them and then talk to the person on the phone. And it was like, why the things that

it pitched were like so wildly creative and cool. It was like, really, it was like really interesting.

They were in the tone of the store. They were like really like they use clever puns. I thought it was

and he was showing me screenshots of like, the person writing back being like, you had me at,

you know, it was very, it was very good sales prospecting. So, okay. So obviously, like,

our, that's like an incredible story about experimentation at a super high rate, right,

like just like nothing, we could never have done anything like that even five minutes ago. And

now it's going to become completely routine. But it's also a story about how all of our

communication channels are about to be super saturated with AI generated experimentation,

you know, like whether we want it to or not. And so if you think if you just extrapolate a

little bit, if this technology holds the way we think it will, it's pretty clear that every company

is going to be sending just huge volumes of AI generated email, such that people are going to

need AI generated email clients to read the email for them and summarize it for them. And someone

was joking, we will be making jokes about like, I'm going to write three bullet points. My AI

will turn that into an email, send it to you, your email will redact it back to the three

bullet points. Couldn't we have just exchanged three bullet points in the first place? We were

like wasting a lot of silicon, you know, a lot of GPUs were burned to, to, you know, move these

three bullet points from point A to point B. But I don't think that's as silly a story as it sounds.

I actually am kind of excited about the possibility of AI powered marketplaces to be

far more fair than the way we do it today. If you think about that story, the problem

fundamentally is that you have a massive number of people who could create things for store owners.

And if all of those people emailed every store owner on the planet every day, what they could do,

it would be an overwhelming amount of information. And so neither side is really capable of doing

that. But like AI is capable of doing that. So like imagine a world in which everybody is required,

and it's also, but it's also really easy to do, to define like a procurement policy.

Like what am I interested in buying, right? And what problems do I want to solve? What am I

interested in buying? And what like, what information do I want to have? And my agent reads my inbox

for me with this filter and applies the filter completely fairly. It doesn't matter if I played

golf with so and so last week or whatever, just if the proposal comes in and it's credible and the

AI is like really diligent about making sure it's not spam, like then it will bring the thing to my

attention, but it won't show me the email. I will be tricked by its clever, you know,

Alree style positioning nonsense. And it was just like, it will give me the essential information

that, Hey, did you know that there's this thing that could actually save you a bunch of money?

Oh, okay, great. Like that is so much better than advertising could ever be. And it's also way

more fair. We could then say, okay, actually, we would like every conceivable vendor to send me

every as many emails as they want at any time, just blow me away with all the things you're

thinking to do. Let your AI go crazy, trying to convince my AI that your thing is actually good.

Like that's not, that's not wasted time that actually create a lot more fairness in the world.

And like create a really even playing field for procurement for information. Think about like

journalists and pitches, and you just see like so many situations where we've established hierarchical

gatekeeping, like structures, because that was the only way to manage the volume of information

that had to be processed for that thing to happen. When those, when those limits are removed,

it's could, it could be terrible, but it could be really awesome.

I love your optimistic bent on all the things we're talking about. I really respect that.

And that might be a good segue to the final thing I wanted to chat about, which is just the

stuff you're working on now. So you talked about you're working a lot on helping companies

with their governance. Also, I think you work on company culture

and helping companies make, make money and profit and build real businesses.

And then that obviously connects to long-term stock exchange.

So can you just talk about what it is you're spending your time on there and where you see

big opportunities? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's one of the big, big, big issues that we're

grappling with. Like if I compare the questions I get asked by founders today versus 10 years ago,

these issues are so much more in people's minds than they were back then.

And I often now, when I work with, when I meet, when I work with a founder for the first time,

we'll often do a thought exercise that's kind of like, okay, we've talked about culture,

we've talked about the company. It's like, okay, great. Why should anybody trust you?

Like you're asking your, and companies are built, like we're talking about companies now

building stuff that is so invasive into people's lives, like so much more powerful than before.

And really honestly, this is just about taking seriously the rhetoric about changing the world.

So many tech companies, when they're raising money, are going to change the world in fundamental

ways. And when they're being asked to take moral responsibility, they're like, I'm just a little

database. It's like, can't have it both ways, buddy. Are you like a Superman who's reordering

the whole world to your whim? Like, well, then you have moral responsibility for the outcomes.

And, you know, that's like a hotly debated point right now. But I feel like it's actually super

people have already made it clear in their rhetoric where they stand there. They're just

trying to evade that responsibility. So the next gen of founders are don't find this complicated at

all. People feel a real sense of responsibility to make the world a better place. Like real things.

Okay, great. So you're asking people, you know, like I was, you were, you're like,

we're going to so many companies that are like straight out of science fiction. I mean, like

a company that does, you know, travel from San Francisco to Tokyo in one hour. You're like,

that's unbelievable. You know, actual weather changing, like, like the real thing where you're

like, we're going to change the amount of habitable land on the planet and solve famine and drought

forever. Obviously AI, there's these incredible, just incredible possibilities and, you know,

in nanomaterials and quantum computing, I should go on. There's just so many cool things going on.

But they all have really dire consequences. I mean, so I can do a really advanced biological AI

company where like, imagine having an LLM, imagine like chat GPT, but for biological compounds,

we'd be like, AI, could you just synthesize for me a molecule that has these properties

just described in natural language? And it's like, sure, you're like, that could be incredible.

Like think about the cures and the diseases. And I just like, that's going to be an amazing

transformational technology. But it has such obvious risk and downside that we have to take

it really seriously. Like, why should anyone trust you with this power? And people always

say the same thing, well, I'm a really good guy. And you know, I'm your bro, man. I've got good

intentions. It's like, well, kiss a crap about that. You could die. You could be replaced.

Some investor could like sweep you. Like I tell you how my story is going to tell you about startups

where the investors change management, you know, involuntarily. And so the fundamental problem is

that no individual person can ever make promises on behalf of an organization. It's not possible.

It's a category error. You're replaceable. And the reason is because organizations are actually

alive. They are super organisms with their own soul and their own life. We are their cells and

organs when we make them founders don't create them birth. And that's different. We don't own them.

They're not slaves. We nurture them. It's different. So if you want to make promise, if you want your

organization to be trustworthy, the promises it makes, if you want to win the public's trust by

making promises, they can believe you have to embody those promises in the structure of the

organization itself so that even if you weren't there, the promise would be kept. And people act

like that's impossible. But there are lots of examples. I mean, like think about like the code

of medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath. Think about, you know, in the US, you want to do healthcare,

you have to have a care delivery organization that is like staffed and run by doctors, not by

private equity, you know, guys, like there's all these things where like we know how to build

structures that are, you know, organized around some purpose. So what should that purpose be?

I was talking to a former Googler. I hate to pick on Google because, you know,

they've obviously done a lot of good things in the world, but they're like, I think the

locus of a lot of tech people's disappointment in the world. And so this is nothing unique to Google,

but I just happened to be talking to an ex-Google. And he was talking about the values and the company

and his disappointment and what had happened in the many years that he's been there, the good and

the bad. I said, okay, ask me, answer me this question. I'm going to ask you two different

things. So for each thing, I want you to tell me what is your assessment of the probability that

this thing will happen in the future? So thing number one, what do you believe is the probability

that Google will file its next quarterly report on time? It was like 100%. It was like, how 100%?

You'd be like, as certain as the sun will rise, bet your life on it. He's like, as certain as the

sun will rise 100%. I agree. Now, second, second question, what is the odds that Google would

be complicit in something that would make them money, but at the expense of murdering somebody?

He's like, oh, they probably wouldn't do that. He's like, probably 100% as certain as the sun

will rise. He's like, well, no. I was like, oh, really? What do you have? I was like, well,

come on, what if we run a self-driving car and kill somebody and they cover it up? What if

then we build a social media product and it's complicit in a genocide like Facebook who went

through that. It's like, I don't think they would do that on purpose, but it looks like such,

like the difference between the thing that is certain and the thing that we don't know. I was

like, okay, why is that? We just, we treat that like normal. Like, of course companies file their

reports on something. But is it because in the human heart, fidelity to finance rules is hard

coded, but care for other humans and their life is not? People don't give a crap about quarterly

reports. We have built a massive apparatus in these organizations to make sure that certain

things happen. Companies are really good at things that they care about. Therefore, we can

learn something interesting about the things that they care about by what they choose to be good at

and what they perennially are not good at. And so my view is that what it means to be a for-profit

company, like we've gotten it wrong, basically incorrect, making a profit is actually about

maximizing human flourishing. That's what it means to be for-profit. So like our current category

says that Philip Morris is a for-profit company and the Smithsonian is a not-for-profit, but that's

just backwards. Smithsonian is a lot more good in the world than the merchants of death at Philip

Morris. So I think we've just gotten confused that all forms of making money are the same,

but we all know that that's not true. There's exploitative, extractive ways of making money,

and then there's truly additive ways of making money that actually create net new value. And so

if companies are dedicated to human flourishing and they want to be the kind of company that will

create net new value and they don't want to become a bureaucratic nightmare, they don't want to become

a rent-seeking blob of discriminate math, like we don't want that to happen. We have to encode

those promises into the company in a deep way. And I think that's really what governance is about.

Like the whole ESG movement, all the discussion about this has gone totally off the rails. Like

Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores. It's absurd. So how can that possibly be right? We have

to find a better way forward. And so like once you, again, going back to lean startup and first

principles, like once you go back to that first principle, say, what would it look like if every

person in a company felt fiduciary duty to promote human flourishing? Like how would you do it? And

what would be different? And I've just, I've started to meet founders who are building companies like

that. And it's almost unrecognizably different. And I've been talking, I've been framing this, of

course, in terms of the big things like, you know, obviously, like you think about the weather

control startup, like that needs to be right, not just because like I have a supervillain,

got their hands on it would be really horrible, but also because like you can easily imagine

they got bought by some private equity firm who's like, this is awesome, we can now like put every

town in, you know, in a zero sum competition with their neighbor for the good weather and extort

them both from like, that would be just as horrible. We don't need supervillain for this. Like

none of us should want our technology to be used in that way. So we need to prevent that from

happening. But what, so when we put that in that ethos, we make that part of every decision, like

we finally can create the environment that like people really want to work in, like just,

just to make great products. I feel like most people I meet just want to work on something

awesome. And we act like giving like that, that's just like, just happens. But I've worked with

so many companies now, like even the ones that are really, truly great. You go meet a team,

it was just when we had, we had the island of freedom, we had the fully full, we just,

we were able to do it exactly right. That's one of those satisfying experiences in my career.

You ask people, why was it, how was it made? They're like, how was the product made? No,

how was the island of freedom that you lived on made? I don't know. Ask my boss.

And I've been, I've done this exercise. I've asked the boss and the boss's boss and the boss's boss.

I've got all, and like sometimes I'll go all the way up and we'll be like, well, actually the

founder of the company who's still around. I made it so. But sometimes no one knows.

You're like, who's in charge here? The board is in charge. They're like, I don't know. CEO

asked me to serve on the board. It's like, who chooses the company, chose its own board, the

board chooses the sea. Like it's all self-referential and it's like, where did it come from? So right

now I kind of view it as like an accident. It just happens sometimes. But that's because we're not

engineering these beings to create the outcomes that we really want. And I just think that it's

like a blind spot as company builders. We're so focused on the product. I'm not nearly focused

enough on the organization. And we, we tend to say at the surface level stuff like culture,

we don't get into the deeper stuff. So yeah, I think as builders, as an, as an industry,

we need a new movement to say like, we are going to build companies where human flourishing is the

thing at the beating heart. And we're going to, we're going to wield that as a competitive advantage

to like not only change the world for the better, but also make a lot more money. That's the crazy

thing about it is these companies are, are worth a lot more than their competitors. Because if

you're working, like if you're without naming the company, I talk about a company that is an

incredible ethos of love and just like it actually loves their customers. It's amazing. And that's

like the whole everything cascades down from that central premise, including the instruct,

like every CEO I meet is like so frustrated all the time. Like I can't get people on the same page.

I tell them what to do, but they don't listen. It's like, maybe part of the reason you're

having trouble with this is the strategy you're communicating does not actually make sense to

people. Well, this one really makes sense. Like treat your customer like you treat your own parents.

People are like, Oh, that's actually really easy and clear. Like I understand exactly what that means.

And so their customer loyalty is unbelievable. Can you imagine what their retention is like

if you actually felt you call customer service and it's like you're reaching your guardian angel

rather than some board customer service wrap. It's amazing. Like, so their competitors are like,

This is not fair. We had to come. It's like unfair to compete with this. This is like something

as a monster. But like when you're going to a customer like, Hi, would you rather work with

a company that's owned by some private equity schmuck, or a company where some of the prosperity

you help me generate is reinvested in you and your community? Like it's a competitive advantage

to do the right thing. So I feel like that, like we're going to have a new wave of founders who

take that seriously who are going to just they're going to steamroll. It's going to be really awesome

to watch. I can see how you started a movement. Maybe accidentally I am mesmerized. I am sold.

If people listening are also sold and want to build a company this way, what do you what can

they do? Is it work with the long term stock exchange? Is it is there something they could

do to help move their company and product to you and business in this direction?

I feel like there will come a time when there's a lot of resources about how to do this and there

aren't a lot right now. So it's a bit it's a bit thin. I'm working on it, but you know, we're still

trying to figure out the right the right way. But I am hoping to start doing some events and some

some things like to talk about this stuff. So people should should feel free to reach out or

follow me in my unusual places. If people want to do it themselves, talk to your lawyer. This is

like definitely one of these talk to your lawyer moments. I've worked with enough companies. I've

actually like been around long enough that I've worked with multiple companies that have gone

from zero to IPO and beyond. So I like I have personal friends who've like taken a company

public or like now extremely wealthy and who like sometimes even call me and like, Hey,

I run this massive multinational company. Can we can we talk about this like very specific

situation that's come up at work? You know, like I still am involved in those companies. I still

get to hear sometimes what it's like to actually do it. And one of my main takeaways of that entire

process is that it's always too early until it's too late. So what happens is people hear something

like what I'm saying like, Oh, yeah, we need to make sure, you know, like, here's some things you

can do. Obviously, you can become a public benefit corporate social, what's it called in California,

social purpose corporation. It's like there's legal designations you could take.

You could talk to a company that the day that because they're tech, their startup involves

building a technology out of something that comes out of indigenous cultures,

they took 10% of their company and they put it in a foundation, the trustees of whom are tribal

leaders from the cultures that they interact with. And those people that that has like an

economic role in a role in governance, you can establish like a foundation like that.

You can do what's called the board mission pledge where people on your board are required

as a condition of being on your board to pledge that they'll use their business

judgment under Delaware law to support the mission, not just the narrow interest of shareholders.

You can build we call it an LT SPV, which is basically a financing instrument that operates

like a regular SPV. But every LP in the SPV has to sign a contract to say that they will support

the mission of the company. If you ever want to do something like a V corporate version or you ever

if there's ever a situation where it's unclear whether they're in favor of you doing the thing

that's right by your stakeholders long term, they're pre committed to that. And we assign trustees

to oversee those shares rather than just the narrow interest of the show. So like, so I can go,

I can go on and there's like all this stuff you can do. But I get so I get companies,

I get founders excited, I've been getting founders excited about this for a long time.

I've now been long enough at this that like founder will go to their lawyer and the lawyer will say,

listen, sounds great. But like, you don't need to do that right now. You can always do it later.

And then the companies go bigger and they'll you know, they'll do some financing around each

financing round. It's like, is this the time? That's fine, we can just do it later. And then it's like

18 months from the IPO, they fired a CFO, and there's like a bankers and the whole thing's

on rails. And the CEO is like, now, hey, did we ever establish that foundation thing for our

non employee stakeholders? And they're like, huh? The thing we talked about, you said it was too

early. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Have we done it? Oh, no, it's too late. It's too late. The

thing's on rail, we do tarrollers wouldn't like it. The bankers are like, oh, you don't want to put

that your IPO prospectus. It's like, wait a minute, well, when was the right time? You're telling me

that like 18 months ago, July 3rd through 7th, there was a four day window and it was the right

time. It's never the right time. Why is it never the right time? And I've seen founder after founder

after founder get steamrolled. The only exceptions I know is a mutual friend of ours who like actually

stopped the IPO process and was like, no, I won't file the paperwork. They tried to steamroll them

and file the paperwork without them. And like he said, no, until I see this thing in there,

we're not doing it. And it was a very contentious thing took a tremendous amount of political

capital I admire immensely for doing it. But most founders don't, most founders just go along

and the thing never gets done. So the most important thing is to sit down with your lawyer and just

take them through a few hypothetical situations and ask them, are you properly protected against

this specific thing? For example, if tomorrow, Philip Morris shows up, pick your favorite evil,

I use Philip Morris because my dad's a pulmonologist. So I grew up as Philip Morris is the ultimate

of evil corporations, but pick your favorite evil core. If they show up tomorrow and they offer you

$1 per share more than your company is currently worth to buy it from you and your investors

in order to use it to sell cigarettes to children. Do you have a fiduciary duty to say yes or a

fiduciary duty to say no? Believe it or not, if you went to a fancy law firm and they filed for

you the standard articles of incorporation that are used in Silicon Valley, most governance experts

upon reading those documents would say you have a fiduciary duty to say yes. If that doesn't horrify

you and make you want to jump out a window, I can't help you at all. And if you don't care,

fine, I got nothing to say to you. You don't care, you don't care. There are really sociopathic

people in this world and they build sociopathic companies that I can't help you. But if you do

care, sit down with your lawyer and just be like, hey, is this true? Could this happen to me? And

they'll be like, yeah, obviously. And you're like, if I like to prevent that, what could I do? And

I'm like, well, your investors might not like it. Investors like it this way because it maximizes

their returns. And you're like, yeah, but I don't, that's not what I asked you. And your lawyer,

all your lawyers are good enough to know the answer to this question. What can you do? And if

they can't go back and rewind the video that Lenny, I just had, I just named a bunch of things,

you can have two founders preferred shares, you can do, you know, all this stuff, just

ask them about some of that stuff. And don't ask them, should I do it? Ask them, tell me for

each thing just to be like, can you give me the pros and cons of doing it? And they'll be like,

the pros are, you know, it might actually allow you to save your company's soul in a dire situation

like this, the cons are investors might not like it too much. And you just be like, just sit there

and be like, hmm, I'd like to do it. That sounds good. Like thank you for advising me on the pros

and cons. You work for me. You're my lawyer. Like I'd like to implement this thing and just

honestly, just pick a few of them to get started with. And over time, what you need to do,

last piece of advice, every founder wants the one weird trick. This is how me and startup

started to be like, can you just tell me the one weird trick to keep my company innovative forever?

I was like, there's no one weird trick. You want to do the right thing. It is a relentless and

constant process. We need to build a structure of the company so that at every level, at every moment,

every decision the company makes, somebody in the room making that decision feels like they

have a fiduciary duty to do the right thing. If that's the outcome you want, then this is going

to be a perpetual process of constantly trying to find ways to create the alignment that is

needed between the governance, the management structure and the actual operations and culture

of the company. Those are not separate things. They're actually only one thing because it's

just one being you have a skeletal system, a muscular system and a circulatory system,

but those things are not separate. They work together to produce you the being and the same

thing is true for these governance structures. I think most founders are under-indect, under-invested

in that, and that's why we get to these horrible outcomes. To give founders a little ammo in doing

this because, as you said, investors are not going to be excited to sacrifice profits. Employees may

not be. Are there companies that you can share that have done this and have implemented some of

these things that are public? If not, what confidence can you give founders to be like,

many, many amazing companies have done this and it's actually not that hard?

I don't like to name specific company names in venues like this because then people always say,

well, but what about this? People like to be the what about is something too much. Also,

I like to let companies speak for themselves. I have way too much confidential information

and I just have to be really careful about it. Nothing I'm describing here is hypothetical or

unreal. I have witnessed this many, many, many times myself. Every story I tell, it's a real

company that you can meet. They're real people. They're out there. They're not always the loudest.

The loud voices in our industry tend to be the ones that have something to sell.

These companies are just quietly doing the right thing. They don't really need to tell you about

it because they're doing it. There's an inverse proportion to the loudness and controversy

and memeness of the thing and how likely it is to be accurate, unfortunately.

What I will say is this is kind of an open secret in the world. Here's the thing that really surprised

me. I thought the way that we build companies, like the standard corporate governance practices

that we all do, must be well established in research. They must be well backed up. It must

be the only and best way. But when you start studying these things, you find the exceptions

really fast. I got into this because of Toyota. Only because I called the thing Lean Startups.

I wanted to borrow stuff from Lean Manufacturing. I studied Toyota. Well, Toyota has a really

weird corporate governance system, which is part of the old Japanese Koretsu system where the Toyota

family is intertwined in its ownership with their supply. It's like by modern standards,

it's a terrible rat's nest of disastrous corporate governance practices. But if you look at the

literature, everybody who studies Toyota is like, well, the reason they're able to do this awesome

stuff is because they have a philosophy of long-term thinking. I used to be like, well,

how can you have a philosophy of long-term thinking if you're subject to quarterly returns?

And they'd be like, oh, they don't pay attention to that stuff because they have this other

structure. And they're like, oh, that's weird. So for a while, I was like, oh, I guess it's just

Toyota. We should build more Toyotas. But then there's always family-run companies out there

where the family has produced this outcome. And then I started to meet foundation-controlled

companies. You know, it's funny, open AI is the hottest new thing. Open AI is a non-profit

foundation with a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary. I thought that was like, wow,

open AI. So that's actually very common. There are a lot of companies like that in the world.

In certain European countries, it's actually like 25% of the companies, like public companies,

are all structured that way. So it's actually like, where are we normal? And I did a talk for one of

those companies a few years ago. And it blew my mind because when I would go there and talk to

them, I was talking to their CEO and their leadership. And I was like, oh, what's it like to

deal with the public markets and quarter? And they're like, oh, we don't do that. I was like,

oh, is that a major source of competitive disadvantage? You know, you guys are non-profit.

And they're like, are you kidding me? We crush our competitors because they have to waste time

on all that stuff. We don't waste time on it. I was like, oh. And then like,

anyone ever heard of Warren Buffett? And why did his companies have a competitor? Like,

he was always like, oh, if you're giving up profit, your investors might not like it. I'm like,

these companies are just our world destroyers. What are we giving up? That's why I go start

with the wrong definition of profit. We're actually make a ton more money if we do it this way.

And like Amazon, for all of its flaws, like the long-term thinking, the customer centricity,

like, that's a major source of competitive advantage. And I've worked with many of Amazon.

I've worked with Amazon. I've worked with many of their competitors. And like the funny part

with the competitors sitting there, they're like, oh, man, Amazon's entering our market.

We need to do XYZ. And I'm always like, do you think Amazon's doing XYZ? And they're like,

oh, no, they don't have to do that stuff. We had to do all this bullshit that our investors

require and the activists and whatever. And I'm like, it's like, well, if you're competing against

them and they don't have to do that crap, maybe you should try doing it their way and be like,

oh, our investors wouldn't like that. I was like, your investors want you to get your butt kicked

by Amazon. Are you sure? So I actually think one of my realizations here is that the investor-centric

view of corporations was called the shareholder primacy theory of corporations. It's just wrong.

It's wrong even if all you care about is maximizing returns for shareholders. Shareholders have this

propensity to be the person who killed the goose that laid the golden egg. And it's been going on

for 150 years. These case studies go back to the 19th century. It's an old, old, old idea.

And the solutions are actually all hidden in plain sight. So I was reading a research paper the other

day that studied some of these, I think it was in Denmark, foundation-controlled companies versus

level-matched public companies that are not foundation-controlled. And I found the foundation

controlled companies outperformed from a financial performance perspective. And I was like,

how is this not the most incendiary result? If this is true, so much of the indoctrination

we've all received about what it means to be a for-profit company, just wrong. Because those

companies should be riddled with slowness and agency problems. I know the theory so well. I

can tell you all the things that ought to be true. If those things are not true, what's up? And then

I was like, wait a minute. I've been to these foundation-controlled companies. I've been to

Hershey. It's just controlled by the founder donated the shares to a foundation that runs a school.

I've seen it with my own eyes. And even having seen it with my own eyes, it took me a while to

realize, wait a minute, this is an open secret. So I was kind of horrified to find out that this is

well-known and yet was never offered to me. How can no one ever offer me the chance to build a

company this way? And if you study even open AI or any of these companies that are now structured

this way, it's always very idiosyncratic. They were on the standard path and then something

happened that allowed them to do something unusual. And I was like, well, I don't understand why we

have to wait for it to be idiosyncratic. Why don't we do it on purpose? And so I started to conceive

of this idea. I call it the spiritual holding company, basically the thing at the center that

is responsible for the soul of the overall ecosystem of companies that is the enterprise.

And you can see that, obviously in the opening example, if anyone's just studied the anthropic

long-term benefit trust, it is not coincidentally structured that way. But you see lots of examples

where that's what's done. And I started just pitching it to founders and said, look,

let me try to show you what the benefit of this would be. And I've been amazed how many founders

like breakdown and founders like start crying with me where they're like, this is what I always

really wanted to do. But I never felt like no one would talk to me about it. I didn't think it was

possible. I want to put, you know, there's a critical stakeholder I want to put at the center

of everything I'm doing, or there's some reason why we're doing this. And I want that to be the

thing. I was trying to start up who's trying to get, and again, it's not like a kumbaya thing,

you know, do good or whatever, virtue signaling bullshit. Like, it's a competitive issue.

There's a company that is working to recruit academic researchers to leave their lab and

come work for the startup full time. It's one of the most difficult recruiting challenges there is,

because you're talking, you know, it's not talking about like kids out of some school, it's like

tenured professors who are leaving behind a very good life to go do this thing. They would only

do it if they profoundly believed in your mission, but they're not naive. And the first question

every one of those people asks is like, how do I know this technology is not going to be used for

you? Because I like I have complete academic freedom. I'm going to give that up for you,

make me believe that this is the real thing. And if you're like, well, you know, we we believed in

some manifesto and we're good people, and we got money from some investor who's promised

he was going to be a good guy, like that is not going to cut it. And so they're having to do the

whole thing like this sit down their lawyers, what do I have to do to make this promise real

for these people to make them want to join. And I just I've just seen that over and over again,

if we have the courage to do it, it can solve what are really today considered insoluble

business problems. So it's it's it's cool. But I think it's scary for people to feel like they're

doing something different. And so I think over time, we'll get more of these stories on the record,

we'll get more people will have, you know, they'll be more precedent for it. But I gotta say,

I just did not to harken back to leave startup too much, but I'll never forget sitting with

early people who are like, what's the proof? What big company is doing this? And I'll be like,

just wait, you know, if you don't want the competitive advantage now, you can get it later.

And like, many of the people you look back on who was profiled in those books, like many of the

early lean startup adopters are like very successful people today, because they didn't

feel like they had to wait, they were able to think for themselves and apply the principles

in their own life. And I don't ask anyone to take this on faith. This is not like you have to do

what I say, it's more just like, think for yourself, like if this makes sense to you and

no one can explain to you why it's bad idea in a way that you find compelling,

give yourself permission to at least try it and see what happens.

What a beautiful example of first principles thinking looping back to our very first question.

I think it's gonna be the longest episode we've done yet, which is amazing. Also,

I think it might be my new favorite episode. So that's a good combination.

With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. We'll see what lightning,

what sort of lightning we find. Are you ready? I'm ready.

What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

There's a book called The Enlightened Capitalists that is just a hundred years of people trying

to fix this problem and failing and like the detailed case studies and like no founder should

ever read it end to end. It's too depressing. But it's important to know some of these stories of

founders that like they're willing to talk about their regrets on their deathbed that they like

wish they had done differently. For those who think there's one weird trick that will help

disabuse you of that notion, but it's helpful to understand the mistakes that have been made

before so we can do better going forward. On a happier note, I really want more people to read

Ken Luz, The Dandelion Dynasty. It's a silk punk fantasy series, but it's written by,

and he's a wonderful writer. If you want to see what like real optimism about engineering and

the ability of engineers to change the world, but transformed into a totally different environment,

it's just such a great, such a great read. The audiobook is really good. Also,

and I've been kind of plugging that plugging that lately. And then if you want just something

that's like pure fun, you know, it's not really the season for summer read, but like, and also a

really good audio book is The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. She's just such a great writer.

And I know it's a very frivolous thing on the surface, but there's actually a lot in there.

And it's, I won't, I won't ruin it for, I don't think I would say it would be a spoiler,

but there's actually like a surprising amount of depth for what is really just a fun action

adventure kind of read. I can't wait. If I hope it is someday made into a movie, it will be.

If they do a justice, it will be really terrific.

What's a favorite recent movie or TV show?

I really have been trying. I don't have time. I'm a young kid. So my media consumption days are

extremely, extremely limited. But I have been, I've been kind of forcing myself to slog through a

bunch of the Disney plus Star Wars series, which have been almost universally disappointing with

the exception of Andor. For those that have not seen Andor, it really is very good. Not good for

a Disney plus Star Wars show. It's like actually good for television, which I couldn't believe when

I saw the premise of it. Also a huge fan of Andor, and I've recommended it many times. And I feel

like now every new Star Wars series, I'm just comparing it to that bar. And that's the problem.

It's just like, if they would just make that creative team, or they would just let them make

shows, it would be okay. It would redeem all the rest of their failures. Yeah.

Just keep making equals. I'll watch them all.

What is a favorite interview question you like to ask people when you're interviewing them?

My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice

that they learned in their career and to really get into it. Like, tell me the story of how you

learned the best practice, like how, you know, whatever, you just let them go on and then you'd

be like, great. Tell me a situation where that best practice would not be applicable. Most people

can't do it. So interesting. What is the favorite product you've recently discovered that you really

like, whether it's an app or something physical? I was just singing the praises of a product to a

friend. It's the most boring and stupid product ever. It's just a humidifier. And you'd be like,

okay, how can you mess up a humidifier? But like, actually, it's actually really difficult to get

it exactly right. It's like, you know, what, like, there's always little attention to detail

crowd. This is a group about craft. It was on my mind. It's like a very humble appliance. And it's

actually like, I've gone through like 10 different models trying to find something that doesn't drive

me. But you know, like, if you want to run it at night, if it has a light that's on all night,

that's really annoying. If it makes a noise, that's no good. If it overheats, this is like all these

things where you're like, boy, if anyone had used the jobs to be done framework for one minute on

what this physical device is supposed to be, this is the product they would have built. And I can't

believe it's like such a so interesting in modern capitalism. There's so many categories where

they're just there isn't a product like that. Or there's just one, like, how come every product

does not like that? And, you know, the forces we've been talking about are the reason why it's

funny to see it like, you know, represented in such a humble object. What is the actual humidifier

that you found? It's the Levoit 300 s ultrasonic humidifier, Levoit 300 s. It's, it's like, it's

just a really well made $60 appliance, you know, it's nothing special, but they're about to see a

spike in sales. Good Levoit. I somewhere some somehow there was a product management meeting

where they talked about how to make this thing. And so I just I can picture it right now somebody

was like, look, the way we make these things sucks. Like, he please let me just like put the thing

that's normally on the bottom, let me put it on the top and let me put this in there and put that

in there. And someone was like, oh, okay, that's going to add three cents to the cost and reduce

our margins by what and someone was like, no, really think we should do it right. So I would

like to reward people. Yeah, this is going to take us off topic potentially. But I've just

thinking I've been thinking more recently about how most often the best stuff comes from just like

one person singular control over how to do that thing over and over and over. Yeah, there's actually

if you studied Twitter production system, they had this job that's called the chief engineer.

I wish more founders knew about this, because like when you become large, it's important to be

able to empower the founders that work for you. And I just only see yourself as the founder.

So the chief engineer is the person with the moral authority over an entire line, like a car

from start to finish. And I don't know if this is still true, but back in the days when people were

writing a lot about Toyota, inside the company, the car is not called the Toyota Camry. It is called

so and so sans car. And the thing about the chief engineer is they have no reports. Nobody works for

them. They just have like the they have what's called the big room. If you've studied that whole

thing, like there's like a place where they are, and they have the they have a small staff, but

like they have the design and the car and like any but as the as the number of people who work

on a car, you know, it swells up and then it comes down because you have the design phase,

then you go into production, and you eventually like the repeal goes back down.

The most important thing you have to do in a product is make trade off decisions.

And if you just let people make their own trade off decisions, it's totally different. It's

really difficult to have any kind of coherent design like thrust. And so the idea is like this is

the person who makes those two, if there's a fight between two departments about how much the

thing should cost or if someone has a question like this, then I can improve the the aerodynamics of

the thing by this much, but it will cost this much and it will mean we have to take this button and

turn it from metal to plastic. You have someone who can actually be like, no, that button has to

be metal. Like we made a promise that this is going to be like or but doesn't like you just need

someone who knows that thing. It has to be that you can keep it in somebody's head. So yeah,

call the chief engineer. Just when I thought we were done with golden nuggets in this episode,

that is so interesting. I think that makes so much sense. And I also agree that should happen

more often at companies. Wow. Yeah, it's very much missing examples structures. Yeah. All right,

two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you like to repeat yourself, share

with folks, something that you come back to often that helps you do the right sorts of things?

Well, I won't get into the whole explanation. The motto is that nothing real can be threatened

and nothing unreal exists. Although the whole other episode just unpacking that.

Amazing. Final question. You invented a lot of terms, a lot of concepts. Is there one that

you don't think cock fire and that kind of spread as much as you thought it should?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got tons. I got tons. Oh man, the cutting room floor is full of so many things.

I went through a really extended period of trying to use, but it was before Lean Startup,

I tried to use the cell biology as the metaphor for a startup. I should have been,

I wanted something more biological, less mechanical. I never got one person to understand

what I was talking about. It did not work. But I'll take the one that surprised me the most.

This is such a small one, but I really thought that this would like take off and people would

be way into it. I did a lot of writing about it and then like couldn't get couldn't get the stick.

So everyone knows viral loops. There's also engagement loops. And I was like, Oh, just like

we have viral loops, which is about how come bioproducts grow. We should also have engagement

loops, which is about how people stick. And like, there's a science to stickiness.

And like people have written about that, like from the point of view, like how do you make your

product more addictive? But that's not really what this is about. This is about being able to model

the dynamics of how customers flow through. And a version of that is in the Lean Startup, we have

what I call the law of sustainable growth, which is a situation where new customers come as a

natural side effect of the actions of past customers. And so that is obviously true of the

viral loop. Everyone knows the paid, you know, engine of acquisition where you have, you know,

whether your marginal profit per customer drives your ability to invest in customer acquisition.

But there's also what I call the sticky engine of growth, which is kind of like the vestige of

this idea that made it into the Lean Startup. But I actually think that that's a whole really

interesting thing where like, if you think about the way to think about it is like,

if someone is living their life, having a happy time, then for some reason they use your product.

Why did they use your product? What made them come back to your product? And it's actually,

there's not that many things it can be. Like, it might be because you gave them a synthetic

notification, like, Hey, please come back to my product. And they did. It could be because

some kind of organic notification took place. Like that is like, they got an email from a friend

on your platform that was like, they got a notification that was driven by like their,

you know, one of the most successful customer emails of all time is PayPal's you've got money.

Click here to take the money. It's like, has a very high click-through rate. Maybe second only

to Facebook, someone has tagged you in a photo, but we're not going to tell you which photo it was.

So you better click, right? Like, so like, so something happened. If it's not one of those two

things, then it's got to be because of positioning. Something in your brain on its own told you to

use that product. Or like, why did you go start playing World of Warcraft? Did someone have to,

did you have to get a notification to remind you like, you like playing, you know, how you like

doing it or like, or something happened in your life that like made you neither you're hungry.

So you went to the thing to get the food. Like, because those are the only ways by which people

come back to a product, those are all, those all can be measured, studied and understood to the

same level of precision as we have with viral loops. I can't for the life of me understand

why viral loops gets all the attention and no one is remotely interested in the science of

engagement. So I thought, I thought, I was a time when I thought engagement loops would make me way

more famous and lean start up everyone. I was very, very wrong. This also reminds me that you also,

I think we're the first person to talk about growth as loops and these specific loops and a

growth engine. Yeah. Yeah. So wow, we discovered another one. I imagine there's many more. Eric,

this was incredible. I definitely think this is my new favorite episode. Thank you so much for

being here. Two final questions, working folks finding a line if they want to reach out potentially,

and then how can listeners be useful to you? You still find me at theleanstartup.com. I'm at

Eric Reese, E-R-I-C-R-I-E-S on all the usual places, although I really don't do a lot of social

anymore. So like joining my mailing list at theleanstartup.com is probably the best way to

keep track of like the major things that I do in my life. And then yeah, I do try to get on

some social from sometimes to make some announcements. And if you want to reach out,

I'm just Eric at theleanstartup.com. How can listeners be useful to you? Oh, that's really

sweet. You know, honestly, people need to just take these ideas and do something with them.

And then you learn something from it and then tell me what happened. That's all I want in

exchange. Just tell me what happened. Even if you, like the people I've learned the most from

are the people that tried to use my ideas. I thought they were like the stupidest thing they

ever heard of and like doesn't work and they're mad and whatever. Like tell me, I want to know

all about it because really my job, like the way I see myself is like my job is just to try to

understand these things. I just want to know the truth. If I'm wrong, like, I don't like being

wrong. I'm not, I'm as attached to my ideas as anybody else, but like I try really hard to find

out what is true. So if you discover something new, please tell me. That's all I ask. Just let

me know. And, and if you don't try, then how are you ever going to discover anything new? So just,

you know, if you like, you know, every day I meet people who are like, who just heard about

Lean Startup for the first time. For me, it's so old that like every day that people read the book

for the first time and they're like, they have a question about, so like, if that's where you're

at and you just discovered it, like, excellent, you know, I've, I read a couple books, you can go

read them like, please, for those ideas. If you're someone who's like jaded and they're like, oh,

I'm so tired of hearing about Lean Startup. Like I mentioned a few new ideas in this,

in this conversation, like, go try one of those. And like, even if, even if it doesn't work or

if he does work or, you know, like even the people I've learned a lot from are people who

they tried it and in the process of it not working, they had another even better idea.

And then they went and did that, well, go do that. Oh, I asked, tell me what happened. I want to

learn from, from people who, who making this happen. And like, you know, I hope as we come

together as a, not just as a Lean Startup movement, but as a startup, like as a group of people who

fundamentally believe that we can make the world a better place through the building of organizations

from scratch. Like we have that as our belief, like that, that the future is not scary, newness

is not something to be feared or opposed. But there is a like a responsible, methodical value

creating way to, to make positive change in the world. Like that, that's an ethos that is not

universally shared. And that if someone's listening to your podcast, my assumption is you're in our

tribe. So like, we as we have a collective responsibility to think about, like, what do we

want to, what do we stand for? Beyond just my company, my founder, my story, my that, but like,

what do we as a group, what are our shared and collective values? And how do we make those

manifest in the world? I'll leave you with one last idea. We collectively have so much power,

it's crazy, because the system, the way it works down, what I've learned about our current, you

know, what they call late stage capitalism, right, by financialized engine of capitalism,

is that it is value destroying in so many ways. And although markets discipline companies,

and they require them to create more value than is destroyed to stay alive, new companies,

the ones that we built are so valuable, like the core insight that makes a thing is so valuable

that the being that you built can withstand so much damage before it collapses. And yet,

if you look at the average tenure of companies and public companies, you just look at average CEO

tenure, like any all the metrics you look at are really grim here, like we're destroying

companies faster than we create them, such that like the total net number of public companies in

America is down more than half from a peak that was in our lifetime, it's not that long ago.

What's going on? Well, the system requires a steady supply of fresh meat to replenish that

which it destroys. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are one of the peddlers.

So you're the manufacturer of the thing that the system requires for its basic survival. And so,

as a matter of fact, we as a group, we get to set the terms by which this is done. And so,

if we want to stop selling our beings, our babies, our children for money, we don't have to do that.

If we want them to have a certain ethos themselves in the world, we want them to be

trustworthy counterparties and do something for the people we care about, we can insist that that is

the precondition upon which we will give our everything to. And so, I don't want to say that

I know all the answers or that my values are the ones that should win out. But I do think that we

do have a certain shared value set of values that we ought to be more ardent in defending.

And I hope your listeners will take that to heart.

And beautiful and empowering way to end this. Eric Rees, thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or

leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Eric Ries, Lean Startup, MVP, Pivoting, AI, Long-Term Stock Exchange, Craft, Mental health, Entrepreneurship, Governance

People

Ben Silverman, Clay Christensen, Eric Ries, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D'Angelo, Paul Graham, Thomas Kuhn, Warren Buffett

Companies

Google, Philip Morris, IMVU, Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), PayPal, Facebook, SEC, Segment, Loom, Atlassian, Slack, Box, Retool, Toyota, Open AI, Amazon, Hershey

Organizations and Institutions

Smithsonian, The Lean Startup

References

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Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). He’s also a multi-time founder and currently advises startups, VC firms, and larger companies on business and product strategy. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• The current state of the Lean Startup methodology

• Common misconceptions about the Lean Startup methodology

• Understanding how to actually think about MVPs (minimum viable products)

• When to pivot and when to stay the course

• Thoughts on AI and how to deal with uncertainty

• How to structure your company around core values and create products that benefit humanity

• The philosophy behind Eric’s current big idea: the Long-Term Stock Exchange

• Much more

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Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today’s transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.

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Where to find Eric Ries:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/

• X: https://twitter.com/ericries

• Website: https://theleanstartup.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Eric’s background

(04:46) Eric’s recent activities and projects

(06:23) Eric’s start in advising and first-principles thinking

(10:56) Lessons from designing the Lean Startup process

(14:04) The current state of lean startup methodology

(22:33) Common misconceptions about the methodology

(24:28) Changes Eric would make in an updated version of Lean Startup

(27:52) An explanation of minimum viable product (MVP) and why Eric still stands by the process

(37:36) An example of “Less is more”

(41:24) More on MVPs and the importance of testing your hypotheses 

(41:24) How LTSE had to pivot after a partnership fell apart

(48:37) Eric’s take on the concept of craft

(53:36) Why getting fired for standing by your conviction can be a career accelerator

(55:17) Tech’s mental health crisis

(56:28) Advice for founders stuck in a “zombie company”

(1:00:16) How continuous pivots shape a company’s vision, with a real-life story

(1:08:20) Challenges in assessing companies from an external perspective

(1:13:17) Practical advice for businesses considering a pivot

(1:18:42) The impact of artificial intelligence

(1:26:59) The current capabilities of ChatGPT and its potential use as an equalizer in the marketplace

(1:31:26) Eric’s current work with founders on human flourishing

(1:42:40) Advice for founders who want to build ethical companies 

(1:49:37) Examples of first-principles thinking

(1:53:42) Why shareholder primacy theory is wrong

(1:55:19) The “spiritual holding company” 

(1:58:12) Lightning round

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Referenced:

• The Long-Term Stock Exchange: https://ltse.com/

• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898

• Lean manufacturing: https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/definition/lean-production

• Six Sigma: https://www.6sigma.us/six-sigma.php

• Clay Christensen: https://claytonchristensen.com/

• Eric Ries on 4 Common Misconceptions About Lean Startup: https://www.entrepreneur.com/starting-a-business/eric-ries-on-4-common-misconceptions-about-lean-startup/286701

• Anakin Skywalker meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/for-the-better-right

• Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/inside-linear-building-with-taste-craft-and-focus-karri-saarinen-co-founder-designer-ceo/

• Snow Crash: https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958

• IMVU: https://about.imvu.com/

• Ben Silbermann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silbermann/

• Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley: amazon.com/Wonder-Boy-Zappos-Happiness-Silicon/dp/1250829097

• Understanding Steve Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field: https://www.emexmag.com/understanding-steve-jobs-reality-distortion-field

• Paul Graham’s website:http://www.paulgraham.com/raham

• Segment: https://segment.com/

• Loom: https://www.loom.com/

• The Slack story: https://www.paperflite.com/blogs/slack-story

• The Social Network on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/70132721

• Thomas Kuhn: Paradigm Shift: https://www.simplypsychology.org/kuhn-paradigm.html

• Conway’s Law: the little-known principle that influences your work more than you think: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-conways-law-acmi

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail Guards Scene on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVWH01E2weA

• Toyota Production System: https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/production-system/

• Warren Buffett’s Forbes bio: https://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett

• The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good: amazon.com/Enlightened-Capitalists-Cautionary-Business-Pioneers/dp/0062880241

• The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty): https://www.amazon.com/Grace-Kings-Dandelion-Dynasty/dp/148142428

• All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries: https://www.amazon.com/All-Systems-Red-Murderbot-Diaries/dp/0765397536

• Star Wars: Andor on Disney+: https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5

• Tesla Powerwall: https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

• Levoit Classic 300S ultrasonic smart humidifier: https://www.amazon.com/LEVOIT-Humidifiers-Ultrasonic-Essential-Customized/dp/B09C24TYGQ

• The Law of Sustainable Growth: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20121015181612-2157554-the-law-of-sustainable-growth/

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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