Eric Ries: Incorruptible, and the Case for Long-Term Governance Reform

Mar 31, 2026

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(0:00) Intro

(1:40) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel

(2:26) Start of interview

(3:19) Eric's origin story

(5:00) The Lean Startup Journey

(10:23) About The Long-Term Stock Exchange

(18:00) Governance and Eric's New Book Incorruptible

(24:14) On Governance in Startups vs. Public Companies and so-called "best practices." "One of the key ideas in the book is that it's always too early until it's too late."

(28:37) Why the title Incorruptible. How to become an incorruptible force for good in the world.

(33:15) The board members' sacred obligation. The call for a director's oath.

(34:40) The concepts of Financial Gravity and Career Equity. "The force that no one controls, but everyone obeys." "The number one thing CEOs notice before and after the IPO: every employee is looking at the stock ticker every day."

(41:38) Innovations in AI Governance (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) "A new old idea"

(44:36) On the Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) structure.

(46:25) The Case for New Governance Structures. "The shareholder primacy debate has become completely divorced from the actual material interests of shareholders." The example of Costco.

(52:45) On Dual-Class Share Structures. "I don't think emperor for life is a great political system" "[The] standard governance [model] has to be really bad for dictator for life to be an improvement." "I'm interested in trying to create what I call the architecture of institutional longevity. What would it take to create organizations that can endure for decades or even centuries? In order to do that, by definition, we have to find ways to encode the ethos."

(56:51) Mission-Locked Constellations. "Structures that involve many different entities that are locked together to act as a bit of an immune system against corruption." "The spiritual holding company: a constellation of multiple entities where some entity has the responsibility of being at the center to provide basically mission protection as a service to the for-profit entities under its purview."

(1:01:07) The Novo Nordisk story. *reference to the Acquired podcast episode.

(1:07:10) Books that have greatly influenced his life:

The Machine that Changed the World, by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos (1990)
Toyota Production System, by Taiichi Ohno (2001)
Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker (2003)
Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)
The Enlightened Capitalists, by James O'Toole (2019)

(1:12:20) His mentors. Steve Blank, Ken Duda, Maliz Beams, Dario Amodei, Brian Chesky, Matthew Prince, Sid Sijbrandij, Dustin Moskovitz, James Reinhart, Todd Park.

(1:14:00) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives her life by "Nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists" (from A Course in Miracles)

(1:15:25) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves

(1:16:08) The living person he most admires

Eric Ries is the Creator of the Lean Startup method and author of The Lean Startup, he has spent two decades reshaping how companies are built and managed. He is also the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) and host of The Eric Ries Show podcast. More info on his latest book Incorruptible here.

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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License