Founder, entrepreneur, and best-selling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries discusses how to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Ries talks with world-class technologists, thought leaders, executives, and others working to create a new ecosystem of trustworthy organizations with limitless potential for growth and a deep commitment to purpose. Together, they uncover the tools and methods to ensure the next generation of companies are designed to maximize human flourishing for generations.
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Données mises à jour le 29/09/2026
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How Veeva Became the First Public Company to Convert to a Public Benefit Corporation | Peter Gassner
jeudi 24 septembre 2026 • Durée 42:19
What if maximizing shareholder value can actually make a company less valuable?
Peter Gassner is the founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, a cloud software company serving the life sciences industry. Before founding Veeva, Peter built enterprise software at IBM, PeopleSoft, and Salesforce. Under his leadership, Veeva became the first publicly traded company to convert to a public benefit corporation.
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, Peter joins me to explain why profit is necessary for a healthy company but should be the result of fulfilling its mission, not the mission itself. We discuss his belief that companies create lasting value when their employees, customers, and investors are aligned around a larger purpose, his discomfort with founding documents that prioritized shareholder returns, and Veeva’s two-and-a-half-year journey to becoming a public benefit corporation.
We also explore how shareholder primacy can narrow a company’s thinking and limit innovation, how Veeva’s new structure opened the door to providing free software to clinical research sites, and why Peter believes the conversion has benefited employees, customers, and investors alike.
Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.
A Founder’s Guide to Pivoting Without Killing the Company | Misha Esipov
jeudi 8 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:03:10
Misha Esipov is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit. In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I talk with Misha about what it takes to build a company inside one of the hardest parts of finance to break into.
Misha immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child and watched his parents rebuild their lives from scratch. Years later, after a conventional path through math, finance, and business school, that experience resurfaced as a question that wouldn’t let go. Why do capable people lose access to credit simply because they cross a border?
Nova Credit began by tackling that problem directly, starting with international students and immigrants who were being shut out of the system. Then the pandemic hit. Immigration stopped, and the company’s core market disappeared almost overnight.
Misha shares what it was like to lead through that moment, how crises clarify where leaders should focus their energy, and how Nova Credit found a way forward without abandoning its original purpose.
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and what it really takes to build something that lasts, this conversation is for you.
Escaping the Zero-Sum Economy: A New Model for Local Prosperity | Zita Cobb
jeudi 11 décembre 2025 • Durée 01:24:23
Zita Cobb grew up on Fogo Island, a remote fishing community off the coast of Newfoundland that operated for centuries without cash. Her childhood was shaped by a deep sense of place, the collapse of the inshore fishery, and a belief that communities survive through mutual care. When she left to study business, and later helped build JDS Uniphase into one of the most successful high-tech companies of its era, she carried those ideas with her. The rise and fall of the telecom bubble gave her a front-row view into what happens when profit and speed outrun purpose, sending her searching for a different model of development.
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Zita to talk about that journey and the philosophy that guides her work today. We discuss why she believes business is a tool for solving real problems and how communities can reclaim agency by understanding their own assets. Zita explains how Shorefast grew into a holistic set of enterprises on Fogo Island, including the Fogo Island Inn, which reinvests all surpluses into local culture and economic development. We talk about how communities can build their own pathways to development and why Zita believes lasting change begins close to home.
The Ultimate Guide for Creating Products People Trust | Seth Goldman (Honest Tea)
jeudi 20 novembre 2025 • Durée 01:03:38
Most companies scale by cutting corners. Seth Goldman built a brand by refusing to.
Seth is one of the founders of Honest Tea, a longtime chair at Beyond Meat, and the cofounder of Just Ice Tea. His career has been defined by a belief that business can be a force for human and environmental good. From a thermos of tea brewed in his kitchen to national distribution and acquisition by Coca-Cola, he has spent decades exploring how values can live inside systems built for profit.
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Seth to talk about the full story of Honest Tea, from its founding to its sale and eventual shutdown, and how those experiences shaped his approach to building again. We discuss how trust and long-term relationships helped him rebuild quickly, what it takes to embed purpose in supply chains, and why he believes even B Corp standards do not go far enough.
How the Former U.S. CTO Built a $3B Healthcare Company Powered by Love | Todd Park
jeudi 6 novembre 2025 • Durée 01:32:24
Most companies optimize for profit. Devoted Health was built to serve people.
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Todd Park, co-founder of Devoted Health and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer, to explore what it looks like to design a company for human flourishing at scale.
Todd shares how Devoted earned one of the highest trust scores in the industry and how he and his brother, Ed, built a business that treats every member like family. We talk about what it takes to operationalize love inside a system as complex as healthcare and how Devoted never saw any problem as outside its mission.
In our conversation today, we talk about:
• What it means to have love as an operational framework
• How Devoted’s unambiguous mission became a superpower for alignment and trust
• The formula Todd uses to define what world-class healthcare really means
• Why Todd believes hard problems belong inside the company’s mission, not outside it
• The role of trust as both Devoted’s core metric and its greatest moat
• Lessons from Howard Schultz on scaling culture
• What it takes to design an ecosystem where business, technology, and community all serve the same goal
The G.O.A.T.s of Kindness on Bootstrapping a Purpose-Driven Company | Dr. Brent Ridge & Josh Kilmer-Purcell
jeudi 23 octobre 2025 • Durée 01:01:47
Most companies talk about purpose. Beekman 1802 made it their operating system.
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Dr. Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell, co-founders of Beekman 1802, to explore how a small act of compassion grew into a multimillion-dollar skincare brand rooted in community and purpose.
After losing their Manhattan jobs during the 2008 recession, Brent and Josh moved to a farm in upstate New York and agreed to take in 80 homeless goats from a neighbor. That decision led to their first product, a bar of goat milk soap, and to a philosophy of entrepreneurship built on kindness and long-term thinking.
Together, we talk about scaling a values-driven company, turning The Amazing Race into PR that fueled their growth, and how to make purpose authentic instead of performative. We also explore why kindness and discipline can coexist, and how the best brands instill a sense of belonging.
From Fired CEO to Billion-Dollar Exit: How Lukas Biewald Turned Failure into the Future of AI
jeudi 9 octobre 2025 • Durée 01:05:54
Lukas Biewald has been shaping the future of AI for nearly two decades. In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, we explore how his early passion for the board game Go, his hard-won lessons as a founder, and his focus on alignment and culture helped him build Weights & Biases into a trusted toolmaker in machine learning.
In our conversation, we discuss:
• Lessons Lukas drew from Go about pattern recognition, persistence, and the power of computation
• The hard-won lessons Lukas took from CrowdFlower about timing, focus, and staying in the wrong role too long
• How Lukas created his own unpaid internship at OpenAI to sharpen and expand his technical skills
• The pain point that inspired Lukas and his cofounders to build Weights & Biases
• Practical ways Lukas kept his board aligned
• Why caring deeply about your product and users beats clever hacks and pitch decks every time
• How W&B’s ‘Year in Review’ showed that delight can be a moat in enterprise software
• Why the CoreWeave deal feels fundamentally different for Lukas than the sale of CrowdFlower
How to move beyond bureaucracy, not waste talent, and innovate faster | Michele Zanini & Gary Hamel
jeudi 25 septembre 2025 • Durée 01:37:17
Bureaucracy was once a breakthrough. Today, it’s become a costly drag on innovation, human potential, and business impact. In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, authors of Humanocracy, to explore how organizations can move beyond outdated management models and unlock true human thriving.
Hamel and Zanini have spent years researching and advising some of the world’s most forward-thinking companies. Together, we make the case for replacing top-down control with systems that maximize contribution, creativity, and ownership at every level.
We dive into how to rethink management from first principles, why employee engagement is at historic lows, and what leaders can do to build organizations that unlock the full potential of their people.
From Blacksmith to Billionaire: The Making of Patagonia’s Ethos
jeudi 11 septembre 2025 • Durée 01:28:48
Patagonia has always been different. While so many companies lose their way when profits come before people, the planet, or even their own products, Patagonia continues to stay true to its values.
In today’s episode of The Eric Ries Show, I speak with journalist David Gelles, author of Dirtbag Billionaire, his new book about founder Yvon Chouinard. We explore how Chouinard built Patagonia with an ethos of quality and conservation, how he resisted the corrupting pull of profit-at-all-costs, and why he ultimately gave the company away to protect its mission.
We talk about what Patagonia’s story reveals about the possibility of building ethical companies that not only survive but thrive. And we make the case for putting strong protections in place from the very beginning, so that a company’s purpose can endure long after its founder is gone.
“AI Will Break the Internet” — Cloudflare CEO’s Big Prediction
jeudi 28 août 2025 • Durée 01:18:58
What if your company’s mission turned out to be bigger than you imagined?
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I speak with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, now a $70 billion company defending 20% of all internet traffic. We trace how Cloudflare’s mission wasn’t declared at the start, but discovered through a series of principled decisions, from protecting journalists and activists to making encryption free for everyone.
We also explore today’s urgent challenges: how AI’s shift from search engines to answer engines threatens the web’s business model, why creators must be compensated, and what a sustainable, human-centered internet could look like.
This is a conversation about technology, power, and what it means to build with principle.
Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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