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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The Oracle Of Silicon Valley Shares How to Create More Value Than You Capture | Tim O’Reilly
Thursday, September 12, 2024 • Duration 01:40:23
What is the relationship between technology and society? What happens to idealism over time? I’m fortunate to have discussed these questions and many more with Tim O’Reilly for this episode of The Eric Ries Show.
Tim is the founder of O’Reilly Media, which has provided countless programmers and technologists with foundational information for doing their work well. He’s also been a long-time witness to the changes and growth of tech, and has consistently looked far ahead of other people, perhaps most famously in his book What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.
Many call Tim the Oracle of Silicon Valley. He thinks of himself more as “a voice in the wilderness” and someone who brings together people with great ideas to build new things. In our conversation, we covered how to build a business with a real ethos, how to gain competitive advantage by doing the right thing, and why thinking beyond the quarter, or even the year, is crucial for survival.
As he said, “Companies need to think about the long term, which is: who is going to provide what you are the gatekeeper for if you basically have a relentless acquisition of all the value for yourself?” Ultimately, he believes – and I couldn’t agree more – that “we need to build an economy in which the important things are paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts.”
Other topics we touched on include:
AI from multiple angles
Tech companies as the fulcrum between suppliers and customers
Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.
The Art of Pivoting: How TaskRabbit Reimagined the Gig Economy | Stacy Brown-Philpot (Google, TaskRabbit, HP, Nordstroms)
Thursday, August 29, 2024 • Duration 01:20:08
Stacy Brown-Philpot is a unique voice in Silicon Valley. She began her career as a public accountant and worked at Goldman Sachs before landing at Google.
She was the COO and then the CEO of TaskRabbit, which she saw through its sale to Ikea. Today, she’s on a number of corporate boards including HP, Nordstrom, StockX, Noom, and Black Girls CODE. She’s also a founding member of the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, which invests in Black, Latinx, and Native American founders.
Throughout, she’s been a consistent advocate for building cultures where people can bring all aspects of their rich and varied lives to work. The importance of setting out what you want to be and fully committing to it is the wisdom she’s held her entire life: “My grandmother's always telling me, if you don't stand for something, you fall for anything.”
In our conversation, we touched on Google’s rise and its eventual tumble from its “don’t be evil” ethos, what it was like to pioneer the sharing economy at Task Rabbit and the pivots the company went through along the way, and why selling the company to Ikea was dependent on its mission because “they weren't going to buy anything just to buy it. They needed to buy something that they believed in because they're only a part of something that they believe in.”
Stacy’s model of compassionate leadership is inspiring, as is the fun she’s had executing it for the last few decades, even when things were bumpy. She had a lot to say about both, as well as:
What “the greater good” really means
Going from 50,000 people at Google to 60 at TaskRabbit
The value of sharing meals
The importance of celebrating things that happen outside of work at the office
Carrying forward a founder's legacy into a new era for the company
Fomenting crisis to foster growth
How constraints breed creativity
Taking the chaff with the wheat, at work, as a parent, and anywhere else
The role of the board
Reid Hoffman challenges your thinking on AI, governance, and politics
Thursday, August 15, 2024 • Duration 01:57:50
The latest episode of The Eric Ries Show features my conversation with Reid Hoffman. Executive Vice President of PayPal, co-founder of LinkedIn, and legendary investor at Greylock Partners are just a few of his official roles that have changed our world. He’s also been a mentor to countless founders of iconic companies like Airbnb, Facebook, and OpenAI. He’s an author, a podcast host – both Masters of Scale and his new show, Possible, with Aria Finger – and perhaps most importantly a crucial steward of AI, including co-founding Inflection AI, a Public Benefit Corporation, in 2022.
Reid has also long been a voice of moral clarity and a stabilizing influence on the tech ecosystem, supporting people who are working to make the world a better place at every level. He’s a firm believer that “the way that we express ourselves over time is by being citizens of the polis – tribal members.” That includes not just supporting the legal system and democratic process but also building organizations “from the founding and through scaling and ongoing iteration to have a functional and healthy society.”
We talked about all of this, as well as AI, from multiple angles – including the story of how he came to broker the first meeting between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella that led to the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership. He also had a lot to say about how AI will work as a meta-tool for all the other tools we use. We are, as he said,” homo techne,” – meaning we evolve through the technology we make.
We also broke down his famous saying that “entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down” and:
• The human tendency to form groups
• The relationship between doing good for people and profits
• AI as a meta-tool
• What he looks for in a leader
• The necessity of evolving culture
• Being willing to take public positions
• His thoughts on the economy and the upcoming election
How to build trust and win your customer’s attention with Seth Godin
Thursday, August 1, 2024 • Duration 01:02:01
This episode of The Eric Ries Show is all about the relationship between trust and success. I can’t think of anyone better to talk about it with than Seth Godin, author of the classic Permission Marketing, the best-seller This Is Marketing, and many other books, as well as a fantastic daily blog that has been going strong since the early days.
He also co-founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne. While the world tends to view Seth as an expert on marketing, he sees what he does in slightly different terms. “What I write about is how do humans interact? What stories do we tell ourselves? What do we want? What's worth doing?”
We talked about the roots of “the epidemic of unicorns,” the two approaches to gaining customer loyalty, how AI has permanently changed the means of production, how to build systems that create the conditions for great work to occur more easily, plus:
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Neo4j – The graph database and analytics leader. .
Inside Kickstarter: Co-Founder Yancey Strickler on Building the Crowdfunding Giant
Thursday, July 18, 2024 • Duration 01:38:48
Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the founder of Metalabel, a platform for releasing collective work. He’s also the author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World.
I’m thrilled to share our recent conversation in this episode. Yancey started out as a music journalist before applying his talents to helping the world share its creative pursuits. For him, creativity and humanity are implicitly connected, and so he’s been a forerunner in thinking about how to build companies that bring good things into the world and are also successful without devolving into extractive behaviors.
Not that any of this is simple. As Yancey says, “Everything is harder than you think. To do anything well is so hard. [But] if you put in the work, you don't need to fear it.”
We talked about the founding and growth of Kickstarter, which has been profitable since it’s 14th month, the power of humility, past mistakes and future hopes, why he started Metalabel, and more including:
• The innumerable inventions that make up our world
• Crisis hopping in Kickstarter’s early days
• The challenges of funding speculative projects
• Being one of the first Public Benefit Corps
• Creativity and self-knowledge
• Company building as an art
• Collective creativity
• The Bento Method
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How to Scale Trust Into a Billion Dollar Business | Ritu Narayan (Zum)
Tuesday, July 9, 2024 • Duration 01:17:05
For this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sat down with Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zum, which has had incredible success in the field of student transportation.
The company began as a private service to tackle a problem Ritu was facing herself: how to function as a working parent dealing with erratic pickup and drop-off schedules. Before long, it became clear that there was a far larger opportunity to change pretty much everything about how all kids get to and from school.
Pivoting to working with school districts and a fleet of electric buses, the company set out to “modernize student transportation to make it safe, sustainable, and accessible for all.”
To say it’s been a success is an understatement. Zum now serves thousands of schools in multiple states, and in February 2024, it hit unicorn status with a valuation of over a billion dollars. As Ritu says in our conversation, “the service is for everybody.”
We also talked about everything from carbon-neutral buses to cracking the procurement system of public school districts, the invaluable asset of parental peace of mind, scaling care, and more, including:
• How Ritu came to entrepreneurship
• Scaling trust
• How coming from the outside allowed the company to transform the industry
• Shifting from a B2C company to a B2B company
• Zum’s values: customer obsession, doing things the right way, thinking big and executing meticulously, and building better communities.
• How a clear mission makes alignment easier
• Zum’s “Five Step People Program” to reinforce culture and behaviors
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Lessons From Co-Founding Facebook, And Now Asana | Dustin Moskovitz
Thursday, June 20, 2024 • Duration 01:11:23
Welcome to The Eric Ries Show. I sat down with Dustin Moskovitz, founder of not one but two iconic companies: Facebook and the collaborative work platform Asana. Needless to say, he’s engaged in the most intense form of entrepreneurship there is. A huge part of what he’s chosen to do with the hard-earned knowledge it gave him is dedicate himself and Asana to investing in employees’ mental health, communication skills, and more. All of this matters to Dustin on a human level, but he also explains why putting people first is the only way to get the kind of results most founders can only dream of. We talked about how to get into that flow state, why preserving culture is crucial, his leadership style and how he decides when to be hands-on versus when to delegate, and how Asana reflects what he’s learned about supporting people at all levels.
Dustin sums up the work Asana does this way: “Our individual practices are meant to restore coherence for the individual, our team practices are meant to restore coherence for the team, and Asana, the system, is meant to try and do it for the entire organization.” I’m delighted to share our conversation, which also covers:
• How he uses AI and views its future
• Why he founded a collaboration platform
• How he applied the lessons of Facebook to building Asana
• Why taking care of your mental health as a founder is crucial for the company as a whole
• His thoughts on the evolution of Facebook
• The importance of alignment with investors
• His philanthropic work
• And so much more
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How to Disrupt an Industry: Lessons from James Reinhart (ThredUp)
Thursday, June 6, 2024 • Duration 01:28:30
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I talk with James Reinhart, founder of the second-hand resale platform ThredUp. A history major in college, James started his career as a teacher. That might not seem like it has much to do with fashion, but, as he explains, his early education and experiences actually led him not only to be a dual degree student at Harvard’s Business and Kennedy schools, but to a long-term view of ThredUp’s power to effect real change.
We get into the reasons why having a harder mission can be counterintuitively easier and why, as he says, “intrinsically good businesses are good for bottom lines and good for the world.” Not only did ThredUp generate 80 million dollars in revenue in the first quarter of 2024, but James has an uncanny track record of being able to accurately predict what’s going to happen ten years ahead.
Those details alone should be more than enough to pull you in, but they’re just a fraction of what we talked about. I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation with the founder whose mission is to inspire the world to think secondhand first.
• What it was like to be an entrepreneur at Harvard Business School before the days when everyone was doing it
• How his education background fed into his business acumen
• The value of investors who believe in you
• The advantages of having a mission that all your stakeholders are passionate about
• His experience going public and advice for founders
• Why he built a company culture around humane principles based on employee feedback
• The change he’s working towards and believes is possible
• And so much more
—
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His First Company Went Public For $3.5 Billion, Now He’s Reversing Type 2 Diabetes For 100 Million
Thursday, May 16, 2024 • Duration 01:35:35
In this first episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with serial entrepreneur and intrepid explorer, Sami Inkinen. Sami has co-founded two companies: Trulia and Virta Health. After Trulia was acquired by Zillow for $3.5 billion, he rowed from California to Hawaii with his wife, unassisted. What can’t this guy do? Now, he’s on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people with his latest venture, Virta Health. In this episode, we discuss:
In the interview, we cover:
• How Sami got started as an entrepreneur coming over to America with no experience
• What it was like to IPO during his time at Trulia
• What he’s learned raising money after a market crash and a zero-interest environment
• The best way he found to get great talent
• Why Virta is a mission-based company disguised as a for-profit company
• What he learned rowing unassisted to Hawaii from California
• Why he says you should create a mission that is both simple and ambitious
For too long, company builders have been told that purpose and profit are at odds -- that trading one for the other is inevitable. A burgeoning group of founders is proving that wrong, creating organizations whose commitment to their mission inspires the trust of customers, employees, investors, and other partners, leading to serious competitive advantage.
Better companies mean a better world for everyone not just now, but far into the future.
Join Eric Ries for conversations with a range of leaders from across industries as well as thinkers who are contributing to this new movement to tackle generational challenges by centering human flourishing.
Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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