‘Lean Startup’ author reveals his one regret about his best-selling book – and how his new one fixes it
When Eric Ries wrote his landmark book “The Lean Startup,” published in 2011, the introduction concluded with a bold statement: “The Lean Startup movement wants to ensure that those of us who aspire to build the next big thing will have the tools we need to change the world.”
Fifteen years later, Ries admitted to a room full of startup founders in Seattle that he wished he had added three words to that sentence: “better.”
“I made a mistake, so I feel like an idiot,” he said, answering an audience question about what he would change about his successful book. “If I ever revise it, I will include that one sentence.”
Ries said emissions don’t seem to matter as much in 2011. Watching how parts of the tech industry have evolved since then convinced him otherwise.
You are doing it yourself with a completely new book.
Ries was speaking Friday at Seattle Flow Startup Day, a startup conference organized by Marcelo Calbucci. It was a comeback – Ries headlined the same event in 2011, the year “Shallow Start” came out. This time he was previewing his upcoming book, “Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great.”
At its core, “Incorruptible” says that the standard definition of profit (income minus expenses) has been fundamentally broken. Ries invented a new definition: profit is the maximization of human prosperity. Specifically, he defines profit as the remainder of human prosperity created by an organization: what remains after accounting for all its impacts on people’s lives, not just those that appear on the balance sheet.
“We should all pretend we think all ways to make money are equally good,” he told the Launch Day audience. “But nobody thinks that.”
Ries uses the word corruption not to mean fraud or bribery, but structural decay – the gradual rusting that pulls successful companies away from their machines. This book uses case studies spanning centuries to show how this happens, and what innovators can do about it.
Among his advice to hundreds of founders in the room:
- File as a public benefit organization. Ries called it the easiest step in the book — a two-page legal filing in Delaware that allows a company to accomplish a specific goal beyond maximizing shareholder value — and said any founder who skips it is making a big mistake.
- Do it now. At every stage, he warned, someone will tell you to wait – your lawyer, your investors, your board, your bankers. “It’s always ‘not yet, not yet, not yet.’ Then, bam, at the moment hit you in the face.”
- Don’t treat the mission as an afterthought. Founders are taught to be serious about the business first and worry about the equipment later, he said. He argued the opposite: delegation is the primary source of competitive advantage, and abandoning it makes everything difficult.
- Explain who you care about. His method for measuring people’s prosperity is simple: make a list of people you wouldn’t want to betray, figure out how you would make their lives better, and write down how you would know. Those are your metrics.
“Indestructible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great,” by Eric Ries, will be published May 26 by Authors Equity.
