Episode

How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, discusses his new book Incorruptible, about why successful companies lose their founding values and how governance structures can prevent it. He explains "the force no one controls but everyone obeys," tells the Novo Nordisk and Anthropic origin stories, and describes practices like public benefit corporation charters, mission guardians, and long-term benefit trusts. He also shares the Cloudflare free-encryption and Groupon email-frequency stories as examples of "harder is easier" leadership.