I told Eric Ries that I felt like puking after reading his new book, Incorruptible.
Here’s why:
In The Matrix, right after Neo takes the red pill from Morpheus, Neo is shown the truth for the first time.
Neo’s reaction is pure overload and he starts barfing all over the floor.
In Incorruptible, Eric shares hard truths about how organizations are built… and why success itself so often turns companies against the people and principles that made them worth building in the first place.
The reality is SHOCKING and, just like Neo, being shown the truth that bluntly was tough to swallow.
But the book isn’t all doom and gloom…
It’s mixed in with hope, beauty, and a CLEAR roadmap of a new way forward to protect the soul of companies we entrepreneurs work so hard to build.
The book blew my mind and gave me a whole new level of permission to not only build companies, but entirely new Civic Infrastructures (my favorite concept out of the new book) that create civilization level change.
Since reading it, I’ve been talking about it non-stop to everyone I’m in contact with.
Eric has spent his career walking founders from idea → IPO. And he kept watching the same heartbreaking pattern play out over and over:
Visionary entrepreneurs would build something they loved, sell it or take it public… and then watch their baby get gutted by short-term thinking, fiduciary “duties,” and investors squeezing every last drop of value out of it until there was nothing left of the original soul.
So Eric wrote the book on how to build a company that can’t be corrupted, and how we might design entirely new civic infrastructure for the world that’s coming.
A few things we unpacked on the episode:
- Why nearly every founder unknowingly signs away their company’s soul on day one… and the single line in your corporate charter that makes you legally vulnerable to selling to the worst possible buyer
- Eric’s radical redefinition of “profit”: What it actually means to be a for-profit company when you account for all the value you create AND destroy across time, space, and human lives
How to design a “spiritual holding company”: the 100-year-old structure that protects the soul of a business across generations, so the mission you built it for can never be gutted by short-term decision making
Find Out More About Eric Ries
- Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries
- Incorruptible book website (bonus chapter, implementation guides, courses): https://www.incorruptible.co
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE)