Don’t Join an AI Company Until You Watch This

1. 0:00 – 2:57

   Intro

   1. AGAakash Gupta0:00

      Is Sam Altman just a bad CEO, or is he trapped in a bad structure?

   2. EREric Ries0:04

      The focus on Sam the person obscures the structural problems that need to get fixed, not just for OpenAI, but for all of these companies.

   3. AGAakash Gupta0:12

      Eric Ries is the Lean Startup guy. He created the most successful movement in tech ever.

   4. EREric Ries0:18

      For me, the worst scandal is the time that they put asbestos in the baby powder and covered it up. Its talcum powder caused her ovarian cancer.

   5. AGAakash Gupta0:27

      What?

   6. EREric Ries0:28

      Yeah. Yeah. In baby powder of all things. The killer that's about to kill you is already inside your house. Most of the time when companies collapse, the problem is internal.

   7. AGAakash Gupta0:37

      Can I copy-paste these governance features and will I have an incorruptible company?

   8. EREric Ries0:41

      No, absolutely not.

   9. AGAakash Gupta0:42

      So you write about this concept of financial gravity, where success is actually pulling companies away from their mission.

   10. EREric Ries0:48

       In order to understand and build an incorruptible company, you have to understand the deeper forces that act on organizations. You can say, "Well, I don't believe in gravity," but guess what? Gravity believes in you.

   11. AGAakash Gupta0:58

       So what were the choices you and Jeremy made? I believe you actually have Answer.AI as a for-profit. So how did you structure it properly so that it's incorruptible?

   12. EREric Ries1:07

       I just want you to ask yourself one simple question before you agree to what they say.

   13. AGAakash Gupta1:13

       Before we go any further, do me a favor and check that you are subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify Podcasts. And if you wanna get access to amazing AI tools, check out my bundle, where if you become an annual subscriber to my newsletter, you get a full year free of the paid plans of Mobbin, Arise, Relayapp, Dovetail, Linear, Magic Patterns, DeepSky, Reforge Build, Descript, and Speechify. So be sure to check that out at bundle.aakashg.com. And now into today's episode. We have a different episode for you guys today. You come to this podcast for a lot of AI PM tool breakdowns and AI PM courses. One of the things that people don't talk about enough is governance, and in AI PM it really matters. AI safety and ethics is one of the top things that AI PMs are evaluated on in interviews and on the job, and governance is one of the most important angles. Today we have on one of my personal heroes and legends, Eric Ries. He's kind of, as I told him, 20 years ahead of me in his career. He's created the amazing book, the amazing movement, the amazing brand. He's run a bunch of companies through it, some of which you'll get to hear about in today's episode. And in today's episode, he's gonna break down the famous OpenAI versus Anthropic structural battle. He's gonna walk you through exactly how companies get corrupted. He's gonna help you understand Enron versus Costco, and he's gonna help you see how you can structure your company, how you can make decisions on a day-to-day level that actually contribute, that actually are incorruptible. So if you wanna get better at the craft of business, if you wanna get better at AI, this episode is for you. Eric, I think the structure that is on the top

2. 2:57 – 6:27

   OpenAI's structural failure

   1. AGAakash Gupta2:57

      of everybody's mind is OpenAI. OpenAI started as a nonprofit.

   2. EREric Ries3:01

      Yeah.

   3. AGAakash Gupta3:01

      It created a capped profit arm, then they just converted to a for-profit PBC.

   4. EREric Ries3:08

      Yeah.

   5. AGAakash Gupta3:09

      So based on everything you just showed us, what does that structural trajectory tell you?

   6. EREric Ries3:15

      Yeah. OpenAI is a really funky example, and it's kind of hard to know what lessons to draw from it, 'cause it's such a singular and strange story. I mean, if you've read that giant New Yorker profile of Sam Altman, it's, like, mind-bending how complicated the whole thing has been. And obviously, there's big personality people involved, Elon and Sam, and it is complicated. And OpenAI has been anything but stable. I mean, it's really, depending on how you count, like two or three crises, um, that have almost ended the company. Like, it's, it's a recurring theme. But if you look at this diagram, OpenAI, for all of the attempts they made to protect the mission, it never had this structure. It only ever had one board, and I think that was a big mistake. Um, now, you know, could they have known that all the crazy things that were gonna happen were to happen? No. I think they were caught very much by surprise. So I'm sympathetic and, um, you know, I'm not here to throw stones. But I think it's really interesting that the number one lesson of OpenAI to me is that people think that governance means whatever it says on the piece of paper. So the board of OpenAI very naturally were like, "Look, it's our responsibility to hire and fire the CEO, right? We have that power." And in fact, Sam used to brag about that. If you look at his congressional testimony from before the crisis, he would say stuff like, "The reason you can trust me is I'm accountable to a nonprofit board who can fire me anytime." But when they actually tried to fire him, they did it, by the way, in the middle of trying to close a tender offer that he had personally negotiated. So pro tip, maybe don't do that.

   7. AGAakash Gupta4:33

      [laughs]

   8. EREric Ries4:33

      Um, but that created tremendous financial gravity that was aligned with Sam. Because all the employees were about to make millions of dollars personally from this tender offer. Microsoft, their number one investor and their biggest supplier, was livid because they hadn't been given any kind of notice. And the other investors were all tied to Sam. He had raised all the money. So this, like, confluence of events meant although the board had power on paper, the actual power was held by the employees, the supplier, and the investors. That's not an uncommon, uh, situation. So part of the goal of studying governance, like, part of the reason why it creates career acceleration for people, whether they're founders or not, is governance gets you a seat at the big boy table, okay? This is where the grown-ups meet to discuss the really consequential things, and governance is a study of power relationships. Who actually holds the power to do what? And it has that political character to it, the question of, like, if this company, this organization, was like an ancient Greek polis, right, a city state, what kind of, what kind of culture would we have? Are we more like Athens, are we more like Sparta? Well, every organization really reflects somebody's vision of utopia. It's somebody's idea, "This is the proper power relationship between people." And organizations have this special quality that when they grow, they turn the outside world into themselves. They metabolize resources, and they make the utopia bubble- ... get bigger. Someone once described, I think it was Benedict Evans, uh, described Amazon once as a machine for creating more Amazon, turning more of the world into Amazon. Like, that's what it does. And I think that's true of every company. Like, that's what it does. If, if it has integrity, it grows, it makes more of the world the way that it thinks it should be. So if you ask yourself from that perspective, based on everything we've heard, like what was the ethos? What was the integrity of OpenAI? I think we're left with a lot of questions.

   9. AGAakash Gupta6:24

      Earlier you had mentioned how a lot of founders give you a call when they're

3. 6:27 – 9:19

   Dario called Eric early

   1. AGAakash Gupta6:27

      creating a company. One of the craziest [chuckles] stories you tell in the book is that Dario Amodei gave you a call-

   2. EREric Ries6:33

      Mm-hmm

   3. AGAakash Gupta6:33

      ... in the early years of Anthropic. So when you analyze their governance structure, is, are they implementing things in a better way?

   4. EREric Ries6:42

      I think so. You know, of course, I played a role in doing it, so of course I think it's great. T- for the record, okay, like people, people misunderstand this all the time. I am not taking credit for Anthropic's success, okay? All credit to Dario and that exceptional team for all that they have done. They are crushing it, amazing. Okay, well done. Nor am I saying that they are perfect and have never made a mistake. I can tell you some mistakes, okay? No problem. But I think it's really important to understand that what makes them different, uh, and I've been called by a lot of companies over the years. They were already... Like, I met them right after they had left OpenAI, okay? So they were still smarting from that whole split. They were still trying to figure out what the seed round, they were trying to figure out what is our very first investment gonna be, what should the team be? And they were very concerned with their ethos of AI safety. And say what you will about that and whether they have it right or whatever, but they sincerely believe it, and they have really put it, they have, um, their actions speak louder than words, as you know, as my father used to say, right? Like, they have put their money where their mouth is, and they have shown that commitment over and over again. So to me, they said, "Look, we wanna make sure that we are gonna be able to protect this ethos." They didn't use that word, but that's the word I would use for it. Protect it as we scale. They understood that this was gonna be a multi-trillion dollar company or more if it worked, which meant that the temptation to steal the technology, to use it for some evil purpose was going to be immense, and they needed the tools to resist. Now, they were very lucky. They had aligned investors who were on board, um, or so it seemed. And we talked about this exact structure, the need for a mission lock vehicle. Now, to do that required them to defend this idea for two years as they raised their Series A, Series B, and I think it was in the Series C they finally, um, enacted what they call the long-term benefit trust. The LTBT is the formal, um, mechanism to have these trustees who are AI safety experts who have a s- who are able to appoint directors to the for-profit board, and they have... It's a very complicated thing, but as the company achieves milestones, the trust gains in power, so it's able to appoint more and more seats. Um-

   5. AGAakash Gupta8:38

      Mm-hmm

   6. EREric Ries8:38

      ... it's, it's a very clever solution to a very serious problem. And if you've ever wondered how come Anthropic just seems like a little bit more courageous than the other AI companies, now you know why. It's not just Dario personally. I mean, after all, he's a first-time founder, technical founder. He's great. I love him a lot, you know, I love him to death, but like, this is his first rodeo. Most founders who are doing it for the first time, when the stakes get high, chicken out because they don't have the appropriate protections to support their conviction. And, you know, I think the difference, you know, partly is about Dario's character. I admire him greatly. But part of it is about the proper structure that Anthropic has surrounded him with.

   7. AGAakash Gupta9:15

      Your new book has this framework at the center of it.

4. 9:19 – 14:51

   Four governance dimensions

   1. AGAakash Gupta9:19

      I myself was lucky enough to get this copy that your team sent me. So as I was studying it, there was something on page 91, I believe, which is where I wanted everybody to start.

   2. EREric Ries9:31

      Okay. You got it.

   3. AGAakash Gupta9:32

      So in this, you're talking through the blueprint, and you talk about it as the financial blueprint. So what are the four responsibilities that each company needs to get right?

   4. EREric Ries9:45

      Okay. So let's take a step back, 'cause when, when we talk about being an incorruptible company, people wanna know, "Well, what's that, what does that mean?" And they hope we're gonna talk about something exciting and fun. Like, ooh, is it about strategy, business model, culture, stakeholders, whatever. No. Wrong. In order to understand and build an incorruptible company, you have to understand the deeper forces that act on organizations that are invisible. You don't see them. In the same way that you can say, "Well, I don't believe in gravity," but guess what? Gravity believes in you. So when you jump up in the air, you come right back down to Earth. The same thing happens to organizations. If there are cracks in the foundation, if they're not strong enough, they get pulled down by financial gravity. So for most founders, most leaders that I work with, they don't even know what the word governance means. They've literally never read their corporate charter. They think it sounds like a building permit, like some kind of thing for lawyers to fuss over. But actually, corporate governance is the foundation, the constitutional structure that determines if an organization is strong or weak. And so if we wanna build an incorruptible organization, we need to do two really important things. We need to make sure that the internal stuff is strong. Everyone is aligned around common metrics, common goals, common purpose. And we have to have that strong exoskeleton that if people try to, to tempt us or pressure us to abandon the mission, we have the strength to resist. So yeah, if you want, I'll, I'll share my screen. If you want, I can show you the diagram.

   5. AGAakash Gupta11:10

      Yeah. You, you have f- listed four responsibilities. If you can walk us through the four, and then I think you said most companies only get one of these right, so why is that?

   6. EREric Ries11:19

      Yeah. So I call it the new governance. Like, it's a new idea about what corporate governance can and should be. Has four dimensions. So our goal is to create something worth protecting, okay? To build a trustworthy organization. Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset on the planet right now. And in order to stockpile it, we have to really get these inner dimensions right. But then if you stockpile a super valuable asset, guess what? People are gonna try to steal it from you. What do you expect? So, so one of the things I think I really didn't understand earlier in my career is that to the extent an organization is successful, that just makes it a more valuable target for someone to try to capture. So instead, we wanna make sure we build with structural integrity. So the foundation of all governance things is compliance. Today, pretty much every board is focused only on compliance. That means making sure we follow the rules, making sure no laws are broken, making sure there's no self-dealing. That stuff's important, but well covered elsewhere. And then purpose is the second dimension, and maybe the most important dimension. Today, we live in the era of what's called shareholder primacy, which holds that the purpose of a corporation is just to enrich its shareholders, and often just its short-term shareholders. This is a pervasive legal doctrine that has spread all over the world and even metastasized out of business into almost every kind of organization today. So that's pretty much it for modern boards. They're pretty much focused on compliance, and then to the extent they talk about purpose, they're talking about enriching their shareholders. I think we should add two more dimensions to that. First of all, purpose can be a lot more rich than just financial purpose. We'll talk about that. The second-- The, uh, third dimension is coherence, what I was saying before. To what degree is everything internally aligned around that purpose? So for example, is it possible that the organization might be tempted to make money by betraying the mission? This happens all the time in modern companies. We've all had that experience of a favorite brand, you know, that loses its way and then all of a sudden starts using cheaper products or the food starts tasting bad. I feel like I talk to so many people who, like, if a private equity firm takes over their favorite restaurant, they say they can taste it in the food.

   7. AGAakash Gupta13:28

      [laughs]

   8. EREric Ries13:28

      Ownership structure of a company has a certain taste to it. That's how pervasive this problem is. And then the last dimension is what I call integrity, and integrity means both in, as it would with a person, the ability to make and keep a promise, but also structural integrity. To what degree can an organization be bullied or pushed off course by outside forces? When we have this complete package together, we can build an incorruptible company.

   9. AGAakash Gupta13:55

      Which of these is the hardest to achieve? Which do companies have the most trouble with?

   10. EREric Ries13:59

       Well, hardest to achieve, um, they're kind of from easy to hard. So most companies, like, do okay on compliance. They maybe take an attempt at purpose, like if they have a mission statement or something like that. I don't think that counts, but at least it's an effort. Such companies are not mission-driven. They're mission-hopeful. And then as we get further and further away from the things that we as leaders directly control, it gets harder. So coherence is harder because purpose is something we fundamentally choose. It's a matter of our intention. What are we trying to do? And you know, generally when we're starting a company, we can write whatever purpose we want directly into the legal documents. Coherence is an operational discipline. We have to get our employees and all the other people we touch aligned. That is not the easiest thing to do. But integrity is certainly the one people struggle the most with because that relates to boards of directors, to our relationship with investors, and our relationship with the broader financial system.

5. 14:51 – 19:22

   Product teams and coherence

   1. AGAakash Gupta14:51

      When it comes to doing some of this coherence work in product building, what is the role of the executive team, the product leadership, and then the actual engineering team on the ground? How does that split up? Who's responsible for what parts?

   2. EREric Ries15:06

      Yeah. So product is usually, in a product-led company especially, product is where the rubber meets the road. So a lot of companies, a lot of leaders tell me, "I believe in product quality." I'm like, "Oh, do you? Is that your corporate purpose or just, you know, a slogan you want to use?" For a lot of people, it's just a slogan. When push comes to shove, um, when the pressure comes down, they will compromise on product quality. They'll compromise on design or whatever, on efficiency or whatever it is that they hold most dear. But in mission-driven companies, it's not like that. Everybody's aligned around that choice. So I'll give you a funny example. People hear the word purpose and they're like, "Oh no, it's some kind of ESG thing," right? It's just like, sounds vague and like, "Oh, what are we gonna talk about?" And I remember, uh, reading an article about a, a very famous big-time public market investor who was criticizing Unilever, the big industrial giant. Um, Unilever had said it wanted to infuse purpose into all of its products, and the hedge fund guy was like, "Oh, come on. At the point that we're talking about the purpose of Hellmann's mayonnaise, I think we've lost the plot." And I was like, "That's a, that's a good line. Like, I totally hear you, man." But interesting to me is, like, funny you picked that particular example because actually Hellmann's mayonnaise, humble though it may be, is food, so its purpose is actually very clear. It's to nourish and delight the people that eat it. So people think, well, what does it matter what the product manager thinks the purpose of Hellmann's mayo is? But I actually think it matters a great deal. For example, imagine an efficiency consultant shows up and is like, "Hey, product manager, I just realized we could save like 5% of the cost by using this carcinogenic ingredient," or, "Hey, why don't we lace it with the tiniest little bit of heroin? No one will notice, but it'll make the product super addictive. What do you say?" They might be like, "Well, I don't know, man. In the long run, that seems like it could really blow up in our face." They're like, "Yeah, that's true, but your stock options will be long vested by then. No one will notice." If you think the goal of the company is to enrich its shareholders, it's very easy to be tempted by these kinds of decisions. Of course, a purist, you know, the Steve Jobs type, will never, ever make such a trade-off. Outrageous to suggest such a thing because we love the craft itself. What most people do not understand is that if you have a belief that your organization is meant to do something specific other than make money, whether that's as humble as you want to make a high-quality mayonnaise or as complicated as you want to solve climate change, you are a business revolutionary whether you know it or not because our dominant financial system only accepts the idea that the purpose of a company is to increase shareholder value. So when push comes to shove, the product team is where these conflicts ultimately get borne out, and those of us who've been in organizations that get a little bit larger know this feeling well. In product is usually, and engineering is often where you'll find the people I call the torchbearers. These are the people who not, maybe don't have the fanciest title, maybe don't have all the formal power, they're probably not the highest paid people in the org, but they're the people with the moral authority who really believe in the company's mission. And you know, they're the people you go to when you need help. Like, "Hey, some product manager is trying to get me to, to make this feature worse for customers to make a lot, a little bit of money. Can you help me?" And they'll be like, "I got you. I got you." Right? You know who I'm talking about? Everyone's met these people. If you've ever had the job of being a torchbearer though in a modern company You live your life under siege because every day of your life, some person is in your office with a spreadsheet being like, "Excuse me, but what is the ROI of doing the right thing here? Wouldn't it be a little bit more efficient if we did..." You know, like you can't argue those points because the way that we've constructed most companies today, the ROI of doing the right thing is negative by definition because the costs are tangible, but the returns are intangible. So this is where, why product and engineering leaders especially are essential for fighting back against this consensus. We have to have, those are the people who have to stand up and say, "Listen, I want to work somewhere where our commitment to quality or whatever the value is, is not just skin deep. I want to know that it's written in the corporate charter. I want to know that even if we get pressured, we're going to have the freedom to do the best work." And if you look at the best companies, the ones that have really been able to last for a long time, the ones that get a consistent talent advantage, they're the ones who have done this hard work up

6. 19:22 – 22:11

   Financial gravity explained

   1. EREric Ries19:22

      front.

   2. AGAakash Gupta19:22

      Talk about forces kind of pulling us away from the right decision. One of the most interesting forces you wrote about is financial. So you write about this concept of financial gravity, where success is actually pulling companies away from their mission.

   3. EREric Ries19:37

      Yeah.

   4. AGAakash Gupta19:38

      Can you explain how that works and how to combat it?

   5. EREric Ries19:40

      So financial gravity is this force I have been doing battle with my whole career. You know, I've witnessed it in the companies I've helped start, and I've faced it in the companies I have started myself. And whether I've been a board member or a CEO or CTO, whatever my role is, I see it all the time. And of course, the privilege of being the lean startup guy is I get to help lots and lots and lots of people start their companies. People call me all the time for advice. It's maybe the most common phone call I get. "I'm thinking about starting a company. I have a company, I want to raise a series A. We've raised a bunch of money, I want to prepare for an IPO." Those are the kind of calls I get. So I've watched this process as companies lose what made them special, and I eventually started to realize that there was this force. It was like, I call it the, the force that no one controls, but everyone obeys. That's like seeping into all the decisions, and it's not necessarily conscious. People say they still value quality, or they say they want to put the customer first. When push comes to shove, they just feel like, "You know, it'll be a little easier to compromise just this one time," and next thing you know, it's death by a thousand paper cuts. Jim Senegal, the, the founder of Costco, called it literally like taking heroin. You do it one time, you raise prices a little bit, you get away with it, your stock price goes up. You're like, "Ooh, I don't know if I want to do that again," but you kind of have to because now that's baked into the forecast. And think about how many startups have had this problem. You, you, you want to raise money. You need to show consistent growth. You want to show a, a hockey stick shaped growth curve up and to the right. Well, the compromise you made in one month, you got to make it again the next month else you risk a, God forbid, the numbers go down. Oh, no. So it's a very easy trap to fall into. And, uh, in the book, I really work through the psychology of it, like why does this force operate? What are its laws? Just like Newton's laws of gravity, we need to know the laws of financial gravity. And one of the most pernicious parts about it is that gravity is about the feeling you have, unconscious, that if you comply with the values of those who have more than you, you will get ahead. So it's about your imagination of future transactions. And if you've ever been around a person who's meeting a celebrity or a billionaire for the first time, you ever seen that? It's so gross. They're like, all of a sudden, the, the, the strongest people I know will, like, all of a sudden become super obsequious and, like, they just desperately want to please that person. It's really gross. Why does it happen? If you ask them about it and say, "Was that your plan to turn into blubber and Jell-O in front of, you know, whoever?" "No, I just, it just came over me." It's an unconscious reflex. You can't turn it off any more than you can stop your eyes from dilating in the dark.

7. 22:11 – 24:19

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   1. AGAakash Gupta22:11

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8. 24:19 – 28:43

   Costco origin story

   1. AGAakash Gupta24:19

      a reason. Okay, so this financial gravity is always pulling us. There are these forces always pulling us, especially product managers. I think one of the coolest cost case studies you talked about was Costco.

   2. EREric Ries24:30

      Yeah.

   3. AGAakash Gupta24:30

      Where they built this governance fortress. Can you walk us through how Costco has built an incorruptible company?

   4. EREric Ries24:36

      Yeah. Costco is like the classic exception to almost every rule. When you talk to people about corruption, especially, people will be like, "Ugh, you know, I was, uh..." An economist was giving this lecture the other day, and they were talking about how only family-run companies can sustain a mission over multiple generations because every other company succumbs to cost-cutting and quarterly pressures and all this stuff, and they were listing off the, the family-run companies that have had all this longevity. At the end of their lecture, they were like, "Oh yeah, also Costco for some reason." Costco's not family-run, but they also seem to be the exception. They can do this thing. Anyway, moving on. And that's so many times people say like, "Oh, once a company gets big, of course it's gonna fall to corruption. That's just human nature." And then you're like, "But do you like shopping at Costco?" "Oh, yeah, they're the-- They-- That hasn't happened to them." But Costco's a $400 billion public company. Surely, if it was inevitable, it would've happened to Costco by now, right? So to understand Costco, you have to understand a guy named Sol Price. He's the father of modern retail. If you wanna know how influential he is, Walmart is called Walmart because Sam Walton was paying homage to Sa- [chuckles] to Sol Price's company, FedMart. So when Sol-

   5. AGAakash Gupta25:41

      Mm

   6. EREric Ries25:41

      ... started FedMart, Sol was a lawyer originally. And when he was a lawyer, he learned in his training that you have to have a fiduciary duty to your client, meaning you put the client's interest before yourself. And when he became a retailer, creating FedMart in the 1950s, he thought, "Well, who's my client? Oh, the customer is my client." So just like Costco today, he believed in what he called a fiduciary duty to the customer. That meant that when competitors would try to undercut him on price, he would literally put up signs inside his own store saying, "Don't buy this product from me. You can get it cheaper down the street." Think how unthinkable that is even now. Like, how many DTC brands would you wish would just do that? Just tell me where the lowest price is. Why do I have to be the one to find it? As a result, customers loved FedMart. They would travel miles out of their way to shop there. Company was very successful. It went public, and as a public company, he was frustrated by this financial gravity constantly trying to get him to conform to the retail best practices. So to avoid that, he took the company private. He found really awesome investors, so he thought. They became the 51% owner, he became the 49% owner, and he operated as a private company once again. This solved exactly zero of his problems because the new board was just as captured by financial gravity as the public markets had been. They wanted faster growth. They wanted higher prices, uh, higher prices and lower wages, not the reverse. But Sol was a completely uncompromising person. He had a ethos, a, a character. He believed in his business philosophy, and he understood that it was an engine that was powering FedMart's growth. He wouldn't compromise. So what happened? Well, one day in 1975, Sol Price came to work and found the locks on his door had been changed. He could not get into his office because he doesn't work at FedMart anymore. The board had fired him. So the board got what they wanted. They got Sol Price out of their way, and they instantly turned FedMart into conventional retail practice again. By 1982, within just seven years, they completely destroyed what Sol Price had built over more than 20. The company was in liquidation by 1982. There are no FedMart stores anymore, uh, anywhere in the world. That was a pretty sad story, but very typical. If you've been around this business, you will know lots of stories like this of a founder, a naive founder pushed out of his own company. But Sol, classic founder, he did not give up. He didn't re- go retire. He took two weeks off is my favorite detail in the story. He took two weeks off, and after two weeks, he leased the office upstairs from FedMart-

   7. AGAakash Gupta28:03

      [laughs]

   8. EREric Ries28:03

      ... and he was back at work. He created a new company called Price Club, which when I was growing up in San Diego, was like a local fixture, even at the point that FedMart was a distant memory. Now, Price Club you have probably never heard of because one of the people that left FedMart to go to Price Club with Sol was a guy named Jim Senegal. Senegal had started as a stock boy in FedMart and worked his way up to executive. He was very loyal to Sol Price, but after a few years of working at Fe- uh, at Price Club, he decided it was time for him to strike out on his own, and he created a new company. And a few years after that, his company and Sol's company merged to form the company you now know as Costco.

9. 28:43 – 31:25

   Johnson & Johnson warning

   1. AGAakash Gupta28:43

      Mm-hmm.

   2. EREric Ries28:43

      And here's what makes Costco different from FedMart. It's not that financial gravity likes Costco any better than it liked FedMart. Believe me, every few years, Wall Street makes an attempt to try to damage Costco's governance, try to prevent it from being different. We see it all the time. I have a whole bunch of quotes in the book. One of my favorites is, uh, a, a Wall Street analyst. Let's see if I can find the quote here. The analyst wrote, "Costco is spending what could have been shareholders' profit on making a better experience for customers." Now, most product people hear that, and they're like, "Is he complimenting them?"

   3. AGAakash Gupta29:16

      [laughs]

   4. EREric Ries29:17

      No. This is a criticism. S- Costco is wasting money that it doesn't have to spend on customer experience. It could just be giving that money to the shareholders. And here you really see the essence of how our modern finance-driven economy sees value creation. Customers are a resource to be mined for the benefit of investors, not the other way around. So the reason why Costco has endured for 40 years and is one of the best performing stocks in the whole S&P 500, I include this little stat, uh, in the book right here. If you had invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 1985, you would have $151,000 today. If you'd taken that same money and put it in the Costco IPO, you would have $8.7 million today. Costco is an incredible performer. And this is the paradox or the confusion that we have. People think the way to create shareholder value is through shareholder primacy, but no. Sol Price understood you have to have a fiduciary hierarchy that puts shareholders last, not because shareholders are not important, but because shareholder value is the exhaust from the engine. When you put the exhaust in the intake, when you make finance the goal rather than the result, you get deeply confused. So the reason why this has worked is that Costco was built with this governance fortress. The fortress prevents outsiders from pressuring the company to abandon the ethos that Sol Price created, and that really is the blueprint in a nutshell. You wanna have the ethos of Sol Price and the integrity of Jim Senegal.

   5. AGAakash Gupta30:47

      So can I copy-paste these governance features, and will I have an incorruptible company?

   6. EREric Ries30:52

      No, absolutely not. Um, these features make sense for Costco's unique structure, but every company has to have the structure that makes sense for it. And I wanna be super clear about this. It's like Just because you have a structure that resists pressure doesn't make you incorruptible. Because remember, the, the killer that's about to kill you is already inside your house. Most of the time when companies collapse, the problem is internal. It's an internal misalignment. And founders and leaders are routinely naive about this point. Can I tell you one more story?

   7. AGAakash Gupta31:24

      Yeah.

   8. EREric Ries31:24

      All right.

10. 31:25 – 40:39

    Mission lock vehicles

    1. EREric Ries31:25

       So in 1910, a guy named Robert Wood Johnson II went to work at his father's company called Johnson & Johnson. Okay? And, uh, he rose through the ranks of the company, and in 1932, in the depths of the Depression, I- he took control. I think his father died right in the middle of the Depression. Now, Robert Wood Johnson was a real Sol Price-type character, an absolute giant of industry, completely uncompromising. Uh, he, uh, opened factories when other people were closing them. He raised wages during the Depression. He understood that the Depression was temporary, and that if he strengthened the company during that time, his employ- the employee loyalty, the customer loyalty that that would generate would, would drive the company to explosive growth when the r- when the Depression finally ended. That's exactly, uh, what happened. So a decade later, he's preparing for the company's IPO during World War II. Okay? So can you imagine, people think, oh, gosh, there's geopolitical uncertainty today, but he had to plan this IPO during World War II. Okay? Just really think that through. And he was worried even then that the company might lose its way once it became a public company. So unlike Sol, who I think went into this relatively naive, Robert Wood Johnson had a plan. The plan was to create something called the Johnson & Johnson Our Credo. This is a very famous document in business history. You can see it here on the screen. Basically, patients, doctors, and nurses first, employees second, communities third, shareholders last. Notice the pattern? So he wanted to make sure that everyone who worked at Johnson & Johnson would embody this credo, so he had it carved into eight-foot-high limestone blocks and had them inscribed on the company's walls in the headquarters, where they exist to this day. The theory of change was very simple. His idea was that if you want to work at Johnson & Johnson, every day on your way to work, you're gonna walk by the credo. You're gonna see it carved in stone. Doesn't that sound good? Does that seem like that would help remind people what this is all about? But it didn't work. While he was alive, it worked great. He was an absolutely uncompromising person, as I mentioned. He fired his own cousin. He fired his own son for violating the credo. Like, he was really strict about this. But he eventually died, and stone doesn't enforce itself. As the company grew and as the eras went by, the company eventually came to be captured by financial gravity as it came under the sway of our modern best practices, including shareholder primacy. So much so that starting in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, it started to be rocked by scandal after scandal after scandal, where the company put its own self-interest ahead of customers and patients. I think you can pick, like, which of these, um, scandals is the worst. Uh, for me, the worst scandal is the time that they put asbestos in the baby powder and covered it up.

    2. AGAakash Gupta34:10

       What?

    3. EREric Ries34:11

       Yeah, yeah, in baby powder of all things. It's kind of shocking that the company that had this credo would do this terrible thing. We know that they covered it up, by the way, because eventually these things always come out in litigation, and then the documents get made public. So they knew, and they've had to pay unbelievable settlements. Um, you know, it'll most likely be, like, a $10 billion settlement by the time this thing is done because they actually gave a bunch of people cancer. And you ask yourself, "How is it possible that at Johnson & Johnson of all companies they could do this?" The people who put asbestos in the baby powder walked by the credo on their way into work every single day, and yet that wasn't enough. So a good corporate structure can protect a preexisting ethos, but it doesn't cause it to come into being. We've got to have both for this to work.

    4. AGAakash Gupta35:02

       Hmm. And I guess the Enron example is another famous one people can probably relate to. They had the missions [laughs] printed at their headquarters. It didn't make a difference. So we can't print out a mission statement. One thing you did identify for folks was a mission lock.

    5. EREric Ries35:21

       Yeah.

    6. AGAakash Gupta35:21

       And I really like this. I think this is gonna be on page 261 for you.

    7. EREric Ries35:25

       Here's the Enron slide, by the way.

    8. AGAakash Gupta35:27

       Oh, yeah.

    9. EREric Ries35:27

       This is from the Ne- this is from the Netflix Culture Code deck, which is just, it's just awesome. Yes, E- Enron's, um, values were integrity, communication, respect, and excellence. And I, this, I didn't know this until I did the research for this book. Enron's board was named one of the five best boards in America right before it blew up.

    10. AGAakash Gupta35:44

        [laughs]

    11. EREric Ries35:45

        Had a lot of independent directors, followed all the best practices.

    12. AGAakash Gupta35:48

        So you can't just print them out like Enron. [laughs] You can't just carve them into stone like Johnson & Johnson, but you can do something you talk about, which is a mission lock vehicle. What is that?

    13. EREric Ries35:58

        So before we get into the details of this, I want to warn your listeners that it's gonna sound weird, okay? Because there are a lot more kinds of organizations out there in the world than most people have ever been trained in or, uh, taught to encounter. Even if you've gone to business school, you may never have heard of this structure. Certainly, most VCs have never heard about it. Most founders are never told that there's any option other than the standard Delaware C corp venture-backed company like that. We live in a very much a corporate monoculture. But just because this idea is new to you doesn't make it new. In fact, the German optics company Zeiss, the ones that made, like, my and probably everybody else's lenses who are watching this right now, they had this structure in 1885.

    14. AGAakash Gupta36:40

        Wow.

    15. EREric Ries36:40

        So it's actually a very old idea. The idea is that, um, just like in political science, we understand that having only one decision-making body, you know, right, like one branch of government, is actually intrinsically unstable. You can have checks and balances between multiple branches of government and create stability even when people disagree. So the mission lock vehicle is the idea that having a separate entity That is a set of trustees or stewards who oversee the performance. They hold accountable the board of directors of the for-profit company. This structure is more common than you realize if you've ever eaten a Hershey chocolate bar or shopped at IKEA or you've been to Patagonia, um, if you've shopped at John Lewis Partnership, if you've ever been to the UK, if you have a Vanguard mutual fund, if you, um, have taken a Novo Nordisk medication, you have been a customer of this structure. And in fact, this structure is so common that we have enough data to be able to answer questions. There's a lot of rigorous academic research on these structures, and it turns out they perform better than you'd expect compared to conventional structures. So for example, the Novo Nordisk, ZEISS, in- called industrial foundation structure where the mission lock vehicle is an actual nonprofit foundation. Companies with that structure are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to conventional companies. We're talking about 10% versus 60%. So it's not an inconsiderable difference. And they also overperform in almost every financial metric you can think of because they just are capable of sustaining long-term plans and making long-term investments in a way that traditional normal companies, uh, are not able to do.

    16. AGAakash Gupta38:20

        So should everybody consider doing this? Are there people who shouldn't adopt this?

    17. EREric Ries38:24

        I think it's kind of a no-brainer. And in fact, I'll tell you one of my favorite stories about the development of this structure. It goes back to 1920 when a woman named Marie Krogh was living in Denmark. She was one of the first Danish doctors, actually, very interesting, uh, woman in her own right. But she contracted diabetes, which at that time had no known cure, so it was a fatal disease. But her husband, August, had just received the Nobel Prize, and so he asked her, in spite of her illness, would she accompany him on a lecture tour of North America? She said yes, and they came to North America, uh, to, you know, travel around and meet other scientists and have his lectures. Now, at one of those lectures, she was sitting next to another scientist at the dinner table, and he told her about a new breakthrough that had happened in Canada. He said that scientists there had managed to finally isolate insulin, which could potentially be a cure for diabetes. So she convinces August that the two of them should extend the trip, travel to Canada, and see this research breakthrough for themselves. They do. They see it. They realize its immense potential immediately, and they ask the Canadians if they can have a commercial license to bring this cure back to Denmark with them, not just to save Marie's life, but to save thousands and millions of others. The Canadians agree, but everybody involved is very uncomfortable with the plan because decades before Martin Shkreli, they all had this instinctive fear. They said, "Wait a minute. If we are a for-profit company and we make a life-saving medicine, it's no problem to charge a fair price for that, of course. We have to pay for the laboratory, after all. But what if our future selves, our future progenitors, right, our descendants in this company, what if they feel the temptation to say, 'Wait a minute. If I have your life-saving medicine, couldn't I charge you whatever I want? Won't you have to pay?'" See, they saw science as a public trust, and they, just like that product manager we were talking about where quality is number one, to them, scientific integrity was number one, and they wanted to build a structure that would embody that principle for all time. So when they went home to Denmark, they created the Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium. They created it as a for-profit company with a nonprofit parent company, and that foundation has guarded, has acted as the mission guardian

11. 40:39 – 44:42

    AI tooling and Answer.AI

    1. EREric Ries40:39

       or the mission lock vehicle for more than 100 years. The company, of course, is not called Nordisk today. It's called Novo Nordisk. It is one of the largest companies in Europe, and for, for a time it had a larger ma- uh, market cap than the GDP of Denmark. It is a behemoth of a company. And this structure has worked incredibly well. Just like the f- the governance fortress at Costco, when people have come at Novo Nordisk to try to get it to do the wrong thing, this structure has resisted. But it has an extra feature. Not only has it helped them resist external pressure, it has also helped them resist internal betrayals. So in the book I tell the story, and this is gonna sound like a ludicrous exaggeration, but read the story and you'll find out that this is 100% the truth. There's actually a great Acquired podcast episode about it if you don't wanna read the book. You can just go watch the podcast episode. That's fine, too. There was a time in the, uh, I think it was in the early 2000s when the board, the trustees of the nonprofit foundation had to make a decision to stop the for-profit subsidiary from doing something really stupid, and they did. It was really difficult. It cost everybody a ton of money, and it pissed everybody off. But as a result of their foresight, the nonprofit trustees created for the shareholders of Novo Nordisk more than $500 billion of shareholder value because just having the long-term perspective allowed them to protect the research program that ultimately, uh, enabled them to invent GLP-1. So the next time someone tells you that you have to do the conventional structure-- I talk to so many founders and they're like, "Well, but my lawyer said, my investors say, I talked to a banker, I talked to this person." I'm like, I'm sure whoever you talk to is very smart, but I just want you to ask yourself one simple question before you agree to what they say. Are you sure that they're smarter than a Nobel laureate? Because August and Marie Krogh worked this out 100 years ago, and it worked. And I feel like when I learned these stories, I was frankly pissed. I was like, wait a minute. This is like my birthright as an entrepreneur. How come I-- how come no one ever told me these stories? How come I never know these-- like how come this, this history has been erased from business education? It's been erased from entrepreneurial education, and my goal of writing this new book is to bring it back and to say, "You know what? These structures work. We should use them."

    2. AGAakash Gupta42:45

       Yeah. I feel like everybody these days, they just pick up Zero to One from Peter Thiel. He says Delaware C Corp. They never think about these structures. So let's talk a little bit more about structures. Okay, guys, so we have walked you through how to create an incorruptible company in like 35 minutes. We've given you a little bit of a crash course Eric is a man of many talents, and when I was researching this episode, I learned that he's not just the lean startup guy. Actually, he's co-founded Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard with nine people, no managers. You also built Solve It, an AI-powered platform you use for everything. You're living in Cloud Code and shipping things every day. Maybe can you start with what does a typical workday look like inside your tooling stack? Um, how are you using the different tools and putting them together?

    3. EREric Ries43:37

       Oh, typical day? Are you kidding me? [both laughing] My life is so complicated, and that's just like, yeah. It's just such-- It's so different. Like now I'm doing this with you, but like if you'd asked me that question six months ago, I would've been heads down writing and had absolutely no time for anything. So, you know, it's-

    4. AGAakash Gupta43:51

       Mm.

    5. EREric Ries43:51

       ... it's different. It's different every day. And like I said before, the, the pr- the true privilege of my life is that people like Jeremy, you know, or Luke at Virgil or, um, so, so many people over the years have entrusted me to be on the entrepreneurial journey with them. So I've been a founder, I've been a CEO, but I've been a, a co-founder too, and I kind of like that. I like both jobs. They're both really interesting, and I learn, I learn a ton. Um, so yeah, I like to, I like to be behind the scenes. I like to be on the board. I like to be having entrepreneurs' back. That's kind of how I conceive my job. You know, when I'm helping someone else build their dream, their vision, my job is to make the structure that supports them, like I did for Dario, incorruptible. That's the goal. So yeah, Answer.AI, uh, is someplace I, I spend a fair bit of time. You know, I also built the Long-Term Stock Exchange, so I've got a lot of things going on, and depending on what's up for which company, you know, that determines what I'm doing that day. But like, if you want, I can share a little bit about what it was like to

12. 44:42 – 47:27

    Why AI writing fails

    1. EREric Ries44:42

       use Solve It. Solve It is the platform we make at Answer.AI. And just to give, maybe give a little bit of background on Answer.AI. Jeremy Howard is like a machine learning legend. For many of the people who are listening who got their-- Like people who got their start in machine learning as a programmer, like it's not uncommon that they learned deep learning from Jeremy on one of his fast.ai courses, okay? He's like, for many years been my friend and the person I call when I have a machine learning question, like I need to understand something, I call him. And when he was ready to take his research and turn it into a research lab, he was concerned. He goes like, "I don't wanna do it if I'm gonna wind up like everybody else." So actually, like the, our ability to, to wrap him in an incorruptible structure unlocked the in-investment opportunity for his VCs that made it possible for this company to exist. It wouldn't have existed otherwise because Jeremy's a person of tremendous integrity, and if he couldn't do it in a way that protected his principles, I don't think he would've done it at all. That's partly why I admire him so much. Um, so yeah. So one of the products we make at Answer.AI is called Solve It, and it is, um, it is a way for us to embody our philosophy about AI, which is that AI should never be used to replace people. It should not be used as a replacement for human creativity. It should be used to augment human creativity. That's the idea. So for example, when I first started writing this book, there was no generative AI. I've been working on this for a long time. But over the whole time I've been writing and researching this book, while I had a human research team and human editors, I also benefited from GPT-3 and then GPT-4 and then Opus and, and Sonnet and all these different models have gotten better over the course of time. And w-when they first started getting good, I was like, "This is gonna be great." I was excited to use them for writing, but they really did not work very well for writing. They still really don't because everything you write winds up sounding like garbage.

    2. AGAakash Gupta46:22

       [laughs]

    3. EREric Ries46:22

       It makes it sound like AI. Like AI-- Just like private equity has a flavor, AI has a sound. It makes a certain sound. If you understand how LLMs work, you'll understand why it actually makes sense. It's conforming you to the training distribution. It is actually the way that most of these chatbots are organized. They are memetic conformity machines. So that's actually one of their problems. So when people are so pumped to use AI to replace humans, I think they're making a huge mistake. First of all, it's like profoundly antisocial to be gleeful about such a thing. But more importantly, they're sanding all the rough edges out of their intelligence. And it's funny, like when someone uses the phrase AI, by the way, they are literally taking sides in an age-old debate about the nature of intelligence. And if you really think a generative LLM is quote-unquote "intelligence," you're siding with Jacques Derrida and Foucault, okay? Like you're, you're siding with the postmodernists who claim that la- intelligence is just language. If you understand LLMs, they're just language. So like you really have to understand what they're, what they're good for. So I couldn't really use AI effectively in my writing or editing process

13. 47:27 – 57:39

    Solve It live demo

    1. EREric Ries47:27

       until we invented Solve It, and that was the major unlock for me. It made this book so much better, um, because it allowed human-in-the-loop AI interactions where we can blend what the human is doing and what the AI is doing in such a way that we have true shared context between both parties. So you can see everything the AI can see, and it can see everything that you can see. And not only can you correct it by giving it chat commands, you can just edit its responses. So if it does something wrong, you can just be like, "Oh, let me just replace what it said with what it should have said." And because at the end of the day, LLMs are auto-regressive, the more wrong answers there are in a chat history, even if you tell it immediately afterwards, "No, don't do it like that," the more it learns the pattern of wrong answer, "No, don't do it like that," right answer. So then it starts to mimic its past behavior. And not to mention all the problems with sycophancy and hallucinations and all the other things. So having, having the end user have a lot more capability and control over what's happening helps a lot. It also allows us to focus, and you can do this in any tool. I, I use Cloud Code and oth-other tools too. But in whatever tool I use, I try to really focus on capabilities, not artifacts. This is The Lean Startup 101 for those that are paying attention, right? Like the, the unit of progress in a highly uncertain situation is what's learned, not what is made. So as long as you're having the system teach you how to make an artifact, it's okay. Then your capabilities increase, your sense of agency increases. You learn how to use it better. But as soon as you're just like, "Ah, just make me an artifact and then tell me when it's done," or, "Hey," uh, like I, I caught myself with some of the codes when I've done vibe coding. It's a bit like a slot machine. You know, you give it a design for something, and then it's like, "Do you want me to suggest improvements to the design?" "Yeah, sure." "Do you want me to make some adjustments?" "Yeah, why not?" "Hey, you know what would be better is if we kind of went over here." Next thing you know, the product it built for you is not really what you had in mind. It was just the most convenient thing where you're like, "Yeah, sure. Why not? Why not? Why not?" You kind of get into this soporific state. I think it's gonna look a lot like people who are playing slot machines look when you put them in the MRI machine. It's like you're not really in control of what happens. And now going back to what LLMs really are, as a result, you wind up making mediocre stuff. What does mediocre mean? People think mediocre means like, like lacking in quality, but it really just means in the central part of the distribution of outcomes. So you're making the same stuff as everybody else. If that's what you want, go for it. There's a lot of things where you don't care. It doesn't matter. You just need something very basic. You don't need originality. No problem. Use it for that, no problem. But the second you wanna do something that will give you a competitive advantage, that will have some level of artistic integrity, that will, will, will be reflecting who you are as a person, you have to be very careful how you use these tools.

    2. AGAakash Gupta50:11

       Mm-hmm. So how does Solve It-- Maybe you can walk us through how you wrote some specific book chapters with your actual artistic integrity and voice.

    3. EREric Ries50:20

       Let me see what I can pull up for you. I'll show you. This is, this is Solve It. Um, this is my Solve It instance, um, where I have just tons and tons and tons of these dialogues going back months and months and months and months. You can see how long I've been working on this book. Months and months and months, they go back and back and back-

    4. AGAakash Gupta50:41

       Mm-hmm

    5. EREric Ries50:41

       ... and back and back and back and back. Uh, and every single one-- The way I think about Solve It is it's like a canvas. I mount my work onto the canvas, some part of my work, and then I work on it myself. Solve It's job is to help me, the human being, do good work, not to tell me what to do. But it's extremely helpful for, um, keeping track of things, for researching things. Um, let's see here. Here's just a copyediting pass, you know. Let's see what I have here. May have to click on a few of these before I get something that's actually interesting, 'cause copyediting-

    6. AGAakash Gupta51:12

       [chuckles]

    7. EREric Ries51:12

       ... can be really boring. So this is what Solve It looks like. There are three kinds of messages in Solve It. These green ones are called notes. This is just raw markdown. The orange ones here, the kind of reddish ones, are prompts. This is where I ask the LLM to do something. Um, and then blue are code, so I can write Python code natively. So we, we mix and match any of these things. And when you're working in a certain message, the LLM only sees the messages that come before it. So here you can see I'm giving it some context. Here's a pr- here's its kind of overall prompt. Here, uh, we developed a t- Eric Ries writing style guide, so, you know, it can understand, like, the kinds of things I'm trying to do. Um, here it has a list of things to avoid. This is all the kind of AIE stuff that is really toxic, so I, like-- Even when it's talking to me, I want it to know, please don't use that stuff. It drives me crazy.

    8. AGAakash Gupta51:59

       [chuckles]

    9. EREric Ries51:59

       Uh, special rule about em dashes. This is, this, this dialogue's from a while ago, so you can see that was when that was still an issue. And here is even a briefing about, like, what is this book about? This is a-

    10. AGAakash Gupta52:08

        Hmm

    11. EREric Ries52:08

        ... this, this dialogue's from late in the process, where the book already has a really defined structure and a defined outline. You can see all the chapters. Just a ch-chance for it to kind of get a sense of what are we accomplishing together. Here's a bunch of Python code for, um, stuff we need to pull in various, um, pieces, um, of the book. And I'll skip over this stuff. Code, code, code. Bunch of code. So, like-

    12. AGAakash Gupta52:30

        That's a lot of code over here

    13. EREric Ries52:30

        ... one way to think about this is, like, it's my own custom personal rig, where I have combined-- Like, I have written some of the software myself. I've used the LLM to help me write some of that software. I've used my teammates at Answer.AI to help me write some of it, so that everything is highly customized for what I want to do.

    14. AGAakash Gupta52:47

        Mm-hmm.

    15. EREric Ries52:48

        Um, so here, yeah, like we're-- This is, this is, um... We've got a, a to-do list. We've got reader comments from, uh, test readers. So here's like-- This enables new kinds of writing that was never possible before. So this is-- Maybe I'll just focus on the reader comments part of this, 'cause that's the most interesting part of this dialogue. I had more than 600 people be test readers of this book. I'm a big believer in feedback. Haven't you heard?

    16. AGAakash Gupta53:09

        [chuckles]

    17. EREric Ries53:09

        And we use this product called Help This Book, which is like an online reading platform where people can leave structured comments as they go through. So I had a CSV with more than 10,000 reader comments in it from all these 600 readers. Now, that's too-- I read e- like, as they came in, I read every single comment. Like, every day, my daily ritual for months was I started my day with, "What are the comments that came in overnight? Okay, what..." I wanna read every comment, and I would really take it really seriously. But at a certain point, it gets overwhelming. Like, oh my God, I'm trying to work on this one paragraph. How many comments have I gotten about that paragraph? I don't know. I can't even remember, right? The context is more than my wetware can understand. So here I wrote some software to help me, um, look at the comments. Let's see if I can find some comments. Comments, comments, comments. This is all, um, instructions about how it likes to work. Here we go. Okay, this is mapping chapter IDs. Oh, here we go. Yes. So we're gonna be working today on chapter four. Great. Um, that's the sixth chapter in the comment structure because of interstitials and stuff. Um, there are-- At that time I did this particular dialogue, there were 9,546 comments total, of which 470 of them are from recent versions that relate to this chapter.

    18. AGAakash Gupta54:24

        Hmm.

    19. EREric Ries54:24

        So even that, like, that's too many comments. I can't be like, "Okay, how do I incorporate this number of comments?" Um, but I can have it summarized for me. Okay. And here you can see the tool calls that it's calling in Python to understand. It's like, great, here's what people like about this chapter. Here are the things they especially like. Here are problems that they have flagged. Here are some suggestions. So it's like, okay, great, now we can get to work. Here's the actual chapter itself from my copy editor, and now we start going through all the different things that we're gonna work on. This dialogue is a little boring because we're, um, we're working on copy edits. This is a lot of technical stuff in the writing. Let me see if I can find something that's a little more substantive, just to give you some sense of the variety of it. And stop me if this is getting boring.

    20. AGAakash Gupta55:08

        No, this is really interesting. So you've basically created like a agentic harness within Solve It with various code blocks, various context blocks. A lot of people build these out as like Claude code operating systems. You build this out in Solve It in a visual way.

    21. EREric Ries55:24

        Yeah. Okay. So this is a much older, this is a much older version of it from when I-- Oh, God, this is really old, from when I was still working in Google Docs. So this is like-

    22. AGAakash Gupta55:31

        [chuckles]

    23. EREric Ries55:31

        ... this is maybe from a year ago. But you can still see, like here is a summary of what the chapter was at that time, um, what's good about it. Okay, here is the, here are all the different sections. Some of these sections are still in the book, but a bunch of this-- Oh, unfortunately, "Master using it and then you can have this" is gone from the manuscript. I liked this one a lot.

    24. AGAakash Gupta55:51

        [chuckles]

    25. EREric Ries55:52

        Uh, so you know. Yeah, "Where we're going, we don't need roads" I think was also cut. So, you know, not every, not every meme and pop culture reference made it into the final manuscript.

    26. AGAakash Gupta55:59

        [chuckles]

    27. EREric Ries56:00

        So here is a typical-- This was like a typical day for me a year ago, was like, "Okay, great. Here are 27 things I need to do for chapter five." And just being able to write them all down is already such a relief. Like, okay, to-do list. And like my editor and anyone I work with can like add to-dos to this list, just like, "Here's something that needs to happen. Read this Costco story and make sure it actually makes sense and we made this like make sense." So anyway, so... And we would just, uh, go through one thing at a time. You know, here, here's the repetitive language that we were using in this story. Here's what we need to work on. Now, let me see if I can show you one more thing. Um, this is a lot of going back and forth, back and forth. Here we're seeing like, okay, here's the diffs. This is, um, more cumbersome version than what I have now, so I'm-- It's a little, it's a little clunky. But what you're not seeing here, the one thing that is not present is it looks like the AI is doing all this writing, 'cause I'm just saying next, next, next, next. But what you can't see is v-very frequently, if it generated text that I didn't like, instead of saying, "No, that's not right," I could just pop in here and I can edit this markdown directly and just be like, "Actually, this is what you should have said."

    28. AGAakash Gupta57:15

        Hmm.

    29. EREric Ries57:15

        Even what I would frequently do, these have all been deleted, but usually what, what I would do if I was getting into a kind of a difficult section, this stuff is all pretty easy that we have here. I'm seeing if I can find a more difficult one. Um, yeah, here we go. So like here is a more complicated paragraph, um, where we're trying to figure out like how do we adjust. So here's all these like, um... Oh, h- oh, this is good. This is actually good to show you.

14. 57:39 – 1:08:07

    Structuring Answer.AI as PBC

    1. EREric Ries57:39

       So here's the cultural significance of the Costco dollar fifty hotdog research report. So this is, this is actually a deep research report pulled from another LLM, probably from OpenAI Deep Research, if I had to guess, which is just all the links and research we have on this topic. So just all the things you need to know about this topic. Okay, great. So now, given this research, what could we consider doing in the manuscript itself? So again, this is like not doing the work for me. It's helping me keep track of all the work that I've already done. Sometimes I would pull in deep research. Sometimes this would be research done by a human person. Um, sometimes it would just be my private notes. I'd accumulated thousands of pages of notes in the course of researching this book. So then we would say, "Okay, let's make a revision incorporating this plan," and it would give me a new paragraph here. Here you can see we're turning it into diffs, and then we're actually adding it to the manuscript. But what you can't see is in almost every one of these instances, if I wanted to, I would edit it directly, or I might say, "Okay, I actually don't like that. Let's figure out what to do." And we would go back and forth, back and forth, analyzing, analyzing. And the most common thing I would do is I would write something and then ask it to analyze it for me. "Is this any good? What's good about this? What's not good about it?" You can't just believe everything it says. You have to be very careful with this feedback 'cause it can ruin your authorial voice. Believe me, it took me a while to get the hang of it. But once you figure it out, it's just so nice. Like writing is the loneliest, saddest activity in the world 'cause it's just you and the page. And it's just like, it's very nice every once in a while even to get sycophantic reviews of your work. You know? [chuckles] Like even if you know at some level that like it's kind of telling you what you wanna hear, it can help you keep going. It's very nice. So anyway, so we would go back and forth. When I would figure out what I liked, I would just put it back in here as if it was the LLM's first suggestion. And so what you'll see if you read these dialogues carefully, the LLM is actually getting smarter as we go, as it figures out what good looks like to me. Because it's not-- All the kind of context bloat you see with something like Claude Code is removed. All that code is-- Everything has been deleted from context. Only the information that it really needs is present. So anyway, that's Solve It in a nutshell. And yeah, I use it for writing and research, but of course, the team mostly uses it to write software, so it, it also can do all the things pretty much that Claude Code can do.

    2. AGAakash Gupta59:48

       Okay, guys. I don't think anywhere else you're gonna be able to find out how he actually wrote the book. There you get to see the actual chats of it. Fascinating. So I wanna bring this back to our discussion in the first part of the episode, which is the structure.

    3. EREric Ries1:00:02

       Yeah.

    4. AGAakash Gupta1:00:02

       Because a lot of PMs, I'd say probably like 50, 60% of them, they eventually graduate to founder.

    5. EREric Ries1:00:09

       Yeah.

    6. AGAakash Gupta1:00:09

       So what were the choices you and Jeremy made? I believe you actually have Answer.AI as a for-profit. So how did you structure it properly so that it's incorruptible? What were the specific decisions you made?

    7. EREric Ries1:00:20

       Sure. Yeah. So Answer.AI has certain advantages. First of all, Jeremy is a legend, so that's always nice. Um, and therefore, investors were very keen to invest, so you know, we were able to really partner with them and be thoughtful. Like we sat down with our investors, and it wasn't just like, "Oh, please, please give me money. Give me a term sheet." No. We had a real conversation about like what is the right long-term structure to protect the integrity of this research. Now, we didn't do the works, 'cause at the end of the day, like Answer.AI's a couple years old, but it's a relatively young company. We've raised only a Series A, and that's it. So, you know, it is a public benefit corp. So yeah, so Answer.AI, the first thing we did was we converted to what's called a public benefit corp or PBC. This, there's a lot of confusion out there about this because, um, it sounds very similar to the B Labs or B Corp certification. People sometimes talk about how about being a B Corp. That's the little B with a circle in it you've seen at the farmers market. That is not the same thing. That's a certification, and that's good. It has-- I have a whole chapter about that. You can read chapter 13 if you want about certifications. But PBC is something much more fundamental. PBC is the opportunity to write your corporate mission directly into your corporate charter, and that gives you and your directors on your board permission to pursue that public benefit, even if it conflicts with shareholder value in any given time period. So it's a very important tool, and it requires you to be, um, serious about what... It requires-- It, it allows you to fix this very serious problem we see in so many companies. Like, for example, remember Silicon Valley Bank?

    8. AGAakash Gupta1:01:47

       Of course.

    9. EREric Ries1:01:48

       Remember when it ex-imploded?

    10. AGAakash Gupta1:01:50

        Yeah.

    11. EREric Ries1:01:50

        Yeah. That was a very stressful weekend for me, too. I had, at the time, if you counted up all my companies, I had probably, like, I don't know how many, but maybe more than $100 million of various companies invested at Silicon Valley Bank on the day that that thing went south. So yeah, it was very stressful. And if you-- And a- in the aftermath, I remember reading about why the company had-- why the bank had blown up, and it had a lot to do with this, like, very arcane interest rate maneuver that they had done. And what's so interesting is that five years before, the bank had lobbied Congress. They had actually gone to Washington to log- lobby Congress for permission to do this thing so that they could make more money. It actually would've been illegal. And they got the laws changed that allowed them to shoot themselves in the foot so that then they could collapse. And I was like: Why did they do that? Like, it's actually, like, kind of crazy how, like, they had such a good thing going. Talk about killing the golden goose. They had such a good thing going. They were a beloved institution. They had such trust with their customers. You know, so much so that, like, many of us were not properly diversified because, like, we couldn't even imagine. Surely Silicon Valley Bank would take care of us, right? And I remember reading, um, at the time their mission. Let's see if I can find this in the book, actually, since I have it up. I love this format where we get to really look at the, look at the screen share and stuff like that.

    12. AGAakash Gupta1:03:07

        Yay. [chuckles]

    13. EREric Ries1:03:09

        Okay. Yeah. Here's, here was the official mission statement of Silicon Valley Bank: "To help innovative companies move bold ideas forward." Doesn't that sound cool? I love that mission statement: "To help innovative companies move bold ideas forward." But that was not their legal purpose. That was just the mission statement. Their actual... Let's see if I can find it. Here it is. [clears throat] Because SVB is a bank, their documents are all super easy to find in public. Whereas for most Delaware C Corps, you have to ask a lawyer to pull it for you. But you can pull it. If you want to read anybody's corporate charter, your lawyer can pull it for you.

    14. AGAakash Gupta1:03:48

        Oh.

    15. EREric Ries1:03:48

        Not a secret. Yep. Anyway, uh, since they were a Delaware corp, their actual charter said as follows: "The purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may now or hereafter be organized under the general corporation law of Delaware." And you're like: "Well, what, what about moving bold ideas forward? Where'd that go?" No, any lawful act. Now, unfortunately, people hear that, and they're like: "Oh, that doesn't sound so bad. Any lawful act seems pretty open-ended." Wrong. Big X, wrong. Today, most governance experts interpret this phrase, "any lawful act or activity," as meaning maximize shareholder value. So at the time that SVB was doing this lobbying, it would've been seen as good governance. They're doing everything they can to maximize shareholder returns, even though the bets that they made, the risky interest rate bets that they made, they didn't help the mission at all. They were a purely self-interested cash grab, and as a result, they killed the golden goose. So s- uh, the public benefit corp is a way to, um, fix that problem. So the other thing about the PBC that I want people to know is that it is not an-- A- although it's a relatively new idea in America, like, that you should have something called a public benefit corp, the idea that corporations should exist to pursue a public benefit is not a new idea at all. In fact, for the vast majority of the time there have been joint stock corporations, this was the default. It was only allowed to pursue a specific purpose. In the 19th century, if you tried to take over someone else's company, first of all, they were allowed to resist you. Not like today's boards, which have to roll over and play dead. They were allowed to resist you vehemently. But if you succeeded in taking it over, imagine you took over a company that was designed, the public charter was to make a railroad, and you said, "You know what? I'm gonna change its corporate purpose from make a railroad to enrich shareholders." That would've been a crime. The courts would void your charter as beyond its authority. That is the natural state of corporations. The modern idea that corporations are just financial intruments, instruments to benefit shareholders is younger than most of the trees in your local park. So act accordingly. So that's an important part of the Answer.AI, um, uh, governance fortress. But another element that is really important, especially in the early days, is you have to have somebody act as the mission guardian. That's what I call it in the book. The mission guardian is who has the responsibility to make sure that no matter how much pressure is brought to bear, the company can stay according to its purpose, stay on mission. Let me see. It's-- Even the LLM is having trouble 'cause there are so many public benefit corp charters in my inbox. It's like, "Do you mean this one? Do you mean this one?" No, I don't want that. None of those, please. 'Cause the, the Google search a-API for-- It, it just like, it can only, it's only as good as the Gmail search API. It's really frustrating.

    16. AGAakash Gupta1:06:39

        Hmm.

    17. EREric Ries1:06:40

        Somebody please solve this problem.

    18. AGAakash Gupta1:06:42

        [chuckles]

    19. EREric Ries1:06:43

        Um, okay. So the, so the mission guardian. So in this case, it was easy. Jeremy and I are the mission guardians. We're the founders. He is the majority founder, so he really is the mission guardian, and he-- We vested voting and board control in him because at the end of the day, an AI research lab reflects the research agenda and vision and priority of the founder. Duh. So if you can't trust him, then you have no business investing in this company or even working in this company. But when we were trying to recruit people, we have several people who've worked for the company who have said, they're like, "I wouldn't have taken any other job, but for the chance to do this, I'll take a job. I'll come work here." But in order to recruit such high-caliber talent, we had to make them a promise. They had to be like, "How can I be sure this technology will be used in an appropriate way? How do I know that this vision will in fact be the, the reality of our day-to-day life?" And we could say, instead of having to be like, "Trust the nebulous future investors who may or may not invest in this company," we could just say, "Trust Jeremy. If you trust Jeremy, you're gonna be all right." And that was enough for most people. Now, I hope as the company grows, we will expand to what we call constitutional governance and to things like the mission lock vehicle. But, you know, we're a young company, so it hasn't really been necessary to do that. I would expect by the time we raise more money, then we will im- have implemented those features.

    20. AGAakash Gupta1:07:52

        Okay. So you don't always have to do Everything from the get-go, which I think might scare some people away. And I think that was a detail you included in the Anthropic timeline too, which was like they did some major stuff in, did you say their Series C?

    21. EREric Ries1:08:05

        Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is really important.

15. 1:08:07 – 1:15:45

    Build Measure Learn today

    1. EREric Ries1:08:07

       I will read it to you. So here is Answer.AI's defined public benefit. "The specific public benefit to be promoted by the corporation," this is-- I'm reading to you now from our legal charter filed in Delaware, "is to develop and increase society's understanding and awareness of the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence." I love how they put AI in quotation mark parentheses. "By researching, teaching, and discussing the proper uses and benefits of AI, as well as developing useful and practical applications of AI that could be ethical and beneficial to society. This may include participating in discussions concerning AI as well as its various applications and uses, teaching and/or developing AI technology and/or applications, as well as engaging in foundational research related to all aspects of AI. In addition, given the rapid development of AI technology, a further benefit to be promoted by the corporation is to do such work as the corporation hopes would be effective for helping develop ethical and beneful-- beneficial uses of AI for society." Can you tell that an engineer helped draft this?

    2. AGAakash Gupta1:08:59

       [laughs]

    3. EREric Ries1:08:59

       Like, it's very comprehensive. Most public benefit corp statements are much shorter and much loftier, but Jeremy and I were very worried that this would be misinterpreted, so we tried to be extremely exhaustive to say, "Look, this is what we're about. Everyone who invests in the company, you need to know this is what we're about. And all you have to do to bui- to invest in this company and believe it's a good investment, you just have to understand that if we accomplish this, do you think we're gonna be worth something?" And it's like, yeah, if you could accomplish this, if you actually do the foundational research that establishes how AI could be beneficial to society, like that's probably gonna be pretty valuable. And that was the same bet people made, you know, made with Dario. Like, you don't have to necessarily know exactly how the money is going to be made. Nobody could have anticipated Claude Code in particular. But they were like, "Look, this is foundational research. It's in the right area. It's being done by the right team. That's a pretty good bet."

    4. AGAakash Gupta1:09:48

       So that brings it full circle for everybody. We've covered governance. You've seen now how Eric is building with governance, sequencing it over time. I have a couple more questions 'cause I have the lean startup guy here with me. Build, measure, learn, I think it is the most famous business framework probably ever now. You created it.

    5. EREric Ries1:10:10

       Mm-hmm.

    6. AGAakash Gupta1:10:11

       It's informed everything. We've had guests like Dan Olsen on the podcast, who created the Lean Product Playbook entirely on top of that idea.

    7. EREric Ries1:10:20

       Yeah.

    8. AGAakash Gupta1:10:20

       I'm curious if build, measure, learn breaks for AI, and specifically foundational AI. We're talking about like $10 billion training run, takes like two years. Does it apply to all cases?

    9. EREric Ries1:10:34

       So in order to answer that question, you have to understand that build, measure, learn is not a set of tactics. Like, the reason people have been able to build so many consulting frameworks and product frameworks and books and all, like, there's like s- a whole series of people who've made their careers on top of it, is because it is a general purpose statement of principle, which says that the value in a entrepreneurial situation, a situation of high uncertainty, the value is in the learning, the reflection on each idea. So whoever has the faster velocity through that loop has the advantage. So yes, that's true whether the thing takes a month or a year or 10 years. I've used build, measure, learn on combined cycle power plants that take decades to build and construct, and that cost like a billion dollars. I've used it on cancer therapies and all kinds of super long-term projects. Heck, I built the Long-Term Stock Exchange. It's right there in the name of the company. It took me like 10 years to get it off the ground. So what matters is not how fast you go relative to dating apps or whatever you use as your fast cycle time, you know, imagination. It's just, can you go faster than the convention in that industry? So if you look at, um, you know, the AI foundation model wars, the labs that are able to release more quickly, both on the product side and on the research side, have a decisive advantage than the ones who have, like, put out one super model and then go dark. Have you noticed that?

    10. AGAakash Gupta1:11:59

        Yeah.

    11. EREric Ries1:12:00

        Like, they're the ones who customers come to rely on, and it's not just that you learn more. That's awesome. It's also a matter of trustworthiness. If a company's on fire, if they're cooking, like Anthropic's been cooking lately, you start to feel like, "Well, I should build my app on top of Anthropic because my app will just magically get better all the time." And so now you're starting to create these network effects that are really powerful. We see that whenever we see a platform war. People love, and the, the pressure to standardize on the leading vendor is super high, and the fact that Claude Code is emerging as that, as that standard I think is, uh, one of their huge competitive advantages, mostly being powered by the fact that their product organization has unparalleled velocity. So yeah, I think it's build, measure, learn, A+.

    12. AGAakash Gupta1:12:46

        So this is the part of the podcast where I'm trying to get you in trouble, you know. So [chuckles] is Sam Altman just a bad CEO, or is he trapped in a bad structure?

    13. EREric Ries1:12:55

        You know, it's funny, like, everyone always wants me to comment on Sam, and, like, Sam has been nothing but lovely to me. So, like, I have no beef with Sam. I think, you know, from my interactions with him, he's done nothing but be high integrity and, and kind to me and, and a really, like, really nice guy, really supportive person. Um, I've read all the same stuff you've read, so I don't know. I honestly don't know. I think that the focus on Sam the person obscures the structural problems that need to get fixed, not just for OpenAI, but for all of these companies. I feel like AI governance is one of those critically important things that's probably as important as getting the technology right if we wanna see this technology be used in beneficial ways down the road. So yeah, I would rather the focus be, rather than on Sam v. Elon, which I know drives a lotta clicks, I get it, but I would much rather the focus be on what is the appropriate governance structure? Who should have insight? Who should have control over these models? And I, like, I personally am a believer that we should have the equivalent of a sovereign wealth fund, like the Alaska Permanent Fund that oversees oil wealth in Alaska or the Norway fund. Like, that is a common, uh, structure that you use industry-wide when you have a natural resource explosion like this. I would love to see, in exchange for all these regulations that the AI companies want waived for them, including, by the way, like, training on all copyrighted material without compensating the authors. Hey, I'm an author. I'm in the training set. You know? Like, I always tell people it's, if you think being in the training set is bad, you should try being excluded from the training set. Okay? That's even worse. So, like, everyone's in a no-win situation right now. It'd be so much smarter if we had what's called compulsory licensing, meaning we just establish the rule that they're allowed to train on everything, but some of the profits that get made from that have to be contributed back to the people who contributed all that cultural worth. And what's so crazy about LLMs is like, yes, they were trained on all the greatest works of literature that have ever been written, but they've also been trained on every mean tweet, every Reddit post, every, like, random scrap of cultural output is in there. So, like, to me, this is like humanity itself created this technology as a collective act. The people who did the matrix multiplication, of course, played an important role. I didn't mean to say they did nothing. But, like, the raw material required the silicon chips, it required the RLHF people working in Africa and other low-wage countries, and it required all this cultural output. To me, it's the most obvious thing in the world that we should have a shared governance structure that includes broadly shared prosperity. Justin Rosenstein, the former, um, co-founder of Asana, has an op-ed, um, the other day in Fortune magazine about, uh, democratic councils that could oversee AI. Like, there's a bunch of proposals floating around. I would wish, I wish that was getting, like, one-tenth the social media and TV time that Sam v. Elon was getting, personally.

    14. AGAakash Gupta1:15:38

        Oh, man. I literally have a list of, like, 90 more questions I want to ask you, but we'll have to save that for the next

16. 1:15:45 – 1:19:43

    Where to find Eric

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:15:45

       episode.

    2. EREric Ries1:15:45

       I look forward to it.

    3. AGAakash Gupta1:15:46

       Eric, there are so many things you have going on, but now is the time to let everybody know about them. [laughs] What are all the things you have going on? Where should they go to find them?

    4. EREric Ries1:15:56

       Just everything. How much time do you have? Good lord.

    5. AGAakash Gupta1:15:58

       [laughs]

    6. EREric Ries1:15:58

       The most important thing is to go to incorruptible.co and buy this book, okay? And I know people hear about a book and it's like, "Okay, look, here's the book." But first of all, it's a very sweet cover designed by my longtime collaborator, Marcus Gosling. You can see it's shiny. It's nice. He did a really nice job. This book is beautiful. Um, you, the reason you wanna get a copy is not just because you're gonna really enjoy it, because logically speaking, I get it. People are like, "Well, I'm just gonna wait and see if the book becomes a thing, and then if it becomes a thing, I'll get it then," right? "If everyone's talking about it, then okay, then I'll have to read it. Okay, whatever." But if you do that, if everybody does that, then it doesn't become a thing. So, if you actually like an auth- this is not just about me. If you have anyone in your life who's an author and you actually like them, you need to pre-order their book. You need to get it right away when it first comes out. So, if you wanna do me a personal favor, you really wanna make my day and the day of someone who matters in your community, rather than just going on Amazon and clicking on the book, which you can do, you go to incorruptible.co. We have lists of all the independent bookstores all across this country that are carrying the book. Or even better, don't do it online. Walk into the store or call them. Tell them you want 10 copies of Incorruptible on launch day, May 26th. You will make their day, and you will make my day. So yes, please pre-order the book. Of course, if you don't want it in hardcover, you can get it in e-book, you can get it in audiobook. I am the narrator of the audiobook, for better or for worse. So, that has a bunch of cool bonus content, and there's all kinds of cool bonuses on the website. For your readers, I think there's two things they might be really interested in. One bonus is we have implementation guides. So, if you've heard me talk about some of this stuff, like public benefit corp and mission lock vehicle, and you're like, "How do I actually do it?" Like, down to the level of what are the docs and how does it work? We have those guides available for those who pre-order. And we also have readers guides. So, if you're like, "Hey, I'm not a founder yet," or, "I'm thinking of maybe being a founder one day," or, "I'm a board member, I'm a, I'm an employee, I'm a consumer. I wanna think through these ideas from the perspective of my unique role," I've partnered with a whole bunch of people who have those jobs to help develop readers guides that, um, will help you kind of m- um, master the material in a way that's relevant for your career. So, that's Incorruptible. That's definitely job number one. If you want to take your company public and not lose its soul, you can learn more about ltsc.com. That's Long-Term Stock Exchange. If you're an early-stage company and you want legal representation that won't charge you by the hour, that will work on the kind of things we're talking about, but will also handle all your other really boring administrative back office for a flat fee, you want tryvergil.com. If you want, if you're a company that wants to do lean startup trainings, you can go to leanstartup.co. I could do this all day. So, I'm involved with a lot of companies, is the, is the short, long and short of it. But yes, if you wanna follow me, the best way is to get on my mailing list, which you can do at incorruptible.co, or follow me, obviously, in all the usual places on social media.

    7. AGAakash Gupta1:18:33

       People say I have a lot of businesses and a lot of things going on, but now they know that the people I look up to, like Eric, they're doing a lot more. If you want to see a glimpse into hopefully the future of Aakash, that's Eric.

    8. EREric Ries1:18:46

       [laughs]

    9. AGAakash Gupta1:18:46

       You have had such a huge impact on the tech industry, on the product world. It's been an honor to get a chance to speak with you. Thanks, Eric.

    10. EREric Ries1:18:54

        Take care. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the kind words. That's really very nice of you.

    11. AGAakash Gupta1:18:57

        I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you could take a moment to double-check that you have followed on Apple and Spotify Podcasts, subscribed on YouTube, left a rating or review on Apple or Spotify, and commented on YouTube, all these things will help the algorithm distribute the show to more and more people. As we distribute the show to more people, we can grow the show, improve the quality of the content and the production to get you better insights to stay ahead in your career. Finally, do check out my bundle at bundle.aakashg.com to get access to nine AI products for an entire year for free. This includes Dovetail, Mobbin, Linear, Reforge Build, Descript, and many other amazing tools that will help you as an AI product manager or builder succeed. I'll see you in the next episode.

Episode duration: 1:19:43