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Today’s Episode
Eric Ries is the Lean Startup Guy. He was an early call from Dario Amodei when he was founding Anthropic.
Dario could afford that call and make the connection. But what about you?
I’m making that call for you today. Eric spent the last few years creating his next movement after Lean Startup, Incorruptible, and I get the low down:
How to structure your company with a trust
Governance structures you can copy
And the underlying culture you need
But this isn’t the same as other podcasts you may have seen with Eric.
He goes behind the scenes to show how he wrote Incorruptible with his AI tool Solveit and live screenshares his writing workflow with Claude.
Check it out:
🎊 To celebrate, I’m giving away 10 copies of Eric’s book Incorruptible:
All you have to do is fill out this short survey on PM salaries.
🆓 I’m doing a free webinar Thursday on getting AI PM interviews. Join me:
The next cohort of my LandPMJob program starts August. If you want my 1:1 coaching, sign up.
Today’s Deep Dive
I’ve written up the PM’s Guide to Governance:
The four dimensions of Incorruptibility
The Costco case study to become Incorruptible
How to structure your next company (if you’re a founder)
Plus, two bonus sections:
[Bonus 1] How Eric Ries Uses AI to write
[Bonus 2] The Lean Startup methodology in the AI era
1. The four dimensions of Incorruptibility
If you start studying the world’s most lasting companies, the first thing you’ll learn is that:
Most spectacular startup collapses were governance failures, not product failures.
So how do you avoid them? Four things:
For PMs, this can often feel mainly like it’s for founders. True. But:
As you become a senior executive, you have to start to think like a founder
PMs are torch-bearers when it comes to a company’s corruptibility
Many PMs end up becoming founders after they reach CPO
2. The Costco Case Study
Let’s talk about Costco for a second. It’s one of the best performing companies of all time:
How has Costco had such longevity? Well, it actually starts with disappointment. You see, Costco was co-founded by a guy named Sol Price.
Sol originally created FedMart. It became a very successful company, but he gave control to investors. Eventually, the board wanted growth while Sol would do things like tell customers to go buy from a competitor down the street if they had a cheaper price.
So, the board locked Sol out of his own company. It didn’t work well for them. By 1982, FedMart was in liquidation.
Sol, and his mentee Jim Sinegal, didn’t want to follow in FedMart’s footsteps. So when they built Costco (a merger of their two companies), they built a governance fortress, with staggered board, poison pill, fiduciary hierarchy, and a cultural fortress:
The cultural fortress is perhaps the hardest to capture part. How do you build an Incorruptible culture like Costco?
Eric takes inspiration from Jim Sinegal:
Compromising is "literally like taking heroin," one small price increase, stock goes up, you get hooked. Now it's baked into the forecast, so you have to do it again next quarter.
You have to avoid “financial gravity.”
$10,000 invested in the S&P 500 in 1985 is worth $151,000 today.
The same $10,000 in the Costco IPO is worth $8.7 million.
3. How to structure a company from day one
Many PMs go on to become founders. If that’s you, how should you structure your company?
Dario Amodei called Eric when Anthropic was still figuring this out.
Here’s the advice you can get from that call - without the access:
Seed Stage
Convert to a Public Benefit Corporation. Write the corporate mission directly into the charter. It is a legal structure that gives directors permission to pursue purpose even when it conflicts with shareholder value.
Designate a mission guardian. Someone with the authority and responsibility to keep the company on course. At Answer.AI, the founders hold that role.
Series A-B
Like Anthropic created and defended a Long-Term Benefit Trust, you will have to do the same.
Investors may want to change the terms. Hold the line.
Series C+
At larger companies, a mission lock vehicle can take the role of mission guardian:
This is what Answer.AI, Eric’s company did, and what Anthropic did.
Just remember, structure isn’t everything.
Me: Can I just copy-paste Costco or Novo’s governance structure?
Eric: No. There isn’t a universal blueprint.
The right governance depends on your company’s mission, ownership, funding, and stage. What works for Costco won’t necessarily work for Anthropic or for your startup.
That’s why the next question should be, “How can I design my own company?”
So that covers it on our short tour through governance for PMs. Now, two bonuses.
Bonus 1: How Eric Ries uses AI to write
The thing to avoid in the AI era is being called slop. How does Eric do it?
The book Incorruptible was written inside Solve It, the AI platform from Answer.AI. The approach is fundamentally different from prompting.
How it works:
Three block types. Notes (raw markdown you write), prompts (LLM instructions), and code (Python). You mix and match freely.
Context control. The LLM only sees messages above the current one. You choose what it knows.
Direct editing. If the model writes something wrong, instead of saying “try again,” you replace what it said with what it should have said. The model learns from the corrected version, reducing the mistake-correction cycle.
The writing style guide. A document loaded into every session listing phrases to avoid, patterns to follow, and the author’s specific voice characteristics. The generic AI gets banned before it starts.
Eric then took it to the next level. He had 600+ test readers leave structured comments, which the tool helped him organize and do months of daily turns on.
Bonus 2: The Lean Startup methodology in the AI era
Does the most famous business framework ever created break when a single training run costs $10 billion and takes two years?
No. But you have to understand what it actually is.
Build, Measure, Learn is a principle for operating under uncertainty. Its essence is:
Learn as quickly as possible
Turn every iteration into feedback
Shorten the time between building, measuring, and learning
Repeat faster than everyone else
The framework has been used on power plants, cancer therapies, even the long-term stock exchange. It works in the AI era too.
What matters is whether you can go faster than the convention in your industry.
If everyone else in your space takes 18 months between major iterations and you take 12, you have the advantage.
Claude Code is emerging as a standard partly because Anthropic’s product organization has unparalleled velocity.
Shipping velocity does more than accelerate learning. It compounds trust through two effects:
The cooking effect. When a company is shipping consistently, getting better visibly, you start to feel safe building on top of their platform. Your app will magically get better over time because their platform keeps improving.
The standardization effect. Once enough developers choose a platform, everyone else has an incentive to do the same. Enterprise customers sign multi-year contracts. Partners build around it. Hiring shifts toward it. Over time, the platform becomes the default choice.
And how does Claude Code ship so fast?
Their velocity is powered by the governance structure that gives the team permission to invest in the long term without quarterly pressure to cut corners.
And that’s how we come full circle.
Finally, here’s a one-sheeter you can print on governence:
Where to find Eric Ries
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