INCORRUPTIBLE

The AI Conference 2026 — the 5,500-person San Francisco gathering of AI builders, researchers, and leaders (Sept 29–Oct 1) — announces a fireside chat between Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media founder & CEO) and Eric on founder responsibility and the future of the AI-powered economy.

“Join Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media, and Eric Ries, Founder and Author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Incorruptible, for a fireside chat on what it takes to build AI companies that matter.” The AI Conference on X

Don MacPherson releases E188 of his 12 Geniuses podcast with Eric. Announces the episode with a 29-like LinkedIn endorsement that goes further than most: 'the best business book I've read in 20 years' and 'This book will influence a generation of entrepreneurs.' Frames the book as an answer to the question 'What if human flourishing was the measure by which we evaluate organizations?'

“"Incorruptible" is the best business book I've read in 20 years. I found this copy out in the wild at my local bookstore. This book will influence a generation of entrepreneurs. It answers the question: "What if human flourishing was the measure by which we evaluate organizations?" I am so thrilled that I had the chance to interview the author Eric Ries for E188 of 12 Geniuses.” Don MacPherson on LinkedIn

EO (700K-subscriber global media brand for builders) releases a 25-minute Eric interview walking through why good companies get destroyed in the name of profit, the governing documents almost every founder signs without reading, and the structures a few companies use to protect their mission — the Sol Price firing at FedMart, the Philip Morris acquisition of Vectura, and how Anthropic and Patagonia stay true to purpose. Closes with a 15-year revisit of The Lean Startup and what AI can and can't speed up.

“Fifteen years after The Lean Startup, he's onto a different problem. Not how to find something worth building, but how to keep it. In this conversation, Eric explains why good companies get destroyed in the name of profit, the governing documents almost every founder signs without reading, and the structures a few companies use to protect their mission.” EO episode description

Jonathan Jackson (Dimagi co-founder & CEO) and Amie Vaccaro (VP Growth & Strategy, CommCare) release a full episode of the High-Impact Growth podcast with Eric on Incorruptible — walking through his radical reframe of profit as the maximization of human flourishing, financial gravity, the Costco and Novo Nordisk mission-lock structures (the latter preserving the research that became Ozempic and $500B in shareholder value), and a 'no-courage activism' question any job candidate can ask.

“Eric dismantles the conventional definition of profit and offers a radical replacement — profit as the maximization of human flourishing — then explains "financial gravity," the unconscious pull that bends organizations toward the values of whoever holds the money, whether investors or donors.” High-Impact Growth podcast episode description

Christian Soschner — biotech investor and Beginner's Mind host — releases a full-hour Eric interview walking through why shareholder primacy is a recent legal theory, how 'any lawful act or activity' erased corporate purpose, what actually killed Sears (a CEO who extracted $1.5B from himself while the company lost $11B), and why foundation-owned companies (Novo Nordisk, Patagonia, IKEA, Grundfos) outlive competitors. Ends on the turtles-all-the-way-down question of who guards the guardian.

“If you go to your local park, you'll find trees older than shareholder primacy.” Eric Ries on Beginner's Mind podcast

Day One® / First Cheque hosts Cheryl Mack and Maxine Minter release a full-hour Eric interview walking through what founders and early investors can do at the earliest stage to prevent mission drift — including the Novo Nordisk spiritual-holding-company structure, the Purdue Pharma million-dollar story that destroyed a startup, and Eric's 'Big Cojones' board-meeting moment where he expected to be fired for refusing to abandon his unconventional methods.

“Eric explains why many widely taught governance best practices are actually shareholder-value destroying, and why the earliest stage of a company is the easiest time to build in protections against this drift.” First Cheque (Day One) episode description

Callye Keen — founder of Kform and host of The Startup Defense (a podcast for founders, investors, and operators building for national security) — releases a 33-minute conversation with Eric on mission mortality, financial gravity, and why the Lean Startup toolkit protected companies through the first cliff but left them naive about a second one: the pressures that drag principled companies into corruption after they succeed.

“I used to think your company failing was the worst thing that can happen to you. Oh, no, my friend. It's hardly in the top 10. There are fates much worse than death that have plagued a lot of founders.” Eric Ries on The Startup Defense podcast

Cal Fussman — the interviewer who has spent his career drawing out big-name figures for Esquire — hosts Eric on Big Questions to walk through the Devoted Health customer-service rep story from Incorruptible: a patient kept returning to the ER, the rep asked why instead of just processing the claim, discovered mold in the patient's home, and got the company to help the patient move. Fussman frames it as proof of what happens when a business defines its product as love.

“Eric Ries tells this story in his latest book, Incorruptible, as proof of something AI can't replicate: the instinct to ask the right question and respond to the answer as if the patient were a family member.” Big Questions episode description

David Pereira — Untrapping Product Teams host and product-management writer — releases his Eric conversation and pulls three takeaways: corruption is the honest name for enshittification, a mission statement is worthless without values-in-action, and the 'culture bank' as a running deposit-vs-withdrawal ledger with Ries's rule to never voluntarily make a withdrawal.

“We call it mission drift, bureaucracy, enshittification. Eric says our grandparents had a sharper word for making money by draining value out of a company. As he puts it, "It's so much easier to destroy than it is to create."” David Pereira on LinkedIn

Dianne Penn — Anthropic's first technical PM, now Head of Product for AI Research and Labs — closes her Lenny's Podcast appearance by naming Incorruptible as one of just three recommended books, alongside Crucial Conversations and How to Raise an Adult. Lenny Rachitsky's 200K-subscriber product podcast; Anthropic's own governance is a case study in the book.

“Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great” Dianne Penn on Lenny's Podcast (Recommended Books)

Tom Fox — the longtime compliance-industry commentator behind the Compliance Podcast Network — dedicates his weekly Sunday Book Review to four FT-picked summer reads for compliance leaders, with Incorruptible sitting alongside Henry Snow's Control Science, Xiao Hai's Adrift in the South, and Justin Baer's House of Fidelity.

“What can four summer reads on environment, science, and technology teach compliance leaders about integrity, resilience, risk, and the future of business? In this #SundayBookReview, I consider Control Science by Henry Snow, Incorruptible by Eric Ries, Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai, and House of Fidelity by Justin Baer.” Tom Fox on LinkedIn

Stephan Spencer releases a second Eric episode on his Get Yourself Optimized show (following the Marketing Speak episode) — walking through why Costco and Patagonia stay true to their mission for decades while so many others give in to shareholder primacy.

“Most companies eventually give in to the pressure to maximize profit at any cost, but a rare few resist that pull entirely and stay true to their mission for decades.” Get Yourself Optimized episode description

Aakash Gupta — product-management writer to 1M+ subscribers — releases an Eric conversation framed around governance as a study of power relationships: the Sam Altman firing as OpenAI's structural design failure, Dario Amodei's three funding rounds defending Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, and Costco as the 'governance fortress' whose returns crush the S&P 500.

“Eric's read is that if you've ever wondered why Anthropic seems a little more courageous than the other labs, that structure is why. Most first-time founders chicken out when the stakes get high. Dario has a structure built to support his conviction.” Aakash Gupta on LinkedIn

Halle Tecco — Rock Health co-founder and long-standing digital health investor — releases a 40-minute Eric episode framed around why healthcare companies drift from patient mission toward shareholder primacy, with Novo Nordisk's ownership structure as the counter-example.

“Healthcare companies are built to improve patients' lives. So why do so many prioritize shareholders over the people they're meant to serve?” The Heart of Healthcare episode description

Suzie Lewis's business-leaders podcast releases a 41-minute Eric conversation on organisational soulcraft — mission guardians, PBC status, tenured board structures, and the argument that profit is best defined as the result of maximising human flourishing.

“The companies that last aren't the ones that avoid pressure. They're the ones that decided early what they would refuse to trade away.” Suzie Lewis on LinkedIn

Paul Shapiro — Better Meat Co. CEO and Business For Good host — drops a 53-minute Eric episode covering mission-hopeful vs. mission-driven, whether nonprofits are as capture-prone as for-profits, Adopt-a-Pet's Lean-Startup pedigree, Beyond Meat's pivot to protein water, why independent directors have statistically failed to prevent corporate corruption, and what governance can learn from ancient sortition.

“The more successful an organization becomes, the more valuable it becomes as a target. It becomes something worth stealing or in the book corrupting.” Eric Ries on the Business For Good Podcast

Stephan Spencer — SEO and digital-marketing author (Google Power Search, The Art of SEO) with 101K+ X following — hosts Eric for a 47-minute Incorruptible conversation on his Marketing Speak podcast. Covers why Lean Startup still holds up in the AI era, mission guardianship over stated values, the low-information diet, and why the timing of a protective structural decision matters as much as the decision itself.

“I've seen the very best that this industry has to offer, but I've also seen the dark side of it. I've seen people lose control of their companies. I've seen companies go public and then get ruined, forcibly taken over, founders ejected. Companies that we used to see through the lens of such idealism are now monsters and we see as some of the most evil companies in the world.” Eric Ries on Marketing Speak with Stephan Spencer

Adam Grant — Wharton professor, five-time NYT-bestselling author (Think Again, Give and Take, Hidden Potential, Originals, Option B), and host of TED Audio Collective's ReThinking — releases a 30-minute Eric episode framed around the book's central provocation: corporate corruption may look unsolvable, but it isn't. TED Podcasts publishes the video version on July 16.

“Corruption in organizations is one of the biggest problems of our time, and many people believe it may be unsolvable—but Eric Ries doesn't think so. As entrepreneur and author, Eric has dedicated his career to helping businesses succeed and do the right thing. His new book, Incorruptible, focuses on how to help organizations stay aligned with their ideals.” Adam Grant on ReThinking

Harry Max (author of Managing Priorities) opens the Traction Heroes episode 'Agency' by reading from Incorruptible's 'Who is the Bank?' section, calling out Ries's diagnosis of financial gravity and the Whole Foods-to-Amazon arc as the frame for the whole conversation about organizational agency.

“I'm easily going to guess this is going to be my 2026 book of the year.” Harry Max on Traction Heroes

Software Engineering Daily — a leading podcast for engineering leaders — releases Gregor Vand's conversation with Eric on Incorruptible, framed for founders and engineers: how to build resilient organizations and what technical staff can do to resist corruption from the inside.

“Eric Ries is the creator of The Lean Startup. He joins Gregor Vand to discuss why good companies go bad, building resilient organizations, and what founders and engineers can do to resist corruption.” Software Engineering Daily

Bob Bouthillier closes his two-part Incorruptible review with episode 100 — the second half walks through what Ries calls organizational incoherence, the Culture Bank framing of every decision as a trust deposit or withdrawal, and the structural protections (Public Benefit Corporations, mission pledges, tenured voting, co-determination, ESOPs, spiritual holding companies) that hold a mission once the culture alone is not enough.

“#100 Incorruptible by Eric Ries (Part Two)” The InnoGuide Podcast, Episode 100

Michael Krigsman hosts Eric for an hour-long live conversation on whether an AI company can take outside investment and still stay independent of its investors' demands — covering financial gravity, how to lock a mission into a legal structure under real financial pressure, what Anthropic's mission structures reveal in practice and where they fail, and what enterprise buyers should examine in how their AI vendors are funded and governed.

“Growth, outside capital, and the race to monetize all pull AI companies toward easy money. Eric Ries on whether a company can resist that pull and stay true to its mission as it scales.” CXOTalk Episode 923 page