Why Your Favorite Brand Stopped Caring About You - Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

23:20Years ago, Nicholas and I were kind of obsessed with this question of how do you help companies start creating capacity to innovate? And we actually struck upon governance as well. And we had this idea around what we called an exploration committee that just like a, you know, a board has an audit committee. Yeah, absolutely. But to actually have, so I think there's an incredible leverage at the governance layer. So much leverage. It's the most powerful lever in corporate life. And most leaders don't, not only don't know how to pull it, but I've never even heard of it. It's unbelievable to me how ignorant we are about the tools at our disposal.

24:05And it's funny that if you talk to VCs about companies, they'll be like, you know, everyone knows of being non-consensual. and right is the only way to make money in venture. We have to be a bold contrarian. And those same VCs, as soon as you're like, let's talk governance, they're like, I don't know. You don't want to be - Oh no, yeah, exactly. Delaware C Corp. You know, it's just like, you want to keep it vanilla, right? Okay, where would my bold contrarian go? Like, what happened? So I feel like founders have to take control of this themselves and just be like, no, this is the kind of company I want to have.

24:33I had a lot of founders do this. I coached them to look in the mirror every day and practice saying this one sentence until you can say it with confidence. It's just like this. As the founder, it is my judgment that an essential component of our business strategy is to be trusted by, it's a mad lit, fill in the blank, customers, okay, or whatever. Nurses, we need nurses to trust us, okay. And in order to earn their trust, we need to adopt technique X. We need to be a public benefit court, or we need to have a long-term benefit trust, or we need to have a foundation that gives upside to the nurses because otherwise it's profoundly unfair, whatever it is.

25:12And what's critical about this magic sentence is it forces the person you're talking to to object to something specific. What exactly is your objection? Is the objection that I'm not the founder? That it's not my decision to make? That my judgment is flawed? That this is not our strategy? That trust is not essential? That this technique won't give us trust? Like, which is it? And what you'll find is most people cannot do this because all they're telling you when they object is they've been vaguely told slash indoctrinated into the idea that everyone's supposed to follow the best practices. I think actually it's a really important point.

25:50What you're saying is that a founder may say that in the mirror or otherwise, but not realize the internal inconsistency with their stated mission and their legal obligation. And you're saying there actually has to be alignment between what you're telling yourself. because I guarantee, like, I mean, dude, 95 % of the founders we know are saying that's true about them. And what you're saying, actually, I don't mean to put words in your mouth. What it sounds like you're saying is they're unknowingly lying to themselves if they've taken hook, line, and sinker, these kind of vanilla governance structure.

26:24You're saying if you've taken that structure, you cannot look in the mirror and say this because they're at the heart of your business and the inconsistency is irresistible. And the giant lie, you are lying. The worst lies are the ones that we tell ourselves. Can I tell you a story? Please do it. He's a founder. I won't out this founder because it's a little embarrassing for him, but I get the privilege of my life, okay? Like truly the most fun I get is basically every day I get to meet founders. People come to me with a crazy idea, you know, like Otto's, like we're going to do this thing. Like that's insane.

26:54Most people are like, I love a crazy idea. I love it. Crazier the better. So people come to me and pitch me like stuff that is just completely wild and they ask me for my help. It's like it makes my life so interesting. and I get to work on projects with like truly diverse kinds of things. Hey, one day someone wanted to meet with me for like an autonomous agriculture or something, something technology. And I was like, sure, why not? Happy to meet. So he's giving me this presentation and he's got these robots that are like autonomous vehicles with AI that can fly, they can roll on the ground, they can walk through the air, they can float.

27:28They're just like very, you know, omni-terrain. And he's like talking about how they could be used for agricultural monitoring, But all I could see was like every science fiction movie I've ever seen, which like you just mount a turret on this thing. And it's like it's scary. I mean, it reminded me a little bit of the white ball from The Prisoner. You know, I was just like this thing. This is like the stuff of nightmares. So anyway, I'm like, dude, just real quick. Is there any possibility that these could be used like as a weapon? And he like gets so frustrated. You could see the air go out of it.

27:59It's like, God, why is everybody asking me that? Like, I swear, I'm not trying to build autonomous murder robots. You know, I pinky swear promise. And I was like, well, that doesn't really make me feel any better. Because how do you know that they won't be used for that? And he's like, well, I have such good intention. Not doing it. But if it's not, if those intentions are codified in a legally binding document. I was like, look, you want, you're trying to convince all these people to trust you with this incredible technology. because you're so mission driven. But I would say you're more like mission hopeful.

28:34You're hoping that it all works out and that nobody will take this thing over and use it for something that you hate. Are you prepared to make the tough decisions now to prevent that from happening? It was like, not really. I just want to raise money. Can I ask on the... Good luck. One of my favorite podcasts is this, If Books Could Kill, where they go at links through books that you can buy in airports. And at one point they went through Who Moved My Cheese, which is this kind of famous business book. Yeah, I know it well. I have not read the book and neither do I know that, but they were talking about how basically optimizing for shareholder value is a relatively new concept that wasn't really kind of like populated until the 80s.

29:18I'm throwing something out. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because it seemed to be such a thing that everybody now just assumes is like, that's how it always been and should be. Yeah, people have been taught that this is a pillar of capitalism and it's so wrong. So first of all, for the majority of the time on this earth that there have been joint stock corporations, it was seen as completely obvious by everybody that those corporations should be created to do a specific thing, to make a railroad, to build a canal, to build an insurance scheme or something like that. And therefore, the only purposes that would be allowed to have corporations form around them were ones that had a public benefit, what we would now call a defined public benefit.

30:00That's where the PB and PBC comes from. The idea that a corporation is not a vital, beautiful living thing, but merely a financial instrument to enhance investor returns is a very new and super aberrant idea in history. And what's bizarre about it is that it has no democratic legitimacy. Shareholder primacy was never, not even once in the history of the world, subject to any popular referendum or enacted by any legislature. So we're living in this world of shareholder primacy. And people ask me, well, why is that? A very small cadre of lawyers, legal scholars, board members, and judges, starting in the 60s and 70s, got enamored of this idea.

30:42And they just decided it. Decided this is how it's going to be. So what's weird is if you ask people, is shareholder primacy the law? They're always like, well, it is, but not really, but it is. It's like common law. It's kind of a thing, right? It's so... But it's not even in the common law because it's happened. Like the common law wasn't made in 1986. It's not in all countries, right? You know, I'm obviously from Denmark where for tax reason, most of the companies that people know, Lego Cosper, Novo, Govan by Trusts. And they have in their constitution that basically they have to do things for the greater good.

31:20And so while the subcompany, I guess it's the same way that now Anthropik is structured, can make money. Oh, exactly. Grunfos? Yeah, Carlsberg. You write about it in the book. Yeah. Yeah, no, Denmark is like the laboratory of this idea because, yeah, it's actually very funny how it's like it's an obscure quirk of Danish public policy has caused it to be the epicenter of this structure. But thanks to that structure, we have a lot of data. Denmark is actually the leading provider of the data that shows that this is a better structure than conventional companies can achieve. But here's the thing that's really important.

31:51If you read the legal papers that defend shareholder primacy and you cut through all the BS about is this the law or is it not the law, you eventually get to a bedrock idea where they say, look, at this point, whether it should have been the law or not, at this point, it is now a normative consensus that this is how companies operate. Normative means, like a descriptive consensus would mean, we all agree that this is what companies do. They are mercenary assholes and there's nothing you can do about it. But a normative consensus is a consensus about how companies should behave. Normative consensus means everybody knows that everybody knows that companies should behave this way.

32:29They literally write stuff like this. Managers not only can, but should break the rules if it is profitable to do so. What's wild about this normative consensus is when I talk to people who build companies for a living and I ask them, are you part of this normative consensus? Everyone's like, no, I think this is the dumbest idea in the world. I say, well, interesting. Apart from just now, have you ever told another living soul that this is what you think? Oh, no. And is this is this documented? Is it actually is it defensible in court? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Everyone's afraid to say anything about it.

33:03And therefore, that allows the consensus to continue. They're complicit in the consensus. Yeah. The other thing that I think is very important for founders to understand, when we say that this is a new idea, let me just walk you through how this worked in the 19th century. Okay. This is how it was in the United States until 1899 in Delaware. So very recently in the 19th century, let's say you were the world's richest man and there was a certain company that you wanted to control, let's say it was a railroad or a canal because there was no social media, you want to borrow a bunch of money from banks and take it over.

33:38First of all, in the 19th century, the board of directors would have been seen as perfectly justified in fighting you tooth and nail to prevent this from happening. There was no fiduciary duty to sell your company. 19th century observers would have found that ridiculous. But let's say you succeeded anyway. You take the company over and you tell everybody, I'm going to change its corporate charter from making a railroad to enriching shareholders. That's its new purpose. That would have been considered a crime. And the courts would void your charter as beyond the scope of what was authorized. That's how far we've come in just over 100 years.

34:14And even for the great bulk of the 20th century, when this system was reformed, because in the 19th century, to get a corporate charter, you had to make a petition to your local state legislature where you describe the public benefit. That was cumbersome. I'm not saying we should go back to that. The idea was called general incorporation, which was that anybody should be able to form a company for any reason. We take that for granted today, but it's just over 100 years old. It's actually a very new idea in human history. It was paired with limited liability, also a relatively new idea, limited liability for shareholders.

34:43And the idea was shareholders should be able to invest since they don't control what a company does. They shouldn't have liability for what it does. And anybody should be able to declare what their public benefit is and then form any company they want. That was fine. That actually worked really well for most of the 20th century, because even though you could make a company for any reason, you still had to have a reason. And investors, since they weren't in control of what you did, didn't have any liability. When we switched to shareholder primacy, we blew up this whole system. And actually, we're causing the deterioration of our economy thanks to this toxic idea.

35:16First of all, now, whenever you confront a company and say, why did you do this sociopathic thing? Companies say, well, it's not up to us. We had no choice. We're just doing our fiduciary duty to investors. But then you're like, great, so I can hold the investors accountable for this action? No, they have limited liability. So we've actually created what Ann Davies calls the unaccountability machine, where no one's - It's like, it's the Steinbeck quote, right? There's no way the public in the long-term will tolerate this state of affairs. And if you've wondered why have there been increasing calls for the corporate death penalty in recent years.

35:46This is why it's actually a logical response to this idea of shareholder primacy. One of the reasons why I think, A, I think, you know, your new work is important for many reasons. But in the context of AI, one of the things that we talked a bunch about in this podcast is in order to scale yourself, you need to understand how to create autonomous agents that do the work for you. In order to do that, you need to be able to articulate what your operating system is, how you take decisions, all these different things, because obviously otherwise the model would just kind of answer in a generic way, not in the way that you would.

36:18Yeah, yeah, of course. And so I have been on this tirade for the last few months to kind of really articulate my own stuff in like a persona.md file. I've been talking to a lot of people about like doing that. And so I think from anthropics and the highest level of governance, I think all the way down to the most individual, I think increasingly we're looking at a place where people can do stuff to change things. Like just adding into your governance structure of your own agents to say, here's like a little, here's my integrity, kind of like five lines of principles. Yeah, if you just put once, one of my ideas in the book is that we should redefine what it means to make a profit, to maximize human flourishing.

37:02That's literally what it means. If you put that one sentence in your agent document to say that, by the way, my personal view is that to make a profit means to maximize human flourishing, you will be surprised how influential that sentence will be to its behavior. Governance is about coherence, coherence inside and out, high and low, top and bottom, everything together rowing in the same direction. It's very powerful. I think part of the reason this is so hard for folks, and especially, I mean, as a recovering MBA myself, I started in finance. I love a good spreadsheet, right? Dollars are very easy to measure.

37:35You know, flourishing is very difficult to measure. So our system is geared towards that which is easy to measure, not necessarily that which is worth measuring. In academic literature, this is called surrogation, where the metric becomes the surrogate for the thing itself. And you know how everyone's talking now about legibility? You need to make your life legible to the AI so that it can help you. This is a huge part of the problem. Right now, this is not really an AI-specific thing. right now, we are teaching people, for example, the stack rank activities by ROI. One of the earliest things you learned in your MBA program, I was taught it as a junior engineer, ROI rules everything.

38:12Except the most important decisions we make, the ones that build trust are ROI negative by definition because the returns are intangible, but the costs are tangible. So say more, say more. Give us a practical example of that because I really want to make that. Yeah. Yeah. So let me tell you a story. I'm going to tell you a story about H-E-B, a grocery store in Texas. I like this because it's very - One of my favorite retailers. It's incredible for folks who don't know it. Anyone who's ever been to Texas or spends time in Texas can't shut up about H-E-B. Outside of Texas, they're not that well-known.

38:40What I loved when I was doing the research for this, the people in Texas mistakenly, frequently mistakenly think that H-E-B stands for here, everything's better. But actually, it's not. It's even not the name of the company. It's just the initials of the founder's son. Anyway, the company's been going, I think, close to 100 years, 80 years, something like that in Texas. Remarkable organization. Remarkable organization. And I tell this story during the pandemic, I think there was an ice storm in Texas. And one of the stores, the power goes out. And I'm talking about hard power out, no backup generators, no phones, no way to call headquarters, nothing.

39:14The lights go out. And the reporters tell this story after the fact. They're like, there was a collective groan in the store. You can imagine why. Why are people upset that the power is out? Why are they in the store? It's an ice storm in Texas. They're obviously stocking up on stuff. So everyone's like, oh no, I'm not gonna be able to get the stuff my family needs. The store manager jumps up on a table and says, everybody gather around. Just take your carts, go home. And someone's like, how are we gonna pay for it? You're not gonna pay for it. Just go home. And people hear this story and they're like, wow, what a brave manager.

39:48To defy the wrath of corporate, to give out all this free stuff, they must've been very brave. But no, as you pointed out, this is not a brave manager. This is something that H-E-B drills for. Not for ice storms in particular, but for the idea that they are a fiduciary to the customer. They got to take care of people. And if you have the opportunity to do so, you do it. So that the people like the customers are in tears. The loyalty you gain from doing something like this. The people who shop there that day, they're never shopping somewhere else. I mean, it's just a profound moment in their life.

40:14This happened. Now, imagine they could have gotten corporate on the phone. And imagine they were in a conventional company that rules by spreadsheet and ROI. You can easily imagine someone being like, excuse me, but what is the ROI of this activity? and the manager being like, I don't know, man. People are going to be in tears being so grateful to the thing. But I can tell you exactly how much it costs to give them all that free stuff. It's going to be exactly$25 ,333.23. How much is this loyalty you claim worth? How much is it worth? And I've actually been in this argument many times in companies.

40:45I remember one time we were talking to a company that was like really recalcitrant about doing the right thing. I won't say what the thing was, but it was very, to me, very obvious they need to do the right thing here. Tell me you didn't want to do it. All these people talk about the ROI, ROI, ROI. And we're like, loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. And finally, the finance people are like, okay, fine, fine. We agree getting this loyalty would be really useful. We're like, finally. But honestly, now don't we have to consider the ROI of this action that you propose compared to what if we just have a loyalty program?

41:14Wouldn't that be a more efficient way to get the loyalty? And you're just like, oh my God, stop it with this. It's funny. A really critical idea. a really critical idea is, first of all, to try to make the intangible things tangible. We have a whole chapter about this, how to use metrics that can capture - Which is a little bit difficult. Like, what's the KPI of my life? Very difficult. But also, we have to have certain principles that are not legible. I think this is something that is very - Listen, I'm Mr. Metrics. I'm very pro-metrics. But not every decision can be made by the metrics. Some decisions have to be made in an a priori way.

41:48including, by the way, the decision about what to measure and what not to measure. The late, great Clay Christensen said in his last book before he died, he said it is easier to do the right thing 100 % of the time rather than 98 % of the time. And that is just an incredibly profound idea. When you take certain things off the table, think about Steve Jobs. I love the story. He used to have fights with his engineers over the visual layout of the wires inside a case of a computer he didn't think customers should be allowed to open. And the engineers would be like, man, who cares? No one is ever gonna know.

42:25No one will ever see this. So why are we arguing about this? And he'd be like, but we're gonna know. We're gonna know. Coherence, that's a great example of coherence. This is what we stand for. And that goes back to that harder is easier principle. By making life more difficult for himself, he actually taught an important lesson to his team. This is what we stand for. This is who we are. And because they saw him do that in little ways, they started to believe he would do it in big ways. And that's why people were so insanely loyal to him. One of the things that I think is extra interesting in the age of AI about this is I feel a lot of us are now trying to figure out how do we offload stuff to AI?

43:03But then we're also trying to figure out when do we actually need a human loop? And what kind of human loop? We have obviously the founder of BarkBox. And one of the things we do is we make these incredible dog toys. and some of the doctors are funny for the humans and they're credible for the dog. And so we refer to them internally as they have Bach magic. Now, one of our head of design, Derek, he's incredible at doing that. Now, the irony is, of course, that I am not able to define what that means, right? And almost per definition - It's illegible. If I was able to, I could probably outsource it to an agent because then I could just put on one of the parameters that I want.

43:39And so I think what I think Christian Masberg in his book, Sense-Making Call, the difference between thick data and thin data, where the thick data is this thing that we humans understand. The party is just getting started. The mood in the office is weird. Those are things that are easy for us to compute. But to your point, we have lived in a world for many years where those were kind of like touchy-feely kind of character traits that we didn't really value. And so I think ironically, we're now forced to think much more about this on like the smaller level. Yeah, yeah. No, everyone is grappling with this right now.

44:14And rightly so. To me, this is like, imagine you were in a car, a combustion engine car, and you didn't have a speedometer. And you're like, how can I figure out how fast I'm going? Someone says, look, we realized that the amount of exhaust coming out the tailpipe is correlated with our speed. So that's going to be our primary KPI, exhaust coming out the tailpipe. At first, it's not a problem because that is a pretty reliable indicator of speed. But then somebody realized, someone else says, oh, I heard that your goal as an organization is to have maximum exhaust out the tailpipe. Let's throw some sawdust in the engine.

44:47So the metric becomes the surrogate for the thing itself. We have all been taught that when a company is healthy and growing, its share price will increase. Therefore, anything that makes the share price increase must make it more healthy. Wait, what? Makes it healthy. Yeah, exactly. Where did we get that idea? And this is, AIs, of course, are an amplifier of this tendency. if you insist on only doing the things that are legible to the AI, you will, we will, we will live your life in this trap. On the flip side, if you view AI as a compliment, as something that could enhance human agency and creativity, then you will never have this problem and you will be able to use the technology in a really powerful way.

45:26The last thing that I'll say, just because I think it's actually related to the AI in your book is this governance issue is deeply relevant to the AI moment. What I'm reading right now, the infinity machine, Sebastian Malaby's book about deep mind and Demis Sabas. And these are conversations, the conversation you're describing at Anthropic and that you're kind of articulating more broadly is animating the AI dialogue right now, whether people know it or not. Right. And the question of governance, the question of what do we do when there's a lack of coherence or how do we ensure coherence is something that the smartest people in the world have been thinking about for the last 20 years.

46:05And, and by the way, not really solving, I think. Yeah. Yes. Um, so it's, it's, it's a deeply, it's a D as far afield as kind of the topic of governance may seem to some folks, it's actually deeply inherently related to AI. And so I'm really grateful that we had the chance to learn from you. Some of, some of the things that you've learned as you've been studying the last couple hundred years. I think it's got tons of bearing, not only on the AI moment, but also on the founders and professionals in our audience. So thanks for taking the time. Yeah. I really hope this book will have as much impact as the lean startup, then I think it'll be a better world.

46:41Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Henrik, I wanted to start with a bold question for you to reflect. We asked Eric, what about the person who's already created a governance structure? They've already got a venture, what can they do is all lost. And he said, I love these three words. He said, why not try? He said, usually you can just change your structure with a majority vote, you know, or with the new influx of capital. So my question for you is as a founder, you've got a company right now. How do you think about your own company's governance given that conversation? I mean, I thought a lot about it after the conversation.

47:18We were recording this like a a few days after and and it's definitely one of the statements that kind of like stuck with me i think he's right that you can probably when you come back with new money kind of introduce that to your investors and so i i think it's then depends a little bit of like quote unquote how hot your deal is because obviously if you're going around you know begging for cash then you probably get even more restrictions uh put on you then then you necessarily have the opportunity to negotiate kind of what we'd consider better terms. But I definitely think it makes a lot of sense.

47:53And I do think it's an incredibly important conversation. And it's not one that we've had a lot, I think, in the entrepreneurial space. It's obviously not one that historically has been promoted from the investment side. And so I think it's prudent that entrepreneurs can look themselves in the mirror and say, hey, I want to be able to deliver the promise to the customer that I serve. And for me to be able to do that forever, which hopefully is the duration of the company's life span, I probably have to think of some structures. And so, yeah, I mean, I greatly salute him for writing the book, very much saluting him for picking the, of this kind of difficult conversation.

48:33And I think it's, it's on an entrepreneur now to, to take that kind of pattern and then kind of run with it. one uh one follow-up thought that i had is you and nick have autos right you're helping a bunch of entrepreneurs build new businesses is there any way to make good governance the default structure of a new business right instead of bad being the default why not make good the default yeah i think so i mean like a lot of the companies that run on autos.com are not necessarily entities And so they don't have the same governance structure as a LLC will have, but they do have principles on operations.

49:14And I do think that having good behavior is something that we can affect. And so this is something that we're also thinking about now as part of the platform. And I hope that Eric will help us promote more of that kind of attitude, not just in our organization, but across the organizations that we help build. The last thing that struck me was the whole mirror sentence that he recommends founders say in the mirror, right? What stood out to you from the conversation? I think I'm kind of like was torn the whole conversation because everything he says, I find to be true, but also very difficult. And so.

49:56In what sense? How do you mean difficult? He's talking about how basically that an organization structurally is increasingly set up to serve the return of capital, like so your shareholders, than it is being set up to serve the customer that you're serving, the one that pays you money. And so I think that insight is fundamentally true. And I think many of us, when we have been able to build successful companies, it's because we start up with thinking about how we serve our customers very, very well. And then over time, that kind of erodes because we become bigger and the interest of returning capital becomes much more kind of prudent and powerful.

50:39Now, it is difficult because to his point, the organizational design and this governance design is then set up. And I would imagine many entrepreneurs will be met with very cold faces when they come back and saying, hey, here's a thing. Next year, we're not going to try to hit profitability or we're going to reduce profitability because we think that the capital that we made is best served in giving more value back to the customer. That is just such a foundational different belief system. And so I think he had a very prudent argument. And I do think in the long run, it makes more sense to serve your customer because that's how you're going to serve your shareholders too.

51:24But it is complicated, man. And I don't think it's easy. And so it's not just about a founder here and there kind of looking themselves in the mirror and kind of agreeing. It's a complicated fight that's a little bit more, going to be a little bit more forceful than getting better values. Yeah. Well, you raise a really interesting point that I hadn't really thought about in regards to Anthropic, or I think about it in regards to the example of Anthropic. Are you a price maker or price taker, so to speak, as a founder? And I think the Anthropic example, my sense is Dario and his team were probably more, they were making the price when it comes to raising capital because of their pedigree and because of their history.

52:07They were leaving open AI, they knew what they wanted to do, right? And so that maybe, I don't know, are they more of a price maker? Whereas they can sell, which is say like to a VC, they can walk away. And I wonder whether a lot of folks, maybe they have a more normal kind of a startup. They may be more hesitant to impose terms because they're just going to not get funded, right? Yeah. And I think the same thing, you know, obviously Mark at Facebook has a famously governance structure that gives him a lot of power. And I think I've heard conversations where founders go like, oh, you'll be very neat to have the same setup, right?

52:41But again, I think when he managed to do that, Facebook was really on fire and it was in one of those rounds, like it wasn't a down round where he suddenly made those changes. And so, yeah, I think that's a good observation. Now, the beauty would, of course, be if we could find cases or examples where you could show that both benefit that this is not a zero-sum game. This is not where you're taking away from the investor and giving to the customers. This is where the investors get even more back because that they serve their customers. Well, that has to be the argument, right? That has to be the point.

53:17It doesn't work otherwise. That has to be the point. And I think that a lot of time the company's lifespan is longer than maybe an investor's is in that company. And so they just want the next three. Let's say your PE firm, you might go, yeah, that might be well that in 15 years, this will pay dividends. but I'm going to be out in three or four years. Well, that's the core of his argument, actually, is those kinds of sources of capital actually are making a sacrifice you shouldn't be willing to make. Or you shouldn't be surprised when the business is no longer what you want it to be. But also, I mean, sometimes some founders, they will have to make decisions and they might have been working for something for 12, 15 years and not made a lot of money doing it, although on paper it's worth a lot.

54:02And so then a liquidity event comes around, like you sell to a PE firm, then you have to be cut out like a very special cloth to then go like, you know what? I'm not going to do this deal if you don't do X, Y, Z. But I think back to the original point, that is the conversation that we need. And I think in many ways, customers and society at launch is asking founders to increasingly take that posture. And I'm like, obviously looking for like, how do you get a little bit of help taking that posture? Because it's not going to be an easy one to take. I wonder if the opportunity space is actually for investors who want to see a different kind of governance.

54:39If you take as a premise as an investor that you're going to create more enterprise value as an aligned organization, which really deeply connects to the mission, maybe instead of the burden being placed on the founder to fight for their rights, maybe there's a new kind of investment. I don't want to say vehicle, but a new style of investor who says this is actually a better way of doing it. And we, as the investor, are going to impose proper governance on the companies that we fund. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's interesting. And I do think that there would be a market for it.

55:11Like if there's any of those investors out there, they can give a call. If you take Founders Fund, for example, they, at the time, famously was fully pro-founders, They were basically, we don't fire founders. We are in support of secondary transactions so the founders can take money off the table along the way and all these different things, which at the time was kind of unheard of. And so I think it's a super interesting kind of point that maybe there's like a new investment opportunity of being the ones who go and say that. Now, back to the point of Anthropics, I mean, as I understand, one of the reasons why they got funding to start with was because a bunch of people basically felt that needed to be a company that were thinking more about safety than what was out there.

55:52And so they might have been talking to a group of investors that was already kind of open for that document. Yeah, yeah. Great conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I agree with you, Henrik. I wish Eric all the best in championing this new cause. I think it's a needed book. It's needed thought leadership. And I'm really excited to hear what our audience thinks about the topic as well. Yeah, me too. So with that, I think it's time to call it a day. And so the only thing that's left to say is bye-bye. Bye-bye.