Mission Integrity, Financial Gravity, and Lean to Incorruptible with Eric Ries

0:00Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callye Keen. Today we have Eric Ries. I want to get into your past. Everybody knows about Lean Startup. I want to talk about mission and I want to talk about building amazing companies. But before we dive in, same question I ask everyone, what are you passionate about right now? gosh well yeah having a new book out it's very much on my mind but you know to me the book lean startup all my work is just an instance of a more general class of problems like i've been trying to help people recover their sense of agency and build great things for a long time and i feel like that's kind of like a problem a problem of our times is this feeling that all of our ambitions are very small and not just our economic ambitions, but our moral ambitions, our social ambitions.

0:50Like what, who built the institutions that govern our modern life? People, human beings, our grandparents built most of them. Some of them were built a lot older, a couple of more recent, but generally speaking, I think people are accepting that this is all we can do. This is all that is possible to a degree that I find really, really unfortunate. So yeah, I like to try to enhance that feeling of human agency, especially with all the technological disruption coming our way. I love this framing for the conversation. And I do want to ask you one boring question because everyone knows you from the Lean Startup and it created this innovation ecosystem phenomenon across the world.

1:28I've used it in accelerators for 10 years as a, you know, references. Hey, this is the lingua franca. You need to read this book because everybody's read the book. Like you have to understand this. You're going to have very difficult conversations if you don't know what's inside this book. This is so common. And then to go from that to now incorruptible, like what, what happened in your life to say, I need to tell this story because we were all about starting things and now we're all about maintaining things or keeping that mission in, in the parlance of, you know, our world and the defense world, keeping that mission focus, keeping that user in mind, keeping the morality, purpose, reason for the business.

2:12So what's happened then and now? What's that vignette look like? Okay. On the one hand, as the kids say, I seen some things. Okay. So like I've been at this a long time now. Lean Startup came out 15 years ago. And honestly, I don't mind to sound like woe is me. Okay. The privilege of my life is that not a day goes by that someone doesn't ask me for advice building a company, starting something brand new, revitalizing an existing company, working in nonprofit, in governments, in defense, in civilian applications, all over the world. It's been an incredible journey. And I've loved every minute of it.

2:51I really enjoy the process of getting the intellectual stimulation of getting to study so many different kinds of businesses and try so many different kinds of things. How cool is that? Love that. And yet I've also seen the darkness that is at the heart of so many of these organizations, which we're going to talk about. Okay. So that's like, so why on the one hand, there's a, there's this thing that I have seen and this book is not a work of abstract reasoning to me. This is not some like, you know, philosophical debate about the nature of humanity or whatever. No, this is a very practical problem.

3:23And that's in some ways why to me, it is always like one thing. This is not really to me, a departure from that same mission I've been on this whole time. Lean startup was all about how to develop mission-driven companies. That was really its focus. And the reason why it's had so much success in civilian and defense applications is because the people that gravitate to it are people that are trying to get results, trying to accomplish something great. If you're just trying to make money, if you're just trying to do something simple or small, you don't really need Lean Startup. Lean Startup only makes sense in the context of an ambitious long-term vision.

3:58the problem is and this i will take some responsibility for i and a lot of other people i think we're frankly naive about the causes of mission mortality you know obviously for startups the main issue of mortality is just you never you never get product market fit you never manage to make anything that anybody wants never raise any money you never even have any of the problems that we talk about later and i used to think like okay that's let's just focus on that but so many of the companies that we got through that cliff, got past that hurdle, built something extraordinary, started to build a great company, were nonetheless undone, as surely as if they had gone bankrupt or never raised money.

4:37In fact, some of those founders, what happened to them is worse than bankruptcy. 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 await a lot of founders. I have a whole file now. People have been sending me the names of companies, like case studies of companies where the founder's name is the name of the product. And then that founder gets ousted. And now they have to watch as this zombie version of themselves goes out and wreaks terrible havoc in the world and they can't do anything about it.

5:08In one case, the founder was sued by the original company saying that he can't start a new competing company because his name is trademarked by the company. It would cause confusion. There's some bad things that have happened. And of course, we're joking about this stuff. Of course, like the restaurant where like private equity takes it over and the food is disgusting. So it's always like these forms of corruption are everywhere. Those are the funny ones. Not to make light of people's life work being ruined, not to make light of the fact that for employees, for customers, for communities, those things can be devastating.

5:38But of course, we also have companies whose technology is downright dangerous, whose products are being used in malign ways. when they fall into bureaucracy or even malignancy, like they become a generation of threats that then the next generation of startups have to be built to defend us against. And think about what's happened to our world with the information environment that we're living in, the collateral consequences, the negative externalities of all these choices that were made to make a relatively small number of people wealthy. I know a lot of those people. I was there. I remember their idealistic younger selves and now look at them.

6:12And the question I have for all of us, myself included, so many people I've worked with, I grapple with this question in the book, is what was it all for? These people who've gotten so wealthy from wreaking all this destruction, do they seem happy to you? Do they seem content? They mostly seem to me to be miserable and often paranoid. And I just think this system causes us to treat the people involved as heroes or villains. We want to personalize what happened. And I'm all for accountability for people's choices. But that keeps us, I think, a little bit distracted from the fact that we are sending one founder after another into this system that has its own values, its own logic, its own force that it applies to organizations.

6:57It drags them down. And I was naive about it. So I'm sick and tired of it. I don't really want to send people out unarmed into that fetal battle anymore. And so my book is an attempt to diagnose what has happened to help people not be naive and understand what they're up against, but far more importantly, to lay out a blueprint for how we could build a much stronger kind of organization that is capable of resisting or even harnessing these forces to good end. One thing that I wanted to emphasize that I found really interesting in the book is you're not making a specific personal indictment of the moral character of particular people.

7:33You're making a judgment about the financial gravity of what happens when you grow. There's just many decisions around incentives inside the business, around having a quarterly update or reducing the price of a product. There's these thousand little cuts that mold the company because it becomes a financial instrument versus it being that original intent of we're going to change the world for the better in this one specific way. it becomes an engine. Two things that I think are interesting. And we stopped working for large corporations, even primes, like in defense. One, because they have their time in place, but like the cadence and what is important to them is to sustain like a large organization.

8:25Their primary goal is to sustain the organization. This is how like biology works, right? And it's it's mission adjacent, but it has to maintain the organism. And so that means lots of slow moving pieces and resources. And I like to build stuff. So we work with startups, right? But it's not that there's bad people and good people. It's just, you look at the big corporate examples and it is how that corporation must function. And you look at the small companies and you say, hey, these are these virtuous lean startups, right? But in the past decade plus, now there is a separate but equally powerful financial gravity for these startups.

9:12It's like, I need to raise really quickly. I need to promote my successes. I need to constantly post on LinkedIn or Twitter. And so I can raise the value of my company. Raising each round becomes its own race. And And that can be misaligned. And take this with a grain of salt because this is like I'm saying in my industry, defense is not the fastest industry in the world. But if you're trying to raise every 12 or 18 months and your industry has a two-year BD cycle, it requires a little bit of misalignment oftentimes because people, they're not going after patient capital. They're not being patient and product-led or mission-led.

9:51I found that this is really interesting, this idea of financial gravity, and it just made me think of it's really we're not that far off from the size of the organizations. People make these decisions almost unconsciously. They're molded by that away from this core piece. So I just I wanted to pose that to you. And like, yeah, you're seeing it. You're literally witnessing it right now. This force is utterly pervasive. I call it the force that no one controls, but everyone obeys. and it's there in the public markets. It's there in the tiniest startup. It's there in nonprofits, governments, you name it.

10:27It is a part of human psychology. And the mechanism of it is really important to understand because it can sound mysterious or kind of weird because people look at this thing like, well, if you're seeing people in your team make moral compromises, tell them to stop. Hire different people. Have a training. They're like, a bunch of stuff you can do. And that stuff is important too. Sometimes you do just have an individual person make a bad decision. You got to tell them not to do that. but a lot of founders, a lot of leaders, a lot of board members, a lot of people who seem like they have a lot of power are nonetheless very frustrated that despite doing everything they can think of using the leadership tools they've been taught, this force gets in anyway.

11:06It starts to change people's behavior anyway. And I think I spent a lot of time trying to understand like, what are the laws of gravity? How does it work? What's going on? Here's my theory. so deep in our evolutionary wiring deep down in the lizard brain part of what it means to be a human being is a circuit a reflex to pay attention to who controls resources and to align yourself with those people please because in evolutionary time you never know when you might need the resource that they have and resources were scarce so that doesn't really matter what the resource is it could be a financial resource like food or money but it could also be power it could be status.

11:43These things are valuable and they're important. And if someone has a lot of them and you have a little, you want what they have, you pay attention to what they want. So it's just, it's running all the time, like a background reflex. When you, when you walk into a dark room, you don't have to tell your eyes to dilate. You're not even aware your eyes are dilating. It just happens automatically. If you try to control it, if I say, listen, do me a favor and don't dilate your eyes in the room. You can't, it's not, it's not under your voluntary control. So if you've ever watched a friend, you want to see the circuit in action, watch somebody meet a celebrity for the first time.

12:14I mean like a mega celebrity and watch them turn into jello. The toughest, most like manly man dudes I've ever met. Like sit in front of Oprah and they're like little boys. Like, oh, what can I do to please you? You know, anything I can get you, anything you want. Like just it kicks in. It's automatic. You ask them afterwards, why were you acting that way? They don't know. It wasn't their plan. It is a reflex. You watch someone. I've been around a lot of billionaires. You watch them enter a room. You watch them get pitched stuff. You watch people talk to them. There is this automatic, everyone in the room is thinking the same thing.

12:46They're trying not to, but they can't help it. What might this person want? What might they want? It's not so easy to find out. You don't just go ask them, hey, Oprah, what would you like? That's not how it works. You try to figure it out. You look for subtle cues. You're thinking about it all the time. You see this, obviously, in political power, too. So that's okay. Okay, so an individual person acts weird in the presence of a famous person. So what? Well, organizations, now think about this. An organization is a collection of people, all of whom are running the same hardware. Which means if the organization needs something or might need something from someone who has a lot of resources, then these behavioral changes will sweep through the organization and be happening all the time.

13:28So it's best to think of your organization as like a giant receiving antenna for this signal. So for example, ask a CEO who's taken their company public recently. You ask them this question. What's the number one thing you noticed that was different the day after versus the day before you go online? They all say the same thing. Well, now everyone's watching the ticker every day. You're like, oh, so what? Who cares about that? Well, it's not so much that they're watching the ticker. It's that they start to say things in meetings like this, having a product meeting. I think we should launch this new feature.

13:59Someone will say, I don't know. The market might not like it. Who? Is that a person? Did Mr. Market join our meeting? Who? Did you survey a bunch of investors to find out what they want? Oh, no, I'm just saying they might not like it. Talk to a startup. Maybe we should go in this bold new direction. We're raising money. Series A is coming up. Investors might not like it. They might not like it? You sure? Have you talked to them? Did you do 20 pitch meetings to find out? Well, we can't do that, right? It becomes this thing. What might, might, might, might? Get us what we want. Now, again, that wouldn't even be that problematic because, of course, you could just tell people, stop doing that.

14:39If I catch you saying the market might not like it, you're fired. That wouldn't be so bad. Except the problem is not what people are saying but what they're thinking and how it affects their behavior because, according to the psychology research, consistently enacted behaviors eventually become internalized as values because you have another circuit in your brain that is always trying to construct for you a consistent self-concept. So when you do things, you need to know why. You need to feel like the things you do make sense to you. And so you will invent justifications for why what you did reflects what you believe.

15:17This circuitry is so powerful, it can change what you believe without you knowing it. You meet people who've been influenced by this system over many years, and you tell them what they used to believe. Think about like an idealistic hippie who now works at Goldman Sachs. You're like, did you abandon your idealistic beliefs? No, how dare you suggest such a thing? That's considered an insult. I found a new way, a different way to be consistent. Really? Are you sure? Or did you spend a lot of time around people who think a certain way and you started to think that same way too? So I think the unconscious values transmission is gravity's most pernicious effect.

15:56Culture is what you do. So you have this mission and then you have this evolving culture because it's an organization, just a group of people with some processes thrown in. Right. So, yeah, then you get this mission cultural drift. I think that that is very interesting. Is there a way to inoculate ourselves against this kind of drift? Yes. Do we need to? Yes, yes. This is not so – I feel bad how negative this all sounds. But it is important to grapple with how bad this is. This is a very strong force that is shaping every aspect of your reality, whether you realize it or not. Not just for-profit companies, by the way.

16:39In the book, there's data on so many of these effects, like why medical errors are stubbornly persistent, why your local sports team sucks, why the construction costs of transit in the United States are out of control. like thing after thing after thing, the demise of local journalism, the fact that hotels are terrible, all this private equity nonsense. That's just an immense amount of behaviors being driven by this, the logic of this system. Okay. So it's powerful, it's big, but it is not in dumb. And the reason I'm so confident about that is because if it was inevitable that we all fall to this corruption, there would be no exceptions.

17:17Yet there are exceptions. There are companies that seem to - Good counterfactual. Yeah, they defy this logic. And again, I don't want to hold these companies up as perfect. Just because they've been able to resist corruption doesn't mean that they never will make a mistake or haven't made a mistake. Rather, they've been able to maintain their mission integrity over long periods of time. That's really what makes them remarkable. And the second thing that makes them remarkable is that they defy our modern best practices about how companies are supposed to be run, built, and structured. And that's hard for people to believe.

17:51I know how this sounds because it's like best is right in the name of the practices. You're telling me how can they be bad if they're literally the best practices? But the data is here. There's a whole chart in the book literally called Best Practices Destroy Shareholder Value. You can just see the academic evidence that is piling up about this. So the inoculation takes two forms. There's stuff we have to do on the inside to inoculate, meaning we have to teach or evangelize a mission and create alignment around that mission. That's a leadership responsibility. And then there's an outer responsibility to protect the mission from outside pressure.

18:30And since gravity operates both ways, we have to have both tools in our toolbox. So let's talk about the inner stuff first. On the inner stuff, like building a structure to protect a company is useless. If the culture that it's trying to protect is malignant to begin with, what good is that? It's just going to be corroded from the inside. That's not helpful. So kind of three layers of leadership we have to get right. First is we have to establish what is the purpose of this company? Why does it exist? And people look at me like this is the dumbest question ever. Like it's a for-profit company.

19:01We're just trying to make money. Really? You're just trying to make money. I'll give you an example. Someone came to me, a serial founder, very successful guy. I want to build a new technology company, but I go and hear about stakeholders. I'm not woke blah blah blah I just want to build a great company it's okay well what's a great company to you it's a great company is one where it makes the highest quality products never compromises on quality it you know wins in the marketplace by creating more value than anybody else it makes its shareholders incredibly rich because it has the most value creating product development engine and engineers the best engineers in the world this is the best place in the world for them to work I said really and is it your experience in your career that this kind of naturally happens automatically for most companies?

19:41Like, no, that's why I'm starting my third company. All my previous companies went to shit because, you know, they lost that thing. I was like, great. What's your plan to make sure that doesn't happen this time? He's like, I'm just going to be really ruthless about it. Everyone's going to learn that our job is to make money by whatever means possible to maintain our leverage, to make sure that nobody can ever tell us what we're doing. I said, okay, but I can prove to you that you yourself do not believe what you just said. I said, what? I know what I believe. I was like, no, you don't. Here's, I'll prove it to you right now.

20:09Easy. Imagine in the future, you're successful. Okay. You have all these products that are going great. One of your engineers comes to you and says, boss, I just figured something out. I just figured out that we can actually make more money by making this product a little bit lower quality. We swap out some of the parts. We make it like a little bit defective. Customers won't even notice, but then they'll have to pay us more money for repairs and for new versions and stuff like that. You doing it? He's absolutely not. Never in a million years would I over my dead body. I said, great. But didn't you just tell me a second ago that your goal was to make money by whatever means necessary?

20:42He's like, yeah, but not like that. Oh yeah? Is there a principle more important to you than making money? He's like, well, I just told you it's product quality. I was like, okay, what is it? You can't have it both ways. Do we make money by making high quality products or do we make money by whatever means necessary? He's like, oh, what I meant to say And we make high quality products. Great, but you said you wanted to be the greatest work environment for an engineer ever. If you could make more money by treating your engineers like crap, would you do it? Never. I would never do it. It's like, so he had his whole list of things that were what I call his fiduciary commitments.

21:15They were his extra financial things that he would rather die than betray. Okay, step one is to write those things down. Just to say what they are. I can't tell you how many founders skipped a step. They think their only fiduciary duty is to shareholders and they wind up becoming sociopathic. Do not do this. Write it down. I'm not going to tell you what your values should be. I don't know. Think for yourself. You tell me your employees are important to you. Write it down. Tell me your customers. Do you want your customers to be better off? Write it down. Whatever it is, write it down. So that's the first step.

21:42We establish our purpose. What is this organization actually committed to? Now, saying it's your purpose doesn't count for much. Having a mission statement is worth nothing. In the book, I give the example of Enron. Enron had these incredible values up on the wall. of integrity, respect. You know, it's like, you write on a wall, I don't, nobody cares. It doesn't do anything. Enron was named, by the way, in having one of the five best boards in America right before it collapsed. So like you can get all kinds of accolades and pretend all kinds of stuff. But the question is not what is your mission statement?

22:12What is the actual mission? So the next step, the next layer is to get management and business model alignment. You've made these commitments. Now we have to make it real in your everyday decision-making. I call the key principle here, harder is easier. It is a lot extra. It's like extra work you have to do to be principal. extra work to have a long-term vision, extra work to have that vision be aligned to human flourishing. Yeah, it's extra work. But that tension that that extra work requires is the place where a lot of breakthroughs happen. So you have to build a management system where you insist on this and a business model where there's simply no way for the company to make money except by achieving the mission.

22:47All our forms of making money are structurally barred. And then the third layer is culture. Culture is an emergent property, not something you can directly command. in the same way that health is not something you can command your body to be healthy. But the choices you make over time compound into health or sickness, into strength or weakness. Same thing here. And there's a bunch of techniques in the book for getting the culture aligned to the mission too, so that every employee knows this is what you're supposed to do, even if no manager is present. This is really what it means to be mission driven rather than just like mission hopeful.

23:21All that sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, it is. but the payoffs are enormous. That's the path of ethos, having a character. Now that stuff will be worthless if you don't also protect it with a structural integrity to resist the pressure that will inevitably come. Because this again is one of the things I don't think we teach people properly. The more successful an organization becomes, the more valuable it will be to somebody else to take it over. So this is like the parable of the goose that laid the golden egg. the more gold in the goose, the greater the temptation. So you better be geared.

23:56If you think you can build this super successful, super valuable organization and no one will try to steal it from you, you are kidding yourself. You need to install the defenses, the locks on the doors, the locks on the windows, the alarm system. Think about what are those defenses that prevent this takeover from happening. That needs to be something that people think about from a very early age. Eric, I know you've been on a lot of podcasts and I've seen a lot of media coming out for the new book, which is highly warranted. Thank you. Right. But I want, I want to know what question you wish people would ask because there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of thought and content covered here.

24:33And I have, I have a feeling people just ask you the same. Well, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so like there's probably something in the back of your mind and I wish somebody would talk about this. Yeah, no, totally. There's, there's some great stories in the book that get a lot of attention. And then there's some, I think, just as great stories that for some reason don't get any attention. So for example, obviously people ask me a lot of questions about Costco, about Patagonia, about Cloudflare. These are great companies. Tony's Chocolonely I really like talking about. But there's a company in the book, I don't name it out of respect to the founder, but maybe relevant for your audience.

25:08It was an agricultural drone startup. And I didn't know anything about it. A friend of mine says, hey, can you meet with this company? Do you mind? I was like, sure. Something agriculture or something, something? Sure, no problem. So I go have this meeting and this guy shows me this demo. He's like, we have this really cool technology. It's like amphibious and flying and rolling around or they could like all terrain, all climate, you know, drones. And he shows me this video of them like wafting around fields, doing all this stuff. It's just like, I don't know. It looked like straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.

25:38If you just put guns on these things, you'd be looking at like something real nasty. And I just, all I could think about was like killer robots, killer robots. And he's like going on about agriculture, agricultural yields and all this farming. And I'm like, listen, this sounds amazing. But if you don't mind me asking, is there any chance these could be used as a weapon? He's like, God, why does everybody keep asking me that? Like we're trying to do agricultural drones here. What are you talking about? And I'm like, well, we've all seen the same movies and the video. And he was like, I don't understand why people tell.

26:07I promise we're not going to create killer murder robots. And so I asked him the book. And I feel like all of us, yes, like if you hear the pinky double swear promises not to do this, you feel any better? You're like, oh, good. Now that you've promised me you have such good intentions, like it's fine. I don't feel any better. I'm like, does anyone feel any better here? No, that's not. That is a completely unsatisfactory answer. And yet he couldn't see it. He's like, we're this mission driven company. We're trying to deal with this good stuff. Why are people constantly assuming we're going to do something bad?

26:38And it's like, yeah, because they don't, you imagine that good intention up against financial gravity, please. And then he's like, we've got this awesome guy on our board and he's got all this drone experience. I'm like, drone experience where? You know, it's just like, we've got these awesome investors. It's just like, you can just see it happening. You can see how, and listen, I'm not intrinsically against the possibility of a defense drones company being a high integrity mission oriented company, but this person was trying to create a peaceful technology. He's not trying to create dual use.

27:08He's not trying to create a weapon. He wants to create something that is used for something else. And yet he's not aware of the fact that this could easily turn into something that is antithetical to his own values. Again, I'm not trying to be judgmental about what's right to build here. Rather, is he in control? I give another example in the book, a geoengineering startup literally trying to change the amount of arable land on the planet Earth. Okay, an incredible technology for weather shaping and weather control. And, you know, I'm talking through the governance structures of this company. We're talking about how to be mission-driven, all that stuff with the founder.

27:43And he's like, okay. But ultimately, if I have control, what do I need to worry about? We're going to make a lot of money. If this technology works, we'll make a lot of money. I said, I want you to consider this possibility. What if one day your board comes to you and says, you know, we've been spending all this money trying to make it, you know, improve weather conditions in all these places. But isn't weather kind of a zero-sum game? At a certain point, there's only so much precipitation to be had. Couldn't we go to a ski resort or a town or a city? Some aggro don't say, listen, we'd like you to pay us to optimize your rainfall.

28:23If you don't, we're going to go down the street to the city next door. We'll do it for them instead. You should pay us a weather protection fee. You could charge that fee to both parties. You could charge it to every city and ski resort in an area. Whoever doesn't pay doesn't get the rain. If you did it right, you wouldn't have to do anything. The technology becomes like a tactical reserve weapon to be used only in case of noncompliance. And I'm telling the story. He's like looking at me like with horror. He's like, this is like a mafia story. It's like, welcome to corporate best practices, my friend.

28:58Now, he's like, I would never do that. I would just go into founder mode and fire anyone who suggested that, whatever. I was like, okay, but what if the person who had this idea is your own board of directors? What if a private equity firm approaches them and says, I want to buy this company? I'm willing to pay more than it's worth because I want to do this strategy. What if they don't even need an outside? What if they just decide on their own initiative to betray you in this way? Do you know that that, according to many governance experts, they would have a fiduciary duty to do it, to fire you and take the company in this terrible direction.

29:31And you could just like, you could see the light bulb go on. He's like, oh yeah, you can't founder mode your way out of this. This is something that is going to happen unless the company is properly protected. And I just, there's so many stories like that in the book and they're kind of grim. So I get why people don't ask me about it. But you asked, nobody ever asked me about those. Interesting. Defense historically is an M &A market. So you will see someone grab a smaller company specifically for a piece of technology or a contract they have. And so founder mode kind of goes out the window. It's completely useless in those situations.

30:02Absolutely. And listen, I don't know what the stats are in pharma, in defense, because I don't know if it's been studied, but in pharma, where there's a lot of M &A activity, there's a whole academic literature on what are called killer acquisitions. The academics have been able to prove that at least 5 % of pharma acquisitions, and of course, the actual number must be much higher because this just the ones they can prove it. 5 % of pharma acquisitions are designed to shut down the R &D of the acquired company. That's what it's for, because that's to the competitive advantage of the person doing the acquiring.

30:33That is not value creating. That is value destroying in the macro sense. And so I can only imagine how much of that is going on in other industries too, where we don't have the data to demonstrate it. And I just think we should call that what it is. That's a form of corruption because people are making money without creating any of the corresponding value. Eric, thank you for taking the time to be on the show. But before we go, we talked about some really positive things. We talked about some really negative things. What's a positive takeaway that you've learned in the last 15 years about startups that still, you know, it brings a smile to your face and makes you think positively about the world.

31:12So it's not all about companies coming to steal your ideas. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I feel like, you know, this is dark stuff. So of course we got to talk about the dark parts of it. Absolutely. But I really think, I actually am very optimistic about the next generation of founders. You know, I don't know how many of the current crop of companies that have been already built to this extractive pattern. We can say some for sure, but I think we can build a whole new generation of companies that are aligned to human flourishing from the beginning. That is what they're meant to do. And I think that that will extend not just to a whole new wave of cool products and services.

31:48That is the way out of the paradox of AI. If we're going to survive this coming revolution, this is the way. But also a new generation of what I call civic infrastructure. There's a whole chapter in the book on how to create organizations that have like a rule setting or standards creating gravitational influence on the industry around them. I obviously have a lot of experience with this, having created a new stock exchange from scratch, one of the few to do so. And not to get into stock exchanges in particular, but that's like a whole category of things that I think a lot of founders don't even consider starting.

32:23Because, again, it sounds like the kind of thing our grandparents would have done. But now all that innovation has been done. There's nothing left to do. Wrong. No. There's so much that is desperately needed for climate, for AI safety, for misinformation. Yeah, for the ethical use of these new generations of weapons. like figuring all that stuff out is going to take a lot of people doing a lot of cool new stuff. So I think expanding our definition of what can be pursued as a startup initiative is really valuable. And in fact, one of my favorite things about the book so far is I've already had some readers reach out to me and say, thanks to the book, they're pursuing a new business idea that they never previously would have considered because they didn't have the right mindset.

33:02There was an opportunity staring them right in the face. And because they didn't have the tools, the lenses to see it, they missed it. Now they're getting back on track. They're figuring those things out and they're pursuing them. I think there's a lot of good work to be done. That's a great place to lead us out. Eric, again, thank you so much for taking it. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody for listening. Don't forget to like and subscribe. My name is Callie Keene and this has been The Startup Defense.