Why success destroys the companies we love, with Eric Ries
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
What if the way we think about business value, trust, and capitalism itself is fundamentally broken? Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup changed how a generation of entrepreneurs build companies. Now, Ries takes aim at some of the most sacred business assumptions today in his new book, Incorruptible. Ries joins Rapid Response to share what he witnessed firsthand in the clash between Anthropic and the US government, and why he believes the current system is failing the very people it's supposed to serve. He also brings in-the-trenches stories from Cloudflare, Novo Nordisk, and Whole Foods to make the case that courage, not capital, may be the most undervalued asset in business right now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. Exciting news. Applications are now open for the Masters of Scale Summit. |
| 0:08.7 | It's happening October 20th through October 22nd in San Francisco, and it is a really special event. |
| 0:16.5 | Please join our curated community of founders, innovators, and leaders shaping the future. |
| 0:22.6 | Expect ideas that challenge your assumptions and connections that move your business and maybe even your life forward. |
| 0:30.2 | It's an experience that can change literally everything. |
| 0:34.3 | Apply now at Mastersofscale.com slash Apply 26. That's masters of scale.com slash apply 26. |
| 0:43.7 | It's not just that companies become too big to fail and we bail them out, although that's |
| 0:47.2 | happening. It's not just they become too big to jail, but they become too big to care. These |
| 0:51.8 | companies, they eliminated the competition. They and their advisors, |
| 0:55.0 | you know, the economists who said monopolies are good and efficient, they're today just absolved |
| 0:59.4 | of all responsibility. Shopping really hard doesn't solve monopolies. We warned them at the time. |
| 1:04.6 | They did it anyway. The inshidogenic policy environment is what created this. To hear why the internet |
| 1:09.6 | keeps getting worse, check out episode 1280 of the Jordan Harbinger |
| 1:13.1 | Show. |
| 1:16.0 | Are you open to the possibility that you were taught something in business school that |
| 1:19.3 | was a lie? |
| 1:20.6 | When the empirical evidence says that the theory is wrong, we have to be willing to say that |
| 1:24.9 | not only is this a better way, but it also should call into doubt our conviction that our modern doctrines about value creation, about governance, about finance are correct. |
| 1:34.9 | I think it's actually very clear that they are incorrect and that we've been taught, I would say, indoctrinated into a set of best practices that as a whole are value destroying. |
| 1:43.4 | And it's time for us to just say no. |
| 1:50.7 | That's Eric Reese, author of the iconic bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric is just out with a new |
| 1:57.0 | book, and it is, if anything, more revolutionary. It's called Incorruptible. And in it, |
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