Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad

Eric Ries is the creator of The Lean Startup Method and the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and the build measure learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate. In this episode, Eric joins GregorVan for a wide ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello, and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Today is a very special episode. My guest today is Eric Rees. Welcome, Eric. Hey. Thanks for having me. So I think a lot of our listeners will know who you are, will know your work. I think I'd just like to dive straight into it there, which is you are Eric Rees of the lean startup. That Eric is Indeed. I'm that guy. Yep. So a lot of our listeners, I reckon we've maybe got 50% have all read that book and guided them so hugely on their journeys as founders, as software engineers, and maybe the other half maybe haven't heard of it as well. So just starting there, why was the lean start up so seminal in terms of what it brought to software engineering? Well, you can never really account for why does a book become what it becomes. So is, at the end of the day, up to readers to spread the word about it. I think a lot of people entering into product engineering entrepreneurship today take for granted concepts like pivots and MVP and build measure learn and continuous deployment almost as like, of course, obviously, like, how else would you do entrepreneurship? How else would you build a new product? And don't really appreciate how different the state of the art was even twenty years ago. The startup was published in 2011, but I'm old enough now that I can be your eyewitness. I can tell you what it was once like. And listen, it still is that way in a lot of places that are still following a stage gate or waterfall style methodology, still really believe that the business business plan is not just like a thinking exercise, but a literal prediction about …