Welcome everybody to this week's Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar, brought to you by STVP and the Management Science and Engineering Department. We are so excited for this week's ETL, but to introduce our VIP this week, we're going to do a fireside chat format, and let me introduce you to the facilitator of the fireside, which is Professor Saikat Chaudhuri.
Professor Chaudhuri is the leading director of the Entrepreneurship Center in the Engineering School, STVP, and a professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department. There's a lot of excitement around Professor Chaudhuri because he's the newest addition to the faculty, but that belies the long tenure that he brings to the role. He was formerly the faculty director of UC Berkeley's MET program, Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology, and brings a profound amount of experience on looking at issues at the intersection of entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation. And he's not just a thought leader on how to start startups, but he's also a thought leader on thinking about navigating through the challenges of disruption and scaling, which is why he is perfect for leading our fireside today. So let me hand it over to Professor Chaudhuri. Oh, you don't need this.
Thank you so much. Overly generous introduction, Ravi. I could not be more excited to be here because I get a taste of what all of you are about and get to do this fireside with our special guest. You know, our guest, Eric Ries, doesn't need much of an introduction. You've probably heard his name, and just in case you haven't, I guarantee you've heard about the ideas. He's the author of The Lean Startup. He's also written Startup Way and The Leader's Guide, and most currently, another book that's come out is called Incorruptible. So we're going to talk about all those things today, but Eric really brings decades of experience when it comes to not just helping startups, but also advising established organizations and how they navigate different kinds of innovation through different kind of phases, such as the disruptions that we're seeing today. So he's particularly suitable for these kinds of topics that we have. But he's also been an entrepreneur himself in the legal space with the Long-Term Stock Exchange, Answer.ai. He's delving in all these things where he really practices what he preaches. He also has a podcast called The Eric Ries Show, where he has all kinds of interesting technologists and other leaders in the room whom he talks to as well. This time we're going to be the ones asking questions and having some fun with him, but usually he's in the other seat. But please join me in welcoming Eric Ries.
Thanks for being here. Make sure that mic's on.
Testing, one, two, three. Can you hear me? Can you hear me in the back? Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming. All right. We got a full house.
How's it feel to be back?
It's nice to be back. I haven't done this in a few years, so it's very nice to be back.
Awesome. I mean, it's so great to have you here. I mean, you see the room has completely...
It's incredible. ETL is now so much bigger than it was in my memory. I'm saying to everybody, I had to update my mental model of what's happening at Stanford.
Yeah, certainly facilities are nicer and...
Congratulations. And yes, the building is a lot nicer, that's true.
We were reminiscing earlier about this as well, but it's awesome to have you back. Look, we're going to talk about your latest work, but before that, I do want to get into the lean startup and the methodology that you thought of as well. We're in the era of AI. All these folks here are thinking about startups or joining all kinds of companies that are wrestling with AI. But I want to ask you, is the lean startup methodology still relevant?
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Thanks everybody for coming. We're getting right to it, okay. Listen, I think it's held up pretty well. Look, Lean Startup was published in 2011, okay? So this is actually the 15th anniversary of the book coming out. And I didn't know what 2026 was gonna look like when I wrote the book. I only wrote... That I thought that two trends would continue pretty much indefinitely in our lifetimes. On the one hand, the cost and speed of developing new products would collapse. So it would get cheaper and faster every year, all the time. And partly as a result of number one, the level of uncertainty that we would face in all manner of business and institution building would go up. So faster building and higher uncertainty. And the book's been out a couple months now, so I've been interviewed a bunch of times, and a very common question I get now is, do I feel vindicated by events today? I'm like, oh, I like getting that question. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I think that's held up pretty well. And if you look... You know, I did an interview on Lenny's podcast. I'm sure many of you watch, and those that don't, you should be. And he's been on a tear interviewing all of the product managers who build all these AI products at the major labs. And he made the observation that although they don't always use lean startup jargon, because that's really more of an internal-facing thing, if you watch what they say about how they build, the ones that are having success are very much still MVP, iteration, experimentation, like it's really there, and I just... I hadn't really thought about it that way, you know, 'cause I know a lot of these AI founders. I've been involved with these companies, so I've kind of watched it happen. But it was nice to have somebody else take a step back and say, 'Yeah, I think it's still alive and kicking.' So I feel pretty good about that.
If anything, even more so, right? I mean, in the sense that because of uncertainty. But what changes in the methods? How do we think about it differently? Is it just a time compression, or is there more to it?
There's more to it, and it's quite dangerous. So... For as long as I've been in this business, people have been trying to avoid thinking as much as possible. Look, I get it. Thinking is not pleasant. Nobody wants to do it. It burns calories. It gives you a headache. You have to apply your reason to facts and things that are uncertain. People have been trying to outsource their thinking always. They were gonna send it out to India. They were gonna do it. They were gonna outsource it to this vendor, that vendor, this technology, that technology. The core insight of Lean Startup is actually a very humanistic one and always has been, that the unit of progress in an entrepreneurial situation, uncertain situation, the rate limiting step is what can be learned. And learning is the one thing that can never be outsourced. So when we accelerate building, I remember in the Web 2.0 era, how old I am, we were like, wow, building has gotten so fast. By modern standards, it's a joke. You're like, oh man, now we can vibe code in a day what we used to take six months building. So, but even then people were like, well, now that building is so fast, I don't have to bother learning anything. Just build everything. But then how well does that work? The challenge has always been knowing what to build, what is actually of value to be built. The building has never really been the hardest part. So yes, we're seeing a dramatic acceleration of the ability to build. But in a lot of cases, not only are people not really taking advantage of the fact that they can use this technology to learn faster, they are getting into the soporific stupor of vibe coding. I'm convinced that when they do the first MRI studies and they put vibe coders under a machine, their brain's going to look like a slot machine player. You're not thinking anymore. You're just like, sure, Claude, yeah, OK, that sounds like a good idea. Let's do that. Oh, OK, that's a good idea. And I know people who do that for 20 hours a day, and the next day they're like, what did I make? What does it do? What is it? Has it any relationship to the thing I thought I was making? No, it doesn't. And even worse, people are starting to pitch me on the idea that instead of talking to customers, because, well, who wants to do that? What a pain. Just train an AI agent to emulate the customer and then have it give you the feedback. My friends, this is not gonna work. This is gonna end real badly. And the reason is really fundamental to what AI is. AI is fundamentally replicating what it knows from the training distribution. If you doubt this, please go play with the historical LLMs that people have trained. People have done these amazing experiments where they'll train an LLM on texts up to a certain cutoff date. Like, there's an amazing one that was only trained on Victorian era English texts. Yeah. So if you ask it anything in the world that was happening in Victorian England, it knows everything. But if you ask it about something that we know from history is about to happen one year after the cutoff date, it will confidently explain to you how that is impossible. Right? Human flight? No, that cannot happen. There's one that was trained, the cutoff is one year before Kitty Hawk, and it's like, human flight? Of course that can't happen. What kind of a fool do you think I— right? It doesn't know except what it has been trained on. If you're trying to do something new, you are guaranteed to be pushing it out of the training distribution, and therefore, in order to maintain differentiation and originality, you have to provide that. You have to be the human spark of that thing. Otherwise, you're either not doing something new, in which case, why are you in this class again? What, for God's sake? Or it will very subtly get your idea to conform to what everybody else is doing. And have you noticed how all the vibe-coded slop looks the same? Even the people that tell it to make sure it doesn't look like slop. It still looks like someone who told it not to look like slop instead of something done by a real human being. Have you noticed? Everyone's like, I can see that on LinkedIn. Every post is slop. Not my posts. Yeah.
Lots of interesting things to unpack there. I mean, look, the uncertainty is there, but just we shouldn't be surprised there's hallucination. Because all it's doing is taking a weighted average of all the information out there, much of it which is not correct, for example, and spitting it out, right? It's not really doing that original thinking, right? And without that uncertainty, we can't get innovation or that entrepreneurship, right? I mean, these themes really resonate with me as well. You touched upon it. So what if people can crank out their product or even their pitch deck in a day? It's gonna be generic, right? So the key becomes, how do you distinguish yourself? How do you distinguish yourself as an entrepreneur in a time when it's so easy to build all the other stuff, because that's gonna be genericized?
No one wants to hear this answer. It's so boring. It's the same as it ever was. How many people you know that are vibe coding? Everyone here knows someone who's vibe coding. They're like, what do they talk to you about? I cranked out 10,000 lines of code yesterday, right? They're like, I'm so impressed. I wrote a 45-page paper in a minute. I'm so pleased with myself, right? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, that's not impressive. How many of those people are like, I got 10 customers yesterday? Where are the vibe-coded customers? That's what would impress me. Show me customers, show me revenue, show me progress against solving somebody's problem, making their life better. Now, I'm not saying that nobody has used AI to accomplish those things. Of course, some people have. They tend to be more AI vendors than AI users, interestingly, but that's because of the whole bubble that we're living in. If you really take this seriously, like the whole idea of entrepreneurship, like, what is it really? To me, entrepreneurship is one of the truth-seeking disciplines in humanity. Like, it's right up there with being an artist or a scientist. We have to be committed to know the truth of what will work. There's so many careers you could have where you never have to know the truth. You know, you want to ever confront the truth? Try politics. It's great. Wonderful. Go try consulting, even investment banking. You can go really far and never come even in the vicinity of having to know the truth because as long as you can convince other people to enter into your socially constructed reality, it works fine. Try that in entrepreneurship, you will not last very long because at the end of the day, the customer gets the final say. People either do or they don't use the product, and you can delay that for a time, but the reckoning will always come for you.
So the truth reveals itself, basically, whether you like it or not, right?
So may as well get excited about it, get hungry for it, want to know what is true. And if you use technology to aid in the search for truth, it's wonderful. LLMs are the best learning technology we've ever developed. Like, amazing. They're incredible because... If it's in the training distribution, like every human text, every bit of knowledge has been illegally stolen to make these devices, okay? Including mine. Mine knows my work extremely well. You don't have to ask me a question. You can ask it, 'What would Eric Ries say about this?' Yeah. For all you know, I'm just an avatar, right? So take advantage of that, not to make it do the work for you. Rather to have it teach you how to do the work. Use it as a thought partner, as someone who critiques, someone who suggests, someone who shows you flaws in your own thinking, helps you identify your blind spots, helps you learn a new skill. That is wonderful. That is very effective. Having it do the work for you. Again, there's just no way to do something original that way.
Well, the good thing in what you're saying is also that it frees up time to do the interesting stuff, right? Yeah, and even if it's harder, like you said, expends all these things, you have to eat snacks all the time and all these other things, but really interesting stuff. I mean, look, one thing is the AI as a tool and what we can do with it. The other part is the human motivation behind, right, entrepreneurship. Right now we're in a fascinating era. Where it's the gold rush once again. And here's where I come to Incorruptible, because you make a very, very compelling argument that, look, the system is kind of designed to push you towards short-term thinking. But if you really want to be successful in the long run, you shouldn't fall prey, or rather you should guard against that, knowing that should push in that direction. But in a room full of folks who are hearing from everywhere and where temptation looms large and VCs are waiting literally outside this door, how do you convince these folks, think long term, don't fall into that trap?
Oh, I see, I see. That's okay, we'll get them on their next venture. I don't mind. Listen, I don't try to talk anyone out of going to pursue a gold rush if you want to. You know, I get it. Enjoy. I've lived through multiple of these cycles, so I've watched it go up, I've watched it go down, and I've watched what happens to the people that chase the trend. Some of them do get lucky. Some people do win the lottery. But does that mean that playing the lottery is good for you? No, it is not. Now, here's the truth, okay? I know this is not what you want to hear. The people that win the lottery are not happy. I know many of them personally. Many of them are much too rich and are posting on social media much too often, and so you know a lot about their mental health. Do they seem happy and well-adjusted to you? Do they seem like they're having a good time with all those winnings? No. This is like one of humanity's oldest spiritual teachings. The money will not make you happy. What will make you happy is the pursuit of a challenging and satisfactory life, which can include trying to make something new, trying to build something new. But how do we reconcile that with all this trend chasing, all this nonsense, all this noise? You can't. You have to choose. You want to build, you want to go do financial engineering. It's okay. I'm not saying that should be a crime. I'm just saying I don't care. If you want to build, I can try to help you. I can show you what the evidence shows about what supports builders in creating real value in the world. And the people who have figured out ways to make money without creating value are not worthy of your emulation. In fact, we celebrate those people in our society today, but our grandparents would not have been so approving. We don't even have a word for all the different ways you could make money today without creating any value or even by destroying value, but our grandparents and our great-grandparents knew what to call it. They called it corruption. Is that what you want?
It's an interesting way to think about it. I mean, one is sort of the dimension of, is that really the purpose that you're seeking, which I think is really important. What do you want to do, and is it gratifying, is it fulfilling, right? That's one aspect, and a lot of that comes with experience as well. Another way is, I think you're also making the argument that if you want to persevere in the long run and build something lasting and have that impact, that's important too. And to the extent there's this element of I want acknowledgement, part of the problem with these one-hit wonders is that you don't remember them. Right?
No, and a lot of those people spend the rest of their life chasing after the thrill of the one thing that happened that one time. And they can never get it back, and they're ultimately quite sad. I know them personally. I've been at this a while. Like, I can assure you they are not well-adjusted. Some people are like, yeah, but they're living on a private island. So I'll take it. Would you? I mean, it's so easy to joke and laugh about these things, but would you? I think it's one of these choices you really have to make in a very fundamental way. What is your actual goal in starting a company and trying to build something new?
So how do you do that? Like, if you're a founder, or even if you're a little bit more advanced and you want to, knowing that you might fall into this trap, how can you, what can you put in place to kind of keep you on that path to think long-term and mission-oriented?
Let me answer by way of a story, because our conversation has been very theoretical so far. All right. Who knows the legend of the great Sol Price? Man, this is sad. One person in a room full of so many entrepreneurs. Sol Price is one of the GOAT entrepreneurs, and you should all know his story, and you're going to, whether you like it or not, okay? I'm like on a one-man mission to restore the knowledge of Sol Price, okay? So Sol Price is widely considered to be the father of modern retail. Like, he basically invented the concept of the big box discount retail store. Yeah. He is so influential, just to get a sense of it, when Sam Walton was thinking about getting into retail, he named his company Walmart as an intentional tribute to Sol's company, FedMart. Sol started FedMart in the 1950s with a very simple concept. It was a membership store for members only, discounted prices, 14% capped margins. He believed in paying high wages, low prices. His philosophy was to be a fiduciary to the customer. That's what he believed. What does it mean to be a fiduciary to someone? It means to put their interests before your own. So there's a lot of these famous Sol stories. They're awesome. One of my favorites is that if a competitor would try to drive FedMart out of business by undercutting Sol on price, Sol would put up signs inside his own store saying, 'Don't buy this product from me. You can get it cheaper from these idiots down the street.' Okay? That was his ethos. That's what he stood for. So, of course, customers loved shopping at FedMart. Why? Because they trusted the quality and price of every product. They knew they didn't need to shop around and check if it was lower somewhere else. If it was, he'd tell you himself. So, of course, the company grew. Of course, it thrived. Of course, it went public. Sol became a wealthy man. He made a ton of money for his investors, and of course, they were completely satisfied. You're supposed to laugh. It's a joke. Of course they weren't completely satisfied. Have you been paying any attention to how our economy works today? No. For every single day that Sol Price ran this company, as far as I can tell, he fought with his investors about how he could be making them more profit. Why? Because he was violating what they considered to be the best practices of business. Sol believed, as I said, in low prices and high wages. What does Wall Street believe in? High prices and low wages. So this battle went on for more than 20 years, until one day, Sol Price came into his office in San Diego, my hometown, in 1975, and his key does not turn the lock in his office, and he cannot enter anymore because he doesn't work there anymore, because the board has removed him. Now, it's rare in life that you get a true A/B split test experiment. But Sol's life is like the perfect experiment. Because up until 1975, FedMart was a trusted company that grew quickly. The investors got him out of the way, and they got the company to pursue faster growth, more profit. So what happened? They lived happily ever after? No, none of you have ever even heard of FedMart. Why? Because by 1982, they had bankrupted the whole chain. They took only seven years to destroy what it took Sol more than 20 years to build, because to destroy is much easier than to build. If you read the book, this is one of many companies in the book murdered in the name of profit. Now, this kind of thing happens all the time. We're totally used to it, so we don't find it strange. But if you think about it, again, imagine trying to explain this to your great-grandparents. They'd be like, 'His investors destroyed their investment?' That seems odd. That doesn't seem like very profitable behavior at all, does it? That's odd. Now, I like to start with Sol Price as a story here because the story has a happy ending. The book is very depressing in certain sections, okay? I admit that. This story has a happy ending. The part one of the book is called 'The Shape of the Abyss,' so you can tell exactly where my mind was at as I was writing it, because we have to confront this darkness. It's quite ugly. But Sol Price, he could have retired at this point. He was a wealthy man. He could have just said, 'To hell with capitalism, I've had it.' No. He had his life's work stolen from him. So what did he do? He took a two-week vacation. And then he was back. He leased the office upstairs from FedMart in the same building he had started the company and started a new company, which he called the Price Club. Now, today, most people don't remember Price Club, but when I was a kid, that's where my family shopped. By the way, I didn't even know that Price Club was named after a guy. Can you believe his name was literally Sol Price? How funny is that? I just thought it was the low price club where you went to shop. So I never met Sol Price. But my family had a very intimate relationship with his ethos because we shopped there, we knew what he stood for. Now, some of you are figuring out where this story is going because although Price Club is not well known today, it's for a different reason than FedMart. When Sol was fired in 1975, a bunch of his employees quit in protest at the injustice of it. And one of those employees had worked his way up from stock boy all the way up to senior executive, because Sol really believed in hiring and promoting from within. And after a few years working with Sol at Price Club, he went out on his own to start his own company. And a few years later, his company and Sol's company were to merge, forming a combined entity that they called Price Costco. But we just call Costco. Today, Costco is a $400 billion public company that still to this day follows the Sol Price ethos of capped margins by membership only, high wages and low prices. So how do we do it? Well, one answer is to have an ethos like Sol Price, to commit yourself to being a fiduciary to the customer. But some of the smarter students in this room will be like, but hold on. Both companies had that ethos. One was destroyed, one has endured. Why? Because ethos is not by itself enough. Because of this financial gravity. The reason why Costco endures... I used to think, like a lot of people, and if you talk to normal people, like not in business, but regular people, they'll very often tell you, well, Costco is like the exception to every business rule. Costco is the one company you can trust never to betray its promises. You can ask those same people, why do other companies get destroyed?
And they're like, well, it's inevitable. Once a company gets to a certain size or goes public, the quarterly pressure. Any of you ever made this argument? Like, people are greedy, human nature, it's inevitable.
It's like, well, if it's inevitable, how can there be an exception? Isn't that odd? So I used to think—people used to ask me, why is Costco the exception? I said, well, it's just so big. It must be too big for Wall Street to mess with. You're supposed to laugh. Ain't nothing on God's green earth too big for Wall Street to mess with. Are you kidding me? Every few years, the governance ratings agencies consider Costco to have bad governance, the worst possible governance scores, and so activists routinely try to change Costco and make it more like a conventional company. In fact, one Wall Street analyst is one of my favorite quotes in the whole book, I'm paraphrasing, said something like, 'Costco is a company that takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invests it in the customer experience.'
That's meant to be a criticism. How crazy is the world that we live in?
That's insane. So why can Costco resist this pressure when FedMart and so many other companies are destroyed? Because Jim Sinegal, the founder, was there the day Sol Price was betrayed, and he learned his lesson. He built Costco with what I call a governance fortress, a series of interlocking governance protections that make it impossible for the company to betray its promises, either through temptation or through external pressure.
That's the kind of company building we should be emulating.
So look, you can design for these things, right? Because we understand the tendencies that will happen. So if you guard against it, building these systematic structures, that's the kind of thing that we can get from it, right? Really important.
You remind me of all these great companies right now. Southwest Airlines, for example, is under pressure, right? And has been changing everything.
Very sad, very sad to watch.
I'm like, I don't know if this is gonna go well because... But that's the kind of thing that you're talking about. It's very real, which is here. All right, I have some questions from students.
Oh, great. Oh, yeah. Oh, excellent.
And we have all these students. I want to do it a little bit rapid fire and then see. So the first one, these are ranked, you know, based on how popular the questions were. The first one is:
I love it. I love it. Let's do it.
If you were 20 and starting again today, what would you spend the next 5 years learning or building?
When I was 20, I was not capable of a five-month plan, let alone a five-year plan.
Are you kidding me? Oh, I had such envy of those people that had those 10-year plans and whatever. I'd be like, how do you do it? I can barely figure out what I'm doing on Tuesday. And listen, when I was 20, ain't no old person could give me any advice that I would listen to, for God's sake. And like, I think that's wonderful. Like, look, make your own mistakes. They're painful, but you'll come to treasure them one day. I think this is a great time, man, to be an entrepreneur with no dependents and no costs and no nothing,
no legacy career you have to defend or protect, to go into a technological revolution like this. Like, all the stress people have about AI, you should not be having. You should see its incredible opportunity, mostly because most of the social and civic institutions that govern our life today,
in business and outside of business are under tremendous pressure and are mostly on the cusp of collapse. So if our civilization survives, let's presume that it does for a second.
Yeah, yeah, let's keep it nice and upbeat.
If we presume to that, sorry, I mean, you guys know this is like an issue, right? If you presume that we will find some kind of solution, it will only be by having quite a lot of institutional turnover.
And if you study history, I hope all of you are, you'll like notice that our grandparents, my grandparents' generation in the post-war era, like they booted up tons of new institutions that most of which are
still around and govern our lives today, which we are busy like hacking at the foundations, like chopping them up for firewood, and then we're like, oh look, I chopped a bunch of stuff out of it. It didn't collapse today. I guess it's fine. Let's chop some more out. You know, it's like we have lost this understanding of what these institutions are for.
And we've lost our ability to make new ones. And I just think that's a real shame.
So when I started the Long-Term Stock Exchange, I remember telling people I was gonna make a new stock exchange, and they would give me this very particular look, as if I'd said, 'We're gonna make a new moon.'
And they'd be like, 'Okay, two problems. One, we already got one. What do we need another one for? But secondly, who do you think you are? The moon is a celestial object. You don't make a new one. What are you talking about?' And I just found that so strange, this sense of lack of agency that we have. In recent generations is something that your generation is going to have to reverse. So if I was 20, man, I would be very excited about the fact that I might be able to create something that, like, in history textbooks,
three generations from now, will be the thing that people are like, well,
obviously someone figured out how to do that. And, like, pick your issue, pick your area
from AI safety or climate change or like epistemic crisis. Like, it could be something like wild and crazy like that, but we got plenty of small issues too for which, like, our ability to educate, our ability to, like... Find space for art, for beauty, for any kind of calm
is utterly gone. As our society is being ravaged by this disease of an obsession with ROI, every good thing, every humanistic thing is being squeezed out of it by people who are deeply anti-human in their philosophy. You don't have to put up with that. F those people. Show them that there's a better and different way, but you have to get in the fight in order to do that. And I know that that can seem daunting because they seem so rich and powerful, but most of these guys are relatively new on the scene, and they're not going to be remembered very kindly by history. So don't fall into the trap of believing that they know what they're talking about.
No, this is a really good advice, right? And be optimistic, idealistic. That's how new solutions also come, right?
That's how you come up with a bunch of stuff. You kind of answered the second question already, which is, what do you believe about building companies today that you wish you'd understood?
When you were in their shoes, so we covered that one as well.
I've written hundreds and hundreds of pages about that.
Yeah, yeah. And this next question is, so you've clearly been very successful. What's the biggest professional failure you've ever had, and what have you learned from it?
You don't understand that in Silicon Valley, people look upon me with great pity. What I do is not considered successful, because every great company that I could have invested in but didn't, people are like, 'Oh, you poor thing.' Right? And so I've been around the founding of so many great companies I could have gone to work at
or been part of or invest in. I tell the story of Anthropic in the book, which hilariously, when I was writing this book, nobody even had heard of Anthropic. It was not an important company at all, and it doesn't make an appearance in the book till like page 200, which now people find totally bizarre. When I met them, they had just left OpenAI, and I helped them, and I played only a very bit part in the story, so I'm not trying to take credit for their success or anything like that. But all these people knowing Anthropic has this big IPO coming up, they're like... Must be pretty good for you, buddy. Everyone knows I have this. I'm like, 'Oh no, I'm not an equity holder in Anthropic.' And they're like, 'Oh, poor guy, like, how sad for you, pathetic loser.' Like, yeah. So no, every possible investment thing that you could have done, I didn't do it. So yeah, my anti-portfolio is way bigger than my actual portfolio. But do I seem like the kind of person that cares about that? I swear, if you're going to be in this business, you have to get cured of that envy real fast.
And I'm glad that I have.
Well, your utility function is different, right? It's not just about what your bank account may say, but it's also about, can you have enduring impact, right?
How much more money do you need? I just, to me, like, I remember interviewing for my
podcast, Craig Newmark, who founded Craigslist.
And... You know, among people who are at his level of wealth and success, he just seems very well adjusted.
And you can watch the interview. And I kept trying to just ask him, like, every kind of oblique, polite way I could think of, like, why are you okay
with what you have instead of all the things you could have? And he's like, 'I have enough.' I just thought, what a beautiful idea. I was like, oh, what a relief to feel like we could have enough.
And what's amazing about having enough is now you can pursue all kinds of other things in your life. You can be a person. You can do things that matter and that potentially could be part of your legacy. And so, yeah, I'm very grateful to have missed out. Like, I sat... I remember sitting just down the street from here. I sat with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg when Facebook was a tiny company, and Sheryl gave me the rocket ship speech, and they tried to recruit me to work there. I had just left a startup, and I was just thinking about writing about Lean Startup. I hadn't quite done it yet.
And I still have the offer letter, so I can calculate exactly how much it cost me to turn this job down. And I remember sitting with Mark Zuckerberg, and he said to me, he was like, 'Yeah, I think you should come join.' I said, 'Great. I don't totally understand how Facebook is going to make any money. Could you explain it to me?' And he's like, 'I think it's kind of obvious.' I was like, 'I know, but for the rest of us, could you clue me in?' And he was like, 'No.' I was like, 'What am I doing? I don't want to follow this person. I have no object—' I was like, I wasn't, like, prescient, like I knew what was going to happen. But, like, I'm like, 'Thank God I missed out on that opportunity.' I can tell you 20 stories like that. Yeah, so don't ask me for investment advice, but maybe for other things.
I can help you.
A true entrepreneur in a sense, right? Final question, and then we'll get some live questions as well.
Oh, great. Oh, I love it. Yeah, that's great.
But for me, I mean, you know, when you talk, it sounds to me like you're advocating for a bit more of a stakeholder-oriented model rather than the shareholder-oriented model that we're used to. Is that what you're saying? Would that solve part of this problem? Are there other systems that could help us?
Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you read this book very carefully, you will notice the extreme lengths I went through to not use the word stakeholder.
