Hi everyone,
Episode 10 of The New Build is live, and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Eric Ries was one of the first people I reached out to when we were starting Bubble, so getting to sit down with him for this episode’s interview felt pretty special.
Most of you will know Eric as the author of The Lean Startup , a book that gave a generation of founders their vocabulary. He’s back with a new one: Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… And How Great Companies Stay Great, which comes out the same day this episode drops.
About our guest
Eric Ries is a founder, thought leader, and New York Times bestselling author. His first book, The Lean Startup, introduced concepts like the MVP and validated learning that have shaped how startups are built for the past 15 years. His new book, Incorruptible, turns his attention to a different problem that’ll be familiar to many — how to build something that lasts without losing what made it worth building in the first place.
What to expect from this episode
The conversation starts with AI, specifically, why Eric thinks most people are using it wrong. He makes a counterintuitive case that vibe coding tools, for all their speed, can quietly erode the skills and judgment founders need most. There’s research behind this, and it’s worth hearing before you hand more of your thinking over to an agent.
From there, we get into the core ideas behind Incorruptible. Eric’s argument is that companies don’t go bad because their founders stop caring but because the structural forces acting on them are stronger than good intentions alone. He calls this financial gravity, and the pattern it produces is one almost every founder will recognize, which is a company that starts with a clear mission, earns trust, and then slowly becomes something its founders wouldn’t have chosen to build.
The Costco origin story he shares is a good illustration of how this plays out, and why the fix has to be structural, not just cultural.
One distinction that stuck out is his framing of mission-driven versus mission-hopeful. Most companies say they’re committed to something but far fewer have built the apparatus to actually guarantee it. Eric’s point is that if you can’t show the mechanism, the commitment isn’t real. So, the earlier you build those mechanisms in, the more likely they are to hold.
He also pushes back on the idea that moving fast and building to last are in conflict. Lean Startup was never really about speed for its own sake, and how he connects that to Incorruptible is worth hearing.
Where to listen
Episode 9 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:
We launch new episodes every two weeks. If this episode got you thinking about how you’re building your company, not just what you’re building, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you built something on Bubble and want to share the story behind it, you can submit it here.
— Emmanuel