When Eric Ries wrote his landmark book “The Lean Startup,” published in 2011, the introduction ended with a bold statement: “The Lean Startup movement seeks to ensure that those of us who long to build the next big thing will have the tools we need to change the world.”
Fifteen years later, Ries acknowledged to a room full of startup founders in Seattle that he wished he’d added three words to that sentence: “for the better.”
“I made the mistake, so I feel like an idiot,” he said, in response to an audience question about what he’d change in his breakthrough book. “If I ever revise it, I will add that one phrase.”
Ries said the omission didn’t seem to matter as much in 2011. Watching how parts of the tech industry have evolved since then convinced him otherwise.
He’s making up for it with an entirely new book.
Ries was speaking Friday at Seattle Flow Startup Day, a conference for founders organized by Marcelo Calbucci. It was a return visit — Ries keynoted the same event in 2011, the year “The Lean Startup” came out. This time he was previewing his upcoming book, “Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great.”
At its core, “Incorruptible” argues that the standard definition of profit (revenue minus expenses) is fundamentally broken. Ries has developed a new definition: profit is the maximization of human flourishing. More specifically, he defines profit as the surplus of human flourishing that an organization creates: what remains after accounting for all of its impacts on human lives, not just the ones that show up on a balance sheet.
“We’re supposed to all pretend that we think all the ways of making money are equally good,” he told the Startup Day audience. “But nobody actually thinks that.”
Ries uses the word corruption not to mean fraud or bribery, but structural decay — the gradual corrosion that pulls thriving companies away from their missions. The book uses case studies spanning centuries to show how this happens, and what founders can do about it.
Among his advice for the hundreds of founders in the room:
- File as a public benefit corporation. Ries called it the easiest step in the book — a two-page legal filing in Delaware that commits a company to a specific mission beyond maximizing shareholder value — and said any founder who skips it is making a serious mistake.
- Do it now. At every stage, he warned, someone will tell you to wait — your lawyer, your investors, your board, your bankers. “It’s always ‘not yet, not yet, not yet.’ And then, bam, yet smacks you right in the face.”
- Don’t treat mission as an afterthought. Founders are taught to get serious about the business first and worry about mission later, he said. He argued the opposite: mission is the number one source of competitive advantage, and giving it up makes everything harder.
- Define who you care about. His approach to measuring human flourishing is simple: make a list of the people you’d never want to betray, figure out how you’ll make their lives better, and write down how you’ll know. Those are your metrics.
“Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great,” by Eric Ries, will be published May 26 by Authors Equity.
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