Eric Ries: Private Book Launch & Fireside Conversation
Author of The Lean Startup and now Incorruptible
ANNOUNCEMENT: An intimate fireside conversation with Eric Ries — creator of The Lean Startup.
The companies that lose their soul aren’t run by bad people. They’re run by people who built the wrong systems.
Here’s a pattern you’ve seen before.
A founder starts a company with genuine conviction. Strong values. A clear mission. They talk about it constantly — in interviews, in all-hands, in the deck they show investors.
Then, somewhere between Series B and IPO, something shifts.
The language stays the same. The behaviour doesn’t.
We usually explain this as a failure of character. The founder got greedy. The board got short-sighted. The culture got diluted. We find the bad actor, assign blame, and move on.
But Eric Ries thinks we’re asking the wrong question.
Presented by Deel - Hire. Manage. Pay. Anyone. Anywhere.
Eric is the author of The Lean Startup — one of the most influential frameworks in modern business. For two decades his ideas about continuous innovation, validated learning, and founder-led governance have shaped how startups operate at every stage.
His new book is called Incorruptible. And the premise is uncomfortable.
Corporate corruption isn’t primarily an ethical problem. It’s a structural one.
The companies that drift from their mission — that slowly trade long-term purpose for short-term extraction — aren’t mostly run by people who set out to do that. The pattern is too consistent, too predictable, too common across industries and cultures and leadership styles for individual moral failure to be the explanation.
What’s actually happening is this: as organizations grow, the systems around them start shaping behaviour in ways founders rarely anticipate. Ownership structures. Incentive design. Governance mechanisms. Accountability gaps.
Success itself becomes a kind of financial gravity. Quietly, incrementally, bending the company away from what it was built to be.
The founders don’t always notice until it’s too late.
This matters right now.
Trust in institutions is under pressure. Startups — once positioned as the scrappy alternatives to the incumbent giants — are increasingly part of the problem they were supposed to solve.
The founders reading this know the tension. You start with a vision. You raise capital. You hire fast. You build systems to scale.
And somewhere in that process, the system starts making decisions for you.
Incorruptible is about how to design organizations that resist that pull. Not through compliance frameworks or mission statements on the wall. Through intentional structural design — built in from the start, before the gravity kicks in.
We’re bringing Eric to New York for an exclusive private event.
Startups Decoded x Eric Ries — Private Book Launch & Fireside Conversation
A live fireside conversation, a Startups Decoded podcast recording, and an intimate room of founders and operators who are thinking seriously about how to build companies that last.
This isn’t a panel. It’s not a networking event with a keynote bolted on.
It’s a real conversation about one of the most important and underexplored questions in company building: how do you design an organization that stays true to what it was built to be — even when every structural force is pushing it the other way?
If you’re building something right now, this is the conversation you need to be in the room for.
Thanks to our friends…
Goodword - Your Networking Copilot
J.P. Morgan - Asset Management
The Fourth Effect - board and advisory marketplace
Spots are limited, non-transferable, and a private event.
Reserve your seat → Luma
