80% of venture-backed founders are ousted within three years of going public. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a name for the force behind that number: financial gravity. His new book, Incorruptible, argues that success itself is the mechanism of corruption, making companies larger targets for the short-term extraction that destroys long-term value.
Ries points to Anthropic, Costco, and Novo Nordisk as companies that built governance structures to resist that pressure. The fix, in some cases, is a two-page legal filing. The original piece details exactly what that filing does and why most founders never use it, not because it is hard, but because no one tells them it exists until it is too late.
The conversation goes deeper than the book's conclusions. Ries explains the specific mechanics of how mission-aligned governance produces competitive advantages, not just ethical ones, and why the window to implement these protections closes faster than founders expect. Read it before you need it.
[READ ORIGINAL →]