What do you say to this interpretation? In particular do you think most cases could be framed as "the key audience/customer/market has shifted"? Is it possible to find greater financial success while doing things the primary audience doesn't like?

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-to-great-jim-col...

I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is what I credit for some atypical decisions and outcomes [1].

Things regulary go "corrupt" in parts of the company; it's hard to scale without importing culture from big tech. Sometimes, the defense was ICs escalating issues, Dario talking to ICs, and then shaking things up.

But this process takes time, and it doesn't lead to a full reversal; a bad/misaligned hire has reverberating impacts. Many folks are still driven by values (even if their values are not your your values!), but scaling dynamics seem to be evolving like any other org – just at a higher employee count and revenue numbers.

I do place trust in specific people who work at Anthropic, but I wouldn't place trust in Anthropic the organization; it's an organization that's wont to change, regardless of its structure.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174423

That said, you seem to have archetypes above Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk that avoided it.

Can you comment on not what it takes to build such a company, but rather how to transform companies like those that I worked for into ones that resist gravity? Or is it too late?

I wrote a blog post called "Revenue Model is More Important than Culture" (it made the #1 spot on HackerNews a few years ago) arguing that the way to avoid that corruption is by making sure the business model is immune to it, but having read your thoughts, I'd say your argument (structure being the dominant term) is even stronger.

"I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck recalled[..]. "We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you."

That's not structure, that's leadership. They were about to change the price, but one guy at the top with authority and an opinion said no. You could say "it's structure" that there was one guy at the top with authority, but it still depends on him having the right opinion. You need both a good structure and an unwaveringly idealistic (and correct) leader.

How often do you see companies recover from financial gravity? Or is it mostly irreversible?

How much do you attribute worsening of company values to things like professional managers, too much hierarchy, and less founder-mode; versus financial gravity?

In a case like GitHub where their focus seems less on open-source these days, should developers try to help GitHub better support open-source or should the focus be on building alternatives?

Thanks, Jake

You can also see the various accolades, reviews, and awards that it's accumulated so far.

Q1: You have done a few friendly interviews on YouTube, but I haven't seen one that challenges you much. Do you know if there are upcoming interviews that you found pushed back?

Q2: Is the idea of shareholder supremacy fundamentally at odds with your with your preferred alternative governance structures, or is it just a time preference and risk attitude issue?

Q3: You will get sympathetic ears easily due to the subject matter. But the same book about non-profits would be a harder sell. Do you agree, and if true does that say something about the marketplace of ideas?

If so, how is the tradeoff justified? (Make money first, then do "ideal" things?)

If not, why not? (Other than that it's unsuccessful strategically/statistically and wasteful, I guess.)

Any elaboration/response on this theme would be appreciated. Thanks!

I listened to a podcast interview you did where you talked positively about the Novo Nordisk Foundation as a successful governance story, but when I think of long lived foundations, I think of the Ford Foundation and the Hewlet Foundation that have significantly drifted from the founders' visions despite being non-profits. Many people think it is better for foundations to spend down all their resources before the founder is gone to prevent this drift and loss of efficacy.

Have you done any studies of what made long lived foundations drift on their mission despite no profit incentive?

Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books!

thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!

Do you have any recommendations for entity formation infra that caters to mission driven companies? Something like Stripe Atlas that can form the more complex structures? Forming a PBC is becoming more standard but tthe other structures seem more esoteric (and expensive).

Why do you think IMVU never hit escape velocity?

What do you think an experiment needs before it can actually be called learning? And what kinds of product questions should not be done as experiments at all?

One question I have for you is on finances, I think that still remains an afterthought in startup hustle culture, and perhaps even by design, I feel like the system is designed so that VCs keep winning and founders rarely get the exit they deserve. What is your take on that?

What can a founder do to safeguard his position, interests, and company? A couple of things that come to my mind are: have an aligned/friendly board who believe in you; second, have dual-class shares (like Meta, SpaceX, Google). Anything else you would like to add?

How do you feel about these AI only companies, and how do you think they could affect the wider market?

ref: https://www.ft.com/content/b8cc4bf4-6d3c-4974-8428-9a091983c...

I would like to know how best to stand out from the toxic, finance-driven world that is defi and crypto generally, without getting rolled in with all the clowns. Of course, I know that clear messaging and verifiable, evidence-driven claims are good, but I am thinking about the more abstract, strategic side to things, which I still feel under-prepared for.

You said to "Ask You Anything," so here's my question: I have mostly stopped buying from Amazon. That includes books. I'd like to buy your next book. What's the best way to support you if I don't want to purchase through them? More generally, what's the best way to support authors that _only_ publish on Amazon without supporting Amazon itself?

Do you have advice on how to use AI to help teams stay true to their values?

Having not read your book yet, in my mind there's the obvious legal support AI can provide to help navigate complex situations, but maybe there's some other groundwork in the value creation and implementation itself?

I'm curious if you think cooperative businesses leveraging non-voting preferred shares, community shares and other coop investment instruments are more resilient against this type of corruption.

I'm wonder how you see the tradeoffs these models have against traditional LLC/VC models and how you would mitigate them.

How do you think Lean Startup principles could be applied to ordinary families looking to navigate the existing economic stresses we're experiencing?

How much do you blame our values of our society for creating corrupt businesses? Are corrupt businesses just a mirror of our own values?

Let's say this has already happened and ossified across large, formerly-innovative companies that now have so much size and inertia behind them that it might take decades for one to "fail" in a traditional sense. What can be done to reverse the process?

Given the current wave of AI-assisted coding (Claude Code/Codex) and the broader enshittification of SaaS/platforms, do you think B2B SaaS founders now face a new "we can just build this ourselves" problem?

How would you think about testing for that risk early?

Sometimes clients asked IDEO to design under this shitty-MVP model (we generally refused), other times we were brought in to clean it all up.

Why do you think the concept of "MVP" was almost universally misunderstood? And, thinking about Incorruptible, how did the best companies out there internalize it?

I've noticed that VCs try very hard to separate the world into "VCs + founders" and "everyone else" and that the more time a founder spends in the VC+founders bubble the more distorted their worldview can become.

Those who can do, those who can't teach?

> We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.