Eric Ries

Innovator and Author based in San Francisco

Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur, author, and the CEO of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), a platform designed to support companies that prioritize long-term value creation. Born on September 22, 1978, he graduated from Yale University and has a background in technology and startups, having co-founded IMVU, a social networking site, where he served as CTO.

Ries is best known for authoring The Lean Startup, a book that outlines a methodology for developing businesses and products that emphasizes rapid prototyping, validated learning, and customer feedback. This methodology has significantly influenced the startup ecosystem and introduced concepts such as the "pivot," which has become widely used in business discussions.

In 2015, he began organizing the LTSE, which aims to realign the interests of companies and long-term investors, addressing the pressures of short-termism that often affect corporate decision-making. The LTSE officially opened for business in 2019, providing a unique public market environment that encourages sustainable business practices and stakeholder engagement.1 4 5 6

Ries has also contributed to various educational initiatives, including serving as a faculty chair at Singularity University and holding positions as a fellow at IDEO and a general partner at New Context. His work continues to focus on fostering environments where companies can thrive by focusing on long-term goals rather than short-term gains.2 3

Highlights

Nov 15 · twitter

Come say hi: https://t.co/o0sTGNndW6

Nov 7 · twitter

@GroqInc, a semi-conductor startup that makes chips for AI inference, was recently valued at $2.8 billion. It’s a classic “overnight success that was years in the making” tale. On the next episode of The Eric Ries Show, I talk with founder and CEO @JonathanRoss321, who began the work that eventually led to Groq as an engineer at Google. He was a member of the rapid eval team – “that comes up with all the crazy ideas at Google X.” Nevertheless, he felt the risk involved in leaving to launch Groq in 2016 was far less than the risk of staying in-house and watching the project die. It’s just one of Jonathan’s many counterintuitive beliefs that have paid off.

Groq has had many “near-death” experiences in its eight years of existence, all of which have ultimately put it in a much stronger position to achieve its mission: preserving human agency in the age of AI. Jonathan believes that in order to meet it, “[Groq] needs to be in the conversation. The best way to do that is to produce most of the world's AI compute. We want to make sure that there's a lot of voices, and that there isn't control [by] a small number of entities.” Groq is committed to giving everyone access to relatively low cost generative AI compute, driving the price down even as they continue to increase speed. We talked about how the company culture supports that mission, what it’s like to be on the same playing field as companies like Nvidia (and whether it even matters), and Jonathan’s belief that true disruption isn’t just doing things other people can’t do or don’t want to do, but doing things other people don’t believe can be done – even when you show them evidence to the contrary.

Other topics we touched on include: 🔵Why the ability to customize on demand makes generative AI different 🔵Managing your own and other people’s fear as a founder 🔵The problems of corporate innovation 🔵The role of luck in business 🔵The error of insisting on founder control 🔵How he thinks about long-term goals and growth 🔵The importance of empathy 🔵Maintaining trustworthiness

You can listen to or watch the episode here:

And my main takeaways can be found at https://t.co/wIS8XAvSQs