The Professor’s voice had an intensity—and fear—that was impossible to ignore.

He was on the verge of a discovery that could redefine medicine, like a ChatGPT for biology: an AI that could design new medicines to fight cancer, Alzheimer’s, maybe even the next pandemic. The promise was staggering. So was the nightmare. In the wrong hands, the same technology could design a perfect poison, a targeted bioweapon, or a plague we have no defense against.

This wasn’t science fiction. His lab had already created the breakthrough that could turn these possibilities into reality.

As he kept going, I pulled over and parked outside the gathering I was supposed to be attending. The music from the venue rattled my windshield, and I could see throngs of people arriving: employees, ex-employees, colleagues old and new. The board of directors, notably, had not been invited.

I was too engrossed in The Professor’s story to go inside.

I could hear the fatigue and panic in his voice. His potential employees—the brilliant scientists he was trying to recruit from the best university labs in the world—were relentlessly asking him the same hard questions. “They see the danger,” he told me, his voice strained. “They want to know how I can guarantee we won’t sell out. What happens when investors demand we prioritize short-term profits over everything else? What happens if they fire me and put someone else in charge—someone who doesn’t care how our technology is used?”

I wasn’t surprised. Everyone involved had seen Jurassic Park. “When I talk to investors, they say these worries prove we’re not serious about business. I can already see how they’d be perfectly comfortable making money while I become a monster who can’t sleep at night. It feels like I have to choose between saving lives and saving my soul.”

The Professor continued, oblivious to my queasy sense of déjà vu. “But surely I’ll be able to safeguard what we build as we grow. I’ll be CEO. I know my own values. I’ll have control …”

I’d heard this line of thought many times before. From so many others who thought their success would protect them. They were wrong. We were wrong. We hadn’t seen far enough ahead.

My book The Lean Startup gave a generation of founders the tools to build quickly, scale, and create massive value. But I failed to anticipate what came next. I taught people how to build something worth protecting—but not how to protect it.

Like the founder whose gathering was just outside. I hadn’t known how to help him, or many others who used Lean Startup ideas to build incredible companies, only to watch their evolution—and often their destruction—with mounting horror.

Over time, I started to feel like I was feeding one company after another into a meat grinder.

I told The Professor, “Look, I have to go to this event. There are nearly a thousand people here to commemorate a founder and the company they built with him. People have flown in from all over the country, even ex-employees he’d fired.”

The Professor brightened. “That’s so rare—what a sign of respect. That’s exactly the kind of company I want to build. Enjoy the party.”

I paused for a second before answering. “Yeah, except he doesn’t work there anymore. This isn’t a party; it’s a wake.”

Silence.

I had to explain. After years of pressure to abandon the very ethos that made the company great, after years of being pushed to focus on the stock price—more than product, more than customers—this founder had been ousted. The billions he had made for investors were not enough. They wanted more.

“Wait, are you saying that’s going to be me someday?” His voice cracked. “How do I protect this company? Is that even possible?”

“The answer is yes,” I told him. “I believe it is possible.” I could hear him exhale. “But you’re not on track to accomplish it. You’re about to lock yourself into exactly the future you fear.”

“Is it too late?” he asked.

“It’s not too late, but you’ve taken some steps in the wrong direction. The time to change course is right now.”

I promised we’d speak again soon.

That night, at a very unusual celebration, a thousand of us mourned together. Every person who helped build something extraordinary, only to watch it be slowly eroded by something we couldn’t quite name. We all felt a shared sense that this was not how business is supposed to work.

This is the pattern I keep seeing—again and again. Build something great. Scale it. Lose control of it.

I left feeling grimly determined that this reality—one affecting so many companies and creators—had to change. The next generation deserves better.

Over the weeks that followed, The Professor and I forged a different path for his fledgling company. A path that would allow them to shape their own future.

Discovering the path required me to unlearn everything I thought I knew about business, from the very definition of profit to the way we build and structure organizations.

I’ve written books on entrepreneurship and innovation. I’ve built organizations myself and helped others do the same: AI research labs, law firms, nonprofits, and companies pursuing every kind of advanced technology and scientific breakthrough you can imagine. And, sadly, after helping so many companies scale through initial public offerings and beyond, I’ve had a front-row seat to the process by which they get surgically deboned.

So I built a brand-new stock exchange to try to stop the meat grinder from turning. Crazy, I know. In Silicon Valley, everyone thought so too. No joke, I’ve had founders working on immortality ask me if I really think my project is realistic. The Long-Term Stock Exchange was designed to be a sanctuary against short-term thinking. But the closer we got to pulling it off, the more hostile the world became (and I’m not talking about healthy competition.)

This is the question I’ve been trying to answer ever since: why this keeps happening—and how we might finally build companies that are as hard to corrupt as they are to create.

Excerpted from Incorruptible by Eric Ries, published by Authors Equity. Copyright © 2026 by Eric Ries. Reprinted by permission of Authors Equity.   

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