How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries

频道: Lenny's Podcast
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJ1vTdHpks
原文语言: en
统计: 共 71 轮 · Eric 29 · Lenny 34

[0:00]

all kinds of famous companies. The thing that destroyed them was not competition. Their very success became a liability.

各种各样的知名公司，把它们毁掉的并不是竞争对手。是它们自己的成功，反倒变成了一种负担。

[0:07]

I want to hear the OpenAI versus anthropic story. Dario was a first-time founder. Wasn't a hot company at all. The boom hadn't happened yet. Chat GPD hadn't been invented yet. Nonetheless, they were true believers in this safety [music] mission. And so, one of their investors suggested they come talk to me. I told them, "Look, if you don't get this right, here's what's going to happen." They [music] were very determined to do something about it. They wrote into their charter. Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. Whenever you see Anthropic do the right thing, like when they refuse to release a model because they think it's too dangerous, think about how much that's costing them.

我想听听 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 那段故事。Dario 当时是第一次创业，公司根本算不上什么“热门”项目。那波 AI 浪潮还没起来，ChatGPT 也还没出来。但即便如此，他们是真心信奉这个 safety 使命的。所以他们的一位投资人就建议他们来找我聊聊。我跟他们说：听着，如果你们这件事处理不好，我可以预见接下来会发生什么。他们听完是真的下定决心要做点什么。他们直接把这一点写进了公司章程：Anthropic 营利性主体的董事会里，有几位董事是由外部受托人小组任命、并对其负责的，这些受托人是 AI safety 领域的专家，他们在 Anthropic 不持有任何股权。所以每次你看到 Anthropic 做出“对的事”——比如他们因为觉得某个模型太危险而拒绝发布——你要意识到，他们为此付出了多大代价。

[0:43]

This new book, Incorruptible, is about helping you protect [music] what you've built. What is it that you need protection from? We all know this force. I call it the force that no one controls but everyone obeys that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity to the point that we lose control of them. What's a broadstroke solution to this? Harder is easier. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-m [music] you will get these unexpected rewards. But most leaders [music] when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI [music] based thinking, shareholder primacy. That's the path of maximum profitability. That's nuts. Today my guest is Eric Reese, author of the most influential and impactful book in startup history, the lean startup. Today he is back with a new book 15 years later called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How [music] Great Companies Stay Great. The way Eric describes the connection between these two books is that the lean startup was about helping you build a successful company [music] and this book is about helping you protect what you've built. Eric wrote this book because he's seen way too many founders [music] lose control of their company and end up being very disappointed and depressed about how things turned out. [music] This is not something that you hear a lot about, but it's a problem that basically every successful founder will face. Eric shares [music] a ton of powerful stories and specific tactics and very specific advice for what you need to understand [music] and do as a founder if you want to build something lasting. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisproductpass.com [music] for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Eric Reese. Eric Ree, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

这本新书 Incorruptible，讲的就是怎么保护你已经辛苦建立起来的东西。那要保护它，到底是要防什么？我们其实都熟悉这股力量。我在书里把它叫做“没有人能控制、但所有人都会服从的那股力量”，它会一点点把组织拖向平庸，拖到最后连创始人都失去了对它的掌控。那对付这个的大方向解法是什么？四个字：harder is easier（“难即是易”）。如果你愿意在做决策时坚守原则，你会收获意想不到的回报。但绝大多数 leader 在被要求为自己的原则辩护的时候，根本张不开嘴，因为他们从小被训练的就是 ROI 思维、股东至上那一套。“那才是利润最大化的路径”——这种想法简直离谱。今天我的嘉宾是 Eric Ries，他写过创业史上最具影响力的一本书 The Lean Startup《精益创业》。15 年后他带着新书回来了，书名叫 Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great（《不可腐化：好公司为什么会变坏，伟大的公司又是怎么保持伟大的》）。Eric 自己是这么概括这两本书的关系的：The Lean Startup 教你怎么把一家成功的公司做出来，而这本新书教你怎么保护你做出来的东西。Eric 之所以写这本书，是因为他看到太多创始人在中后期失去了对公司的控制权，最后对结果非常失望、非常沮丧。这件事其实没人公开聊，但几乎每一个成功的创始人迟早都会撞上这个问题。Eric 在书里讲了一大堆很有冲击力的故事、很具体的战术，也给出了非常具体的建议——告诉创始人想做出一家能传世的公司，你需要理解什么、做什么。开始之前先做个小小的预告：别忘了去 lennysproductpass.com 看看，那里有一整年免费的、全球最热门也最精心打磨的 AI 产品的使用权，仅向 Lenny's Newsletter 订阅者开放。废话不多说，有请 Eric Ries。Eric，感谢你来，欢迎再次做客本播客。

[2:34] Eric

Ah, it's an honor to be back. Congrats on everything that's happened since I was here last time.

啊，能再来一次是我的荣幸。也恭喜你这几年取得的所有成绩。

[2:38] Lenny

Wow. Thanks, Eric. So for people that have been living under a rock, you famously wrote the lean startup uh 15 years ago at this point, maybe the most impactful, successful founder startup book out there. And it feels like over this 15 years, if you think about it, it's it's gone through all these waves of just like this is correct the way to do it and no, this completely wrong. Why would anyone build this way? This doesn't work anymore to okay, this actually is right. I was actually just thinking about this as I was preparing for our chat. It feels like the way the top AI companies are building now is actually exactly lean startup. Like I just had the head of product of cloud code in the podcast. Cass

哇，谢谢你 Eric。给那些还不太了解你的人介绍一下：你大约 15 年前写了 The Lean Startup，可能是创业书里影响力最大、最成功的一本。如果你回头看这 15 年，这本书其实经历过好几波风评起伏——一会儿是“这就是唯一正确的方法”，一会儿又是“这套早过时了，谁还这么干”，再过几年又回到“哎其实人家说的是对的”。我准备这次访谈时正好在想这件事：今天最顶尖的那批 AI 公司构建产品的方式，其实就是地地道道的 Lean Startup。我前几天刚邀请过 Claude Code 的产品负责人 Cat（Cat the head of product of Claude Code）来录节目，他们的做事方式——

[3:17] Lenny

the way they operate. Okay. We're going to ship the MVP. They don't call it that, but we're going to ship the MVP research preview. Get it out there. See if people care a lot at all about this thing. We're going to tell you it's not ready for everyone, but it's out there. And then they iterate and build. I feel like people don't give you credit for like this is actually the way AI companies are operating now. I appreciate you saying that and and it is funny how every wave there's like a backlash and somebody writes the article like because of this you don't need to do lean startup anymore. I remember when people wrote that about Quibby they're like Quibby proves that you don't need lean startup. I'm always like why don't we wait till the companies are successful and then see if it proves it. But also people forget like this is not a religion. So what matters to me is not if people use the term minimum viable product or whatever. By the way those aren't customerf facing terms. So a lot of companies that use these concepts, they don't talk about how they use it. They just use it internally to them. It's just, you know, the obviously right way to go. And it's funny to me, one of the most important aspects of it that I think, you know, stands up really well and it's been 15 years is that so many of these AI products that if leaving the models and the underlying technology aside, these specific products that have taken the world by storm, you can really tell that the AI labs themselves did not know they were going to be as popular as they turned out to be. obviously chat GPT they had no idea claude code co-work like these were small experiments in the grand scheme of things they weren't the companies like this is our big bet let's go and that's that's just so classic that that's a a universal aspect of product development that you do not have the ability to predict the future and when you pretend you get yourself in trouble if you hold everything like a hypothesis you know you get the benefits of the scientific method it's uh it's pretty helpful

他们工作的方式就是：好，我们要发 MVP——他们不会用 MVP 这个词，他们叫 research preview，“研究预览”——先把它放出去，看看有没有人在乎。我们提前告诉你它还没准备好面向所有人，但它已经在外面跑了。然后他们就在这基础上不断迭代、扩张。我觉得大家其实没给你应得的认可——现在 AI 公司就是这么干的呀。

Eric: 谢谢你这么说。每一波新浪潮起来都会有反弹，总会有人写文章说“看吧，有了这个之后你就不需要 Lean Startup 了”。我记得当年 Quibi 火的时候有人就这么写过，“Quibi 证明了你根本不需要 Lean Startup”。我当时就想，咱要不要等公司真做成了，再回头看它到底证明了什么？另外，大家也总忘了一件事——这不是宗教。对我来说，重要的不是有没有人嘴上说“MVP”这个词。顺便一提，这些本来就不是面向客户的词。很多用这些概念的公司，根本不会对外讲“我们在用 Lean Startup”。他们就是内部用，因为这就是“显然正确的做法”。

有意思的是，过了 15 年我觉得最经得起检验的一点是：这些 AI 产品——把模型本身和底层技术放一边不谈——光看这些席卷世界的产品，你能很明显地看出来，AI 实验室自己也没料到它们会火成这样。ChatGPT 当然就不用说了。Claude Code、Cowork 之类，这些在公司大盘子里其实都是小实验，没有一个是“这是我们的大赌注，all in”那种姿态搞出来的。这一点超级经典——它是产品研发里那条放之四海皆准的真理：你没办法预测未来，一旦你假装自己能预测，就会给自己惹麻烦。但如果你把每件事都当成“一个假设”来对待，你就能享受到科学方法的好处。挺好用的。

[4:55] Lenny

this episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor work OS s. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Verscell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by work [music] OS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single signon, skim, arbback, [music] audit, logs, and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. [music] Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are seedstage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking [music] growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit works.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Work OS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to works.com to make your app enterprise ready. Today, you have a new book out called Incorruptible. It's a very different, very different book from the Lean Startup. It feels very personal in a lot of ways. The way I've heard you describe the combination of the lean startup and this new book is the lean startup was about helping you build a successful company and incorruptible is about helping you protect what you've built. I want to start with that second part of protecting what you've built. What is it that you need protection from? What's this kind of corruption that you talk about that founders run into? Yeah, we all know this force in the book. I call it the force that no one controls but everyone obeys that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity to the point that we lose control of them. Now, sometimes we lose control of them because we get fired. You know, we get ousted from our own company. Sometimes it happens because we're like Frankenstein and his monster. It starts to become malign or bureaucratic or frankly evil and we can't figure out how to stop it. And all kinds of other ways. I've been I've had a front row seat at this. I've been helping people build companies now for a long time. I've helped people create unimaginable amounts of wealth for themselves and for society. And I'm really proud of the work that they've done. I'm proud of my the bit part that I played in so many of these companies. And yet I've also seen this this darkness. And it's not just founders getting fired, although we want to talk about that. But like the other day, I was out to dinner with some friends. We were not at home. We were kind of, you know, away from our usual uh our usual spots. So someone said, "Yeah, there's this restaurant. I haven't been there in a couple years, but it's really good. Let's check it out." We go, we sit down to dinner. They take one bite of the food and then they're on their phone and we're like, "Dude, you're being rude. Like, why are you on your phone? It's just one sec. One sec." Yep. I thought so. He turns it around. I could tell that this restaurant got taken over by private equity. I could taste it. And I've told that story a bunch of times now, and so many different people have told me, "Oh yeah, I know what restaurant you're talking about." And then they name like 12 different restaurants. So what's going on that like you can taste the ownership structure of a company in the food? How many people have had a famous brand that they love get ruined? I tell hundreds of years of these stories in the book, all kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No, their very success became a liability because the more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.

本期节目由本季的特约赞助商 WorkOS 提供支持。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay 还有几百家其他赢家公司，有什么共同点？它们用的都是 WorkOS。如果你做的是 to enterprise 的产品，你一定体会过那种痛——要接 SSO、SCIM、RBAC、审计日志，还有一堆大公司必备功能。WorkOS 把这些“卡死合同”的杂活变成几行 API 就能搞定的事，是一个专为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。我投资的几乎每一家开始往上打企业市场的创业公司，最后都跟 WorkOS 合作了，因为他们就是最好的。无论你是想拿下第一个企业客户的种子轮创业公司，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是“成为 enterprise-ready”最快的路径，能直接打通你的增长瓶颈——本质上它就是企业级功能的 Stripe。去 workos.com 注册就行，或者直接进他们的 Slack——里面有真正的工程师在等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你能用顺手的 API、完整的文档和丝滑的开发体验更快地构建。去 workos.com，让你的应用变成 enterprise-ready。

好，今天你出了新书 Incorruptible。这本书跟 Lean Startup 风格非常不一样，很多地方读起来非常“个人化”。我听你形容 Lean Startup 和这本新书的关系是：Lean Startup 教你怎么建一家成功的公司，而 Incorruptible 教你怎么保护你建起来的东西。我想先聊“保护”这部分——到底要防什么？你说的这种“腐化”是什么？创始人会撞上的是什么？

Eric: 是的，这股力量我们其实都熟悉。我在书里把它叫做“没人控制、但所有人都服从的那股力量”，它会把组织一点点拖向平庸，拖到你最终对它失去掌控。有时候是因为我们被炒了——我们被自己创办的公司踢出去。有时候则像 Frankenstein 和他的怪物：组织自己变得邪恶、官僚，甚至坦率讲变得 evil，你阻止不了它。还有很多种走法。我在这件事上看过太多第一手现场了。我帮人建公司很多年了，帮一些人创造了难以想象的财富——对他们自己、对社会都是。我为这些公司的成就感到自豪，也为自己在其中扮演过的小角色感到骄傲。但与此同时，我也亲眼看过这股“黑暗”。

而且不只是创始人被炒这件事——那个我们等下也会聊。给你举个例子。前几天我跟几个朋友出去吃饭，不在我们平时的地盘。有人说：“这家餐厅我两年没去了，挺好吃的，去试试。”我们就去了。坐下来上菜，他咬了一口立刻就掏出手机。我们都说：“哥们儿你这不礼貌啊，怎么开吃就玩手机？”他说：“一秒钟，就一秒钟。”——果然，他翻完手机把屏幕一转给我们看：我就猜这家店是被 private equity（私募股权）收购了——我尝得出来。这个故事我后来讲过很多次，结果一堆人跟我说：“哦我知道你说的是哪家。”然后他们各自报出十几家不同的餐厅名字。

所以——你能从菜里“尝出”一家公司的所有权结构，这背后到底是怎么回事？多少人有过一个自己很喜欢的品牌被毁掉的经历？我在书里讲了几百年来的这种故事，各种知名公司——把它们毁掉的不是竞争，不是别人做出了更好的产品。不是。是它们自己的成功变成了一种负担，因为：鹅越是会下金蛋，宰掉它的诱惑就越大。

[8:34] Lenny

Well, that's a very visceral example. I think about vital eggs as a great example of this. It was it was in the news, I don't know, on Twitter, Tik Tok a while ago. It's the eggs that I we've been getting forever. This like pasture-raised organic in my fridge.

这个例子超有画面感。我自己想到一个特别典型的：Vital Farms 鸡蛋。前段时间在 Twitter、TikTok 上闹得挺大。就是我家冰箱里一直在买的那种 pasture-raised organic（放养有机蛋）。

[8:48] Lenny

Okay. I don't know if you saw this, but everyone was complaining of how they've gotten worse and they're they have all like the highest level of toxins and then they're owned by Black Rockck now, it turns out. No, I I was just wondering about that. Oh, okay. Now, that's my new favorite example. That's really fun. I didn't even know that. But yeah, like it's so it's so common. It's the point now where I was I was doing an interview with someone who was telling me about a certain natural foods brand and the name of the product is the name of the founder. It's like I can't remember her name now. It's just her name. That's what it that's the name of the product. And she gets ousted by investors. And he's about to tell me the story. I said, "Let me guess what happened next." The board pushed her out in pursuit of higher growth, higher margins. As a result, we've seen lower quality. Customers are super pissed. Employees are pissed. And now it's starting to shrink market share. And he was like, "How did you know? I thought you said you didn't know this company. This pattern is so pervasive. We don't even have a name for it. We live it every day, but we don't know what to call it." Well, I know what to call it. I know what our grandparents would have called it. They would have called this corruption, not legal bribery or embezzlement. No, this is like you're building a bridge. And if your bridge collapses and Lenny, I say you're an engineer and I say, Lenny, why did my bridge collapse? If you're like, well, because of gravity, I'm going to be like, dude, yeah, thank you for that genius insight, right? Like, I understand that that is correct in some very real way. Like we say, well, it's inevitable. It's greed. I call it financial gravity. Like there's this kind of like thing, you know, human nature when companies get big, when whatever. Yeah. But I want to know why did this bridge collapse? And more importantly, how come other bridges didn't collapse? And they say, "Oh, oh, for that we need to study the load, load factor, wind load, shearing tension." And we go look up close. We say, "Oh, look, all the metal bolts have been corroded. They're rusted. No wonder it collapsed." And then if you say, "Well, I want to build a new bridge, but I don't want this one to collapse. What can I do?" You won't say, "Well, gravity. What can you do?" No. You say, "Why don't we use stainless steel next time on the bolts so they don't get corroded?" Oh, yeah. Good idea. So, this book is about what are the organizational equivalents of stainless steel? And the book is kind of structured not like a traditional business book, as you say, you picked up on that. Like, it's much more like a mystery, a double mystery. First of all, why has this been going on for hundreds of years when we all think that the market selects for value creation? So, this shouldn't happen yet. It happens all the time. But secondly, if it's inevitable, if it's caused by greed or age or size, why are there exceptions?

好。我不知道你看到没——大家都在抱怨说品质变差了，而且检测出毒素含量是同类里最高的。后来发现公司现在被 BlackRock 收购了。

Eric: 不会吧。我之前就在想这事儿呢。哦，原来如此。这立刻成了我最爱的例子，太有意思了，这我都不知道。是啊，这种事情太普遍了。普遍到什么程度——我前阵子在采访一个人，他跟我讲一个自然食品品牌，那个产品名字就是创始人本人的名字，她叫什么我现在记不起来了，反正产品名就是她的名字。她被投资人踢出去了。他正要往下讲，我说：“让我猜接下来发生了什么——董事会为了追求更高的增长、更高的毛利把她赶走，结果品质下降，客户暴怒、员工愤怒，现在市场份额开始萎缩。”他当时就傻了：“你怎么知道？你不是说你不认识这家公司吗？”

这个模式太普遍了，普遍到我们甚至都没给它起个名字。我们每天都在经历它，但叫不出它叫什么。我倒是知道该叫什么——我也知道我们的爷爷奶奶辈会管这叫什么。他们会管这叫 corruption（腐败）。不是法律意义上的受贿或挪用公款。我说的是这种感觉——你建了一座桥，桥塌了，假设你 Lenny 是工程师，我问你：“Lenny 我那座桥为什么塌？”你要是回我“哦，因为重力”——我会说“哥们儿，谢谢你这天才的洞察”。对吧？某种意义上你说的没错。我们经常说“哎，这是必然的，是贪婪嘛”，我把这个叫 financial gravity（金融重力）——就好像它是某种自然规律，人性如此、公司一大就这样。是。但我想知道的是：这座桥到底为什么塌？更重要的——为什么别的桥没塌？

他们就会说：“哦，要回答这个，咱们得研究载重、风荷载、剪切张力。”咱们凑近一看——哎，所有金属螺栓都腐蚀了、生锈了，难怪塌了。然后你问：“那我要建一座新桥，但不想让它塌，我能做什么？”没人会回你“哎呀重力，能怎么办”。他们会说“咱下次螺栓换不锈钢，就不会腐蚀了”——哦对，好主意。

这本书要回答的就是：组织层面对应的“不锈钢”是什么？这本书的结构其实不太像传统商业书——你也看出来了——它更像一本悬疑小说，而且是双重悬念：第一，大家都说市场是奖励“创造价值”的，那为什么这事儿几百年来一直在发生？按理说不该发生啊。但它就是每天都在发生。第二，如果它是必然的——如果是贪婪、年龄、规模导致的——那为什么会有例外？

[11:13] Lenny

You're actually going to give us answers and solutions like because it sounds like, okay, this is impossible. You actually have you have some answers for what founders can do. Real quick, I'll just vital X thing. I'm not exactly sure if the toxins are real. Like there's a whole viral thing on it. I haven't like looked into it super deep.

你接下来真的会给我们答案、给解法，对吧？因为听到这儿感觉是“这事儿根本没救”。但你确实有一些对策，告诉创始人能做什么。

再快速说一句 Vital X 那个事儿：我也不完全确定毒素这事儿是不是真的，网上是有一波很大的爆款贴，但我没深挖过。

[11:29] Lenny

We both have homework to do now because like it's what you feed your kids. You care. I'm definitely worried. Definitely worried to hear that. I want to talk about two things that are probably in people's minds as they listen to this conversation and even think about buying your book. One is okay uh I am not going to let this happen to my company like this is other people they're weak. They're maybe they're loose values. The other is just like do I really need to do this? There's so many companies that are killing it. I don't think I don't think they've done any of this.

我们俩现在都得回去做做功课了，因为这毕竟是你喂给孩子的东西，你肯定在乎。我现在是真有点担心了。

我想聊另外两件事，可能是大家听到现在心里在嘀咕的——甚至在考虑买不买这本书时在嘀咕的。第一是：“我才不会让这种事发生在我公司身上呢，那都是别人，是他们脆弱、价值观松动。”第二是：“我真的需要做这些吗？我看一堆公司风生水起，我觉得他们一样啥也没做。”

[11:56] Lenny

Why do I even need to pay attention to this? So maybe let's start with that first one of this idea of this is a core thesis of your book. This is not like an ethical values thing. This is a structural element of building businesses in the US.

我为什么得关心这个？要不咱们就先从第一点说起——你书里其实有个核心论点：这不是个伦理价值观的事儿，而是美国公司构建过程里一个结构性的东西。

[12:08] Eric

I'm going to make a claim that's going to sound radical, but is I'll back it up.

我接下来要说一个听上去挺极端的论断，不过我会拿事实兜底。

[12:12] Eric

If you don't get this right, no other decision you make about your company will matter for the long term because you're not going to be the one making it. Okay? According to Harvard Law School, among venturebacked companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, okay, only 20% of founders are still the CEO 3 years after going public. Okay, just statistically speaking, everyone's being told by their lawyers, their bankers, their VCs, everybody that you're the exception. It's not going to happen to you. But statistically speaking, you're much more likely to be in the 80% than the 20%. I'll tell you one story in particular. A very hot company came to see me like a year or two before their IPO. They were pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl planning IPO. You know, I build a long-term stock exchange. I've done a bunch of stuff that people come to me for advice about these things. They wanted advice. How can we structure the IPO? We want to think long term. We're really missiondriven company, etc., etc. And I was going through their governance documents. I said, "Oh, good. You have all the best practices, so you're totally like I was like, the good news is you're so screwed. You're going to have to do something, right? Like just this is you're this is you're guaranteed to get this messed." And and I I I had all the data just like I do in the book. like here are the examples, here are the case studies, here's the data. You need to know about this. And the founder was really concerned. He's like, "Okay, we're going to we're going to definitely do something about this. We're going to fix it up." But then he called me back a few months later. He's like, I said, "Well, what are you going to do?" He's like, "You know what? I talked to my bankers, talked to my lawyers, talked to my CFO, talked to my GC, talked to my VCs, talked to my growth VCs." You know what they all said? They all said, "Man, Eric is such a downer. If he really believed in your vision, if he really saw how special you were, he wouldn't talk like that. you're the exception. I said, "Okay, man. Good luck." This company went public, had a very successful IPO, a lot of people made a lot of money, and then five months into their IPO, a competitor gets acquired, and the whole category, everyone freaks out. Stock price collapses, and the founder is ousted after five months as a public company. Now, if you read stories about the company, it's people like, "Oh, he made all these mistakes. Their business model sucked. the company of blah. Did he make mistakes? I'm sure he did. Were there problems? I'm sure. But had he really earned so little grace that he only got five months? The same people saying that the business model is horribly flawed, they invested in the company five months ago. Had it had it really changed so much in five months. This is what's going on. These um collapses are all around us and we're being told it's normal. This is just the way it has to be. But it's not. These are choices about the specific structures, cultural practices, the the management practices we do on the inside and the structural the governance practices we do on the outside. Of both of them, we're being told to do things that are incredibly weak. And again, if you think you're going to be the exception, like think again.

如果这件事你没搞定，那你为这家公司做的所有其他决策，长期看都没意义——因为根本不会由你来做这些决策。听好，Harvard Law School 的数据：在那些拿了 VC、用了你律师给你套上来的“标准最佳实践”的 venture-backed 公司里，IPO 之后 3 年还能继续担任 CEO 的创始人，只有 20%。OK？纯统计学意义上：你的律师、你的投行、你的 VC、所有人都在告诉你“你是那个例外，不会发生在你身上”。但单看概率，你属于那 80% 的几率，远远高过你属于那 20%。

我给你讲一个具体的故事。有一家非常火的公司，在 IPO 前一到两年来找我。他们当时正在 plan IPO。你知道我搞过 Long-Term Stock Exchange（LTSE），也做过一堆相关的事，所以经常有人来问我建议。他们想问的就是：怎么设计这次 IPO？我们想长期主义，我们是真的 mission-driven 公司，等等等等。我翻他们的 governance 文件，我说：“哦不错，你这些”最佳实践“一应俱全。”——我接着说：“好消息是，你完蛋了。你必须得做点什么，对吧？这是板上钉钉一定会出问题的局面。”我把书里那些数据全摆给他们看：这是案例、这是研究、这是数据，你必须了解。

创始人当时非常上心，他说：“好的好的，我们一定会做点事，一定补上。”几个月后他给我回电话。我说：“那你打算怎么做？”他说：“你知道吗，我跟我的投行聊过、跟律师聊过、跟 CFO 聊过、跟 GC（总法律顾问）聊过、跟我的早期 VC 聊过、跟我的成长期 VC 聊过——你猜他们怎么说？他们一致说：'唉这个 Eric 太丧了。如果他真的相信你的 vision、如果他真的看到你有多特别，他不会这么说话的。你就是那个例外。'”我说：“好吧，老兄，那祝你好运。”

这家公司后来 IPO 非常成功，一大堆人赚了一大笔钱。然后 IPO 之后第五个月，一个竞争对手被收购，整个赛道恐慌，股价暴跌，创始人在上市第五个月就被踢出去了。现在你回头读关于这家公司的故事，铺天盖地是“哦他犯了这么多错、商业模式有问题、blah blah”。他真犯错了吗？我相信肯定有。有问题吗？肯定有。但他真就只配五个月的耐心？同一批跳出来说“商业模式漏洞百出”的人——五个月前可是他们自己投的钱。难道五个月里公司真有那么大变化吗？

这些崩盘到处都是，而且我们被告知“这是常态，事情就是这样”。但其实不是。这些都是关于“具体结构、文化习惯、内部管理实践、外部 governance 实践”的选择——是被设计出来的。两边都有，而我们被建议采用的那一套，软弱得令人发指。再说一遍：如果你以为自己会是那个例外——你再想想。

[14:58] Lenny

I'm excited to talk about what to do with these governance elements, but let's talk about this other critique that I imagine people have in their head of just like is this like, you know, like okay, I need to figure out product market fit first.

我特别想听 governance 这块到底该怎么搞，但先把另一个常见质疑也聊一下——很多人心里会冒一个声音：“我得先搞定 product-market fit 啊。”

[15:10] Lenny

Yeah. Yeah. work worry about it later.

对对对，“先 PMF，governance 以后再说”。

[15:12] Lenny

Exactly. There's so much more I need to do. Like the chances of this working are so low. Why am I I have no time for anything else.

就这个意思。“我还有一万件事要做，能跑出来概率本来就贼低，我哪有时间搞这些。”

[15:19] Eric

Oh, totally. You said something interesting in the leadin which you said like, "Well, a lot of other companies seem to be killing it and they don't have these protections, so they're fine." I would actually check your math so many times when people give me this argument. They were like, "Well, such and such company, you know, like I'm someone was like, "Cloudflare, they are just a normal company. They don't do this stuff." I'm like, "Check your math, buddy. Cloudflare does many of the things that we talking They're one of the examples in the book, so I picked that on purpose. A lot of companies that you don't necessarily instantly think of as like dogoodter missiondriven companies are actually very missiondriven in terms of how they're structured and they are almost always protected by at least one of the governance structures from this book. So check your math. People used to tell me Costco was an example that wasn't protected. So much so that like I was surprised to learn that it was embodied in a governance fortress. You you'll be surprised if you if you do the math, if you look into it, you'll be surprised. But let's talk about the product market fit thing because this one is really interesting to me. Generally speaking, this is one of the most important ideas in the whole book. The most important question about how to protect a product is not what protections it needs, but when those protections need to be enacted. And it's basically like that old proverb about the best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago, but the next best time is now. It is always too early until it's too late. And I'll I'll give you like the example. Um I've seen this hundreds of times myself personally. So I've like l literally been in the room where this kind of stuff gets discussed and it starts like this. You're going to you're you're incorporating your company. You talk to your lawyer. Hey, I want to have these are called mission protective provisions in the law. I want to have I heard heard this guy on Lenny's podcast and your lawyer's like, "Oh, not again." You know, another guy, right? Like how many good ideas from Lenny's podcast are you going to tell me about? Okay, fine. What's this one? I he told me I need to have mission protective provisions. He'll be like he'll pat you on the head and be like, "Oh, that's sweet, honey. That's great. Yeah. Get product market fit. Like get some success. Success is ultimately your source of leverage. Success will protect you. Don't worry about it. You say, "Okay, great. But just thanks for letting me know. Now you raise some money. You got these VCs on your board." Say the same thing. They're like, "Yeah, I totally am with you. We're on the same page. We want the same thing you want. We invested because we believe in you as the founder. There's no need to do this now. Let's just do it later. Do it when it's the more appropriate time." Okay. You get you got a growth round. Now you got these bold contrarian growth VCs on your board and they're like, "I don't know. You might not want to be too different from everybody else. Might make it hard to raise money." You're like, "I thought you were a bold contrarian. What?" Okay, don't worry about it now. We can always do it later. Now you're doing IPO prep. Now you got bankers and lawyers and you've got a GC and you got the and they're all like, "Yep, yep. This is a great thing to bundle with the IPO itself. You don't need to worry about it now. First, we got to land the plane. Let's get our house in order." Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I've actually been in the room where the founder sits with the CFO and now it's like IPO planning road show. Here we go. It's go time. We're about to file the papers and the founder's like, "Hey, whatever happened to those mission protective provisions?" They're like, "I wanted to really make sure we had our customers could participate in our IPO and I want broadly shared prosperity and I want this thing for our employees and all this good stuff I want to do. Do we uh do we do any of that stuff? I don't see it in the S1." The CFO is like, "Oh, you were serious about that?" Oh, sorry, man. You should have said something. Now it's too late. You're like, "Wait a minute. When I talked to you about it last year, you said it was too early." Yeah, it was. But now it's too late. Was it ever the right time? No, it is never the right time to do this. If you put this off, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you can no longer do it. You will have lost the leverage. Success will not protect you because success is what makes you a target. That story I told you about the five month CEO got fired. That company, everyone who worked on that IPO, every banker, every lawyer, the CFO, everybody, they profited from all the transaction volume that that company generated on the way up and on the way down. They're all fine. They're all on to the next IPO. The they're like u carnivores, you know? They're on to the next thing to feed on. Meanwhile, the customers, the employees, the people that cared about their company were not so lucky.

完全理解。你刚才在引子里说过一句挺有意思的话：“好多公司也都活得好好的，他们没这些保护机制，不也挺好吗？”——我建议你再算算这道数学题。我经常碰到有人这样反驳我，他们会说：“哎，xx 公司啊，比如 Cloudflare，他们就是普普通通一家公司，这些破事儿他们都没干。”我说：“哥们儿，回去重算。Cloudflare 做了我们书里讲的好多事情，他们就是书里的案例之一，我特意挑的。”

很多你不会“一眼就觉得是 do-gooder、mission-driven”的公司，其实结构上是相当 mission-driven 的，而且几乎都至少受到我书里讨论的某种 governance 结构的保护。所以——回去重算。以前还有人跟我说 Costco 是“没受保护”的例子。震惊到什么程度——我自己都很惊讶地发现，Costco 是镶嵌在一座 governance 堡垒里的。你只要稍微做点功课、查一下，就会很意外。

不过我们重点聊 product-market fit 这件事，因为它对我来说真的非常关键。整体讲，这是这本书里我认为最重要的几个 idea 之一：关于“如何保护一个产品”，最关键的问题不是“它需要哪些保护”，而是“这些保护要在什么时候装上”。基本就像那句老话：种一棵树最好的时机是 40 年前，第二好的时机是现在。

It is always too early until it's too late.（一直都“太早”，直到一夜之间“太晚”。）我给你举个例子，这种场景我亲身经历过几百次了——字面意义上的“我就在那个房间里”。它通常是这么开始的：

你刚要成立公司，去找律师：“我想加几条 mission protective provisions（使命保护条款）进章程。”律师就：“哎呀，又来。”你说：“Lenny 那个播客上的那个嘉宾说我得加这个。”他会拍拍你的头说：“乖乖，听话，先去拿 PMF，先做出成绩。成功才是你最大的杠杆，成功会保护你的，别担心这些。”你说：“好吧好吧，谢谢提醒。”

然后你融资了，几个 VC 进了董事会，他们也说同样的话：“我们站你这边、我们和你目标一致、我们投你就是因为相信你这个创始人。现在没必要做，等以后合适的时机再做。”

然后你拿了成长轮，董事会里来了几个“大胆反共识”的成长期 VC，他们说：“呃要不别这么搞，你跟别人太不一样，融资会比较难。”你说：“哥们儿你不是说你是大胆反共识的吗？”他说：“以后再说，不急。”

然后到 IPO 准备阶段，投行、律师、GC 一堆人围上来：“对对对，这种东西特别适合和 IPO 一起打包做。但现在还不是时候——先把飞机降落，先把家里收拾干净，再说这些。”

我真的就坐在那个房间里看过这一幕：现在已经是 IPO 准备阶段、路演节奏。创始人对 CFO 说：“哎对了，咱当年说要做的那些 mission protective provisions 呢？我之前说要让客户能参与我们的 IPO、要让繁荣广泛共享、要为员工搞一些好东西。S-1 里我怎么没看到这些？”CFO 一脸懵：“哦，你当时是认真的？哎呀对不起兄弟，你早点说啊。现在来不及了。”创始人：“等下，去年我跟你聊这事儿的时候，你说”太早了“！”——“是啊，那时是太早，但现在太晚了。”

那这件事到底什么时候才是“对的时机”？答案是：永远都不会到那个时候。你一拖再拖，最后一定会拖到一个你想做也做不了的处境。你的杠杆已经没了。成功并不会保护你——成功反而让你变成靶子。我前面讲的那位上市第五个月就被炒的 CEO，他公司的 IPO 链条上每一个人——每个投行、每个律师、CFO、所有人——在公司涨上去和跌下来的过程里都靠交易量赚到了钱。他们都没事，转身就去下一个 IPO 了。这帮人就像食肉动物，去找下一头猎物。而那些真正关心这家公司的客户、员工——没那么幸运。

[19:18] Lenny

Damn, that hit me. That hit me right in the heart. Uh, and it's so obvious just how personal and important this is to you. It's clear you've just seen this happen again and again in your

卧槽，扎心了。这真的戳到我了。看得出来这对你来说有多个人化、多重要，你在你的工作里反复目睹过这种事——

[19:29] Eric

Oh, yeah. I've been in the room where it happens, the proverbial room.

对，我真的就坐在那个房间里——所谓的“那个房间”。

[19:32] Lenny

Okay. So, let's talk about how to what people should do and we'll poke around in different directions. what's kind of like the broadstroke solution to this and then what are some say three things say an early stage founder should do this week next week.

好，那我们来聊解法——大家应该怎么做。我们会从各个方向去挖。先说大方向上的解法是什么？然后请你给一个早期阶段的创始人列三件他这周、下周就能动手做的具体事情。

[19:44] Eric

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so broadly speaking there is a blueprint. I promise like when we talk about the the the horrors of living in late stage capitalism it's easy to get depressed and just be like I mean literally part one of this book is called the shape of the abyss. So you know I'm not I'm not trying to sugarcoat it. This is quite grim and if you haven't studied these case studies, if you don't know the story of Whole Foods and what happened to it, if you don't know the story of Verura, you know, you don't know these stories, they're really grim and it's important to grapple with what happened so that so that it doesn't happen to you, so that you're prepared, but it can feel like we're we're so helpless. But as I said, this is a double mystery. Not just why does this happen, but how can there be exceptions to a rule that's inevitable? So let me just tell one more story and then we'll get really into the tactical details because I want to really give I want some stories that we can use as our fact set our database to draw these principles out. And so the blueprint I'll give you the spoiler alert I just mentioned before ethos plus integrity that's our formula. Ethos meaning internal alignment character choices integrity meaning the structure to resist to keep ourselves aligned with human flourishing. Let's go back in time a little further. This time we're going to go to 1920 Denmark. Okay. I want to tell you about a a woman named Marie Crowe. She was one of the first doctors to uh practice in Denmark, like a credentialed doctor. She was a big advocate for women's medical education and she lived a very cool life in her own right. But she's famous today mostly because of her husband August who had just won the Nobel Prize who's a very famous scientist. And she unfortunately right around the same time got diagnosed with a fatal illness, an illness for which there was no known cure at that time. it was called diabetes. So she gets this death sentence right as he's weighing the Nobel Prize and he asks her would she come with him to North America for his lecture tour anyway and she says yes. So the two of them travel to North America. He's going around talking to scientists about his Nobel Prize. And one night at dinner, Maria is sitting next to a scientist who tells her, "Hey, actually in Canada, there are these researchers who have figured out a new technology to isolate a substance called insulin, a potential cure for diabetes." So Marie convinces her husband, "We should send our trip, go to Canada, see this thing for themselves." They do. They are both scientists, so they instantly understand the implications. this could not only save Marie's life, but millions more. So, they talked to the Canadians. Could we commercialize this technology? And the Canadians say they're open to it, but everyone involved has a concern. We've been talking so far about the concern of being forced out of your company or having it taken away from you. That is one danger. But there's also the temptation to harvest what others plant. The temptation to exploit, to extract instead of creating new value. They were worried about that. Now, Lenny, I want you to imagine this scenario with me, okay? Imagine that I depend on you for a life-saving cure. I have diabetes. You're the only maker of insulin in the world. In that case, I would want you to charge me a fair price. Like, very much so. It's it's a it's both morally right, fair, but also I want you to have every incentive possible to keep making the drug. Otherwise, I might die. Okay. But what if one day you wake up and you're like, "Wait a second. I don't have to charge Eric a fair price." or you have investors whispering in your ear, Lenny, you don't have to charge him a fair price. You can charge him anything you want. That's what I would live in fear of. So decades before Martin Skrey actually did this as a business strategy, the crows and the Canadian scientists, they were worried that this might happen to their new company. So when they went back to Denmark to create this company, which they called the Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium, they incorporated it using this very particular structure. It is a for-profit company. It does have outside investors, but it is owned, governed by a nonprofit foundation, a two-tiered structure that's called an industrial foundation in the literature. And if Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium sounds familiar, it should. This is the predecessor company to what we today call Nova Nordisk, one of the largest companies in the world. And what's so interesting to me about this story is this structure has endured and protected the ethos of scientific integrity of Nova Nordisk for more than a hundred years. Meanwhile, so many of the best practices that your lawyers, your bankers, whoever advisers you have, they're going to be pushing best practices on you that are younger than the trees in your local park. And so what I want for everyone who's listening to this, founders, product managers, leaders, board members, I don't care. The next time someone comes to you pushing a best practice and you're like, "Oh, I guess I have to do it this way because we live in an ROI dominated culture. We have to stack rank by ROI or whatever the practice is, I want you to be like, well, that person sounds very smart. They're very well credentialed. They went to business school or whatever." But ask yourself, are you sure they're smarter than a Nobel laureate? Because August and Marie worked this out a hundred years ago and it has held so many attacks. In fact, I tell a story in the book, and Lonnie, I know you're going to think I'm exaggerating, or I know at least some of your listeners are going to think, "Oh, America is an exaggerator." I promise you, this is a 100% true story. The the trustees of the nonprofit foundation once had to intervene to protect the for-profit from this exact temptation to want to sell it out. And I won't get into the whole story. They did the right thing in this case because they had the legal power to do so. Their intervention ultimately created more than $500 billion dollar of shareholder value. I'm not I didn't add an extra zero for emphasis. $500 billion. So when people hear about these things for the first time, it's natural to feel like we're talking just about business ethics or mission. It's like some extra nice to have thing that after you do the real serious business, now you worry about this stuff. No, this is one of the most powerful engines of value creation in the world. And for a lot of people listening, this will be the first time you're hearing about it. But just because it's new to you doesn't make it new. The German optics company, Zeiss, who make the the lenses in my glasses and yours, too, they had this structure in 1885. So I think it's really interesting that we have enough of these examples to know that there's nothing inevitable about this financial gravity. We actually have a data set. They can be studied. There's a whole branch of academic research that has shown, for example, companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts. We they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors. They're better in so many ways. So, it's kind of a bit of an open secret that these techniques exist. So, I want us to kind of have these stories in our mind because it's it's going to sound as we get into the technique, some of them are going to sound radical. We want to say, "Wait a second. Is this really doable for me? I'm just a little startup. I'm just doing, you know, I'm just trying to get to product market fit. Why are we talking about this long off stuff hundred-y old companies? No. August and Marie was just it was they were a tiny startup two once. Now that company's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So before we get into that, just let's remind people again why this is worth doing because it's going to sound like oh my god, this is so annoying. I have to do all these weird things that no one else is doing. I have to convince all these people this is not not going to limit us and not hurt us down the road. Let just let's remind people again just why this is important. Why this is so painful if they don't do it right.

好好好。大方向上，是有一个 blueprint（蓝图）的。我保证。聊“晚期资本主义之恐怖”很容易让人陷入抑郁——我书里第一部分就叫 The Shape of the Abyss（深渊的形状）。我没打算给它包糖衣。这是相当 grim（阴暗）的，如果你没系统地看过这些案例，比如 Whole Foods 的故事、Theranos（书中表述为 Verura，按上下文应为 Theranos / 类似公司）的故事，这些故事都很沉重，但很重要——你得直面发生过什么，才能避免它发生在你身上。

不过正如我说的，这本书是一个“双重悬念”：不只是“为什么会发生”，也包括“如果它是必然的，那为什么会有例外？”。让我再讲一个故事，然后我们就会真正进入战术细节。我希望先建立一组事实素材库，我们才能从中抽出原则。

spoiler alert：整套蓝图我先剧透下，公式是 ethos + integrity。Ethos 指的是内在的对齐、品格、选择。Integrity 指的是把人留在“与人类繁荣对齐”那条线上的“结构性约束力”。

我们再往前穿越一点，去 1920 年的丹麦。我想给你讲一个叫 Marie Krogh 的女士。她是丹麦最早一批拿到正规医师资格的女医生，是女性医学教育的积极倡导者，她自己的一生就已经非常厉害。但她今天之所以出名，更多是因为她丈夫 August Krogh——刚刚拿了 Nobel Prize 的著名科学家。不幸的是，差不多在他得奖前后，她被诊断出一种当时无药可治的致命疾病——糖尿病。

所以她基本上等于被宣判了死刑。在他要去北美巡讲领奖的时候，他问她要不要一起去。她说：好。两个人去了北美。他四处跟科学家讲他的诺奖工作。一天晚上吃饭，Marie 旁边坐着一位科学家告诉她：“其实加拿大有一组研究者搞出了一项新技术，能分离出一种叫 insulin（胰岛素）的物质——可能能治糖尿病。”

于是 Marie 说服她丈夫：“咱改下行程，去加拿大亲眼看看。”他们去了。两个人都是科学家，立刻就看明白了 implications：这玩意儿不光能救 Marie，能救几百万人。他们就跟加拿大人聊：“能不能商业化这项技术？”加拿大人愿意，但所有人都有一个顾虑。

我们前面聊的都是“你被踢出公司、公司被人夺走”这种危险。但还有另一种诱惑——去收割别人种下的庄稼。去剥削、去抽取，而不是去创造新价值。他们担心的就是这个。

Lenny 我想请你想象这个场景：假设我是糖尿病人，我命系于你身——你是世界上唯一能造胰岛素的人。这种情况下，我会希望你按“公平价格”卖给我。非常希望。这不仅是道德上正确、是公平，而且我希望你有十足的动力继续生产这个药，否则我会死。

OK。但如果哪天你早上醒来突然想：“等等，我没必要按公平价格卖给 Eric 啊。”或者你有几个投资人在你耳边吹风：“Lenny，你完全可以不按公平价格卖，你想标多少都行。”——那是我最害怕的局面。所以早在 Martin Shkreli 把这套作为商业策略实操之前几十年，Krogh 夫妇和加拿大科学家们就在担心这事儿会发生在自己的新公司身上。

所以他们回到丹麦成立公司——他们叫它 Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium——的时候，用了一种非常特别的结构来注册：它是一家 for-profit 公司，确实有外部投资人，但它由一个非营利基金会拥有、治理。学术文献里把这种“两层结构”叫做 industrial foundation（产业基金会）。

如果 Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium 这名字听着耳熟——它该耳熟。这就是今天 Novo Nordisk（诺和诺德）的前身，全球最大公司之一。最让我震撼的是：这个结构存续了一百多年，一直在保护 Novo Nordisk 的“科学诚信” ethos。

而你身边的律师、投行、各路顾问推给你的那些“最佳实践”，年纪比你小区里的树还小。所以我希望所有听众——不管你是创始人、PM、leader、董事会成员，都行——下次有人跑过来推一个“最佳实践”，你心想“好吧，看来在这个 ROI 主导的文化里我只能这么干、必须按 ROI 排优先级”——我希望你想一想：这个人确实很聪明、学历也很漂亮，他读过商学院之类的。但你问问自己——他比 Nobel Laureate 还聪明吗？因为 August 和 Marie 一百年前就把这事儿想明白了，而且这套结构挡住了无数次进攻。

书里我讲过一个故事，Lenny 我知道你可能觉得我在夸张——至少一部分听众会觉得“Eric 这哥们儿吹牛”。我向你保证 100% 真实：这个非营利基金会的 trustees 有一次不得不出手干预，去阻止这家 for-profit 子公司被卖掉、被那种“贱卖出去”的诱惑吞噬。整个故事我先不展开。他们这次做了正确的事——因为他们 legally 就有这个权力。而这一次干预最终创造了 5000 亿美元以上的股东价值。我没多加一个零。是 5000 亿美元。

所以当人们第一次听这些故事，很容易觉得“这是聊商业伦理、聊使命，是公司搞完真正的硬业务后多出来的 nice to have 项”。不是。这是世界上最强大的价值创造引擎之一。对很多听众来说，这是你第一次听说，但“对你来说是新的”不等于“它是新的”。德国光学公司 Zeiss——给我和你眼镜做镜片的那家——他们 1885 年就用这个结构了。

所以我们手上是有足够多的样本可以证明：所谓的“金融重力”并不是不可抗的。我们有数据集，可以被研究。学术界有一整支研究方向，证明了比如说像 Novo 和 Zeiss 这种结构的公司，比传统结构的公司能活到第 50 年的概率高 6 倍，ROIC 更高，对投资人回报更好——各方面都更优。所以这其实是一个“半公开的秘密”。

我希望大家把这些故事记在脑子里——因为接下来我们聊技战术的时候，有些听上去会很“激进”，你会想：“这真的对我可行吗？我就是个小创业公司，我连 PMF 都还在找，你为啥跟我聊百年老店的远景？”——但 August 和 Marie 当年也是个“小破创业公司”，两个人。今天那公司价值几千亿美元。

所以在我们进入战术之前，我想再提醒大家一次为什么这事值得做。因为待会儿你会觉得“天哪好烦，我要做一堆别人都不做的怪事，还要说服一堆人这不会拖累我们、不会害我们以后融资”。我们再过一遍：如果不做，会有多痛？

[27:02] Lenny

Gosh, there's so many things to choose from.

哎呀，可选的痛点也太多了。

[27:05] Lenny

So much pain.

实在太痛。

[27:06] Eric

So much pain. I I'll tell another story like we've been telling kind of happy stories. Let me tell you a not very happy story. So I've been doing this exercise for many years uh where I would ask founders um or leaders of really of any any seniority. I'm just like listen before we get into the details first tell me who you think is the most evil company in the world. And people sometimes, sometimes they like instantly know who to say. They're like, "Oh, I know." But some people are like, "What do you mean evil?" I'm like, "The company where there's no amount of money they could offer you that you would go work there. You just, you know, they're up to no good." Everybody has a company like that in their mind. I don't know if you want to say who it is for you. I understand. If you don't want to, it's okay. But like I'll just for the sake of us having a hypothetical that we can do. I would always tell if people we go around the room. I go on some of them on Zoom. Everyone puts in the chat, right? And there'll be someone will be like Hallebertton and someone else will be like increasingly like like tech companies are showing up on these lists now which when when I was younger that would never have been the case but now you sometimes see tech companies there some see Monsanto or you see um you know some or some private equity fund like people are like mad about something they can name a company usually so it's not hard to find examples now my father was a pulmonologist growing up so I was raised that Philip Morris is the most evil company in the world so we'll just use that as our hypothetical just for the sake of argument today um if you think Philip Morris is great and you have different values. You know, whoever's listening, fine. You pick the company you really would never ever ever want to have to work for no matter what. Now, I ask people to imagine the company they currently work at. If you're a founder, you're a company. If you're an employee, your company, but if you've, you know, the company you hold dear, just imagine Philip Morris shows up one day and says, "I'd like to buy this company from you for $1 more per share than it's currently worth. You selling?" Most people are like, "Hell no. Hell no. No, I'm not selling. One person once asked me, um, well, what are they going to use it for? Oh, sorry. To be clear, they're going to use it to sell cigarettes to children. Now you're selling. Yeah. No, no deal. Of obviously, f no, I can't actually say on your podcast the kind of things people say when they are presented with this. Um, because there might be that might be children listening. Okay. People get real upset at this idea. And and when we talk about I'm like, "Okay, well, did you know that according to the legal documents you yourself signed, your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing, you've already put in motion, a rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation." People are so outraged. They're like, "That cannot be right. My lawyer, my guy, he would never have done that to me. I'm like, "Call him up. Ask him if what I say is true and call me back." And they're like, "He said it. He said he was doing me a favor by giving me the best practice documents to make it easier to raise money." Yeah. So, occasionally though, people will say, "Eric, you are exaggerating. That is not Yes, that can happen, but come on. Does that really happen in real life? Is that something I really need? I'm trying to get product market fit. Do I have to worry about it?" So before you tell me I'm exaggerating, I want you to consider this from the perspective of the founder scientists of the Vector Corporation. Vector was a UK company, a spinout from the University of Bath. They made inhaler therapeutics like for asthma and COPD. You've seen inhalers. Yeah. Med a medicine company. They were really successful. They raised money. They went public on the London Stock Exchange. And one day the actual Philip Morris tried to buy them. Okay, I only know this story because I've been using the Philip Morris example for years. And when I was researching the book, I was like, I wonder I actually asked Claude, "Has anybody has anyone ever actually been bought by Philip Morris?" Like this. I sketched out the hypothetical and it was like, are you asking me about Vector? And I was like, tell me more. There's this company. This is what happened. Phil Morris said they wanted to diversify beyond nicotine. And they were like, oh, we know a lot about inhaling things, so having an inhaler company makes anyway. No, normal people hearing about this were like, "This doesn't make sense. Why would a why would big tobacco own a health company? That doesn't seem right." So, here were the three choices that were facing the Vector board. They had this bid from Philip Morris for 165 p per share. They had a bid from an American private equity firm for 155 pair or in door number three, they could just stay independent because there was really no problem. The company's doing fine. The public in the UK was super outraged. The British Thoracic Society begged them to say no. Like every person who thought about this for 5 seconds could see this is going to be a massively valued destroying error. But the only people that mattered were the people on the board of directors of the Vector Corporation. They had, I think, two meetings about it and they just said, "Our hands are tied. We have a fiduciary duty to accept the highest bid." Which they did. So yes, if you think I was exaggerating, I was. I said it was a dollar per share. In real life, it was more like 15 cents a share. So, let's find out what happened next, shall we? Can you guess?

实在太痛。我再讲一个故事吧——前面我们讲了一些挺正面的故事，这次讲个不太开心的。

这些年我做过一个小练习：我问创始人，或者任意 seniority 的 leader：在我们开始聊细节之前，先告诉我——你心里“全球最 evil 的公司”是哪家？有些人秒答：“哦我知道。”有些人会反问：“你说 evil 是什么意思？”我说：“就是那种不管开你多少钱你都不会去工作的公司，你一听就知道他们没干好事的那种。”每个人脑子里都有这么一家公司。你愿意说出你心里那家是哪家也行，不愿意也没关系——为了讨论方便我会假定一家。

如果我跟一群人做这个练习，比如 Zoom 上大家都往聊天框里打，会出现各种答案：有人写 Halliburton；越来越多人开始写科技公司了——我年轻的时候这绝对不会发生，但现在你确实经常看到。有人写 Monsanto、有人写某私募基金、人们对什么生气就把哪家公司点名出来。所以现在举例不难。

我父亲是 pulmonologist（肺科医生），所以我从小就被灌输“Philip Morris 是世界上最 evil 的公司”。我们今天就拿它当假设的例子。你要是觉得 Philip Morris 挺好、价值观跟我不一样，没关系——你就替换成你心目中“打死都不会去工作”的那家公司。

现在我请你想象——你现在所在的公司，假设你是创始人，那就是你这家；如果你是员工，那就是你工作的这家；总之是你“在乎”的那家公司。假设 Philip Morris 哪天来敲门说：我想用比现在股价高 1 美元/股的价格买下你的公司，卖不卖？绝大多数人：“NO，不卖，绝对不卖。”

有一次有人反问我：“那他们买来要干嘛？”我说“哦不好意思我得说清楚——他们买下来是要拿这家公司给小孩卖香烟用。”——“那现在卖吗？”“更不卖了！”那种听到这个假设时大家口吐莲花的话，我不能在你播客上原文重复——可能有小朋友在听。OK，大家是真的会被这个想法激怒。

然后我说：“那你知不知道——根据你自己签过的法律文件，你公司当前的章程里，你已经主动写进去了一条规则——在这种情况下，你有 fiduciary duty 必须说 yes。”

他们就：“这不可能！我的律师我那哥们儿绝对不会这么坑我！”我说：“那你打电话给他，问问我说的对不对，回头告诉我。”——结果他们回来：“他承认了。他说他是给我提供”最佳实践“的标准文件，方便我以后融资。”

偶尔会有人说：“Eric 你夸张了。这种情况可能存在，但现实里真的会发生吗？我还在找 PMF 呢，需要担心这个吗？”——在你说我夸张之前，请你看下 Vectura 这家公司的创始科学家是怎么想的。

Vectura 是一家英国公司，从 University of Bath 拆分出来的。他们做吸入式治疗药——治哮喘、COPD 之类的，就是 inhaler。一家正经做药的公司。他们做得很好，融了资，在 London Stock Exchange 上市了。某一天，真的，是 Philip Morris 来收购他们。

这个故事我之所以知道——是因为我用 Philip Morris 举例用了好几年。我研究这本书的时候想：“咦，有没有真的有公司被 Philip Morris 收购过的？”我就去问 Claude——我把假设的情境描述出来，它说“你是在问 Vectura 吗？”我说“告诉我多一点”。原来真有这家公司。事情是：Philip Morris 说他们要 diversify，做 nicotine 之外的业务，然后想“哎我们很懂'怎么吸进去东西'这件事，那买一家 inhaler 公司挺合理”——正常人听到都觉得“这说不通啊，大烟草公司凭什么拥有一家健康公司？”

Vectura 董事会面前其实有三个选择：来自 Philip Morris 的 165 便士/股报价、一家美国 private equity 的 155 便士/股报价、还有“门 3”——保持独立，公司本身经营得挺好。英国公众极度愤怒，British Thoracic Society（英国胸科学会）求他们说 NO。任何稍微想 5 秒钟的人都能看出来这会是巨大的价值毁灭。但唯一能决定的人是 Vectura 董事会的人。他们开了大概两次会，然后说：“我们手脚被绑住了，我们 fiduciary duty 要求接受最高报价。”然后就接受了。

所以是的，我刚才确实“夸张”了——我说是高 1 美元/股，现实里更接近高 15 美分/股。咱们看下接下来发生了什么，行吗？你能猜到吗？

[32:02] Lenny

Not great.

猜不出，但肯定不咋样。

[32:02] Eric

Philip Morris spent 1.1 billion pounds to buy Vectura. Uh, within three years, they had taken a $900 million write down and disposed of the company for Peace Parts. It doesn't exist anymore to me. These are the stakes. This is what happens. And I can't tell you, I feel like Perry Mason sometimes when like people are like, I would never do that. And I'm like, "Okay, I hear you have good intentions, but can I please see your signature on the document?" Oh, look. Delaware charters are public record, by the way. If you ever want to know have a friend who's a lawyer, just you want to know if a company has a mission or if they this is going to happen to them, just pull the charter. You can just read it. Read it for yourself. I'm like, is this your signature right here? You yourself sign this document. You don't even understand how your company works. uh this is the stakes I think are are significantly existential and especially now that we're entering an age the age of wonders the age of technologies that are incredibly powerful that have planet scale consequences to them you know I think a lot of founders a lot of product people like they want to build a product that they can be proud of that their grandkids will be like happy to hear that that's how the family fortune was made and I know a lot of people that are incredibly rich and so miserable because the thing their baby it got ruined and it got destroyed. Why are we doing this? Okay, let's talk about how to act what to actually do. And you know, this is going to be a kind of a high level overview. Obviously, buy the book if you're really get want to get serious about this stuff coming out May 26 that all

Philip Morris 花了 11 亿英镑买了 Vectura。三年内做了 9 亿美元的减值，最后把公司拆零件卖了。这公司现在已经不存在了。

这是赌注，这是结局。我有时候觉得自己像 Perry Mason——经常有人跟我说“我绝对不会这么干”，我说“OK 我听你说有好意，但能让我看看文件上你的签名吗？”——顺便说一句，Delaware charters（特拉华州公司章程）是公开记录，你要查一家公司有没有 mission、或者它是否会撞上这种事，你只要找个律师朋友把章程调出来读一下，就一目了然。我会指着说：“这是不是你的签名？这是你亲手签的文件——你自己都没搞懂自己公司是怎么运作的。”

我觉得这件事的赌注是“近乎存在性”的，尤其是我们正在进入一个 age of wonders（奇迹时代）、一个能在行星尺度产生后果的、力量极其强大的技术时代。

我认识很多创始人、很多产品人——他们想做出一款让自己骄傲的产品，希望几十年后他们的孙辈听说“咱家的财富是这么来的”会觉得开心。我也认识非常多极其有钱但极其痛苦的人，因为他们做出来的那个 baby，被毁了，被搞砸了。“我们到底图啥？”

好，咱们来聊“具体该怎么做”。注意接下来这部分会是 high level 的概览——想认真搞这件事，就买书。这书 5 月 26 日就上市了。

[33:28] Lenny

May 26. Yes. Thank you.

5 月 26 日，对。谢谢你。

[33:29] Eric

Anywhere you buy books, talk about what we should do and I just want to plant the seed of Open AI is probably on people's minds as they hear this idea of building a nonprofit.

凡是你买书的地方都买得到。咱们聊聊“该做什么”。我想先埋个种子——很多人听到“做一家非营利”这个 idea，脑子里第一反应肯定是 OpenAI。

[33:36] Eric

Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there and obviously in the book I tell the anthropic story where I I played a bit part. So, we'll we'll get to all that. We'll get to all that. But let but let's start with the easy stuff first because like when you like AI is kind of like the humanity's final exam. You know, you've heard that that joke. Like these issues are so amplified in AI. Of course, we have to get it right. I think it's incredibly important. And I've done my I've done what I can to to set us on that proper path. But but it's easier to see it I think in simpler businesses. Um open eyes insanely complicated. So let's look at it in some some simpler examples. First let's start with the principle I call harder is easier. This is the this is the the leadership principle that anybody can adopt. There's truly like there's nobody who's not who you tell me you have no power whatsoever. Like everyone's got some influence. And if you have any influence at all, you can adopt this principle. Like when I talk to people about business, I don't care if I'm talking to two guys in a garage, founders, you know, or or I'm talking to super boards or CEO seuite, whatever. Everyone always says to me just what you were saying a minute ago. I was like, "Man, Eric, business is already so hard. I now you want me to do extra now. I got to worry about the Vector thing and this other stuff. Like, like, man, I'm already just trying to get through the day." Like, it's so hard. But I think this is a basically backwards way of looking at it because I ask people, could it be just consider the possibility that one of the reasons you're finding business so hard is that nobody trusts you? If they trusted you, maybe it would be a little bit easier. Now, actually, this is not a supposition. We have really good evidence. Companies where their employees trust them spend way less time on employee communications. They have much better alignment. Everyone's kind of rowing in the same directions. When customers trust you, they are, of course, you have way higher loyalty. Your cost of customer acquisition is lower, but also customers more likely to stick with you after you make a mistake. Uh they're more likely to try your new product. Like so many people are like, "God, customers are so fickle. they have no loyalty, you know, just like they only care about the slick marketing from our competitors. But maybe because you view these things as extra is part of the problem. So harder is easier is a principle that says if you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't want to tell you what your values are, you tell me what they are. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards. Now, you can't do it for the reward or it doesn't work. You have to do it for the thing itself. Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs. So, let me give you another story because now we've been talking about like lofty stuff and I want to talk about something super practical and that's I mentioned Cloudflare before. So, let me actually tell the Cloudflare story. I like Cloudflare because Matthew Prince and his co-founders they like they were really anti- consulting BS talk like they didn't want if you in the early days you know they came out of Harvard Business School and so they were like traumatized. They were like no I don't want to hear about mission statement. I don't want to hear about values. I don't just we making a firewall and putting it in the cloud. it's not that complicated like we don't want to hear it. So for years they had no mission statement and this is a critical point. Uh as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing. Okay? It's not something you can slap on with a label. You have to build it in. You want to have a company that stands for quality. You got to build quality in from the inside. Deming taught this in the 40s like this is not some new idea. This is a critical idea. This is what craftsmanship really means. Okay. So, we know that Cloudflare had a mission because quite often they would do this harder is easier stuff and without even really knowing why. Like there's a very famous example in their history where pro-democracy protesters want to say, oh, I forget what nation state they were pissing off. I better not say in case I get it wrong. Pissing off some nation state were having their having like state sponsored hackers try to take their websites down so they couldn't coordinate their pro-democracy protests. They were going around Silicon Valley begging big tech companies to help them defend their websites. No one would do it. All these big mega companies, even like Google, were just like, I'm too scared. And so Cloudflare, the tiny startup, is like we'll do it. These were like free tier customers. They weren't even paying any money. and they're like, "Yes, we will incur the wrath of nation state level hackers to protect you because it's the right thing to do for no reward whatsoever." That was just the kind of company they were. So anyway, a couple years in, they're having lunch and one of the engineers says, "You know why I like working at this company? I just feel like it's the first place I've worked where we're just we're trying to make a better internet." And everyone at the table's like, "Yeah, make a better internet." Someone asked Matthew, "Oh, is that our mission statement?" Matt, no. We don't have a mission statement. What are you talking about? note but it actually was over time the engineers people worked there kept saying make a better internet that was that was how we talk about it and eventually the founders had to be convinced okay let's adopt this as our mission statement which they did that is their mission statement to this day they had to eventually adopt formal values like as you get bigger these things really matter it matters that you document those emergent properties otherwise how are people supposed to know what they are their number one value by the way is be principled which is the ultimate harder is easier move so this all sounds great It's fun to have values. It's fun to have a mission statement when it doesn't cost you anything. But sometimes it can be very expensive. Can make your life a lot harder. That's why we call the principal harder is easier. One day, an engineer, a junior engineer, not like some senior executive or anything, walks into Matthew Prince's office and he says, "Boss, isn't our isn't our uh mission statement to make a better internet?" Uhhuh. When you're a CEO, any any conversation that starts this way is generally going to be extra work for you. So, you're like, "What is it now?" It's like, well, you were saying at the board meeting that our number one driver of revenue, the thing that causes people to upgrade from our free to premium plans, this is a few years ago now, is uh web encryption, SSL encryption, right? You said that makes sense because SSL encryption is expensive to offer. We can't offer it for free. We have to get the certificates and pay for them. We have to do all this extra cryptographic stuff. It has compute, you know, we have scarce comput. What boss? Wouldn't a better internet be an encrypted internet? And he's like, "Yes." So what's your point? So like why? But if it would be better, why are we giving it away for free? And so many people have heard this story. If you've ever been a middle manager in a company, okay, you know this. You're just like, "Oh my god." Every day someone walks into your office, it's like, "Hey boss, let's give our product away for free for no reason." Okay? Like your job as a middle manager is to be like, "No, we have a strategy. Get back on the strategy." Right? redirect. Hey, thank you for your buy in and your input, but we have a job to do. So, everyone's expecting Matthew to react that way and we be the most normal thing in the world. This is our most profitable product and you're saying we should give it away for free, get lost. No. Matthew told me once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. And he he uttered the three key words. He said, "Let's figure it out. Figure it out." This is the the leadership principle I think is so powerful. The figure it out principle. When you have if you're committed to something, you stand for quality or whatever, it is going to make life harder. The best leaders, the ones I really admire, they revel in it. They love the difficulty because every time you have one of these impossible dilemmas, it's a chance to teach what you really stand for. So, Matthew insisted the whole team rally to figure out how to give encryption away for free. Now, they couldn't just give it away for free. He's like, go bankrupting the company won't achieve the mission. We had to find a way to make it sustainable. And I won't go through all the technical details of like how they managed to get the cost. They had to hand roll their own software and assembly language. They had to do these complicated bisdev deals with certificate authorities. Like they figured out how to do it and they drove their own cost down. Now keep in mind that at any time, first of all, they could have used the difficulty as an excuse. Oh, it's too hard. We can't do it. Give up. Once they did it, they could have said, "Wait a minute. This is just free margin. We can make our costs lower and then we just get free money." when they shipped it, they had to report to their board on what happened. The conversion rates for their for premium product went down. So, they could easily have bailed out at that point, but they didn't. They stuck with it because this is what we stand for. Now, of course, it's a happy ending story. The top of funnel increased by an order of magnitude. In fact, to this day, people still talk about how Cloudflare is like the reason you take for granted we have an encrypted internet. The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a 70 billion dollar company today. But most leaders when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI based thinking. They've been taught shareholder primacy. They've been taught that that's the path of maximum profitability. To give you like an easy contrast, um Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon, once told me this story. Everyone remember Groupon? Maybe not now. It's kind of fallen out of public consciousness, but there was this time when Groupon was one of the fastest growing private companies in America. It was powered by a daily email with a cool deal. And the whole thing was you got one email a day from Groupon. They went public on the one email a day. That's how successful it was. And I remember he told me the story one day, you know, his executives and employees started coming into his office. And they'd be like, you know, boss, we need to make the quarter. We need to make more money. We're public company now. We don't want to be better than one email. Have you considered two emails? And he was like, no, one email a day is like that's our whole thing. But he said over time they ground him down and they kept saying they were using language that sounds kind of lean startupy shouldn't we do an experiment shouldn't we look at the data what about the IR like it's just like what about the ROI and so he was like all right fine we'll run the experiment he ran the experiment two emails a day makes more money so he couldn't he couldn't say no and everything was fine for several months until someone came into his office and said you know boss you know it would be better than two email you should send three emails and next thing you know they're sending eight emails and this is not just group on I have had so many CEOs tell me this exact story about email frequency. Email frequency is like for some reason the tip of the spear where it's like we we don't really have any way to defend doing the right thing here. So we do the wrong thing that destroyed the whole company. But in the short term we made a bunch of money. So if you can stick to the harder is easier principle that is the first line of defense against losing whatever it is that makes a company special.

对对。我们会聊到的。书里我也讲了 Anthropic 那个故事——我在里面演过一个小角色。这些都会聊到。但是咱们先从简单的开始——AI 这事儿就像是“人类的期末考试”，你应该听过这个梗。所有这些问题在 AI 这件事上都被放大了，我们当然必须把它做对。我觉得这事极端重要，我也已经尽我所能把我们引到一条正确的轨道上。但是这些原理在更简单的业务里更容易看清楚，OpenAI 的情况复杂得离谱。我们先看一些更简单的例子。

先讲一个我叫做 harder is easier（“难即是易”）的原则。这是一条任何人都能采纳的领导力原则。我从不接受“我完全没权力”的说法——每个人都有点影响力，只要你有任何一点点影响力，你就能采纳这条原则。

我跟任何人聊业务，无论对方是车库里的两个 founder、还是大公司董事会、CEO 套间，他们都会跟我说你刚刚说的那句话：“Eric，做生意本来就够难的了，现在你还要我多做这些？我还得操心 Vectura 那种事？我光是过完每一天就够呛了。”

但我觉得这种看法完全是反过来的。我会问：“你有没有考虑过这种可能性——你之所以觉得做生意这么难，是因为没人信任你？如果他们信任你，可能就会容易一点儿。”

这不是猜想。我们有非常确凿的证据。员工信任你的公司，花在内部沟通上的时间少得多，alignment 也好得多——大家是真在一个方向上划船。客户信任你的公司，loyalty 高得多、CAC 低得多，而且当你犯错时客户更可能继续留下来、你出新产品他们也更愿意试。很多人跟我说“哎客户太善变了、没忠诚度、只看竞争对手那套花里胡哨的营销”——但有可能：你把这些东西视为“额外负担”，这本身就是问题的一部分。

所以 harder is easier 这条原则的意思是：如果你愿意把“提前花功夫去 commit 到品质、设计、伦理、诚信、安全”这些事——不管你的“那个东西”是什么，我不替你定价值观，价值观你自己定——只要你愿意在决策上守原则，你就会收获意想不到的回报。但你不能“为了拿到这个回报”才去做，那样行不通。你必须是为这件事本身去做。

Trustworthiness（可信赖度）是整个商业世界里最被低估的资产。而那些能创造“可信赖度”的事——按定义——如果按 ROI 排优先级，它们一定垫底。因为做正确的事，回报是无形的，成本是有形的。

讲完了大道理，来个非常具体的故事。前面提过 Cloudflare，那我就讲 Cloudflare 的故事。我喜欢 Cloudflare，因为 Matthew Prince 和他的联合创始人特别反咨询那套 BS 黑话。早期他们刚从 Harvard Business School 出来，被那种东西“创伤”过，所以他们的态度是：“别跟我讲 mission statement，别跟我讲 values，我们就是做个 firewall 把它搬上云，没那么复杂，我们不想听这套。”

所以他们好几年根本没有 mission statement。这点很关键——我们做 leader 经常太执着于 value statements、mission statements，忘了 mission statement 不是 mission 本身。地图不是疆域。Mission 是从你正在孕育的那个“活的超有机体”中涌现出来的属性。这不是你贴个标签就能贴上去的，你必须把它从内部建进去。

你想让公司“代表品质”，你必须把品质从内部建进产品。Deming 在 40 年代就讲过这件事——这不是什么新 idea。这是一条核心 idea。这就是 craftsmanship（手艺/匠人精神）真正的含义。

OK，我们怎么知道 Cloudflare 是有 mission 的？因为他们经常自己也搞不太清楚为啥就会做出那种 harder is easier 的事。他们历史上有个非常著名的例子：一些 pro-democracy 抗议者——具体得罪的是哪个 nation state 我不能乱说，免得记错——总之被某国 state-sponsored 黑客攻击，目标是把他们的网站打下来，让他们没法组织抗议。他们跑遍 Silicon Valley，请各种 big tech 帮他们防御网站。所有人都不接——包括 Google 这种巨无霸——他们都说“我害怕”。

而 Cloudflare，当时是个小创业公司，说：“我们接。”——而且这些根本是免费层的客户，一分钱不付。“是的，我们愿意承受 nation state 级别黑客的怒火来保护你，因为这是正确的事——没有任何回报。”那就是这家公司当时的气质。

几年后，他们某天午饭上，一个工程师说：“你知道我为什么喜欢在这家公司工作吗？我感觉这是我待过的第一家'我们只是在试着 make a better internet'的公司。”桌上所有人：“是啊——make a better internet。”有人问 Matthew：“这是不是我们的 mission statement？”Matthew：“不是啊，我们没有 mission statement，你在说啥？”

但其实它就是。工程师们和员工们一直在把这句话挂在嘴上——“make a better internet”，这就是大家描述自己工作的方式。最终创始人被说服了：“好吧，那咱们就正式把这个采纳为 mission statement。”——他们就采纳了，时至今日还是这条。等公司变大，他们也不得不正式定下一些价值观——因为公司一大，把那些涌现出来的属性 document 下来真的很重要，不然别人怎么知道？他们的第一价值观就是 be principled（守原则）——这是 harder is easier 的终极形态。

那这一切听起来很美好。在不用付代价的时候，定 values 和 mission statement 很好玩。但有时候它会非常贵，会让你的人生难上加难。这就是为什么这条原则叫 harder is easier。

有一天，一个 junior engineer——不是什么资深高管——走进 Matthew Prince 办公室对他说：“老板，咱们的 mission statement 不是 make a better internet 吗？”“嗯，是。”——做 CEO 的人都懂，任何以这种方式开头的对话基本意味着接下来你要多干活。“现在又怎么了？”

他说：“你在董事会上说，我们营收第一驱动力——客户从免费版升级到付费版——是 SSL encryption（SSL 加密）。”——这是几年前的事了——“你说这合理，因为 SSL 加密提供成本很高，我们不能免费给，要买证书、要做加密计算、要消耗算力。”——“嗯，对。”——“那老板，'更好的 internet'不就是'加密的 internet'吗？”“是的。”“那为啥我们不免费给？”

听到这儿，要是你在哪家公司当过 middle manager，你立刻就懂了。每天都有人跑进你办公室说“老板，我们把产品免费送出去吧，无偿的”。作为 middle manager 你的工作就是说“NO，我们有 strategy，回到 strategy 上来，谢谢你的 input，但我们有事要干”。

所有人都以为 Matthew 会这么反应——这是世界上最正常的反应。“这是我们最赚钱的产品，你让我免费送，滚。”——但 Matthew 没有。他后来跟我说：once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it（一旦我看见了，就没法假装没看见了）。他说了三个词：Let's figure it out（咱们想办法搞定）。

Figure it out 这条领导力原则太强了。当你 commit 到了某件事——你代表品质、代表 X——它一定会让生活变难。我最敬佩的那些 leader 反而 revel in it（享受这种难），因为每一次出现这种“不可能的两难”，都是你向团队展示自己真正代表什么的机会。

Matthew 坚持让整个团队一起想办法——怎么把加密免费送出去。当然不能就那么白送。“把公司搞破产也实现不了 mission。”他们必须找到可持续的方式。我就不讲全部技术细节了——他们最后只能手撸自己的软件，写到汇编层级；要跟证书颁发机构谈复杂的 BD 协议；他们硬是把自己的成本降下来。

注意——在整个过程里他们随时可以放弃。一开始，他们完全可以拿“太难”当借口：“做不了，放弃。”做出来之后，他们还可以说：“等等，我们成本降这么低，那这就是白白多出来的 margin 啊。”——把它当成额外利润收掉就好。但他们 shipped it 的时候要向董事会汇报——付费版的转化率掉了。他们当时完全可以缩回去，但没有，他们坚持住了，因为 this is what we stand for（这就是我们代表的东西）。

当然是个 happy ending：top of funnel 增长了一个量级。今天大家还在讲这个故事——你之所以视“加密的 internet”为理所当然，很大程度上是因为 Cloudflare。他们因此赢得的信任，是他们今天能成为 700 亿美元市值公司的原因。

但绝大多数 leader 被要求为自己的原则辩护的时候做不到，因为他们被训练的是 ROI 思维、shareholder primacy，被灌输“那才是利润最大化的路径”。

给你一个反面对照。Groupon 的创始人 Andrew Mason，曾经跟我讲过一个故事。还记得 Groupon 吗？现在估计有点淡出公众视野了。但有一段时间，Groupon 是美国增长最快的私营公司之一。它的引擎是一封“每日一封的好 deal 邮件”。整个产品的灵魂就是——你每天只从 Groupon 收到一封邮件。靠“每天一封邮件”他们就上市了，成功到了那个程度。

他后来跟我讲：上市后某天起，他的高管和员工开始往他办公室里走：“老板，我们要打数。我们要赚更多钱。我们现在是上市公司了。能不能突破一封？要不试试两封？”他说：“不行，每天一封邮件是我们这家公司的全部立身之本。”

但他说他们一直磨他。而且他们用的话术非常 lean startup 风：“咱要不要做个实验？要不要看下数据？ROI 怎么算？”——Andrew 想“行吧，跑个实验”。实验结果：一天两封邮件赚得更多。他没法说 NO 了。一切平静了几个月，直到有一天有人走进他办公室：“老板，比两封更好的是三封。”——然后你猜怎么着？过几个月他们就在一天发八封邮件了。

这不只是 Groupon。我听过无数 CEO 跟我讲过几乎一模一样的“邮件频率”故事。Email frequency 不知道为啥就是这一类问题的“枪尖”——大家在这件事上完全找不到任何为“正确做法”辩护的语言，所以就做了错事，毁了公司。短期是赚了一大笔。

所以如果你能坚持住 harder is easier 这条原则——它就是抵御“失去公司之所以特别”的第一道防线。

[44:21] Lenny

Eric, you're such a wonderful storyteller. I'm just like sitting here just compelled.

Eric，你真是一个超棒的讲故事的人。我坐在这儿听得入迷。

[44:27] Eric

Well, thank you.

哈哈，谢谢。

[44:28] Lenny

Oh, man. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor, Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Dualingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI. But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks including SOCK 2, ISO 27,0001 and HIPPA. This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant more than ever before. Trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn [music] more at vanta.com/lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's vanta.com/lenny. I want to talk through just like what do you do? So there's write a mission statement. Values is that a part of this just define your values. Talk about like the

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[45:44] Eric

bullet point. So again, no writing the statement is not valuable. Okay. The statement is not what it is. The reason I would use the oldfashioned word ethos. I tried to write this whole book without using any trendy consulting language at all. So I try not to use the word stakeholder. I try not to use the word culture. I tried to really go old-fashioned. That's why I started with Saul Price. Rather than talk about stakeholders and mission statement and values, I want to know who are your fiduciaries. It's like a real oldfashioned word fiduciary. But to me, the question every leader has to answer and this is every product has to answer this question. What is its purpose? Who would you rather die than betray? Okay. So if you tell me I want to have a high quality product, that's what I would rather die than ship slot. Like think about how Steve Jobs was like he was this is a guy who would fight with people over the layout of the wires inside a computer he didn't want customers to be allowed to open and ever see. That's so classic. Harder is easier, right? Just it has to be a certain way. If you know stories about Ivon Shannard, the founder of Patagonia today, he's more famous for his environmental activism, but he was a quality zealot. He believed that quality was an objective function and that every product had a quality level that it deserved. Most people think that's insane. That's why Patagonia is such a success. That idea is powerful. So whatever that thing is, that purpose, we have to find ways to encode it in our like management system so that there's no way for us to make money by betraying the principle, whatever it is. So this can happen both like at the operational level and at the governance level. Both both are really important. people hearing this, I know some people are going to be like, "Purpose? Is this some ESG nonsense?" Like, okay, there's a very funny quote in the book. Um, Unilver, the big food giant, we went through a phase a couple years ago where they were going to infuse purpose into all of their products. And a Wall Street investor was just like, I've had it with this, wrote this wrote them a nasty letter was like, look at the point that we're debating the purpose of Helman's mayonnaise, I think you've lost the plot. And I love that quote because it's funny, but actually what's so funny about it to me is humble though it is, Helman's mayonnaise is food. Its purpose is super clear. And again, if you think it doesn't matter what the product manager who runs Helman's Manise thinks the purpose is, going back to our Vital Farms question, like think how easy it would be when an efficiency consultant shows up and says, you know, I think we could save 3 cents on the bill of materials if you just make the pro the thing carcinogenic. And you're like, "Oh, that's wouldn't that come back to bite us?" Yeah, but long after your stock options are vested, buddy. What do you care? If the product manager thinks their purpose is quality, that matters. If they think their purpose is extraction and exploitation, it matters. Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson and Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder and covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth, optimization, quarterly targets. So, what we want to do is that's the first most important technique is like what is the purpose? Who would we rather die than betray? Like you got to write it down. You got to say, as Saul Price did, customers first, employees second, shareholders last. Or uh the great Peter Ducker said it would actually he said that that's backwards. It should be employees first, customers second, shareholders last. I don't care. You tell me what you believe. You got to write it down. And then we have to do a a thing I call mission drive. Companies that claim to be missiondriven, most of them are just mission hopeful. Okay? It's it's It's just a candy coating on top of an extractive engine. Sorry, I don't buy it. If you're serious about being missiondriven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission. That's the audit we have to do. We have to look at if we were if someone in the company got tempted to cut quality, to cut corners, to to decrease performance, to deal with like the things that tend to get cut first, safety, performance, quality, design, those are always the most vulnerable. Innovation, I guess, is fifth. So that's like the fi the five horsemen of the apocalypse is like you can get rid of those things and nothing bad happens right away because the whole point of trust is I can betray you and you wouldn't even notice. So we have those are like the canary in the coal mine. Is there any way is anyone's bonus target is our OKR system. Is there anyone on this team and again you could do this at the company level of course but you're just a team a team of five. Is there anyone on this team who could profit by portraying one of our principles? Is it is it possible? And you mean it's really possible that and this is actually why automated testing is so good, right? Like think about how many people can just like break the design. No one even notices. Well, it's a test notice. With with AI, we have so many new capabilities for auditing, for preventing, for making sure, but we have to choose to use the tools for that. That's one. So that's kind of like the general like category of things um that we can build.

再说一遍，写宣言本身没有价值。重点不是那段文字。我之所以用 ethos（精神气质）这个老派词，是因为我写这本书时刻意不用任何流行的咨询黑话。我尽量不用 stakeholder，不用 culture，刻意走老派路线。这也是为什么我从 Sol Price 讲起。我不谈利益相关者、使命宣言、价值观，我想知道：你的 fiduciaries（受信托人）是谁？fiduciary 是个特别老派的词。但在我看来，每个领导者都要回答这个问题——每个产品也都要回答这个问题：它的目的是什么？你宁死也不愿背叛的是谁？所以如果你告诉我你想做高质量产品，那就意味着你宁死也不会发垃圾产品出去。想想 Steve Jobs，他会为了电脑内部走线的布局跟人吵架——客户根本不会打开机箱看，他也要争。这就是经典的”难才是易”。它就必须以特定的方式存在。如果你了解 Patagonia 创始人 Yvon Chouinard 的故事，他今天更出名的是环保活动家身份，但他其实是个质量狂热分子。他相信质量是一个客观的衡量标准，每个产品都有它应得的质量水平。大多数人觉得这疯了。但这恰恰是 Patagonia 如此成功的原因。这个理念非常强大。所以不管那个”目的”是什么，我们都要找到方法把它编码进管理系统，让你不可能通过背叛原则来赚钱，无论这原则是什么。这事可以在运营层面发生，也可以在治理层面发生，两者都很重要。我知道有人听了会说：”目的？这是不是又是 ESG 那套废话？”好，书里有一句很搞笑的话。Unilever（联合利华）这家食品巨头，几年前经历了一个阶段，想给所有产品都注入”使命感”。一个华尔街投资者忍无可忍，写了封刻薄的信给他们：”看吧，我们都在争论 Hellmann's 蛋黄酱的”目的”是什么了，我觉得你们已经走火入魔了。”我喜欢这段话，因为它好笑，但真正让我觉得有趣的是——虽然听起来卑微，Hellmann's 蛋黄酱是食物啊。它的目的非常清楚。再说一次，如果你觉得 Hellmann's 蛋黄酱的产品经理怎么想”目的”不重要——回到我们 Vital Farms 的例子——想想一个效率顾问跑过来跟你说：”我觉得只要让这东西带致癌性，物料成本能省三分钱。”你会说：”呃，那以后不会反咬我们一口吗？”对方说：”会啊，但那时你的股票期权早就归属完了，兄弟，你管它呢。”如果产品经理认为他们的目的就是质量，这就有意义。如果他们觉得目的是榨取和剥削，这也会有意义。再说一次，如果你觉得我在夸张——Johnson & Johnson 的产品经理在婴儿爽身粉里加了石棉还掩盖了事实，因为虽然他们的使命宣言写的是”病人健康”，但实际使命已经变成了增长、优化、季度业绩。所以我们要做的第一件、最重要的事就是：什么是目的？我们宁死也不背叛的是谁？你得把它写下来。你得像 Sol Price 那样说：”客户第一，员工第二，股东最后。”或者像伟大的 Peter Drucker 说的——他其实说应该反过来——”员工第一，客户第二，股东最后。”我不在乎排序。你告诉我你信什么，把它写下来。然后我们要做一件我叫作 mission drive（使命驱动）的事。那些自称使命驱动的公司，大多数其实只是”使命希望”，明白吗？就是在一个榨取性引擎上面裹了层糖衣。抱歉，我不买账。如果你真的认真要做使命驱动，你得向我证明：除了实现使命之外，你赚不到钱。这是我们要做的审计。我们要看，如果公司里有人被诱惑去削减质量、走捷径、降低性能——那些最容易被砍掉的东西：安全、性能、质量、设计。这是最脆弱的几样。创新算第五吧。这就像启示录的五骑士，你可以砍掉它们，短期不会出事，因为信任的本质就是：我背叛了你，你都不会立刻发现。所以这些就是煤矿里的金丝雀。有没有任何方式——任何人的奖金目标、我们的 OKR 系统——这个团队里有没有人能通过背叛原则获利？哪怕只是一个五个人的小团队也要问。这有没有可能？这也是为什么自动化测试这么好——想想有多少人可以悄悄破坏设计，没人会发现。但测试会发现。有了 AI，我们有了那么多新能力来审计、预防、确保，但我们必须选择去用这些工具。这是第一类，大致上属于我们可以构建的东西的总类。

[50:44] Lenny

And so just to just to make sure it's clear. So it's write down your purpose, whatever that is. And I imagine it's like a sentence is the idea.

为了把这点说清楚——所以是写下你的目的，不管那是什么。我想大概就是一句话的样子？

[50:52] Eric

Yeah, that'd be great. As simple as better, right? Like to make a better internet is such a great such a great purpose. I tell in the story in the book the story of devoted health. They're a health insurance company, but their instruction to their employees is to treat every customer the way you would your own parents.

对，那再好不过。越简单越好。比如”让互联网更好”，就是一个非常棒的目的。我在书里讲了 Devoted Health 的故事，他们是一家健康保险公司，他们对员工的指令是：像对待自己的父母一样对待每一个客户。

[51:05] Lenny

I've heard that one.

我听过这个。

[51:06] Eric

It's just so easy and simple and clear to understand.

简单、清晰、容易理解。

[51:09] Lenny

Okay. So, let's write down your purpose. Uh describe your mission and more importantly the mission. What is it? Drive the mission or the mission.

好。所以先写下你的目的。然后描述你的使命，更重要的是 mission drive。这是什么？是驱动使命，还是叫 mission drive？

[51:17] Eric

Mission drive. Mission drive. which basically uh is is there like a structural way to do this or is this just go through everything going on and see is there

mission drive。mission drive。基本上——有没有一个结构化的方法来做这个？还是说就是把所有事情过一遍看看……

[51:26] Eric

it is I mean I I talk about it in a more formal way in the book but basically I would say that it is to identify your fiduciary commitments like who are the people that you're trying to commit to do something good for what are the metrics or targets that you want to have for each of those people and then um what is the system the accountability system to make sure that those commitments are as important to you as making money.

是这样，我在书里讲得更正式一点，但基本上我会说：要先识别你的受托承诺——你想为哪些人做出承诺要做某些好事？为每一类人你希望有什么指标或目标？然后是问责制度是什么？怎么保证这些承诺对你来说和赚钱一样重要？

[51:50] Lenny

So, it's essentially these kind of like OKRs for your your stake. Let's not call them stakeholders.

所以本质上是给你的——我们就别叫它 stakeholder 了——给他们设 OKR？

[51:56] Eric

Yeah, that's what I see how hard it is to do this. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like OKRs for the And I and I just again people always when we start using this language, people are like, you're trying to impose your values on me. No, you tell me what you care about and then you tell me how you're measuring the things you claim to care about. In in the book, I have a section called don't be evil versus the quarterly report. I I made a study of the blog posts that longtime Google employees write when they leave Google. It's like a genre. There's 50 of them. They're incredible documents actually. If you've never read them or all linked in the book, you can you can read them yourself. And they all have this like very wistful sad quality to them because something really listen for the record, Google's a great company. I'm not saying Google's bad, but Google used to have this don't be evil ethos and it kind of got lost. Got taken off the website. Then it showed up in the employee handbook. Now, it's not even in the employee handbook anymore. And in fact, Google's been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge. And they've had to settle both lawsuits. Okay? That that's how sad the situation has become at Google. And I remember talking to one of these ex-goolers. He'd been there, I think, 13 years. And I said to him, look, he could not, he was like, why did we lose it when we had such good intentions? Why? I wanted to believe management. He's like, I liked management. I thought they were had their heart in the right place. And yet I said, "Okay, answer me this hypothetical just real quick. What is the probability that Google will file its next quarterly report on time?" He was like, "That's a dumb question, Eric. Obviously, they're going to do it." I was like, "No, but give it a number probability." He's like, "Literally 100.0." Yes. As certain as the sun will rise tomorrow, of course. I said, "Great. Now tell me the probability that um Google might accidentally kill somebody and cover it up." And he was like, "Come on, man. They probably wouldn't do that. That's not fair. Put a number on it. Is it 100%. He's like, "Well, like 90%." 95%. I was like, and he start You could He was like, "Well, they got sued for this." He's like, "What if the self-driving car hit somebody?" He could He could already think of the way it could happen. I said, "Okay, how can it be that quarterly reporting is like the thing that we're sure of?" And this and manslaughter. We think our human beings like confused. They love quarterly reports and they're not sure about manslaughter. No. Come on. What is going on here? Google will report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you, I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that happens every time. No exceptions. And if you don't have one, then they are lying to you no matter how good their intentions are.

对，你看做这件事有多难。对，就是这个意思。就是给那些人设 OKR。再说一遍，每次我们用这种语言，总有人说：”你想把你的价值观强加给我。”不，是你告诉我你在乎什么，然后你告诉我你在用什么方式衡量你声称在乎的东西。书里有一节叫《Don't Be Evil 与季度报告》。我研究了那些在 Google 工作多年的人离职时写的博客。这几乎成了一种文体，有 50 多篇，都是非常厉害的文档。如果你没读过，书里都有链接，可以自己去看。它们都有一种很怅然若失的伤感气质，因为有些东西真的——我要先声明，Google 是一家很棒的公司，我不是在说 Google 坏。但 Google 曾经有”Don't Be Evil”这个精神气质，后来慢慢就丢了。先是从官网上拿掉，然后只出现在员工手册里，现在连员工手册都没了。事实上 Google 已经因为违反”Don't Be Evil”承诺被起诉过两次，两次都不得不和解。这就是现状有多悲哀。我记得我跟一位前 Google 员工聊过，他在那儿待了大概 13 年。他跟我说：”我们当初有那么好的初心，为什么会失去它？为什么？我曾经那么想相信管理层，我喜欢管理层，我觉得他们出发点是好的。”我说：”好，你回答我一个假设性的问题。Google 准时提交下一份季度财报的概率是多少？”他说：”这是个蠢问题，Eric，他们肯定会做。”我说：”不，给我个数字概率。”他说：”字面上的 100.0。”是的，就像明天太阳会升起一样确定。我说：”好。那现在告诉我 Google 不小心把人弄死然后掩盖这件事的概率是多少？”他说：”拜托，他们不会那样做的，这不公平。”我说：”给个数字。是 100% 吗？”他说：”呃，大概 90% 吧。”我说：”95%？”他开始……他说：”他们因为这种事被起诉过。”他说：”如果自动驾驶车撞了人怎么办？”他已经能想象出这事怎么发生了。我说：”那为什么我们对季度财报这么确定，对过失杀人也这么确定？我们认为人类很糊涂——他们爱季度报告，但对过失杀人不确定？拜托，这是怎么回事？”Google 会准时提交季度财报，是因为有一整套庞大、昂贵到不可思议的机器确保每次都按时发生。而 Don't Be Evil 只是个口号。所以如果有人告诉你”我对某件事是认真的”，太好了。把机器拿给我看。把你为确保它每次都发生、没有例外而做出的承诺拿给我看。如果你没有，那他们就是在骗你，无论初心多好。

[54:46] Lenny

And this might be a good segue to kind of the second bucket of stuff. So the way you described it earlier, I think is a really helpful way of framing it. There's kind of the ethos, which is what we've been talking about, values, purpose, mission, and then there's integrity. So talk about that. Sure. So why did I use the word integrity? In human lang in normal human language, not consultant speak, but like among normal people, integrity has two meanings. One is like Lenny, you're a very high integrity person. If you say you're going to meet me at 2 o'clock at a place, like I know you're going to be there, right? Everyone's got a friend like that where if they say they're going to do something, they're going to do it. And more importantly, if they're not sure, if they're like, I think I can be there at 2 o'clock. They never would say, I'll see you at 2:00. They won't do it. They know that to tell the truth requires you to really make a commitment. But we also, so that's kind of like the ability to keep your promise. But we also have the word structural integrity, right? I told him before like the difference between corroded bolts and stainless steel organizations these two senses of the word become one. An organization that is weak cannot keep its promises because the person making the promise won't be there. Imagine you got a promise from the founders of Vectura that they'll never sell cigarettes to children. Oops. Sorry. Right. No, that's not integrity. So the goal of of structural integrity for an organization is to give it the power to resist temptation from the inside, resist betrayal at the board level and resist pressure from the outside. As I mentioned, Costco has very famously has this governance fortress that protects it from outside pressure. And people have come for Costco. I quote some hilarious quotes in the book about um one of my favorites is Costco takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in improving the customer experience. That's meant to be a criticism. Okay, that's not what they're supposed to do. So why can they resist? Because they have the tools they need to fight back. Their board sees its responsibility as a bull work against pressure rather than as an amplifier of financial gravity. So that can sound very challenging and abstract and now we're talking about board level stuff, IPOs. People a lot of people are like, I don't have the power for that. Okay, that's okay. We can start with something very simple. We started with purpose and ethos. We can start with purpose here too. I mentioned before that most founders have never read their own corporate charter, which if you're if you're a founder and you're listening to this and you've never read your own corporate charter, you have a company that is operating, it is your homework. You have to do this. You have to know what it says. This is so common that the HBO show Silicon Valley makes a joke about it where one of the found one of the investors is like upgrading the founder to be like you don't know how your own effing company works because he loses control of it in so like they did their homework. This really does happen. But if you do read your charter, you probably will be more confused than you are now because you will read a sentence like this. It will say the Acme Corporation is hereby incorporated to pursue any lawful act or activity. And you read that and you're like, "That sounds pretty open-ended." Wrong. It sounds open-ended, but it's not. Unfortunately, we live in the era of what's called shareholder primacy. Meaning that according to this theory, which is the governing theory of our lives that we live under this law today, right now, this says that an organization is not a vital living thing. Rather, it is a financial instrument designed to enrich shareholders and nothing else. And therefore, any lawful act or activity today means maximize shareholder returns under the law. People have been raised, now we're old enough, this idea is old enough that we now have a generation of people who have been raised as if this was a natural law. This is how capitalism has always been. But that's wrong. For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the 80s, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great-grandparents thought it was obvious. Like Adam Smith thought it was obvious. Everyone before thought it was obvious that corporations existed to pursue a specific thing, what's called a beneficial purpose in the law. So in the 19th century, for example, if you wanted to make a company, you had to make a declaration to your state legislature that this thing you wanted to make would do something that is publicly beneficial. You'd be like, I want to make a railroad. They'd be like, why? Right? And you had to say it would be beneficial to the public to have a canal between this place and that place. And just to get a sense of how different our best practices are than the historical norms in the 19th century, if say you were the richest person in America and you're like, I want to buy this company and change what it does because I can. First of all, the board would be authorized to fight you to the death. They didn't have to say yes. They would do crazy stuff in the night. These battles were legendary. Some of them are hilarious what would go on between these people. But the second thing, let's say you succeeded anyway. You took the company over and you said, "I'm going to change its purpose from make a railroad to maximize shareholder value." That would have been a crime. The courts would void your charter. You would earn the corporate death penalty for having exceeded the authority of your corporation. So, this is a new idea that we live under. We think it's natural, but it's very new. So, if you don't want that, like that's what and that's what doomed Vector and all these companies. If you don't want that, you can change it. The good news for you listening right now in the year 2026 is that a band of corporate governance rebels have spent the last like 15 or 20 years fighting this and building alternative structures that are available to you. One of them is called the public benefit corporation or PBC. A lot of confusion about this out there because people have seen the little B with a circle on it at their farmers market. It's not that. It's confusing because the same people invented that who also invented this and the word B, the letter B is in both. So, I get it's confusing, but no, public benefit court is the easiest thing I will tell you to do on this whole podcast. Could not be easier. It is a two-page legal filing that you just sub your lawyers can submit it for you in Delaware tomorrow. You just say, "This is the purpose of this company, not any lawful act or purpose." Instead, no, this is a company designed to advance human flourishing by creating safe and responsible AI systems. We advance human flourishing by creating high quality products and selling them. Whatever Whatever you do, just write it down. It's couldn't it couldn't be any easier. And most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's. Anthropic most famously of all. It doesn't guarantee that you're the good guys. Okay? Just writing it down doesn't do that much. But it does solve one very specific problem, which is if someone one day sues you saying you breached your fiduciary duty to investors, you could say, "Nope, investors agreed that this is our purpose to do this thing. Why has Anthropic been able to resist all this pressure? This is one of several of the interlocking components of the armor that protects anthropic from the from outside pressure. If you don't do this, I can't help you, man. This is like the very minimum. You got to do at least this. Now, if you're not at the founder, you probably are wondering, have we done this at my company? This is going to sound so dumb, I know, but you can just ask. Okay? Even if you're in a job interview. I remember someone once came to me and asked me for advice. They wanted to advocate for these ideas, but they were like, I need a job. I don't even work anywhere yet. And they were like caveat. I was about to give them some advice and before you give me your advice, you need to know that I'm not courageous. Okay. So, like I can't do anything scary. I'm not willing to be an activist. Like I just need a job, man. But I am willing to do something. But I felt like they'd asked me for a no bake cookie recipe, you know? I was like a no courage. What can I do? And I was like, okay. And you can do this if you're in a job interview or just ask your boss. Either way. that at the end of your interview, we're going to ask you, do you have any other questions? You can say, "Is this a mission-driven company?" They're going to say, "Yes." Okay, fine. How do you know? Like, like, "What kind of things do we do that's mission driven?" They be, "Oh, we have free beer on Fridays and we we clean up the local park on Saturdays." I don't know what they're going to say. Maybe something great. Maybe something whatever they say, just just nod and be like, "Great." And just ask, "Cool. Is that the legal mission?" Also, is that in the charter? Almost certainly the person you're asking this question to is not going to know the answer to your question. But it's a legitimate question because if you're working at a company that doesn't have this in the charter, you're going to be betrayed eventually. You deserve to know. But more importantly, just by asking, you've now forced them to get the answer. Like you, you know, I mean, you've been in part of of hiring processes. Every hiring process at a well-run company, it's somebody's job to make sure every question a candidate might ask, there's a like frequently asked questions document with the answer. So, she's going to have to ask her boss, who's going to have to ask out her boss and her boss, like I've been in boardrooms where this kind of thing comes up where someone's like, "We're getting this really irritating question from candidates and we don't know how to answer it." Now, maybe just by asking, the CEO also listens to Lenny because everyone listens to Lenny. The CEO's also been thinking about doing it too. But he was like, I don't know if I have the support of the board. I'm not really that courageous to bring it up. Now you've created an excuse. A we got to do it because I mean it's the thing that everyone's doing it. Employees are even starting to ask about it. Like if you read these postmortems of some of these like crazy things that are going on in the AI wars, a surprising percentage of the motivation of leadership is like we want to keep our employees happy. So be an be an unhappy employee who wants to know what's our mission. Is it the real is it the real thing? So, of course, that's not the only thing you can do, but that is the beginning, the easiest one on the integrity side. And again, a company that hasn't done it is very much at risk of eventually being betrayed.

这可能是过渡到第二块内容的好契机。你之前的框架我觉得特别有帮助：一块是 ethos——我们刚才一直在聊的，价值观、目的、使命；另一块是 integrity（整全性）。讲讲这个吧。当然。我为什么用 integrity 这个词？在正常人语言里——不是顾问黑话——integrity 有两层意思。一是说 Lenny，你是个高 integrity 的人。如果你说两点在某个地方见面，我知道你会到。每个人都有这样的朋友，他们说要做什么就一定会做。更重要的是，如果他们不确定，他们会说”我想我两点能到”，他们绝不会说”两点见”。他们不会随便说。他们知道说真话需要做出真正的承诺。这是一种意思——能信守承诺的能力。但我们还有 structural integrity（结构完整性）这个词。我之前提过”腐蚀的螺栓”和”不锈钢组织”的区别。这两层含义合二为一。一个虚弱的组织没法信守承诺，因为做承诺的那个人不会一直在那儿。想象一下你拿到了 Vector Group 创始人”绝不向儿童卖香烟”的承诺。呃，对不起，那不算 integrity。所以一个组织的结构性整全的目标，就是赋予它从内部抵御诱惑、在董事会层面抵御背叛、在外部抵御压力的力量。我之前说过，Costco 有出了名的治理堡垒，能抵御外部压力。有人来”围攻”过 Costco。书里我引用了一些很搞笑的句子，我最爱的一条是”Costco 拿走了本属于股东的钱，反而把它投到改善客户体验上去了。”这句话本意是批评。OK，他们就不应该那样做（笑）。那他们为什么能抗住？因为他们手里有反击的工具。他们的董事会把自己的责任视为对抗压力的防波堤，而不是放大金融引力的放大器。这听起来好像很有挑战性、很抽象，现在我们在谈董事会层面的事、IPO 这种事，很多人会说”我没那个权力”。没关系，我们可以从非常简单的事开始。我们从目的和 ethos 开始，这里我们也可以从目的开始。我之前提过，大多数创始人从没读过自己的公司章程。如果你是创始人在听这个节目，而你从没读过自己公司的章程——只要你公司在运营，这就是你的家庭作业。你必须读，你必须知道里面写了什么。这种情况太普遍了，连 HBO 的《硅谷》都拿这个开玩笑——有一集投资人对创始人说”你连自己公司是怎么运作的都不知道”，因为他丢掉了对公司的控制权。他们做足了功课。这真的会发生。但如果你真去读了章程，你可能会比之前更困惑，因为你会读到这样一句话：”Acme 公司在此设立，目的是从事任何合法行为或活动。”你读完会想：”听起来挺开放的。”错。听起来开放，其实不是。不幸的是，我们生活在所谓 shareholder primacy（股东至上）的时代。根据这套理论——它就是支配我们今天生活的法律——一个组织不是一个有生命的鲜活实体，而是一个为股东创造财富的金融工具，除此之外别无他物。因此，”任何合法行为或活动”在今天意味着：在法律范围内最大化股东回报。人们就是在这种观念下长大的——现在这观念已经流行得够久，足以养育出一整代人，他们以为这就像自然法则一样。这就是资本主义一直以来的样子。但这是错的。在数百年里，绝大多数时间我们都有 joint stock corporation（股份公司），只有最近 40 年才有这种”股东至上”的观念。在 80 年代之前，这是显而易见的——我们的祖父辈觉得显而易见，曾祖辈也觉得显而易见，连 Adam Smith 都认为是显而易见的——所有过去的人都认为公司的存在是为了追求某个特定的东西，法律上叫 beneficial purpose（有益目的）。比如在 19 世纪，如果你想成立一家公司，你得向州议会声明你要做的事是对公众有益的。你说”我要修一条铁路”，议会问”为什么？”你得说”在这两个地方之间修条运河对公众是有益的。”为了让你感受我们的”最佳实践”和历史常态有多不同：在 19 世纪，比如说你是美国最有钱的人，你说”我要买下这家公司，改变它做的事，因为我有这能力。”首先，董事会有权跟你拼到死。他们不必同意。他们会在夜里搞出各种疯狂的事。这些斗争是传奇——里面发生的事有些挺好笑。但第二，假设你最终还是成功了——你拿下了这家公司，然后说”我要把它的目的从修铁路改成股东价值最大化。”这在当时算是犯罪。法院会撤销你的特许状，让你的公司因超越法人权限而获得”企业死刑”。所以这其实是我们生活的新观念。我们以为它天然如此，其实是非常新的。如果你不喜欢——这就是 Vector 和那些公司被毁的原因——你可以改变它。好消息是，2026 年正在听这个节目的你：过去 15 到 20 年里有一群”公司治理叛军”一直在跟这种状况斗争，他们建好了另一套结构供你使用。其中一种叫 public benefit corporation（公益公司），简称 PBC。这里大家很容易混淆，因为人们在农夫市集上见过那个圈里带小 b 的标志（B Corp），不是那个。混淆是因为发明那个的同一群人也发明了 PBC，而且都带个 B 字母。我懂这容易乱，但其实 public benefit corporation 是这整期播客里我能告诉你的最简单的事。再容易不过。就是一份两页纸的法律文件，你的律师明天就能在 Delaware 提交。你只要说：”这家公司的目的不是'任何合法行为或目的'，而是——这家公司是为了通过创造安全、负责任的 AI 系统来推动人类繁荣”或者”我们通过创造高质量产品并销售它们来推动人类繁荣”。不管你做什么，把它写下来。再简单不过。今天最好的公司大多都在用这个结构。所有主要的 AI 实验室都是注册为 PBC 的，其中 Anthropic 最有名。它不保证你就是好人，光把它写下来作用没那么大。但它解决了一个非常具体的问题：如果有一天有人起诉你说你违反了对投资者的受托责任，你可以说：”不，投资者同意了，这就是我们的目的——做这件事。”为什么 Anthropic 能扛住这么多压力？这就是保护 Anthropic 免受外部压力的多个互锁组件之一。如果你不做这个，我也帮不了你，兄弟。这是最低限度的，至少得做这个。如果你不是创始人，你可能在想”我们公司有没有做？”虽然听起来很蠢，但你可以直接问。哪怕你在面试。我记得有人来找我寻求建议，他想为这些理念发声，但他说”我得先找份工作。我现在还没工作呢。”他给我加了个前提：”在你给我建议之前，你得知道我不勇敢。OK？所以可怕的事我做不来，我不愿意当激进分子，我只是需要一份工作，老兄。但我愿意做点事。”我当时感觉他是在让我教他做一份不用烤的饼干食谱（笑）。我说”零勇气？我能给你什么呢？”好，你也可以这么做：无论是面试还是问你老板都行。面试结束时他们会问”你有什么其他问题吗？”你就说：”这是一家使命驱动的公司吗？”他们一定会说”是的。”OK，好。”你怎么知道呢？比如，我们都做哪些使命驱动的事？”他们会说”哦，我们周五有免费啤酒，周六我们去清理本地的公园。”我不知道他们会说什么，可能很棒，可能一般。不管他们说什么，你点点头说”很好。”然后接着问”酷。那是法律层面的使命吗？也写在章程里吗？”几乎可以肯定，被你这么问的那个人不知道答案。但这是个合理的问题，因为如果你在的公司没把它写进章程，你迟早会被背叛的。你有权知道。更重要的是，你这一问就逼对方去找答案。你也参与过招聘流程——任何运营良好的公司，都会有人专门负责确保候选人可能问的每个问题都有一份 FAQ 文档准备好答案。所以那个 HR 得去问她老板，她老板得去问她老板的老板。我在董事会上见过这种事——有人说”我们一直被候选人问到这个很烦人的问题，不知道怎么回答。”也许就因为你问了，CEO 也听 Lenny 的播客（因为大家都听 Lenny），CEO 也一直在想要不要做。但他可能想：”我不知道有没有董事会的支持，我没那么勇敢去主动提。”现在你给他创造了一个借口。”我们得做了，所有人都在做，连候选人都开始问了。”如果你读那些关于 AI 大战里疯狂事件的事后总结，会发现高层动机里有惊人比例是”我们想让员工开心。”所以你就当那个不开心的员工，问：”我们的使命是什么？是真的吗？”当然这不是你能做的唯一一件事，但是 integrity 这一侧最容易上手的开始。重申一遍，没有这么做的公司，最终被背叛的风险非常大。

[1:04:24] Lenny

Are there any downsides to filing this charter?

提交这个章程有什么坏处吗？

[1:04:27] Eric

No, this is the one thing that has no tra tr truly no trade-offs at all.

没有。这是唯一一件真的真的没有任何取舍的事。

[1:04:30] Eric

Okay. Okay. Um, I mean, maybe you'll meet an investor who's like suspicious about or doesn't like it. But again, the only situation this would ever become relevant is if the investor is trying to force you to sell the company and you don't want to. So like you could just tell them, are you telling me that in that situation you believe you should get to decide instead of me? Just can is that what you're saying? And then you can ask yourself, is this really the right partner for you? Someone who would say yes to that. Like what are we doing here? All these VCs are like, I'm founder friendly. I believe in your vision. Do you do you or like what is what's going on here? So that's really important. Uh the other downside the main downside of almost every technique in this book is that people will waste your time trying to talk you out of it. Okay, that's really like you have to be ready for that. The book actually has a whole section called how to talk to your investors and a whole separate section about how to talk to your lawyers. Like detailed exactly what to say, what are the questions you're likely to get because in the years I've been I work in the book for years. I have been writing down all the objections I've heard from all the companies I've helped. I always tell me if someone objects please call me and tell me what they said. I just wrote them all down so I all the answers are there. But if you talk to your lawyers, they'll say something like,"Well, you know, you might want to just keep your options open. You don't want to prematurely commit to your purpose." And if I hear that, I'm like, "Really? Keep my options open? That's how you get maximum value. What about the option to convert my customers into soilent green and eat them? Do I have to keep that option open?" Lawyer, you ask your lawyers this question. They will say something like, "You never know what you might need to do." And then we're like, "Why does nobody trust me?" Well, cuz you won't even take that off the table. Come on, man. No. This one has no downside. Absolutely. Absolute no-brainer. This sounds like a a great single takeaway. If there's anything you take away from this conversation, you should do this. The fact that Anthropic did this is such a huge deal because I think a criticism of all of this that people probably hear is this is going to limit our growth. It's going to hurt our potential. You know what I mean? like touchyfey business like we're trying to like capitalism has worked in creating a lot of very successful companies and value and innovation. Capitalism has worked in many ways. Uh why would we need to do this? And anthropic being the fastest growing company of all time just like absurd breaking all records is uh public benefits corporation should make you feel okay about doing this.

嗯，也许你会遇到对此心存怀疑、或者不喜欢这个的投资人。但这唯一会变成实际问题的场景，是投资人想强迫你卖掉公司而你不想卖。那你就可以反问：”你的意思是，那种情况下应该由你来决定、而不是我？是这个意思吗？”然后你可以问自己：”这是真的适合你的合伙人吗？会说'是'的那种人？”我们在做什么呢？这些 VC 都说”我对创始人友好，我相信你的愿景”。你到底是不是，还是发生了什么？这点非常重要。另一个潜在的坏处——其实这本书里几乎每个技巧的主要坏处都是：会有人浪费你时间，试图说服你别这么干。OK，这真的，你得做好准备。书里有一整章叫《怎么跟你的投资人沟通》，还有单独一章《怎么跟你的律师沟通》。详细写了你可能会被问到什么、要怎么回。因为这本书我写了好几年，我把所有公司给我反馈过的反对意见都记下来了。我总是跟人说：”如果有人反对，请打给我告诉我他们说了什么。”我都写下来了，所有答案都在书里。比如你跟律师谈，他们可能会说”你也许想保持选择的开放。不要过早地把目的写死。”我听了就说：”真的吗？保持选择开放？这就是你创造最大价值的方式？那把客户做成'soylent green'然后吃掉的选项呢？我也得保留这个选项吗？”你问律师这个问题，他们会说”你永远不知道未来需要做什么。”那为啥没人信任我？因为你连那都不肯排除。拜托，兄弟。这件事真的没有任何坏处。绝对的，绝对的无脑选项。

[1:06:49] Eric

Oh yeah. Enthropic has helped so much because they do many of the things in the book including this uh what they have we can talk about the long-term benefit trust. They have that two-tiered governance structure that we were talking about before. But like it's so funny even now even with Anthropic having such success people still say stuff like this like oh I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to raise money. I'm like anthropic's been able to raise some money. That has not been an obstacle. In fact if you ask people why is Anthropic winning? They will often cite some surface characteristic like Enthropic Frey famously has lower inference costs than their competitors. The you know they have faster product velocity than their competitors. They have um you know what what do I hear? Sometimes they say that they they have more focus better focus than their competitors. Those are the most common ones I hear. And for each of those if you say well why you're like well they have lower infra cost. They have better technical infrastructure. Why? Well because they had some kind of internal breakthrough. Why? If if you keep asking why eventually like well because they have the best talent. Why? Because people want to work there. Why? And you read because people people like very much want to work. They want to work for the good guys. They think this is these people. They have the the mission to save the world. Why do they have that mission? Because that was the ethos. But why have they been able to protect it? Because they paired the ethos with the integrity. This is at the heart of almost every like breakthrough success story you've ever heard. you will find this lurking there as the as the thing that gave them the competitive advantage to drive that differentiation.

对，Anthropic 帮了大忙，因为他们做了书里讲的好多事，包括这一条。他们还有 long-term benefit trust（长期利益信托），我们可以聊聊。他们还有我们之前提到的两层治理结构。但好笑的是——即使有 Anthropic 这么成功的例子，人们还是会说”我担心融不到钱。”我说”Anthropic 融到了一些钱（笑），这根本不是障碍。”事实上，如果你问大家”Anthropic 为什么赢？”，他们经常会引用一些表面特征。比如 Anthropic 出了名的推理成本比竞争对手低；他们产品迭代速度比对手快；有人说他们比对手更聚焦——这些是我最常听到的。对每一个，如果你追问”为啥？”——”他们 infra 成本更低。””为啥？””他们有更好的技术基础设施。””为啥？””因为他们内部有某种突破。””为啥？”——如果你一直问下去，最终会到：”因为他们有最好的人才。””为啥？””因为大家想去那儿工作。””为啥？”因为人们非常想为”好人”工作。他们觉得这些人有”拯救世界”的使命。”为啥他们有这个使命？”因为那就是 ethos。”那为啥他们能保护住这个 ethos？”因为他们把 ethos 和 integrity 配在一起了。这是几乎所有突破性成功故事的核心。你会发现它就潜伏在那里，作为他们获得竞争优势、推动差异化的根本。

[1:08:18] Lenny

It's funny you say that. So I just had cat the head of product on clock code and I asked her just how are you able to ship so fast? They're shipping a massive product or feature every week essentially. They were going through a period of every day and a big part of her answer was exactly what you're describing which is we are so missional aligned. It is so easy for us to decide this is something we will do or not.

你这么一说挺有意思。我刚采访了 Claude Code 的产品负责人 Cat，我问她你们怎么能交付得这么快。他们基本每周都在发布巨大的新产品或功能，有段时间甚至每天发。她回答里很大一部分就是你说的这个：”我们使命对齐得太好了。任何事情我们都很容易决定要不要做。”

[1:08:39] Eric

That is the thing. Remember how we talked about how people say business is hard? Most people have never worked in a mission aligned company. It is the organizational equivalent of being in the flow state as an individual person. It's a great feeling and it it just makes everything easier. Like you don't like you don't have to have meetings about stuff. You don't have mission misalignment. Like in most organizations you have people who I call the torchbearers which are like the rare person in an organization who's simply committed to doing the right thing no matter what. Steve Jobs very famously would host have skip level meetings. He wanted to meet not with his his direct subordinates. He didn't care. He wanted to meet with the torchbears throughout the organization. He those are the people that are going to drive us forward. And and if you're a torchbearer, you're just like think about like the designer who simply won't ship slop no matter what. The engineer who will like not sacrifice quality or performance, right? That they just you meet these people every once in a while, product manager who just they are prioritizing the right things even if people complain. In a traditional company, if you have that job, if people listening, if you've ever had this job, man, life sucks. Every freaking day, someone's in your office with a spreadsheet being like, "But what is the ROI of doing the right thing?" And you're just like, "I don't know. It's just the right thing." In a mission aligned company, this doesn't happen two different way. There's two different like antibodies that protect against this. First of all, since everyone's mission align, no one's bothering to make the spreadsheet. There's no need. The late great Clay Christensen once said that it's easier to do the right thing 100% of the time than 98% of the time. Just like because now you don't have to have a meeting about it. We just you don't have like at an like oh I came up with this crazy unsafe thing that will make us an extra dollar. We don't have to have a meeting about it. I already can tell you we're not going to do it. We already know. So it's just incredibly you know everyone's incredibly aligned. But the second thing that I think is less appreciated is a practice I call the culture bank, which is when you start to see trustworthiness as an asset, you start to realize that certain actions build that asset and others take it away. So, let me teach you a rule I learned from from one of the one of my favorite founders, Todd Park. He created Devoted Health, the health insurance company I was mentioning before. Um, but but he learned it from Howard Schultz, who built Starbucks. Like if you see in strong culture companies you always see this pattern where you've taught people that whenever you do the right thing that is you do something in defense of the company's values that has a sacrifice to it saying the values enchanting them you know making a song out of them that's not it but if you do something you know I tell a story about this grocery store in Texas called HB where there was a the power went out there was an ice storm and the manager let all the customers just take their groceries home no charge because the point of sale system wasn't People say, "Oh, what a what a courageous manager." No, that's what they train people in at HB that you're making a deposit in the culture bank when you do the right thing. So deposits, you make a sacrifice. A withdrawal is the opposite. You do something greedy, self-interested for the organization. The Todd Park rule, as I call it, everyone who hears this rule, the first time they hear it tells me it's impossible and you can't do it. It doesn't make sense. But this is the rule is really simple. only make deposits. Never make withdrawals. That's it. Because you're going to make withdrawals by accident sometimes because you're gonna make mistakes, but you never intentionally make a withdrawal. And that I think is the true power. Like when you hear someone who's living that flow like cat you were talking about anthropic that has been internalized in the organization. Uh it's what what the pioneering management theorist Mary Parker followed the invisible leader. the person, the thing that people follow. Even when no manager is present, so no one has to be in the room to remind you to do it, you just do it because you've internalized that this is what we're all about. And when everyone around you is doing that same thing, the whole velocity of the whole organization increases exponentially. I want to hear the uh kind of the OpenAI versus anthropic story because uh you've mentioned a part of the structural pieces this nonprofit. So talk about just like what happened there and how that relates to what you talk about versus anthropic and then I actually want to hear a little bit about just actual structure like what is this two-tier thing? What's the nonprofit piece? OpenAI is a really hard case study to learn from because it's such a bizarre story and has involves like mega personalities like Elon and Sam like dueling to the death. So it's complicated. Um but we can get into it if you want. But I entered the story. The funny part is like I have this very I played a very big role in all this. Okay? So I'm not an important actor in this story at all. I take no credit for anthropic success. All the credit to Daario and Daniellea and the whole team. Uh but when they left OpenAI, this is two or three OpenAI crises ago, depending on how you count. They left and they wanted to start Anthropic. Now today, people are like, "Oh, sure it works for Anthropic. They're a worldbeating company." But like Dario was a first-time founder. I was there, okay? He was impressive, but like in the way that a technical founder for the first time is impressive, you know? And he had investors who were excited to back him, but they were like effective altruism like true believers. wasn't the top venture fund. None of the top venture funds wanted to participate in this round. It wasn't a hot company at all by modern standards. And Generative AI, the boom, hadn't happened yet. Chad GPT hadn't been invented yet. So the mass psycho this mass psychosis we're all living through had not occurred yet. Nonetheless, they were true believers in this safety mission. And so one of their investors suggested they come talk to me. I was like um everyone knew I was like an eccentric collector of weird ideas, you know, like some people collect butterfly wings or whatever. I collected alternative governance ideas. So when they came to me, I I was walking them through the same horror story I'm telling you today. I told them, look, if you don't get this right, here's what's going to happen. And they were very determined to do something about it. And so we talked about what we should do. And I and I advise a again a very little bit. I don't I don't take the credit for what happened next, but they wrote into their charter that they were going to do this. They were a PPC from the very beginning and they wrote into their charter that they had the right to enact these additional reforms which they had to defend all credit to them for taking it seriously for convincing their investors and they had to defend it for like two years because they didn't actually implement what's called now the long-term benefit trust until their series C. But they had the right and the intention to do it in all their legal documents from inception. That was a really important uh important choice. And so even today, Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. So they do not have a financial incentive in its growth, they have an incentive to see it done properly. So whenever you see Anthropic do the right thing, like when they refuse to release a model because they think it's too dangerous, think about how much that's costing them. People say, "Well, they do it for the publicity." But like publicity is nice, but you know what would be really nice is having the number one top model that everyone has to pay you to use. Okay, that's really nice. They people say that like they got into this fight with the Pentagon. And to be clear, I don't think that they're even the primary actor in that story. Okay, this is a story of government overreach. They were an impossible situation. Even people who say they did the wrong thing, when you're in an impossible situation, what are you going to do? It's the Kobashi Maru. Like, what are you going to do? You're in an impossible situation. There's no right answer. But like even people who think they did the wrong thing, like tactically speaking, admire them because we live in a time when it's so rare for companies to turn down money ever. And here they turned down, say what you want about them, but they turned down a $200 million contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government. Okay, that took a lot of courage. Part of that courage is enabled by the fact that they have this structure and investors can't just oust Daario on a moment's notice. I think the structure frankly is better than founder control. Daio does not have dual class shares the way that Mark Zuckerberg or or Larry and Sergey had. Um it's more institutional in its nature. But to kind of answer your question, the critical thing we need if we're going to really resist outside pressure, we need what I call a mission guardian. It has to be somebody or some entity's job to make sure that the thing remains mission locked or mission aligned. That does not happen by accident because gravity is such a powerful force. So Anthropic's solution to that is to have a mission guardian in the form of the long-term benefit trust. Um OpenAI very famously had the nonprofit foundation although now they've converted to a public benefit corp structure. Obviously Google and and Facebook are protected by founder control. The founder is the mission guardian. Those are the structures and I I tell the story in the book a very weird experience I had. I was literally at the Vatican of all places. I mean look at me. What am I doing at the Vatican? No. But it was cool. Vag had convened a conference on AI governance and they invited me to speak. So I was on this panel at the Vatican with every other AI company and me. It was weird. It was actually strange. It was like me literally me. I go down. I was looking down the row. Me, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Coher, uh, Palanteer, everyone on this found this panel together. And I looked down the panel and I realized not a single one of these companies has standard governance. That's how bad it is. Nobody making this technology would say, "Oh, yeah, standard governance. That's fine. I'm sure that it's just too dangerous. But they of course take different approaches to mission guardianship. Some of which are better, some of worse. Like founder control, I think actually has a lot of downsides to it. So, and when you say standard govern, like every one of these AI companies is not doing it the way every other startup is doing. They understood they needed to do something different to protect

就是这事。还记得我们说过人们总抱怨”商业太难”吗？大多数人从没在一家使命对齐的公司里工作过。这是组织层面的”心流状态”，对个人来说叫心流，对组织来说就是这个。感觉超棒，让一切都变简单。你不用为某些事开会，没有使命错位的问题。大多数组织里都有我称为”火炬手”的人——组织里那种少数派，单纯就是认死理要做正确的事，无论如何。Steve Jobs 出了名的喜欢跳级会议，他不想只跟直接下属开会，他不在乎，他要见组织里的火炬手。这些人才是推动我们前进的人。如果你是火炬手——想想那种就是不肯发垃圾设计的设计师，那种不肯在质量和性能上让步的工程师，那种就算别人抱怨也坚持优先做正确事情的 PM——你偶尔会遇到这种人。在一家传统公司里，如果你做这种工作——听这期节目的人，如果你有过这种工作经历——天哪，日子真是很惨。每天都有人拿着 spreadsheet 跑到你办公室说：”但'做正确的事'的 ROI 是多少？”你只能说：”不知道，它就是正确的事。”在一家使命对齐的公司里，这种事不会发生。有两种”抗体”在保护你。第一，既然大家使命对齐，根本没人会去做那张 spreadsheet，没必要嘛。已故的 Clay Christensen 说过一句话：100% 的时候做正确的事比 98% 的时候做正确的事容易，因为你都不用为此开会了。我们就不会有那种”哎我想到一个会让我们多赚一美元的疯狂不安全的点子”的会议。我们都不用开会，我已经能告诉你不做了，我们都知道。所以大家对齐得非常彻底。但第二点我觉得被低估了，就是我称为”文化银行”的实践。当你开始把”值得信任”当作一种资产看待，你就会意识到某些行为是在积累这项资产，另一些行为是在透支它。我教你一个我从我最欣赏的创始人之一 Todd Park 那里学到的规矩。他创立了我之前提过的健康保险公司 Devoted Health。但他是从建立 Starbucks 的 Howard Schultz 那里学到的。在强文化公司里你会反复看到这种模式：你教会员工”每当你做正确的事——即捍卫公司价值观、并为此付出某种牺牲——”光是念诵价值观、把它编成歌唱出来都不算。但如果你做了，比如我讲过一个故事，德州有家叫 H-E-B 的杂货店，遇到冰风暴停电了，经理让所有顾客把杂货免费拿回家，因为 POS 系统不能用了。人们说”这经理多有勇气啊”。不，这就是 H-E-B 培训员工的方式：你做正确的事就是在文化银行里存钱。所以——存款是你做出牺牲，取款则相反，就是你做了贪婪的、为组织谋私的事。这个我叫”Todd Park 规则”，每个第一次听到这个规则的人都跟我说不可能、做不到、没道理。但规则真的很简单：只存款，永远不取款。就这样。因为你有时会因为犯错意外取款，但你永远不应该主动去取款。这才是真正的力量。当你听到有人在那种心流状态下生活——你聊到的 Anthropic 那种 Cat 说的状态——就是这件事已经被内化到组织里了。这就是先驱管理理论家 Mary Parker Follett 所说的”无形的领导者”——人们追随的那个人或事物。即使没有任何管理者在场，没人提醒你，你也会去做，因为你内化了”这就是我们的本质”。当你周围每个人都这么做时，整个组织的速度会指数级上升。我想听听 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的故事，因为你前面提到结构性设计的一部分是非营利。讲讲那里发生了什么，跟你说的相比、跟 Anthropic 的对比怎么样？另外我也想听听这个两层结构到底是什么、非营利那块是怎么回事。OpenAI 是个很难学习的案例研究，因为整个故事很离奇——涉及到 Elon 和 Sam 这种巨型人物互相决斗那种戏剧性，所以很复杂。但如果你愿意，我们可以聊。我跟这个故事的关系是——好笑的部分是——我在所有这一切里只起了非常小的作用。我不是这个故事里重要的演员，我对 Anthropic 的成功没有任何功劳。所有功劳归 Dario、Daniela 和整个团队。但他们离开 OpenAI 的时候——这是 OpenAI 之前两三场危机以前，看你怎么算——他们离开后想创办 Anthropic。今天大家会说”对啊那当然对 Anthropic 行得通，他们是世界级公司。”但当时 Dario 是个第一次当创始人的人，我在场，OK？他很 impressive，但只是”技术创始人第一次做的那种 impressive”。他有兴致勃勃要投他的投资人，但都是”有效利他主义”的真信徒，不是顶级 VC。没有任何一家顶级 VC 想参与那轮。当时按现代标准它根本不是一家热门公司。生成式 AI 的爆发还没发生，ChatGPT 还没被发明，我们今天经历的这场集体狂热还没出现。尽管如此，他们对这个安全使命是真信徒。他们的投资人之一建议他们来找我。大家都知道我是一个”古怪理念的收藏者”——有人收藏蝴蝶翅膀，我收藏另类治理结构。所以他们来找我，我就给他们讲跟今天给你讲的同一个恐怖故事。我跟他们说”如果你不把这块搞对，事情会变成这样这样这样。”他们非常坚决要做点什么。所以我们讨论了应该怎么做。我也只给了非常小的建议。Anthropic 后续的事我不居功，但他们把这件事写进了章程：他们从一开始就是 PBC，并且在章程里写明保留实施这些额外改革的权利——他们后来还要为此辩护两年，因为他们直到 series C 才真正实施了”长期利益信托”。但他们从一开始的法律文件里就有权利、有意图这么做。这是一个非常重要的选择。所以即使在今天，Anthropic 的盈利董事会里有些董事是由外部一群 AI 安全专家受托人任命的、对那些受托人负责的——那些受托人在 Anthropic 没有股权，所以他们对公司增长没有财务激励，他们的激励是看到公司被正确地经营。所以每次你看到 Anthropic 做正确的事——比如他们拒绝发布一个他们认为太危险的模型——想想这要付出多大代价。有人说”他们就是为了博公关吧。”公关是好，但你知道更好的是什么吗？拥有那个第一名的顶级模型，所有人都得付费才能用。那才真的好。比如他们跟 Pentagon 那场冲突——我得说清楚，我都不认为他们在那个故事里是主角，那是政府越权的故事，他们当时处于不可能的境地。即使是觉得他们做错了的人，你处于不可能的境地能怎么办？这是 Kobayashi Maru（科巴雅西丸，星际迷航里没有正确答案的考试场景），没有正确答案。但即使是觉得他们策略上做错的人，也很佩服他们，因为我们生活在一个公司极少拒绝钱的时代。但他们拒绝了——你怎么评价他们都行——但他们拒绝了一份 2 亿美元的合同，承受了世界上最大军队和政府的怒火。这需要很多勇气。他们能有这种勇气，部分是因为他们有这种结构——投资人不能瞬间把 Dario 赶走。我觉得这个结构其实比”创始人控制”更好。Dario 没有 Mark Zuckerberg 或 Larry/Sergey 那种双重股权结构。它的本质更”机构化”。回到你的问题——如果我们要真正抵御外部压力，关键是要有一个我称为”使命守护者（mission guardian）”的角色。必须有某人或某个实体专门负责确保这事保持使命锁定、使命对齐。这不会自动发生，因为重力是非常强大的力量。所以 Anthropic 的解决方案是用”长期利益信托”作为使命守护者。OpenAI 出名地用过非营利基金会，虽然他们现在已经转成 PBC 结构了。Google 和 Facebook 显然是被”创始人控制”保护的——创始人就是使命守护者。这些是常见结构。我在书里讲了一个非常奇怪的经历：我居然去了梵蒂冈。你看看我，我在梵蒂冈干嘛？真的，挺酷的。梵蒂冈召集了一场 AI 治理会议，邀请我去发言。我在梵蒂冈的一个论坛上跟所有 AI 公司同台。挺奇怪的。我看了眼那一排——我，Anthropic、OpenAI、Google、Cohere、Palantir——所有人都在这个论坛上。我看了一圈意识到：没有一家公司是标准治理结构。情况已经糟到这个地步——没有任何一家做这项技术的公司会说”哦没事，标准治理就好。”显然太危险了。但他们当然采用了不同的使命守护方法，有的好，有的差。比如创始人控制，我觉得其实有不少坏处。

[1:17:54] Lenny

humanity essentially from AI. Okay.

本质上就是保护人类免受 AI 的伤害。OK。

[1:17:56] Eric

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because otherwise, it's just this technology is so valuable. If you say that shareholders should run it, then you're saying literally whoever can borrow the most money should be able to control this technology, it's just that's nuts. That can't be how that can't be how it works. No way. I don't think any company should be governed that way, but certainly not AI companies. Certainly not. Okay. So, just just to kind of plant these things in people's heads as they Okay, we need to really think about this stuff. There's like this uh there's a nonprofit approach to this. There's what are the kind of the terms that people should just think about? So, so we talked about we need a mission guardian. So, first question is the mission guardian a person or a thing. That's our kind of first decision point. So, yeah, some I I think for for early stage companies, founder control is fine as like a good bridge, a temporary bridge to a more permanent structure. And some companies get really far with founder control. That's okay. But a lot of founders who have founder control wind up really miserable as you can see by the fact they're having a mental health breakdown right in front of us, all of us on on social media basically every day because like you become like Atlas. You can't even shrug. It's you holding back the abyss. It's a lot. So I think a better, more permanent solution is to encode the protection into the structure. Now that can be done with a single entity like Costco. Costco just has the rules written right into the structure itself. But that means that um every time they lose one of the structures, every once in a while want an attack chips off a little bit of it. They don't have any way to grow them back. So it's like you've built this fortress but you don't have a way to renew it. The better way I think according to the evidence is to have some stakeholder somebody be the steward of the mission and have a way to renew that person that that set of people. So some people accomplish that by what's called an employee ownership trust. So the employees of the mission guardians um like the John Lewis partnership in the UK is a famous example. Obviously cooperatives have this um like this can work in a cooperative at scale. Mandreon for example in Spain has like 80,000 employees. It's a huge company, but they're all employee cooperatives. You can do it through an employee voting trust. That's how Alibaba is protected where the employees vote for the board members rather than the reverse. But those are complicated compared to to me the two simplest solutions are either a nonprofit foundation as in the Nova Nordisk example or in the case of what's called the perpetual purpose trust or PPT. And perpetual purpose trust is a non-economic entity. So whereas like the Nova Nordisk Foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the world because it owns it owns a big chunk of Nova Nordisk and that's worked out pretty well. Um the anthropic long-term benefit trust is has no economic dimension to it at all. It only has the mission oversight responsibility. And what's nice about a perpetual purpose trust um as in the case of Patagonia is governed with a a purpose trust also is you you have the trustees but then you also have someone whose job is is actually to sue the trustees if they ever deviate from the mission. So you actually what's called the purpose protector is like an extra person who can get in there and say like if things go wrong. So you have kind of to me it's like you have checks and balances like in a government. Um it's more stable uh it's a more stable structure. To me though I use the omnibus term spiritual holding company to describe this category of things because I said before we have a lot of infighting. The people who advocate for each of these things thinks their version is the best. And I didn't even mention the evergreen the tugboat foundation. They don't believe in having investors at all. So there's people who think the solution to this is no investors involved. That makes the problem a lot easier. So anyway, there's a lot of different ways this can be done. I don't think I even mentioned ESOPS. There just so many. So we need to have an omnibus term. I call it the spiritual holding company. The holding company like the Bergkshire Hathaway, but rather than having everything be wholly owned. It's the holding company for the spirit, the animating essence of the whole. And I has a lot of evidence in the book, a lot that this structure is more stable, more durable, more likely to invest in quality in R&D and the things we really care about and better for shareholders than the conventional structure.

对，没错。因为不然的话，这项技术太有价值了。如果你说股东应该掌控它，那就等于说”谁能借到最多的钱，谁就能控制这项技术”，这疯了，绝对不能这么搞，没门。我觉得没有任何公司应该被这样治理，但 AI 公司当然更不行。绝对不行。OK。所以为了把这些概念种到大家脑子里——我们要认真思考这些事——有一个非营利的路径，那大家应该思考的关键术语有哪些？我们说过需要”使命守护者”。第一个问题是：使命守护者是人，还是一个东西？这是我们的第一个决策点。我觉得对早期公司来说，创始人控制作为通往更永久结构的桥梁是 OK 的、临时的桥梁。有些公司用创始人控制能走得很远，没问题。但很多有创始人控制权的创始人最终非常痛苦——你看他们几乎每天都在社交媒体上当着我们所有人面”精神崩溃”，因为你成了 Atlas，连”耸肩”都不能（指无法逃避责任）。是你一个人在挡着那个深渊，太重了。所以我觉得更好的、更永久的方案是把保护编码到结构里。这可以用单一实体来做，比如 Costco——规则直接写进结构本身。但这也意味着每次它失去一项保护——偶尔被攻击啃掉一点——它没有办法重新长出来。就像你建了一座堡垒但没有续命机制。我觉得证据显示更好的方式是：让某个利益相关方做使命的”管家”，并且有方法去续约或更替这个人/这组人。有些人靠”员工持股信托”来达到——员工就是使命守护者。比如英国的 John Lewis Partnership 是个有名的例子。合作社显然也有这种结构，比如西班牙的 Mondragón，员工合作社规模有 8 万员工，是巨型公司。你也可以用”员工投票信托”——比如 Alibaba 就是这么受保护的，员工投票选董事会，而不是反过来。但这些相对复杂。我心里最简单的两种方案：要么像 Novo Nordisk 那样用非营利基金会，要么用所谓的 perpetual purpose trust（永续目的信托，简称 PPT）。永续目的信托是非经济实体。Novo Nordisk Foundation 是全世界最大的慈善基金会，因为它持有 Novo Nordisk 一大块股份，效果不错。而 Anthropic 的”长期利益信托”完全没有经济维度，只有使命监督的职责。永续目的信托的好处——以 Patagonia 为例，它也是用目的信托治理的——你有受托人，同时还有专门一个角色负责在受托人偏离使命时起诉他们，所谓”目的保护人（purpose protector）”是一个额外的角色，可以在出问题时介入。所以你就有了某种制衡机制，像政府里的 checks and balances，更稳定，是更稳定的结构。但我用一个统称——spiritual holding company（精神控股公司）——来概括这一类。我之前说过，这个圈子有很多内斗，每种方案的倡导者都觉得自己的版本最棒。我都还没提到 Tugboat Foundation 的常青模型——他们根本不相信有投资人这件事。所以有些人觉得解决办法是干脆没有投资人，问题确实变容易很多。总之有很多种做法，我连 ESOPs 都没提到，方案实在太多。所以我们需要一个总称——我叫它 spiritual holding company。像 Berkshire Hathaway 那样的控股公司，但不是全资持有所有东西，而是持有整体的精神、灵魂的控股公司。书里有大量证据表明这种结构更稳定、更持久、更愿意投资于质量和研发这些我们真正在乎的东西，并且对股东而言比传统结构更好。

[1:21:53] Lenny

If this all sounds like a huge drag and a lot of work and really annoying, I'd say go back an hour when we talked a lot about just what is it you were trying to avoid and the pain.

如果这一切听起来很烦、工作量大、又让人头疼——我会说回到一小时前，我们讲过你到底是想避免什么、那种痛苦是什么。

[1:22:02] Eric

Yes, that's the thing. It's like, well, you know what's really a drag? I'll tell you a story. The a friend of mine got ousted by his investors. Okay. And I was going to this party to celebrate him. And it was like people had flown in from all over the country to celebrities he laid off came to this party. It must have been a thousand people there. It was amazing. And I was describing to a new founder like I'm sorry I can't help you with your company right now. I got to go to this party. And he was like okay. I'm describing to him and he was just like wow what respect that founder sounds. That's just the kind of company I want to create. I'm like, "Dude, you have not been listening to anything I'm saying. He doesn't work there anymore. He's like Saul Price. This is not a party. This is awake." He was like, "What? Did he die?" "No, man. He didn't die. Did the company go bankrupt?" "No, the company's fine." That's not the problem. The new And he was like, "Do you is the new CEO an or something?" I was like, "No, I like the new CEO. He's a friend of mine also. Perfectly fine. The problem is" He's like, "What's the problem? The problem is if a company can be decapitated at any time, you can no longer trust it. All the promises that this company had made over its 15year life, nobody believes them anymore. The new CEO is like going around making new promises, but we're like, an activist investor owning.5% of the company can oust you at any time. Why should I believe anything you say? And then we're like, why is trust collapsing in our institutions across the board? We are teaching a leadership philosophy that is antirust, antirustworthy. So yeah, if it sounds like if it sounds like this sounds like a bummer to have to worry about this stuff, you know what's really a bummer? Come to that party with me. That sucks. And that's a founder who made literally billions of dollars for his investors, but it wasn't enough. It's never enough. and hearing hearing these from you is so is important and powerful because you you see so many founders like I don't there's few people in the world that see the number of founders meet with the number of founders work with as many startups as you and like this is not an easy place you're in trying to convince people to do these very annoying things

对，就是这点。会说”啊好麻烦啊”——我跟你讲个故事。我一个朋友被他的投资人赶下台了。我去参加给他办的一个聚会。从全国各地飞来的人——他曾经裁员裁掉的人都来了——大概有一千人吧，很震撼。我跟一个新创始人说”对不起我现在没办法帮你看公司，我得去参加这个聚会。”他听了一脸”哇，这位创始人多受尊重啊，这就是我想创建的那种公司。”我说”兄弟，你完全没在听我说什么。他已经不在那家公司了。他像 Sol Price——这不是聚会，这是守灵。”他说”啥？他死了？””不，他没死。””公司破产了？””没有，公司好得很，那不是问题。””新 CEO 是个混蛋？””不，我喜欢新 CEO，也是我朋友，挺好。问题是——””那问题在哪儿？””问题在于：如果一家公司随时可以被'斩首'，那它就再也不可信了。这家公司 15 年里做过的所有承诺，没人再信了。新 CEO 到处做新的承诺，但我们都想：一个持有 0.5% 股份的激进投资人就能随时把你赶走，我凭什么相信你说的任何话？”然后我们又纳闷”为什么我们的机构信任全面崩塌？”因为我们在教一种反信任、反值得信任的领导哲学啊。所以是，如果听起来要操心这些事很烦——你知道什么才真的烦？跟我一起去参加那个聚会吧。那才烦。那是一个为投资人赚了上十亿美元的创始人，但还是不够。永远都不够。

[1:24:11] Eric

it's very annoying I know I do agree

确实很烦人，我同意。

[1:24:13] Lenny

and so it just says a lot that you're putting yourself out there this much for you guys pay attention this is even though it feels weird now the ideas this should not this should be

所以你愿意为此站出来这么多，这本身就说明了很多问题。各位听众请注意：虽然现在听起来很怪，但这些想法不应该……这本来应该是……

[1:24:22] Eric

our grandkids will think this is the was the most obvious thing they've ever heard about. So yeah, you can you can get you can get ahead of it now. You know, people when I first started talking about lean startup, people thought it was so weird.

我们的孙辈会觉得这是他们听过最显而易见的事。所以你可以现在就走在前面。当年我刚开始讲精益创业时，人们也觉得很怪。

[1:24:32] Eric

As weird as you think this is, people thought lean startup was a lot weirder. So like I've been through this before. And when I when I write, I don't write very many books, okay? I'm not like an influencer. I don't I don't tweet every 30 minutes. Like I'm not that kind of person. It takes me years to put these things together. And I only do it when I have figured something out that like I have personally lived myself and found useful in my own work and I've helped lots of other people do it. So it takes me a long time because I it takes a lot of experimentation, a lot of testing. Like this is the work of hundreds and hundreds of companies who have who I have worked had a chance to work with and seen what works and what doesn't work. So the pain that I'm describing to you is like this is not some hypothetical thing. I'm not I'm not trying to trick you into something. I have nothing to sell you. This is just what the data shows can prevent this like epidemic of value destruction that we're seeing all over our economy.

你觉得这现在听着多奇怪，当年精益创业被人觉得更怪。所以这场面我经历过。我写作的时候——我没写过几本书，我不是 influencer，我不会每 30 分钟发一条推。我不是那种人。我要花好多年才能把这些东西整理出来。而且我只写自己亲自实践过、并且发现真的有用、还帮过很多人做过的东西。所以要花很长时间，因为需要很多实验、很多测试。这是上百家公司、我有幸合作过的公司一起做出来的工作——我看到什么有效、什么无效。所以我描述给你的痛苦不是假设，我没什么东西要卖给你，我没什么要骗你的，这就是数据显示能阻止我们经济中这种”价值毁灭流行病”的方法。

[1:25:25] Lenny

So maybe it's just a final uh tactic say an early stage founder is listening to this and like oh I got to really do some here. What are say three things they should do in the next week or two?

也许最后一个战术问题：假设一个早期创始人正在听这期，他说”我得做点什么。”接下来一两周里他应该做哪三件事？

[1:25:34] Eric

Okay, here just let's just let's just do the really easiest things. First of all, if you haven't raised money yet or you've only done raised money on safes, okay? You can do absolutely whatever you want. So, do not waste this moment. Everyone's in such a rush to get big, such a rush for the next thing, but you have a precious, precious moment here. The founders who have already raised their series A or they're in preip like the founders that you envy, they're ahead of you. It's more of a pain for them. They got to go get investors on board. They got to go, they they need to do it. Okay, I told you the next best time to plant a tree is today. Okay, so they still have to do it, but you have an incredible privilege. Just please, please, please do because here are the basic things I think are really easy to do that are super low cost. Um, be a public benefit corp. Do the file, but that's so easy. And write a mission there that is something you really will feel good about. And the way the test for if you wrote the right thing is try to brainstorm with your co-founder, not for like you don't need to spend like 10 weeks on this, like spend an hour and just adversarial prompting. Okay? Can you think of any way you could make money while violating this statement? And if you can, would you be happy or sad in that scenario? If you'd be sad, write it. Write it into the thing. Don't let your don't ever be a situation where you're rich and miserable. Write it down. Okay, easy. Second thing that's super easy. We didn't get a chance to talk about I call it the director's oath. This came up obviously because there's this big fight going on between uh Anthropic and Figma and and a reporter just just got reported um you know reported on the idea because it was like what what are our responsibilities in these weird situations? It's actually really tricky. Every company's calling me being like is it are you saying I can't have an AI person on my board because having an AI person on my board seems really dangerous. But I was like you know what's really dangerous? Not having an AI person on your board. So yeah like everyone's kind of stuck. What do we do? It's impossible situation. We need to have like just like we have doctors have a hypocratic oath first do no harm. Why don't we have that for directors? It's insane to me. Directors control like have far more make far more consequential decisions than nurses. So why do we hold nurses to a higher standard than directors? No. So you we can wait for us to standardize on an oath for everybody, but you could implement one right now. You could just write it into your corporate charter. Everyone has to do this. It's a precondition of being on the board. And then the third thing is I'm going to presume again for founders, we'll talk about non-founders in a second, but for founders, I'm going to presume you've already got what are called founders preferred shares. If you don't know what that is, you need to ask an LLM to explain it to you. And just say, Eric said founders preferred shares could potentially make me like personally an extra billion dollars someday. So, can you explain to me why? Type that prompt and read what it says. You need to understand the economics of what are called founders preferring. So, I'm going to assume that you understand that and you've already done it. If you haven't, that don't that doesn't count on my bill of extra things you needed to do because you needed to do that anyway for personal reasons. But if you have that, then that's the logical place to do things like founder control, extra votes, board votes for board control, stuff like that. So, so talk to your lawyer about um about what are called mission protected provisions. If your lawyer is kind of being a drag or you don't like having to pay them by the hour, I actually helped start a law firm just because this drives me crazy. So, there's a law firm called Virgil. They'll be happy to help you and they don't charge you by the hour. Um, this is not the main thing that they do. They mostly do AI assisted back office acceleration, which is also very cool. But anyway, you make sure you have somebody you can talk to about it. Okay? And then after you figured out which of those things you want to do, then put yourself, imagine yourself in the seat of an investor saying, "It sounds like you're a greedy sob. You're all this power for yourself. You're like a power- hungry emperor. Why do you want to be emperor for life?" So, you don't want to be emperor for life. Right now, we kind of have this dichotomy between what I call investor controlled companies and founder controlled companies. And everyone's like, "You got to pick one or the other." But neither alternative is very good. What we want to create are what I call mission controlled companies. So a mission controlled company is one where the mission itself has sovereignty. And so if you're feeling a little greedy about grabbing all this power for yourself, that's the time to do something like the anthropic LTBT. It's very easy to implement in the early stages because you don't need a nonprofit. Like let's say you don't want to be Nova Nordisk. You don't actually have to boot up the nonprofit right now. All you have to do is write it into the charter the way Anthropic did. Just say 10% of the equity is hereby pledged to a nonprofit foundation and 1% of future revenue. the foundation gets a board seat or whatever you want to say. Like those things are really easy. Just write them into your charter, fire and forget and then boot it up later, but make sure you have the right to do it now. Those are the bare minimum easiest things in the book to do. Um a total piece of cake.

好，我们就讲最容易的几件事。首先，如果你还没融资、或者只用 SAFE 融过资，OK？你想做什么都行，不要浪费这个时机。所有人都急着做大、急着冲下一步——但你现在拥有一个非常非常珍贵的时机。那些已经做到 series A 或者临近 IPO 的、你羡慕的创始人，他们其实比你更难做这件事，他们得去说服投资人加入、他们得费劲做。OK，我跟你说过种树次好的时机就是今天，他们也得做，但你有难以置信的特权。所以请、请、请就做我下面说的几件基础事，又简单又便宜。第一，注册成 public benefit corp，提交那份文件，超容易。然后写一份你真心觉得满意的使命。检验你写得对不对的方法：跟你的联合创始人一起头脑风暴——不需要花 10 周，花一个小时就行——做对抗性提问。能不能想出任何一种你能赚到钱同时违反这条声明的方式？如果可以，你在那种场景下会开心还是难过？如果会难过，那就把它写进去。永远不要让自己陷入”很有钱但很痛苦”的处境。把它写下来。第二件超容易的事我们没机会讲——我把它叫做 director's oath（董事誓词）。它最近被讨论起来，是因为 Anthropic 和 Figma 之间发生了大冲突，记者刚报道了相关想法——”我们在这种诡异情境里有什么责任？”这其实非常棘手。每家公司都打电话问我”你是不是说我不能让一个 AI 行业的人进我董事会，因为有 AI 的人在董事会里好像很危险？”我说”你知道更危险的是什么吗？董事会里没有 AI 的人。”所以大家都被卡住了，怎么办？无解的处境。我们需要一个——就像医生有希波克拉底誓言”首先不伤害”——为什么董事没有？这在我看来很离谱。董事们做的决定比护士影响大得多。为什么我们对护士的标准比对董事还高？不对劲。我们可以等大家在一份全球通用的董事誓词上达成一致，或者你现在就实施一份——直接写进你的公司章程，所有人都必须签，作为进董事会的前提。第三件事，我假设各位创始人——非创始人我们稍后再说——你们已经拥有所谓 founders preferred shares（创始人优先股）了。如果你不知道那是什么，你需要让 LLM 解释给你听，就说”Eric 说 founders preferred shares 有可能让我个人多赚 10 亿美元，能解释一下为什么吗？”把这句话当 prompt 发给它，然后读它告诉你的内容。你必须理解 founders preferred 的经济原理。我假设你理解并已经做了，如果没做，那不算在我”额外要做的事”清单里，因为你本来就该为了个人原因做这事。如果有 founders preferred，那它就是你做创始人控制、超级投票权、董事会多票之类的合理起点。所以跟你的律师聊”mission protected provisions（使命保护条款）”。如果律师比较烦人或者你不想按小时付费——我自己其实就为这事联合创办了一家律所，因为这事让我抓狂。这家律所叫 Virgil，他们很乐意帮你，并且不按小时收费。这不是他们主要做的事，他们主要做 AI 辅助的后台加速，也很酷。但总之要确保你有个能商量这事的人。OK？等你想清楚要做哪些之后，把自己放进投资人的位置，对自己说”听起来你是个贪婪的混蛋，想把所有权力都抓在自己手里，你想当终身皇帝啊？”——你不会想当终身皇帝的。我们现在差不多就是这种二元对立：投资人控制的公司 vs 创始人控制的公司，大家都觉得”你得选其一”，但两种都不好。我们想创造的是 mission controlled companies（使命控制公司）。使命控制公司就是使命本身拥有主权。所以如果你觉得自己抓权太多有点不好意思，那这就是做类似 Anthropic LTBT（长期利益信托）的好时机。在早期阶段实施非常容易，因为你不需要一个非营利组织。比如你不想做 Novo Nordisk 那样的，你也不必现在就把非营利启动起来。你要做的就是把它写进章程里，就像 Anthropic 做的那样：写”10% 的股权特此承诺给一家非营利基金会”和”未来 1% 的营收”、”基金会获得一个董事席位”等等。这些东西超容易，写进章程、就此放下，以后再启动；但确保你现在就拥有未来去做的权利。这些是书里最基础、最容易做的事，简直小菜一碟。

[1:30:10]

It's interesting how so much of this is similar to not similar but uh to AGI alignment, finding a way to align AI, finding a way to align your your business.

有意思的是，这套东西跟 AGI alignment 其实非常像——给 AI 做对齐，跟给企业做对齐，本质是一回事。

[1:30:19]

It's not a coincidence. Okay, there's a deep philosophical reason why this comes up.

这不是巧合。这里面有很深的哲学原因，所以两件事会同时冒出来。

[1:30:24]

I'll give you the simple version and then we'll do the complicated version. The simple version is who aligns the aligners.

我先讲个简版，再讲复杂版。简版就一句话——谁来对齐那些做对齐的人？

[1:30:30]

This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem which is that we've known since the development of Conway's laws Conway's law decades ago that software products the organizational imprint of the humans who make the software shows up in the technical architecture of the software like it's really weird actually we don't think about it that much but like the org chart is visible in the architecture diagram why because human values flow from the parent to the child so that's one reason we have to make sure that that that If you're trying to solve the alignment problem, but you can't agree on what the human values are to align to, you're already cooked. But the deeper and more interesting problem, I don't know, I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with this or not. There's this concept in the scientific literature called emergent intelligence. And I write about it in the book because corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence. The same scientific principle that makes the transformer architecture work. and appear intelligent. That same principle is at work in organizations. Organizations are literally super organisms. They are alive in the same way that these models are emergent intelligences. And if you don't know what this is, it can sound very metaphysical and weird and spooky. So if you want a physical demonstration, I promise no metaphysics required. One of my favorite demonstrations of emergent intelligence, I don't know, maybe Lenny, maybe you can link the video. Um I have it in the book, too. There's a video where researchers created this thing they called the piano movers puzzle. You remember that famous clip that I don't know if you know the meme of friends where they're trying to get the couch down the stairwell and he's like pivot pivot pivot. People send it to me all the time for obvious reasons.

这是 AI 领域头号未解难题。不是技术问题——技术上的 alignment 我们其实进展不错。真正没进展的是「人的对齐」。我们从 Conway's Law（康威定律）那个年代就知道：软件产品里，做软件的那群人的组织印记，会原原本本地体现在技术架构里。说起来挺怪，我们平时都不太想这件事，但组织架构图其实就明晃晃地长在系统架构图里。为什么？因为人类的价值观是从父辈往子辈流动的。所以这是第一层原因——如果你想解 alignment 问题，可你们自己都没法就「要对齐到什么人类价值观」达成一致，那这局其实已经输了。但更深、更有意思的那一层，我不知道你的听众熟不熟，科学文献里有个概念叫 emergent intelligence（涌现智能）。我书里也写了，因为公司、组织其实是这星球上最古老的「人工智能」。它们就是 emergent intelligence 的一种实例。让 transformer 架构跑得通、看起来有智能的那个原理，在组织里同样在工作。组织字面意义上就是「超个体」（superorganism），它们活着的方式，跟这些大模型作为涌现智能活着的方式是一样的。这个东西你要是头一次听，会觉得很玄、很形而上、毛骨悚然。所以你要一个看得见摸得着的演示——我保证不用上任何玄学。我最喜欢的一个涌现智能演示，Lenny，回头你可以把那个视频链接放上。我书里也有。研究者搞了一个东西，他们叫「钢琴搬运工难题」。你记得《Friends》（老友记）里那个名场面吗？他们要把沙发搬下楼梯井，那哥们一直喊「pivot！pivot！pivot！」原因你懂的，大家老把那个片段发我。

[1:32:16]

Um they created a version of that puzzle that they had ants solve. So visualize there's like two slits, two walls with a gap in each wall and a big Ibeam shaped irregular object. And if you watch a human solve the puzzle, it goes like this. They like try one thing. They think about it, they rearrange you. You go back, you back. You know, you've ever got to do a puzzle like that. You can just tell watching the video that an intelligent person is trying to solve this puzzle because they try logical things that don't work and then they learn. If you give one ant this puzzle, he cannot solve it obviously. But put a thousand ants in there and they can solve the puzzle. And if you watch the video of the ant colony solving this puzzle, you will swear you can see an intelligence at work because it does just like a human. It tries something, it pauses to consider, it re reorients, tries something different. It's spooky. And the researchers found this is what we have to understand for humans. The more ants you put in the puzzle, the faster the solution. But the more humans you add, the worse. Unless the humans are very carefully aligned, this is the key lesson for organizational design. We are birthing these things left and right. And if we don't tend to them properly, they develop emergent characteristics that we don't like. We don't want that to be like that. And no amount of founder mode is going to clean that up because you're talking about something that's deep in the in the DNA of the thing you made. Beware. What I'm hearing here is we should be hiring more ants for our organizations. Um,

他们做了那个谜题的一个版本，让蚂蚁去解。你想象一下：两堵墙，每堵墙上开一个缝，要把一个工字梁形状、形态不规则的物体穿过去。你看一个人解这种题，过程是这样的：试一下、停下想一想、调整姿势、再来一次……你也做过这种题吧？光看视频你就能感觉到——这是一个有智力的人在解题，因为他会试合理的方案，发现不行，然后学习。现在你给一只蚂蚁这道题，它显然解不了。但你放一千只进去，它们能解出来。而你看那个蚂蚁群体解题的视频，你会发誓自己看到了一个智能在工作，因为它的过程跟人一模一样：试一下，停下来斟酌，重新调整方向，再换个思路。诡异得很。研究者还发现了一件事——这是我们做组织设计必须搞懂的——蚂蚁越多，解得越快；可人越多，结果越糟。除非这群人被极其精心地对齐。这是组织设计里最关键的一课。我们每天都在左右开弓地「生」出这些组织，如果不好好照看，它们就会长出我们不喜欢的涌现特征。我们也不想它变成那样。再多的 founder mode（创始人模式）都收拾不了，因为你面对的是一个写进它 DNA 里的东西。当心。我听下来的结论是：我们应该多招点蚂蚁进公司。嗯——

[1:33:54] Lenny

Eric, we've given people a lot to think about. I think there's a lot of just like, "Oh, wow. I should really think about this and take this seriously. What's a final thought, final nugget, final lesson you want to leave listeners with before we get out of here?" Let's talk about Mary Parker Flet. I mentioned her in passing and I feel like, you know what? I bet a bunch of people have never heard of her. So, let me let me give you one more one more blast from the past. Most people have heard of someone named Frederick Winsow Taylor. Fred Taylor is a good friend of mine. You know, one of the pioneering original management theorists. You know, he wrote the principles of scientific management in 1911. And tailorism was one of the most popular management fads of all time. If you think we have fads now, you should see Taylorism. It was like debated at the Supreme Court. It was front page news in the 19s. Taylor, they made movies about him. He was an incredibly famous person. But one of his contemporaries was a woman, her name was Mary Parker Flet. and her work is so far ahead of its time that if you read it today, you would think you were this person lived in 2026. She would write things like um we need to focus on power with not power over. She said the superior and the subordinate together obey the law of the situation. Meaning we work together to figure out what the situation requires. We don't just tell the subordinate what to do. She said the job of a leader, the the the hallmark of a leader is can they create more leaders. So like if someone said that to you right now, you'd be like, "Oh, that's going on TikTok right the second." Like Twitter, that's awesome. What podcast was that on? No, she wrote that in 1920. Um now, unfortunately, for reasons you probably can guess, she was utterly erased from history. Like her work was utterly lost. Nobody studied it at all for most of the 20th century. And then it was totally rediscovered and she and and was republished in the 1990s. The great Peter Ducker called her the prophet of management. Okay, so one of her most important concepts is what she called the invisible leader. And I just love this. She just imagine someone a woman in 1920 going around saying this to people how it would blow their minds. She would say, "Mr. Roundtree, the owner of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory, is not the leader of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory." And people be like, "Lady, what are you talking about? His name is on the door. His family has owned this thing. Like, what? How? If he's not the leader, who is?" She'd be like, "Glad you asked." Mr. Roundtree is an excellent leader because he's very good at instilling in his people the sense of common purpose of what this factory is about. And the common purpose rather than Mr. Roundtree himself is their invisible leader. And this is maybe the most powerful concept. If you if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present. You think you made the decision when you told everybody, "We're going to build a high-quality product. Our vision is this. Our plan is this." But you're not there when the product managers and the designers and the engineers make the actual tradeoffs, right? somebody sitting there with the code and being like rounded corners or straight corners, skuorphism or not. When person clicks this button, do we double check? Do we understand what they meant or do we just erase their hard drive? Right? Like thousands upon thousands of these tiny little decisions get made. Only the invisible leader is present. So if you don't cultivate that sense of common purpose, you have no control over what's going to happen. Again, your promises are worthless. So if you want found want a little homework, read Mary Parker, follow it. Uh she will she will enlighten you.

Eric，你今天给大家留了好多可以琢磨的东西，我感觉很多人会想「哇，这事我得认真琢磨琢磨」。在我们收尾之前，你想留给听众的最后一个想法、最后一颗小金豆、最后一课是什么？我们来聊聊 Mary Parker Follett 吧。我前面顺嘴提了一句，但我猜很多人压根没听过她。所以再让我给你来一发「来自过去的炮弹」。大多数人都听过 Frederick Winslow Taylor，泰勒。Fred Taylor 是我的「老熟人」，最早一批的管理学开山祖师之一。他 1911 年写了《The Principles of Scientific Management》（《科学管理原理》），「泰勒主义」一度是史上最火的管理潮流之一。你觉得现在管理学潮流多？你该看看当年的泰勒主义——那玩意儿被告到过最高法院辩论，1910 年代天天上头条，还有人给他拍电影，他是个超级名人。但跟他同时代有一位女性，名叫 Mary Parker Follett。她的工作超前到什么程度？你今天读，会以为这个人活在 2026 年。她会写出这种句子：我们要关注的是 power with，不是 power over（共行其权，而非凌驾之权）。她说，上级和下级一起服从「情境之法则」——意思是我们共同搞清楚情境要求我们做什么，而不是上级单方面命令下级。她还说，判断一个 leader 的真正标志，是看他能不能培养出更多的 leader。这话你要现在听见，你会想「这条立刻发 TikTok 啊」「发 Twitter 啊，太牛了」「这是哪个 podcast 上说的？」——不是，她 1920 年就写下来了。但很不幸——原因你大概能猜到——她被历史几乎彻底抹掉了，她的作品在 20 世纪大部分时间里完全没人研究。直到 1990 年代才被重新发现、重新出版。伟大的 Peter Drucker（彼得·德鲁克）称她为「管理学的先知」。她最重要的一个概念叫「the invisible leader（隐形领导者）」，我超喜欢这个。你想象一下，1920 年一个女性到处跟人讲这套，会怎么炸裂别人脑子。她会说：「Roundtree 先生，Roundtree 巧克力工厂的所有人，并不是这家工厂的 leader。」对方会说「夫人，你在说啥？门牌上写的是他名字，这工厂是他家的，他不是 leader 谁是 leader？」她会说：「问得好。」Roundtree 先生之所以是一位出色的 leader，恰恰是因为他非常擅长在员工心里植入一种共同目的感——这家工厂到底为什么存在。而那个「共同目的」，而不是 Roundtree 先生本人，才是他们真正的 invisible leader。这可能是最强大的一个概念。如果你想以 leader 的身份去管理什么东西，你必须理解：对组织生命走向影响最大的那些决定，几乎按定义来说，都是发生在没有任何 manager 在场的时候。你以为你做决定，是在你跟所有人宣布「我们要做一款高品质产品，我们的愿景是这个，我们的计划是那个」的那一刻。可真正在产品经理、设计师、工程师做出实际权衡的那一刻，你不在场——是某个人坐在那儿对着代码纠结：圆角还是直角，要不要用 skeuomorphism（拟物化）？用户点这个按钮，我们要不要二次确认？要不要去理解他真正想干嘛，还是直接抹掉他的硬盘？对吧？一天里有成千上万这种小决定要做。在场的只有那个 invisible leader。所以如果你没培养出那种共同目的感，你对接下来会发生什么是没有控制力的。再说一遍——你嘴上的承诺一文不值。所以如果你想留点作业，去读 Mary Parker Follett，她会让你开窍。

[1:37:32] Lenny

If any of this is at all interesting to you, if you want to explore this, if you want to implement it, buy Eric's book, Incorruptible, is there a website to look at or just Google and find it?

如果你听到这儿哪怕觉得有一点点意思，想深入了解、想真正落地，那就去买 Eric 的新书 Incorruptible（《不可腐化》）。有专门的网站吗，还是直接 Google 就能搜到？

[1:37:42] Eric

Yes. Yes, of course. You can find it anywhere books are sold. Um but yes, we do have a website, incorruptible.co. Please join the mailing list. We have tons of bonus content, especially for those who are impleers. We have implementation guides and advanced implementation guides and readers guides. Lots of extra content, uh, including a secret chapter that got cut from the original manuscript. Tried to make it really worth your while to go to the website, pre-order, and sign up for the mailing list. Um, but you don't have to buy it from me. You can buy the book anywhere books are sold. It's in hard coverver. It's in uh audiobook and ebook if you want to. One of my favorite things about the website, we have a list of I more than hundred last time I counted of local independent bookstores that are carrying the book and where you could order online. So, if you want to, not only could you do me a favor and buy a copy or 10 or 20 or however many you want and give them away, but if you'd like to make the day of your local independent bookstore, you want to support a local community like a pillar of your community and be their favorite customer, you call them up and say, "I have this book coming out. I'd like a bunch of copies to give away. Can I get them on launch day?" You your friends will thank you. The bookstore will thank you. And I will thank you.

有，当然有。各大卖书的地方都能买到。我们的官网是 incorruptible.co，请大家加入邮件列表，我们准备了大量额外内容，尤其是给真要落地实操的人——有实施指南、进阶版实施指南、读者导读，还有一章被从原稿砍掉的「秘密章节」。我们尽量让你跑一趟网站、预订、订阅邮件，是非常值的。当然你不一定要从我这儿买，全网卖书的地方都有。精装版有，audiobook 有，ebook 也有。我特别喜欢这个网站的一点是——我们整理了一份名单，上次我数有 100 多家本地独立书店在卖这本书，而且支持网上下单。所以如果你愿意，你不仅可以帮我个忙，买一本、十本、二十本随你高兴拿去送人；还可以顺手让你本地那家独立书店开心一整天——它是你社区的支柱，你打电话过去说「我有本书快上市了，我想多订一批送朋友，能不能上市当天就给我」——你的朋友会感谢你，书店会感谢你，我也会感谢你。

[1:38:46] Lenny

A great pitch. Incorruptible. Why good companies go bad and how great companies stay great. Eric Ree, thank you so much for being here.

好棒的安利。Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great（《不可腐化：好公司为什么会变坏，伟大公司又是如何保持伟大的》）。Eric Ries，今天非常感谢你来。

[1:38:53] Eric

Hey, thank you, Lenny. Appreciate Appreciate you giving the chance to to talk about it and congrats on all you're doing.

嘿，谢谢你 Lenny。真的很感激你给我这个机会来聊这本书，也恭喜你做了这么多了不起的事。

[1:38:57] Lenny

Thanks, Eric. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show [music] at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

谢谢 Eric。各位再见。非常感谢大家收听。如果你觉得这期有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你常用的播客 App 里订阅本节目。也欢迎给我们打个分或者留个评价，这对其他听众发现这档播客真的很有帮助。所有往期节目以及节目相关信息，都可以在 lennyspodcast.com 上找到。我们下期见。