Hey friends, Chase here

Eric Ries is back on the show, and this conversation goes far beyond startups, venture capital, or the mechanics of building a company.

You probably know Eric as the author of The Lean Startup, the book that changed how founders, creators, entrepreneurs, and teams think about building something new. His work helped popularize ideas like continuous innovation, validated learning, experimentation, and staying close to the customer instead of getting lost in theory, ego, or endless planning.

But this episode is not just about how to start something. It's about how to protect the thing you've built once it starts working.

Eric's new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great, asks a question that feels especially urgent for creators, entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders right now:

How do you build something that can grow without being captured, corrupted, or hollowed out?

That question matters whether you're running a company, building a personal brand, growing a creative practice, launching a product, choosing clients, working with sponsors, or trying to do work that actually reflects your values. Because success is not neutral. Success brings attention, opportunity, money, investors, partners, platforms, algorithms, expectations, incentives, shortcuts, and people who may not share the reason you started in the first place.

One of Eric's most powerful lines in this conversation is this:

"Success is not a source of strength. It is a liability, because success attracts predators."

That idea is the center of this episode. If you've ever built something that started to work, you know exactly what he means. The thing that made your work powerful can become the thing other people want to capture. The trust you built can become something others want to monetize. The values that made your community believe in you can suddenly feel inconvenient when there's more money on the table.

This conversation is about how to stay awake in the middle of that pressure. We talk about defining what you stand for, making decisions before the pressure arrives, treating trust as an asset, saying no to misaligned opportunities, and building something that can grow without losing its soul.

Why This Conversation Matters Right Now

We are living in a strange moment for creators and entrepreneurs. On one hand, there has never been more opportunity. An individual with a laptop, a camera, a newsletter, a product, an idea, or a point of view can reach people directly. You can build an audience, launch a business, compete with massive companies, and create a brand around your name, your work, your taste, your values, and your trust.

That is extraordinary, but it also comes with a real cost. The forces shaping our work have never been more intense. Platforms reward outrage. Algorithms reward simplification. Investors reward speed. Markets reward extraction. The pressure to be louder, faster, more polarizing, more optimized, and more "growth-minded" is everywhere.

Eric describes this pressure as a kind of gravity. It is the gravity of platforms, incentives, success, and other people's definitions of winning. If we are not conscious of those forces, they shape us without our permission.

That is one of the biggest themes in this episode: you are always being shaped by the systems you participate in. The question is whether you are awake enough to notice, honest enough to name it, and disciplined enough to choose a different path when the incentives start pulling you away from who you actually want to be.

What We Explore in This Episode

Why success can become a liability when it attracts people, money, platforms, and incentives that want to capture what you've built.
How creators get shaped by platforms and why the algorithm can quietly tune your voice, values, and identity toward whatever gets the most engagement.
Why trust may be the most valuable asset in business and why it is so easy to destroy with one short-term decision.
How to define an ethos before outside pressure, money, growth, or status starts making decisions for you.
Why "harder is easier" when your principles are clear enough to remove debate from the moments that matter.
How companies, creators, and brands slowly trade away their soul through small compromises that seem harmless in the moment.
Why alignment matters more than scale when choosing clients, customers, sponsors, platforms, partners, and investors.
How to build something durable without losing the trust, purpose, and values that made it worth building in the first place.

The Core Idea: Growth Without Betrayal

The real test of success is whether you can grow without betraying what made you worth trusting.

It is easy to talk about values when nothing is on the line. It is easy to say you care about quality, access, creativity, service, truth, community, or long-term thinking when the stakes are low. But values only become real when they cost you something.

That might happen when there is a big check on the table from a misaligned sponsor. It might happen when an investor wants a different path than the one you set out to build. It might happen when the algorithm rewards a version of you that is more inflammatory, less nuanced, and less honest. It might happen when you can quietly take the shortcut, ship something you don't believe in, or make a decision that no one will notice in the short term.

Those are the moments that reveal the truth. Not the words on the wall, not the mission statement, not the brand deck, and not the beautifully written values page. The decision is the proof.

Eric's argument is that if you want to build something incorruptible, you have to know what you stand for before those moments arrive. Once the pressure is here, it becomes much harder to think clearly.

Success Attracts Predators

One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is Eric's warning about success. Most of us are trained to think of success as pure upside: more customers, more revenue, more attention, more leverage, more opportunity, and more proof that the thing is working.

Eric flips that idea on its head. Success is not only a source of strength. It is also a liability, because the more valuable your work becomes, the more attractive it becomes to people and systems that want to use it for their own ends.

That can look like:

Investors who want growth at any cost.
Platforms that reward you for becoming a more extreme version of yourself.
Partners who want access to your audience but do not share your values.
A company acquiring a beloved brand and slowly stripping away what people trusted about it.
Your own internal pressure to keep the numbers moving up and to the right, even when the work starts to feel misaligned.

This is where corruption often begins. Not with one giant evil decision, but with tiny tradeoffs. A small compromise here, a slightly misaligned deal there, a decision that seems harmless because "no one will notice," or a shortcut taken because the quarter is tight.

Over time, the thing that made you trusted starts to erode. The work still looks successful from the outside, but inside the machine, something essential has been traded away.

The Gravity of Platforms

Eric and I also talk about the pressure creators face from platforms. This part is especially relevant if you make anything for the internet.

The promise of platforms is access. You can reach people, publish instantly, build a community, and grow a business without asking for permission from traditional gatekeepers. That is powerful, and I don't want to minimize how much opportunity that has created.

But platforms also have values. Not values in the human sense, but values in the incentive sense. They reward certain behaviors and punish others. They reward what keeps people clicking, watching, reacting, arguing, and coming back.

Over time, creators start to adapt. You post something thoughtful and nuanced, and almost nobody sees it. You post something sharper, more polarizing, more emotionally charged, and suddenly the platform lights up.

That teaches you something, whether you want it to or not.

The danger is that you start to confuse what the algorithm rewards with what people actually need. You begin making tiny adjustments: a stronger hook, a more controversial angle, less complexity, more certainty, more outrage, less truth. Eventually, you may not even notice that your voice has changed.

That is the gravity Eric is talking about. It is not a force that announces itself. It is a force that quietly pulls until one day you realize you have been shaped by something you never consciously chose.

Trust Is a Bank Account

One of my favorite ideas from Eric's book is what he calls the culture bank. The idea is simple: trust is an asset.

Every time you make a sacrifice for the sake of a principle, you make a deposit. Every time you betray a principle for short-term gain, you make a withdrawal.

Eric's rule is almost painfully simple:

Only make deposits. Never make withdrawals.

Of course, we are human. We make mistakes. Sometimes we think we are doing the right thing and we get it wrong. Sometimes something breaks, a customer gets disappointed, or a decision does not land the way we intended. That is not the point.

The point is not perfection. The point is to avoid intentional withdrawals.

Don't knowingly trade trust for a quick hit. Don't knowingly betray the values that made people believe in you. Don't knowingl...