Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate.
In this episode, Eric joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way, and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Sponsors
Agents are getting smarter every day. But even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That’s where Notion comes in.
With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on.
Most agent platforms are single-player, making you stand up your own infrastructure just to start. Notion’s Developer Platform flips both. You get primitives to sync any data source in, give your Custom Agents tools that plain MCP can’t deliver, and orchestrate agents like Claude or Codex alongside your team. The CLI authenticates in one line, and Workers run on Notion’s runtime, so there’s nothing to provision.
Because the workspace your team lives in is the same thing you build on, permissions and governance come standard. Write your code, deploy, done.
Learn more about Notion’s Developer Platform today at notion.com/sed
That’s all lower-case letters — notion.com/sed — to try Notion’s Developer Platform today. And when you use our link, you’re supporting our show!
Most AI frameworks started with voice and bolted on video as an afterthought. Vision Agents by Stream was built video-first from day one. It’s an open-source Python framework that lets you build real-time voice and video AI agents in minutes, not months. With 25+ integrations for models like OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, sub-500ms latency on Stream’s global edge network, and support for YOLO, Roboflow, and custom CV models, you get a production-ready stack without the infrastructure headache. Whether you’re building coaching tools, multimodal assistants, or real-time security pipelines; Vision Agents handles the hard parts. Get started free at visionagents.ai.