Instant NY Times bestseller from Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup. Incorruptible reveals the structural forces ("financial gravity") that pull great companies away from their founding purpose, and the governance design that lets the best ones resist it. The book offers the blueprint for organizations that can grow, prosper, and endure without losing their soul. 💬 Launch AMA with Eric 📘 Free implementation guide for Product Hunt incorruptible.co/resources/guide-for-ph
Hey Product Hunt 👋 Two weeks ago I published a new bestselling book. While The Lean Startup helps entrepreneurs create valuable organizations, Incorruptible covers why and how to protect them.
I wanted to run a launch here because Product Hunt's audience (founders, operators, people who actually build things) is exactly who the book is for. What's most exciting to me is the emotional response and the early adopters already applying these protections to their companies.
Corruption in companies almost never starts with bad people. It's structural. There's a gravitational pull toward extraction, toward the next quarter, toward "best practices" that quietly hollow you out. Unless you design against it, it wins. The book is about how the best companies (Costco, Patagonia, Novo Nordisk, Cloudflare, Anthropic) build what I call a governance fortress.
For anyone who wants to take the frameworks further, I'm sharing the implementation guide free with Product Hunt folks at www.incorruptible.co/resources/g.... It's the workshop version, in writing.
I'll be in the comments all day. Ask me anything about financial gravity, mission-controlled companies, why I think a lot of startup advice (including some of my own) needs an update for the AI era, or where you're seeing the patterns in companies you know.
Feels extremely relevant in a world figuring out how best to govern AI, and the organizations that create and use it. Can't imagine a better person than Eric to have written this book.
The book is a really great read and well-researched. It is definitely highly recommended for any business founder and also for investors. @ericries When most investor-backed businesses are built to be sold, don't the protections all go away when the buyer (e.g. PE firm) decides to dismantle everything?
Thank you for this timely blueprint, Eric. When imagining what Incorruptible would detail, I thought of it as a brilliant epilogue to Built to Last, given the emphasis on how to build institutions that survive the test of time without losing their soul. But your mission transmission goes farther than core ideology. And its stunning. Would you say Incorruptible is as appropriate for the nascent entrepreneur, a person at ground-zero (me), as it is for the seasoned entrepreneur?
Congrats on the new book, @ericries. Does it get easier to write a book now that you've done it a few times?
The book looks interesting, I’ll give it a read. But where’s the startup here? This is the first time in a long while that I’ve seen someone post a book here ;)
Best book ever.
How many of us just want to work with good people who find joy in finding ever more innovative new ways to bring more joy to others in our offerings?
That should be easy, right?
But it's not.
The corruption of the corporate world has driven me mad for decades.
I moved to Silicon Valley in 2009 because it seemed like the only hope for finding “Don’t be evil” companies who could sustain that vow.
This is the happiest I’ve been in a very long time.
I am so very grateful for this book and everyone who is working to create a world in which this vision might actually become real.
The ‘gravitational pull toward extraction’ framing is precise in a way most governance writing isn’t. It’s not that founders become bad people — it’s that the structure rewards certain decisions until those decisions become the default. Building Composa as a solo founder, the version of this I fight is different in scale but identical in mechanism: the pull toward growth metrics over the thing that actually makes the product worth using. Question for you Eric: at what company size does the governance fortress become necessary versus just founder values being enough?
Loving this book. Exactly what is needed right now - extractive capitalism is bleeding us dry. Is there a point in time where the scales tipped to the short-termism? Also, are there examples where a government has intervened to rebalance?
I’ve been spreading the word at London Tech Week, lots of minds to be convinced!
About Incorruptible by Eric Ries on Product Hunt
“Why good companies go bad and how great companies stay great”
Incorruptible by Eric Ries launched on Product Hunt on June 10th, 2026 and earned 174 upvotes and 28 comments, placing #7 on the daily leaderboard. Instant NY Times bestseller from Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup. Incorruptible reveals the structural forces ("financial gravity") that pull great companies away from their founding purpose, and the governance design that lets the best ones resist it. The book offers the blueprint for organizations that can grow, prosper, and endure without losing their soul. 💬 Launch AMA with Eric 📘 Free implementation guide for Product Hunt incorruptible.co/resources/guide-for-ph
Incorruptible by Eric Ries was featured in Startup Books (23.7k followers), Startup Lessons (7.7k followers) and Business Books (1.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 3.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
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Eric Ries
Hey Product Hunt 👋
Two weeks ago I published a new bestselling book. While The Lean Startup helps entrepreneurs create valuable organizations, Incorruptible covers why and how to protect them.
I wanted to run a launch here because Product Hunt's audience (founders, operators, people who actually build things) is exactly who the book is for. What's most exciting to me is the emotional response and the early adopters already applying these protections to their companies.
Corruption in companies almost never starts with bad people. It's structural. There's a gravitational pull toward extraction, toward the next quarter, toward "best practices" that quietly hollow you out. Unless you design against it, it wins. The book is about how the best companies (Costco, Patagonia, Novo Nordisk, Cloudflare, Anthropic) build what I call a governance fortress.
For anyone who wants to take the frameworks further, I'm sharing the implementation guide free with Product Hunt folks at www.incorruptible.co/resources/g.... It's the workshop version, in writing.
I'll be in the comments all day. Ask me anything about financial gravity, mission-controlled companies, why I think a lot of startup advice (including some of my own) needs an update for the AI era, or where you're seeing the patterns in companies you know.
Genuinely excited for this discussion.
Eric