Eric Ries: Incorruptible by Design

Something in the startup air feels different lately. Founders are still building fast, still shipping code before the coffee cools, but the conversation behind closed doors has shifted. Less about growth hacks. More about durability. Less about blitzscaling a headline. More about whether the machine you build today becomes tomorrow’s bureaucracy with better branding. Silicon Valley has always been good at invention. Accountability has been a harder feature to ship. That tension sits right at the center of the startup ecosystem, and it is exactly the territory Eric Ries has been circling for years. On April 7, 02026, that conversation lands on stage at Cowell Theater inside Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

The Long Now Foundation is hosting the discussion as part of its Long Now Talks series, a program that has been running since 02003 when Stewart Brand began pushing audiences to think in centuries instead of quarters. More than 400 thinkers have stepped into that orbit over the years, unpacking civilization scale questions that rarely show up in quarterly board decks. Systems that outlive their creators. Institutions designed to hold up across generations. The kind of perspective that makes most venture timelines feel microscopic. Incorruptible by Design places Eric Ries squarely inside that tradition while confronting a question the modern startup ecosystem cannot dodge forever: if companies are designed by people, why do so many institutions drift toward corruption, concentration, or decay once scale enters the room?

Inside Cowell Theater the format is deliberately simple. A conversation style Long Now Talk running from 7:00–8:30 pm PT, facilitated by Denise Hearn, who Long Now identifies as Director of Strategic Initiatives while the event listing refers to her as Director of Strategic Partnerships. Before the lights dim and after the audience exhales, the Cowell Theater lobby turns into a gathering space with drinks and small bites where attendees mix and mingle. Builders, investors, operators, and the quietly curious will move through the room trading ideas about what comes after the current cycle of scale-at-all-costs thinking.

Eric Ries arrives with a résumé most founders can quote from memory. Creator of the Lean Startup method. Author of The Lean Startup, The Leader’s Guide, and The Startup Way. Founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange, Answer.AI, Lean Startup Co, Virgil, and IMVU. Host of The Eric Ries Show podcast and former entrepreneur in residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. His earlier 02020 Long Now Talk on the Long Term Stock Exchange already pushed the conversation toward market structures that reward patience over quarterly theatrics. In a moment where governance and trust are becoming central questions again, that thread runs straight through the modern startup ecosystem.

The talk also draws from Eric Ries’s upcoming book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great. The Long Now event page lists the book as available worldwide on May 28, 02026, while the Eventbrite listing cites May 26, 02026. The exact day matters less than the timing. Founders are beginning to realize that product innovation without institutional design eventually collapses under its own incentives. And the deeper question hovering over this room is not whether technology will keep accelerating. It will. The real question is whether the institutions powering the startup ecosystem will mature fast enough to deserve the trust they keep asking the world to give them.