Episodes

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I’m joined by Amir Nathoo, Co-Founder and CEO of Outschool, an education platform offering live online classes for K-12 learners. Amir’s own childhood inspired Outschool—while he went to traditional schools, his parents always encouraged his self-driven coding projects at home.


Outschool is about empowering kids to take control of their learning and building a lifelong love for education. It’s a mission-driven company that’s impacting how we think about ...

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I’m joined by Emil Eifrem, Co-Founder and CEO of Neo4j, an open-source graph database. Neo4j enables organizations to unlock the business value of connections, influences, and relationships in data.


In our conversation today, we talk about the following topics:


• The origin story of Neo4j and why they chose open source


• Open source as a means of production vs. distribution


• How open source fosters trust and transparency


• The pros and cons ...

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I’m joined by Iman Abuzeid, the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, a platform transforming how healthcare systems hire nurses.


After earning an MD, Iman pivoted to business and technology. She spent some time working in New York before enrolling at The Wharton School, where she earned her MBA. After graduating, she moved to Silicon Valley and worked as a product manager at AliveCor, where she met her future co-founder. Together, they launched Incre...

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I’m joined by Siqi Chen, a four-time founder and the CEO and CFO of his latest venture, Runway. Runway offers a modern, user-friendly platform for financial modeling, headcount planning, and departmental budgeting—proudly branding itself as “the finance platform your team doesn’t hate.” With its distinctive marketing and brand-building approach, Runway has garnered significant attention. (Full disclosure: I’m an investor in the company.)


Siqi and I discu...

Rodney Brooks has spent his entire life at the intersection of robotics, computers, and AI. When the Roomba vacuum cleaner launched in 2002, his company, iRobot, brought all three into millions of people’s homes.


iRobot had already succeeded with robots for space exploration, mine detection, search missions, and military applications. However, after the Roomba came out, it went public with a valuation of $600 million. By then, Rodney had been working on AI and robots for decades alongside the...

The story of the digital content-sharing platform Gumroad challenges every aspect of the received wisdom about building successful companies. After it almost went under, founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia decided to pare down to the essentials rather than walk away. Then he took his characteristic counter-intuitiveness further and left Silicon Valley for Provo, Utah. Through it all, he never lost sight of what he was trying to do and his joy in building products. Gumroad is now thriving, with $175 m...

The story of Groq, a semiconductor startup that makes chips for AI inference and was recently valued at $2.8 billion, is a classic “overnight success that was years in the making” tale. On this episode, I talk with founder and CEO Jonathan Ross.


He began the work that eventually led to Groq as an engineer at Google, where he was a member of the rapid eval team – “the team that comes up with all the crazy ideas at Google X.” For him, the risk involved in leaving to launch Groq in 2016 was far ...

Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, an ethical AI company that provides training and jobs with equitable pay and benefits to those who face the greatest barriers to stable employment. Among the companies it provides AI development data to are Microsoft, Ford, Walmart, Google, and many others. But before its current incarnation, Sama was a very different organization.


It began as a non-profit, the brainchild and lifelong passion of its founder, Leila Janah, who sadly passed away in 2020. Her vi...

Sal Khan arrived at the idea for Khan Academy truly organically. While working at a hedge fund, he took time in the evenings to tutor a younger cousin in math over the phone. Soon, a family tutoring network was in place, and from there, it was only a few years before Sal realized that the kind of help he was giving his family could – and should – be made available to everyone for free, across disciplines and geographic locations. Today, Khan Academy has over 170 million users and is available in...

Founded in 2011 in the distinctly non-Silicon Valley location of Columbia, Missouri, software integration company Zapier hit profitability in 2014. Today, the company is valued in the billions, and is poised to keep thriving as AI becomes a normal part of everything we do online. My guest on this episode of The Eric Ries Show is co-founder and CEO Wade Foster, whose ethos from the earliest days on has been: “If you're going to try and build a company, don’t do anything that doesn’t matter.” For ...

What is the relationship between technology and society? What happens to idealism over time? I’m fortunate to have discussed these questions and many more with Tim O’Reilly for this episode of The Eric Ries Show.


Tim is the founder of O’Reilly Media, which has provided countless programmers and technologists with foundational information for doing their work well. He’s also been a long-time witness to the changes and growth of tech, and has consistently looked far ahead of other people, perha...

Stacy Brown-Philpot is a unique voice in Silicon Valley. She began her career as a public accountant and worked at Goldman Sachs before landing at Google.


She was the COO and then the CEO of TaskRabbit, which she saw through its sale to Ikea. Today, she’s on a number of corporate boards including HP, Nordstrom, StockX, Noom, and Black Girls CODE. She’s also a founding member of the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, which invests in Black, Latinx, and Native American founders.


Throughout, she’s be...

The latest episode of The Eric Ries Show features my conversation with Reid Hoffman. Executive Vice President of PayPal, co-founder of LinkedIn, and legendary investor at Greylock Partners are just a few of his official roles that have changed our world. He’s also been a mentor to countless founders of iconic companies like Airbnb, Facebook, and OpenAI. He’s an author, a podcast host – both Masters of Scale and his new show, Possible, with Aria Finger – and perhaps most importantly a crucial ste...

This episode of The Eric Ries Show is all about the relationship between trust and success. I can’t think of anyone better to talk about it with than Seth Godin, author of the classic Permission Marketing, the best-seller This Is Marketing, and many other books, as well as a fantastic daily blog that has been going strong since the early days.


He also co-founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne. While the world tends to view Seth as an expert on marketing, he sees what he does in slightly ...

Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the founder of Metalabel, a platform for releasing collective work. He’s also the author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World.


I’m thrilled to share our recent conversation in this episode. Yancey started out as a music journalist before applying his talents to helping the world share its creative pursuits. For him, creativity and humanity are implicitly connected, and so he’s been a forerunner...

For this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sat down with Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zum, which has had incredible success in the field of student transportation.


The company began as a private service to tackle a problem Ritu was facing herself: how to function as a working parent dealing with erratic pickup and drop-off schedules. Before long, it became clear that there was a far larger opportunity to change pretty much everything about how all kids get to and from school.


Pivoting t...

Welcome to The Eric Ries Show. I sat down with Dustin Moskovitz, founder of not one but two iconic companies: Facebook and the collaborative work platform Asana. Needless to say, he’s engaged in the most intense form of entrepreneurship there is. A huge part of what he’s chosen to do with the hard-earned knowledge it gave him is dedicate himself and Asana to investing in employees’ mental health, communication skills, and more. All of this matters to Dustin on a human level, but he also explains...

In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I talk with James Reinhart, founder of the second-hand resale platform ThredUp. A history major in college, James started his career as a teacher. That might not seem like it has much to do with fashion, but, as he explains, his early education and experiences actually led him not only to be a dual degree student at Harvard’s Business and Kennedy schools, but to a long-term view of ThredUp’s power to effect real change.


We get into the reasons why having...

In this first episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with serial entrepreneur and intrepid explorer, Sami Inkinen. Sami has co-founded two companies: Trulia and Virta Health. After selling Trulia to Zillow for $3.5 billion, he rowed from California to Hawaii with his wife, unassisted. What can’t this guy do? Now, he’s on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people with his latest venture, Virta Health. In this episode, we discuss:


In the interview, we cover:


• How Sami go...

For too long, company builders have been told that purpose and profit are at odds -- that trading one for the other is inevitable. A burgeoning group of founders is proving that wrong, creating organizations whose commitment to their mission inspires the trust of customers, employees, investors, and other partners, leading to serious competitive advantage.


Better companies mean a better world for everyone not just now, but far into the future.


Join Eric Ries for conversations with a range ...