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 original creators of AI at Stanford and MIT.

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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 million in volume last year, all thanks to Lavingia’s willingness to take a different path to success.

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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.

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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. Wendy and I discussed the advantages of being a company that puts human potential and intelligence first in everything it does from numerous angles. Sama’s example shows beyond a doubt that everything we’ve been taught about how to succeed in business is far from the only way – or even the best way – to thrive.

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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 50 languages in 190 countries.

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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 Zapier, that has meant staying as close as possible to customers from the start in order to build a product they really want. It’s no wonder their journey to product-market fit was easier than most founders can ever dream of – a story Wade tells in the episode that involves the magic of an early adopter and a lot of hard work.

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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, perhaps most famously in his book What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. In our conversation, we covered how to build a business with a real ethos, how to gain competitive advantage by doing the right thing, and why thinking beyond the quarter, or even the year, is crucial for survival.

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. In our conversation, Stacy Brown-Philpot and Itouched on Google’s rise and its eventual tumble from its “don’t be evil” ethos, what it was like to pioneer the sharing economy at Task Rabbit and the pivots the company went through along the way, and why selling the company to Ikea was dependent on its mission because “they weren't going to buy anything just to buy it. They needed to buy something that they believed in because they're only a part of something that they believe in.”

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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 steward of AI, including co-founding Inflection AI, a Public Benefit Corporation, in 2022.

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.

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 in thinking about how to build companies that bring good things into the world and are also successful without devolving into extractive behaviors.

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.

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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 why putting people first is the only way to get the kind of results most founders can only dream of. We talked about how to get into that flow state, why preserving culture is crucial, his leadership style and how he decides when to be hands-on versus when to delegate, and how Asana reflects what he’s learned about supporting people at all levels.

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.

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.