May 26, 2026 – Lean Startup Eric Ries and Stanford Basketball Coach Eric Reveno

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. We got a great show for you today. This is one that I can promise you will be in the greatest hits very soon. We have two great guests named Eric today. It’s an Eric theme show. We’ve never done that before, so that will put it in the history books as well. First up, we have Eric Reese. He is one of the top two or three thought leaders in the entrepreneurship space, if not number one in the entrepreneurship space, he is very, very well quoted and best-selling. I’m excited to welcome him. And then, after that, we have Stanford basketball coach, Coach Rev Eric Ruvino is with us from Stanford. I can’t wait to meet him, even though he’s going to be all about excellence and leadership. We will be right back. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. I am very excited today. We have one of the superstars of entrepreneurship, Eric Reese, is with us. He is the author of The Lean Startup, which is I would put as one of the top three entrepreneurship books out there, with Why and The Four Minute Lie, I’m sorry, The Four Minute Day, or whatever they calls it. Anyway, he wrote that book and just started just a superstar career for him, selling books and consulting and giving speeches all around the world. He has also now just released a new book called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Eric Ries 2:11
I’m doing great, thanks for the kind work.

Jim Beach 2:13
Wouldn’t you agree that those are the three best, biggest books on entrepreneurship?

Eric Ries 2:18
Well, I don’t know, it’s like, you know, never, it should never ask athletes whether they themselves are in the top five or whatever, but yes, those are those are some very illustrious company to be with. I appreciate it,

Jim Beach 2:29
and Simon and I don’t get along, so I’ll say that, and I wrote

Jim Beach 2:35
like an athlete show where we can

Eric Ries 2:38
have beats and everything, it sounds great, I’m

Jim Beach 2:40
gonna beat the shyster out of you entrepreneurs, and I just did a rant the other day on Tim and his book. Did you see the thing that he’s come out and sort of said, maybe you don’t need to be that hyper focused on this constant improvement? Did you see that article of his, or

Eric Ries 3:02
I did it, I did it, but I’m not terribly surprised yet.

Jim Beach 3:07
All right, so anyway, we have established the top three, and yeah, so Simon and I got in a fight, so that knocks him out, and Tim and I, I don’t like the four hour work week, so that puts you as number one, Eric.

Jim Beach 3:19
So, victory by default. I’ll totally take it.

Jim Beach 3:22
I hate to do it that way, but that’s where we ended up.

Eric Ries 3:26
It’s not a competition, but somebody has to be the winner, so

Jim Beach 3:30
that’s right. So, what else did you take any of your ideas for Lean Startup from other countries or other methodologies, any.

Eric Ries 3:45
Yeah, yeah, it was

Jim Beach 3:46
influences or anything.

Eric Ries 3:48
Totally, I really.. I was obsessed when I was writing a lean startup with trying to understand how it related to other people’s ideas and to older ideas, especially because I, a, I wanted to make sure it was in fact an original contribution. I was kind of always worried, doing my research, that one day I find some long lost book that would have all the answers in it, and I’d be like, “Oh, no need to write this book, but also I wanted to be able to help people who were advocates for, like, lean manufacturing or design thinking or agile programming, or whatever, you know, it was a lot of things I was touching on, and I wanted people to see how their ideas they had learned in their career, in their function, in their background, could relate to Lean Startup. So, yes, you know, Steve Blank’s customer development was a big influence, Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming was a big influence, and then a lot of the business classics, you know, kind of reinterpreted for a modern era, so spent a lot of time with Taichi Ono and the other pioneers of leading manufacturing, Deming, and folks like that, and even went all the way back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, and spent a lot of time in the book trying to help people understand. At that point, too, it was literally 100 years since the publication of the principle of scientific management. Said, look, we’ve had exactly one century of man. Management as a separate theoretical discipline, and let’s take stock of where we are, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where do we need to go for management second century. So that was a big part of how I developed the concepts in these terms.

Jim Beach 5:11
And what was your conclusion for the last 100 years? Have we made progress or gone backwards?

Eric Ries 5:17
Both. Both. See, that’s what’s so interesting about a large scale field like business, it’s so big, so yes, you know, certainly you zoom all the way out, you have to say that business has been a tremendous success over the course of the 20th century. You think about how many people are alive, how much stuff we’re able to produce, our manufacturing capacity, our global supply chains, like these are a triumph of human engineering, and it’s really interesting. I found it fascinating. As a technologist, I’m a software guy, so for me going back and reading the history of industrial leadership and the development of all these ideas was like really fascinating, because it allowed me to go back to a time, which is not that long ago, we’re talking about our great grandparents’ time, where the major problem in the world was that there wasn’t enough stuff, like not enough steel, not enough food, not enough fertilizer, like not enough things. So, from a modern perspective, this is baffling to try to comprehend. Now we have poverty, and we have people who don’t have all that they need, but those are purely political and logistical problems. It’s not a capacity problem, we actually have a problem of over abundance causing climate destabilization and inequality, all these other issues. So it was really helpful to see how management’s triumph over the course of the 20th century also set the stage for these disasters that we in this new century have to learn to confront, but with just as our great grandparents and our grandparents did with the right intellectual tools we can confront and even master these challenges, for sure.

Jim Beach 6:47
All right, very interesting. You were making me think about my grandfather. My grandfather was born in 1892 I grant not you said great grandfather. I was like, well, hell no. My grandfather was actually right,

Jim Beach 6:58
right,

Jim Beach 6:58
exactly.

Jim Beach 6:59
You know, he loved to count how many presidents that he had been alive for, and to tell you which one, and he would get to a certain one from my home state, and then just shake his head and walk away, but

Jim Beach 7:13
people

Jim Beach 7:13
figure that out, all right. Tell us about the newest one, Incorruptible. Why good companies go bad, and how great companies stay great. Released just today, I think the pre-orders are up a little earlier, so it should be at number one as it releases. Tell us about it.

Eric Ries 7:31
Well, thanks for that. Appreciate that. That optimism is great too. Yeah, so I spent now 20 years helping people start companies. I mean, I can’t tell you how many at this point, hundreds, 1000s, incredible companies, and I’ve helped people make so much money and have so much success, and yet there’s like something very sad. There’s like a darkness to all this success. I know so many people who’ve built exceptional businesses and then lost control of them have become something malign, and I think we’ve all watched it, and how many times your favorite product, your favorite brand, you know, got taken over by private equity, or after it went public, it went downhill, or just, you know, how many people were so excited by Google’s don’t be evil ethos once upon a time, and now it’s not like Google’s a terrible company, but

Jim Beach 8:16
oh, come on, does anyone have that same, that

Eric Ries 8:18
same optimism about it? Well, I just say, like, look, and one of the things I did for the book is I researched dozens, I mean, literally dozens of ex-Google employees who’ve written about this, what it was like to watch the company transform into something unrecognizable to them. So I don’t even forget what my judgment is, or your judgment, just listen to the people that work there, and the sense of pain, the sense of loss that they experience as the ethos, the character, the soul of the place was damaged, and we are so surrounded by this phenomenon we don’t even know what to call it. I think it was the economist John Kay wrote in his book that he had taken a friend to his favorite restaurant, and when he got there, he just, he was like very disconcerted, and he was like looking on his phone, his friend was really agitated, like, “Hey, man, what light on the phone? He’s like, “Sorry, just one second, one second. Yep, I could taste it. He turned his phone around, said, “Yep, this restaurant was bought by private equity, I could taste it in the food. And I pulled that story so many times, and people are like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve had that experience. People like, “Oh, yeah, it happened to my favorite restaurant. It’s a universal experience, and it’s contrary to our ideology of what capitalism is supposed to be about. Competition is supposed to be about improving quality, it’s supposed to be about improving efficiency, it’s supposed to be about customers being served better. And yet, in so many areas of our lives, we can see how these forces are making things worse, not better. So, I was like really struggling with what do we call this phenomenon, and what do we do about it. Well, I think we should use the same word our great grandparents, or as you say, even our grandparents would have used. They would have called this corruption, and they would have said, “What are you doing? This is not how you run an economy. This is not what we set up for you. Many ways that people make money today in the world, our grandparents would have considered crime. Lines not just immoral, not just unethical, but illegal. So, we’ve kind of created this very permissive attitude. We’re all forms of making money and are deemed to be equal, and yet so many ways of making money are not value creating, they’re value destroying. We have to see that as what it is. It is a corruption of the moral logic of capitalism, and so we have to learn as entrepreneurs, especially, but as leaders, as board members, as consumers, as employees, no matter what our role is, we have to learn how can we build organizations that are incorruptible.

Jim Beach 10:29
Okay, I have several responses. Then we will ask you that question. Exactly, anthropic, I think about a month ago, or maybe less, came out and announced that they are no longer abiding by their own moral code. Did I see that, or did I make that up?

Eric Ries 10:49
Well, that was a major news story, and you’re absolutely right. They, yeah, I wouldn’t say their moral code, but they changed their with what’s called the responsible scaling policy, which has to do with this question with people who are trying to create what they call super intelligence. What do you do in a competitive environment where you might have competitors who are doing things that are unsafe? Should you follow them into unsafety or should you refuse? It’s like for people who are like, take ethics and morality of AI seriously, this is a very thorny question. I know you’re absolutely right, specific

Jim Beach 11:20
topic move, let’s name it after them.

Eric Ries 11:24
Well, see, here’s the thing, I think that this specific change that they adopted, I don’t know that you can say it is a betrayal. I know it was like it was common to be like, oh my god, they’re changing their safety commitment, but I think it is legitimately a difficult, thorny question about what to do, and probably it was founded at a time of great optimism that all the AI research labs would coordinate together to adopt common safety principles, and it looked like it was going to happen that way for a while, but especially with the rise of Grok and the recent changes at Open AI, you’re trying to see companies going in very divergent paths when it comes to AI safety, so I don’t know. I’m not really like I’m in a position to criticize or to endorse this change. We’ll have to see how it plays out in practice.

Jim Beach 12:08
All right, so I want to guess the restaurant was it PF Chang’s?

Eric Ries 12:13
You know, it’s so funny you say that, because that story isn’t about PF Chang’s, but I was sitting in a PF Chang’s having that exact conversation with someone not that long ago, because, yeah, that is a story where the food is not what it once was.

Jim Beach 12:30
So, why do all of these businesses become so corrupted?

Eric Ries 12:36
I think we have to grapple with what I call the fundamental forces that act on organizations. These are the forces that are more powerful, even than leadership, more powerful than management, more powerful, even than culture. It’s like, think about going beneath the surface of what’s really going on. One of these forces I call financial gravity. This is the force, the pressure that gets exerted on all organizations, for profit, nonprofit, small, large, medium, public, private, you name it. We all feel this pressure from the rise of our increasingly large financial system. Financialization has created this pressure that is just so immense, and what happens is people build organizations that you can trust people say I’m going to build a good company, a great company, a company that you love being my customer. Think about the rabid fans at Costco who love everything about Costco. The financial gravity starts pushing those companies to exploit the trust that they built with customers, the brand that they’ve built, the policies that they built, the culture they built. Try to exploit those things for short-term gain, and unfortunately, many companies are not built to resist this pressure. So, they give into the pressure, they ruin what once made them great, and although sometimes they make a bunch of money in the short term, in the long run those things tend to have disastrous consequences for them and for the other people that they touch. So, that force is something that, unless an organization is very particularly designed to resist, most organizations succumb to today.

Jim Beach 14:07
So, then, is all private equity corrupt? Then, by definition,

Eric Ries 14:16
no. I don’t think so. And I’m actually in the minority in this view, among people who study this, there’s quite a lot of people who’ve looked at this whole situation and concluded that investors are the root cause of the problem, and that’s fair. In the book, I give 200 years worth of examples of times when investors have killed the golden goose by pushing out the founder, by changing the ethos, by ruining what was once great, and the disastrous consequences that follow, and so, as a result, you’ve seen a rise of companies that are staying private. You have companies that are explicitly turning away from investment, and obviously you have a big, big private equity backlash. But I don’t think private equity is, like, by its nature, rapacious. It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, a lot of the original concepts of private equity, it’s. Make poorly performing companies and turn them around, make them more efficient. That makes a lot of sense. I was actually talking to one corporate raider who has a really ruthless reputation, but he engineered an activist campaign against a company I know really well, and one of the things that he insisted on was they get rid of all the board members who were just there to participate and for prestige, and said that everyone who won the board needed to have like half of their personal net worth had to be bound up in the stock of the company they were turning around, so I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. That seems to me like a really good idea. So I think there are private equity actors and activist actors who do a vital or positive function, but unfortunately the temptation for too many of these guys has just been to make the quick buck, to you know, to squeeze margins, to squeeze suppliers, squeeze customers, come in, break things up. They’re so much easier to break things down than is to build them up in the first place. So I think we, we have this, this phenomenon, this temptation that’s no good. But again, I think we have to be careful to say, like, is the blame that there’s greedy people? Well, you know, human greed isn’t with us for all time. It’s not like a new thing, and human greed is not worse than it was before. Human nature doesn’t change that much, you know. In the same way that when a bridge collapses, and I say, well, why did that bridge collapse, and be like, well, gravity, you know, it pulls things down. That’s kind of a dumb answer. It’s like it’s technically true, like, yes, greed is going to be with us forever. Financial gravity is with us forever. When a bridge collapses, we don’t say, “Well, gravity, what can you do? We ask questions like, “Well, who designed that bridge? What kind of tension was it designed to withstand? What kind of wind load could it handle? What kind of load could it carry? We look at those factors and say, “Oh, I see the design of these materials were weak, we could do better next time. And so I think placing the blame only on investors or only on private equity misses the half of the story, which is that our modern corporate governance best practices are teaching generation after generation of founders to build companies that are frankly weak, they are not strong enough to resist these pressures, and so they collapse, but there’s no reason why those best practices should be called best. In fact, the academic research on most of these practices is that they are absolutely value destroying. So, a big part of my goal with this book is to abandon these old best practices and develop a new set of practices that not only are more value creating but more aligned with promoting human flourishing.

Jim Beach 17:19
All right, are there guardrails that we can put on businesses now that would prevent this from happening, and by extension, what kind of guardrails are we going to put on AI? Should we be having guardrails there? And then that’s enough for one question,

Eric Ries 17:41
yeah, yeah, no problem. Absolutely, there are guardrails, and in the book I lay out a blueprint for how people who love organizations, so I don’t only mean founders, but anyone who has a leadership position, a board member, but also I talk about how employees and customers, even investors, like how every one of us has more power than we realize to shape organizations in this better way, and the guardrails, roughly speaking, need to be in two dimensions. They’re equally important. First is on the operational side, so this is what I call ethos, the culture or character of a place. What are the techniques and tactics we can use to make sure that everyone in an organization knows to do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Unfortunately, many of our best practices about metrics, about OKRs, about accountability, about how we track and reward performance by having massive, massive, massive hole that ultimately causes them to lead to exploitative behaviors, even if that’s not what’s intended by leadership, so we got to fix that, and the second thing is we have to build organizations that have this characteristic I call integrity, and people think of integrity like with a person. If a person has integrity, you say that’s someone who can keep their promise, but if I say that a bridge has integrity, you mean you don’t understand that means something different, it means structural integrity, it can withstand pressures that are put upon it. Well, for an organization, both notions of integrity are the same. An organization that is weak to outside pressure can never, ever, ever be trusted to keep a promise, and that organization that can’t be trust cannot be trusted cannot accumulate the most underrated asset in the world today, which is trustworthiness. So, the guardrails on the integrity side are things like becoming a public benefit corporation, legally binding the organization to be what I call mission controlled over the long run. That’s your AI question. Should AI have these guardrails? Yes, it is absolutely vitally essential. We’re already starting to see the tremendously negative effects that AI can have if we’re not careful. Think about the people who’ve been induced by their AI to commit suicide. Think about the companies that have already endured tremendous liability because their AI customer service agent started making up things or hallucinating saying things that are not true. So, I don’t mean to say that those dangers are like an apocalypse already, but I think we are in general not taking nearly seriously enough the need for. Guardrails on this technology. Now, when I say that, some people like, ah, therefore ban the technology, therefore regulate it, therefore do this, if you do that, I think a lot of those proposals are frankly naive, because first of all, this is a geo strategic issue that has to do with, you know, competition with other countries and many, many, many providers, but also because at the end of the day, what we call AI is not a magical thing, it’s for most part what we’re talking about these days, is what are called large language models. They’re just incredibly complicated mathematical functions that take language in and produce language out through matrix multiplication. So, the idea that you can regulate ban controlled math, I think, is a little bit silly. A better way to think about it is in terms of there’s like, think about it like we would think about for product liability. We need to build organizations that want to use this technology to create human flourishing. We should be very suspicious of companies that are not so committed, and we should make sure that we have at a minimum standard the same level of liability, disclosure, transparency for these technologies, as we have for microwaves. Okay, if you bring a little microwave, you put it in your kitchen, you push the button, use it in a completely ordinary way, and it causes a thermonuclear detonation that just levels your house and the three around it. We’re not going to be like, oh, well, you did it wrong, you’re not supposed to push that button, I guess it’s your own fault. No, obviously, we don’t live in the world of caveat emptor anymore. We would say the vendor has a responsibility to help the customer use the product in an ordinary way, in a way that does not cause massive harm. So, I think just some very, very basic standards like that would go a long way toward fitting guardrails that would make it more likely that AI is used in a beneficial way.

Jim Beach 21:39
I watched one of the interviews with Sam Altman, and in my opinion, he admitted to killing one of his co-workers. I don’t know if you know anything about this. How can we.. I’m sorry,

Eric Ries 21:54
I don’t know, I don’t know what you mean.

Jim Beach 21:55
I was just telling you that, that just a little data point that from this interview I interpreted it as Sam saying, yeah, I did kill that guy. How do we take these very, very greedy, flawed people? You know, I’m not going to say that Elon and Sam, and whoever else, the third guy you throw in there, that that’s a bucket of sane people, right there. Two of them are literally James Bond characters. You know, how do we trust people when there’s not enough guardrails? And you know, right, we’re not.. we don’t have them now, and I don’t know how the hell they’re going to get implemented. How do we trust those people? Anthropic.

Eric Ries 22:40
listen, I don’t want to be, I don’t get into specific individual name people, you know, I don’t know the incident that you’re referring to, you say you say what you want to say, that’s fine, but, but, yeah, like, look, look, the people you did, obviously I have responsibility, moral responsibility for a lot of things that have happened in our world today, I mean, and, and you know they’re their views are widely available on social media, so it’s not like it’s like an older era where you’re like, I wonder what Elon Musk really thinks, like he is tweeting his views every single day. So building an economic system that places extreme, almost unlimited power into the hands of individual people like that, I think, is very dangerous, and frankly, foolhardy. So, I don’t, I don’t feel any special need to defend it. Now, I object to the characterization of anthropically in the same category as those guys. You know, I think their behavior for demon should be different. Think about the tussle they had with the Pentagon just recently, where they had to, like, they had to really turn down actual money, like something like $200 million in order to defend one of their own principles, that is relatively rare in business today, but I think that kind of behavior is super valuable to distinguish from others and to praise and say, look, that is actually a good idea, and a lot of people were like, well, they’re just virtuously going, oh, they’re just this, they’re just that, but like when you see someone doing the right thing at great cost to themselves with very little upside, I think that’s something that is insignificant, but, but zooming out, your concern, I think, is quite valid, that is, we don’t want to have to live in a world where billions of people live at the mercy of a handful of relatively unstable people who, from all accounts, look like they’re totally miserable and like trying to find, trying to find some path to happiness, a lot of cases being like antagonistic to the idea of self-reflection in the first place, that is not a, not a happy state of affairs. So we really should be putting our energy into creating institutions, not just cultivation personality around individuals, and again I go back to our grandparents who set up the institutions that we still inherit to this day, that govern the modern world, many of those institutions have lost their vitality because the people that run them, whether we’re talking about university presidents or CEOs or big law firms or whoever, seem to have lost the plot about, like, what, what is the purpose of these organizations, what are they, what are they meant to do, what is their ethos? So, like, so I get that there’s a lot of skepticism about institutions in general these days, but there was a time when these institutions didn’t exist. When they did exist, they were tiny startups. Now they’re old. Now we see them as old-fashioned, but I kind of feel like there’s a need for an old-fashioned wave of civic renewal, where we start to ask ourselves, like, what, what is the democratically legitimate but still dynamic and adaptive way for these decisions to be made? And how can we, as entrepreneurs, how can we as leaders, how can we as citizens demand what I call in the book civic infrastructure, the new kind of civic infrastructure that will mediate a lot of these ideas and take them out of the realm of individual personality clashes and into what I call the architecture of institutional longevity.

Jim Beach 25:47
About 12 feet for me, I have a framed pencil that my mother gave me from Granddaddy. He used that pencil for 20 years, and it’s about two two and a half inches long now, but he kept it for a long time. He was one of those guys that I’ve used this ax for 50 years, you know. I’ve had the head replaced four or five times, and I’ve had the blades five times, but this handle I’ve had three or four times. But this is the best ax I’ve ever had, you know, one of those guys. Eric, I can’t wait to read this one. Fantastic, Incorruptible in bookstores today. How do you want us to buy it? Find out more about you, follow you online.

Eric Ries 26:28
Oh, that’s so great. Yeah, just go to incorruptible.co that’s my website. You can join the mailing list, you can find out all the cool pre-order bonuses that are still going. As people are hearing this close to the release date, we have all kinds of an extra secret chapter you can get, and research a lot of research stuff, some useful practical implementation guides for people who are interested in these ideas and want to go deeper. We have a community of like-minded practitioners people can join, and the book itself, you can get absolutely anywhere books are sold, in hardcover, in ebook, or even an audiobook. I read the audiobook myself, and it has a bunch of cool bonus content in it, and you know, if people are willing, maybe go get a copy at your local independent bookstore and take a selfie while doing it. Post it online, you know, local bookstores are such an incredible community resource, and we don’t appreciate them enough. So might be an opportunity to say thank you to your local bookseller. You can certainly get the book there.

Jim Beach 27:17
Very well said, Eric. Thank you so much for being with us. We’d love to have you back, and good luck on the book.

Eric Ries 27:23
Thank you so much, appreciate the interview.

Jim Beach 27:25
And we will be right back. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. I am very excited and honored to welcome Division One Stanford men’s basketball coach, Eric Reveno, also known as Coach Rev. He has had an incredible career in basketball at Stanford, Georgia Tech, Oregon State, and for the last 12 years he has been the head coach at Stanford. I don’t think you get any more prestigious than that, he really works on leadership as part of his framework for their success. They don’t focus on titles or anything like that. Instead, they focus on teaching individuals how to elevate the people around them. Boy, that is a great strategy. Coach Rev, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Eric Reveno 28:19
Fantastic. It’s nice, sunny day out here in California. They get not too warm, so it’s good. Life’s always good here.

Jim Beach 28:27
Excellent. Well, the school year is wrapped up, so you are going into recruiting season now, I would assume.

Eric Reveno 28:35
Yeah, we’re actually on the quarter system, so our guys are still around. We’ve got workouts, but yeah, but like everybody else, we are recruiting a lot, got a lot of, we’ve got a couple spots to fill, so we’re, we were out over the weekend looking at prospects and trying to find high school kids, and nowadays with the transfer portal, even looking at somebody talking to some other college kids, so it seems to never stop, like a lot of industries these days, it’s continuous, so, but what’s great about the job is how it is seasonal. It does change, so you hit the nail on the head with, like, okay, what are you doing now? It’s different than what you were doing a month ago, or two months ago, or three months ago. So, I always enjoy that part of

Jim Beach 29:17
it. That is fun. The seasonality of a job really makes it easier to do, I think, and makes it a lot more interesting. So, I would agree with that, for sure. Do you have trouble, sir, getting athletes that also can pass the very rigorous Stanford admission process? You have to get players in there.

Eric Reveno 29:39
Yes, I mean, we have trouble in the sense that there’s not a lot of them. It’s not a challenging task when you find the right ones to sell them on Stanford. Is not that hard, but you know you have some that are close. Those are the toughest ones, close but not quite there, and they have to go through the. Admissions process, we actually have to have to fill out an application and do some get their counselors to make recommendations, teachers, and take the SAT, and there’s stuff that, like other schools that that we’re recruiting against, don’t have to do, but when you find the right kid, because the value of Stanford education, they’re normally pretty motivated to do that, so it has its challenges, but it’s more about, you know, identification. You find, identify everyone, the actual sell, you know, sell the right selling is not that hard.

Jim Beach 30:36
No, Stanford is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I have been there during the summertime, and it’s absolutely gorgeous, as you said, and also it’s one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious school in the country. So, I mean, everyone wants a Stanford diploma for sure. What about.. I don’t know, what was it? 10 years ago, there was the admissions scandal, of course. You had absolutely nothing to do with that, but did that impact you at

Eric Reveno 31:06
all? You know, it’s called the varsity gloom

Jim Beach 31:09
was getting in trouble.

Eric Reveno 31:13
Yes, and so they went down a slippery slope of all of a sudden, you know, getting donations and fundraising, and all of a sudden trying to support athletes, because we do get, we do get ability to recommend someone to admissions. Well, what happened was at Stanford, and some other Ivy League schools, some coaches were getting, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars donations to, to, to help athletes get in, and so, you know, it will, it created an opportunity for us to review the process and make it more stringent in terms of how we approach this stuff, because you know, there, you know, we do get a lot of philanthropy from, from very well-to-do people, and they sometimes do have athletes, you know, children, and so how you manage that, not accepting donations when they’re, we can’t accept donations from someone that’s going to, you know, be a potential recruit. They rigorously came out his bios and backgrounds. It’s not that hard for basketball, to be honest, because you look up a basketball player and they double check to make sure he’s a really good basketball player and Stanford fit, but we also check, you know, now they have to do it for, you know, for fencing and for sailing, and for so that the coaches are held to make sure that the coach isn’t good influenced by anything outside of just athletes fit with their program, so like you say, what you know, something that that really did impact us day to day, but it gave us a chance to look at the process of the admissions, the missions process that we have.

Jim Beach 32:45
Right, I remember I thought I think I saw an interview with the sailing coach there, who got in trouble, and it seemed to me that he got the shortest end of the stick of anybody, that he was totally innocent and got on a league out real bum job for some technicality or something.

Eric Reveno 33:05
Yeah, you know, I don’t know the details. I wasn’t actually here when that happened, you know. So it wasn’t like, and I don’t know the details, I don’t know things, so I really can’t speak to it. I think, you know, I do think that, like, it’s a little bit more, and there’s it, the process, like I think it got a little bit, there’s a, there was a gray area that’s hard for people to understand sometimes when you’re trying to raise, build a program and stuff, so yeah, I’m not really exactly sure, but they like, they say they sort of, they keep through, they tightened up the oversight, so a coach isn’t left to the point where he gets caught, you know, unaware that he’s doing something wrong,

Jim Beach 33:46
right. Well, that’s us, or just move on. I’m glad that situation is behind us, and you have a little bit better standards now. So, how did the team do this year? What was your record? How did you do, and what does it look like for next year?

Eric Reveno 34:01
So, we you know, even though it’s we’re out here in Silicon Valley, we play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC 18 team league. We were picked 17th, we finished, we finished ninth, and so it’s Coach Smith is actually the head coach, I’m associate head coach, and Coach Smith is second year here, and so we feel really good about the progress we’re making. Ninth wasn’t our goal, but we almost made the NCAA tournament because it’s one of the power four conferences, so we’re almost even able to make the championships, finishing ninth in such a strong league. We didn’t make it. We hope to get back next year. We had a really dynamic, great player who’s a freshman by the name of Abuka Fory. He’s a name that people will see and hear about. Just a great player, great kid. We’re now actually pulling for him to go to the NBA. He’s trying out in the NBA. And it’s going to be maybe a first round draft pick, which is unfortunate for us, that we’re going to lose them after just one year, but we like the guys that we have back, we love being in the ACC, it’s us and Cal over at University of California, Berkeley, a very, you know, so it’s us out here playing the ACC, but we’re excited about it, and we think we’re going to get over the hump here and get to the NCAA tournament, make a run at the NCAA title.

Jim Beach 35:28
Fantastic. I would love to see that. Are your players different because they are smarter than maybe the players at some other schools? Do you feel like you’re just in a different league because of the competitiveness of Stanford academically?

Eric Reveno 35:47
That’s a great question. I, you know, I first, I would, everyone’s the intelligence factor is interesting because it’s, it’s with a lot of guys, you know, we have guys over the years that, like, that will come across like just like your regular airhead, you know, like just forgetful, or they’re, or asking silly questions, or you know, they don’t jump off as they’re not all the, they’re nerds, we have, we have some of those, but they’re not like all the, all like that, you know, the one thing that’s common about them is their values are pretty squared away, they’re pretty good workers, I’d say. Intensive, more than smart, I’d say they’re good workers, and they’re good learners, right? So, somewhere along the way, they learn to be good students, right? So, they learn to follow through, they learn to do what, do what the teacher says, type stuff. And so, they’re, they’re good, compliant students like that. Some of them are, can be smart, Alex, and have you know, sense of humors and personalities, but they’re good learners. I think that’s what pays dividends. I think, like, you show them a scouting report, you show them some plans, and they’re pretty good at learning it. I think we get spoiled that way, and then we, you know, we still have the issues of trying to build culture and build a team and make sure they’re playing together, and, like, you know, row as a, to use the metaphor, row on a boat, row, and everyone rowing together in the same direction, you know, we still have that issue, but they’re good, they understand things, and they can learn, and they’re not, they can focus pretty good, they can sit there, and you can watch a film session, you know, for 20 year old males sitting there watching film for 20 minutes and going through some stuff, they’re kind of your regular males that maybe they get a little distracted, a little bit, you know, rambunctious or something, but but this group actually is pretty good at focusing, and so that’s that’s what I would say is different, is their learning capacity, learning pace of learning is good, you can use that to your advantage, you still got to make it fun and enjoyable as basketball, but they can learn

Jim Beach 37:46
all right. Let’s talk about leadership, being a teammate, team culture. How do you set your culture like to throw chairs like Bobby Knight? Or

Eric Reveno 37:59
that’s actually a good question, too, because it speaks to the fact that, like, as a leader, you know, you sort of set the tone on what’s important. I think for us, the big thing with being a great is starting with being a good teammate, like, you know, we’ve got this this acronym we use called STORM, where, you know, S is, you got to show up and have some energy and be trying to do the best you can. Everyone has good days and bad days, but be positive, be you know, bring some energy. And then T is take care of relationships, look after each other, you know, just just maybe pay a little bit of attention to somebody if they’re down, just be attentive to others, not just be in your own world and try to open yourself up. O is own your power, you know, like you have an influence on whether we win or lose, like you might not be in the game at the time, but what are you doing to help us win? What do you? How’s that? How are you affecting the outcome? R is raise up others, you know, try to make your teammates better, because if my team’s better, and so, like, for a book of Corey, like, he’s so on our team. If we had made the NCAA tournament, we had done well in the tournament. If our team had been better, he’d have a better chance of being a higher draft pick than he is right now. He still is pretty good, but he’d be better. So, like, lifting others up helps you be do better. And the last one is maintain mission focus with M, maintain mission focus. I see, like, like the objective is to win. Yes, you want to play more. So those five things we talk about, and then from that we’ll have leaders emerge, but like everyone’s kind of focused on those, and and we’re real about, like, who’s, you know, which one are you not very good at whether it’s your reaction to adversity, you know, like the fouls called, and you sort of have an influence on keeping the team focused, and you, and you respond in a bad way, or you’re more, a little more cared, or caring about you really wear your emotions on your sleeve about how you play versus what. Or we win or lose, we’ll talk about those things, and like I said, the guys can handle all that and have that conversation, so that’s the kind of guys we’re looking for, and as a leader, as a coach, like you know, I’ve got to, we’ve got to, we’ve got to embody that and make sure that we’re doing the things that support that value

Jim Beach 40:24
does the team leader develop automatically, is that a process that you get involved in trying to pick a leader?

Eric Reveno 40:34
You know, it’s interesting. Yes, we do, and we’ll pick leaders, we’ll say, okay, he’s our captain this year, and sometimes that’s wishful thinking, you know, because sometimes, because the leader, the guy who plays a lot, is your star, is going to be a leader, because in a sports setting, you know, the guy who, the guy who, at a company who gets paid the most, and is, is, is, you know, has the title, it might get, you know, you know, he’s going to be a leader, so you can’t just say so, you know, we like so and so is going to be a leader, but in a sports team we’ll try to pick guys, but what’s interesting is how there are leaders that that evolve just because they’re they’re the charismatic guy, they’re the funny guy, they’re the ones that the players follow, they’re the ones, and so trying those guys do just emerge, and so if you focus on the teammate values and that person has the teammate values, then they’re going to be a, they’re going to be a servant leader that that really thinks about the team while they’re leading, so we talk about it like that, and the leaders evolved. Both things are really true. The leaders evolve from the group that people follow. A leader is someone that people will follow, and then there’s ones that we sort of try to name captains, or do that sometimes. They’re the same, sometimes they’re not. The ones we try to name captains, people will choose to follow or not. Also, so that’s an interesting problem. You want to have the best teams, those people are the same. Your best people are the designated captains and the designated charismatic leaders. And do you coach the culture? Do you sit around and talk about the culture? I think I don’t know much about basketball. I got to tell you that Eric didn’t coach wooden at UCLA talk about culture as long as half the practice. Sometimes you know, I guess that’s a good point. I don’t know how long. I love the fact that you’re thinking about in terms of how long he did, because he evidently didn’t practice very long, but he did, he did every message, every drill, and every message had something to do about the team, and they say that, like, he was not a tourist, but famous for focusing just on UCLA. They were so talented at the time that he didn’t have to worry too much about the opponent. We tend to worry and talk a lot about the opponent sometimes too, the but but he’s, you know, talking about the culture. We don’t coach Smith, and like, we don’t talk a lot about it, because we feel like sitting down and talking about it can be overly done. We’ll do it some, and Coach will do a good job at the beginning of the practice to sort of frame some things and talk about, you know, setting a standard, helping your teammates reach a certain standard, what it means to be a good to raise somebody up, or you know, your body language is your power, so like only in your power to take one example of what we focus on, like so when you, when you have really bad body language, when your teammate makes a bad pass that has a ripple effect that maybe you’re not thinking up with things in practice, or we’ll set up a drill, you know, we’ll do to make sure that you’re like your job is to work together as a team in a different way, and we’ll try to do things like that, and then after the drill, we’ll point things out, so you try to weave it a little bit again, the attention spans, and keeping, keeping guys engaged, and having them learn different ways is the fun of it. It’s the trick of it. A lot of times you’re teaching stuff, and they’re not aware that they’re learning that.

Jim Beach 44:20
Interesting, I grew up in the 80s, I guess, and when I think about basketball, I think about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and I was a big fan back then. And the last time I went to a Hawks game here in Atlanta, it looked like I was playing harder than they were, you know, walking down the court. I don’t know if they were already out of the playoffs or what, but I was kind of upset because I spent a lot of money to be there, and I took the kids, and you could tell that they weren’t playing hard. I don’t like the NBA anymore. What are your thoughts on the NBA? I just don’t like the characters as much.

Eric Reveno 44:58
Yeah, no, I.. that’s. Yeah, I think it’s improved, so I had, you know, similar experiences, 70s, 80s, it was a different NBA. Now it’s got it’s still more professional, still expensive to go. There’s some things about it that are a little bit too commercialized in terms of just competing and playing, and so I, you know, I can see that I watched the game last night, that was double overtime, and San Antonio Spurs against Oklahoma City, and it was, it was a good game there, they were playing really hard, I think, in the playoffs, you know, the knock on the NBA, when they play 81 games, having the having the ability to play hard all the time. I think you definitely can catch them on a bad night, and I also think the problem, one of the things they struggle with the NBA is trying to figure out how to get their stars to play all the time. So now what they do is they have load management and players will sit out games for their, you know, health, so they can compete at the right time. So you could take the kids and the family to a game to see some particular player, and he might not play that night, so, and the guy who’s taking his place, I always say the guy who’s taking his place is really, really good too, but you know, it’s like they got a backup for the lead singer, The Rolling Stones, or something, the guy could be pretty good, but it’s still not Mick Jagger, so I understand that problem, but yeah, no, I would say, give it a chance this time of year. If you’re flipping channels and you see the NBA now, take a look for a minute or so and see how you we think, because this time of year they’re playing a little bit harder.

Jim Beach 46:30
Well, I thought it’s the playoffs, they should be playing every second with everything, you know.

Jim Beach 46:34
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

Jim Beach 46:37
Michael Jordan, the greatest ever.

Eric Reveno 46:40
I like him. I’m partial to him. This guy at San Antonio, the seven four kid Wimbayama, I saw last night. I’m starting thinking, gosh, maybe he could get thrown them. Yeah, I like Mama Michael Jordan vote. I vote Michael Jordan over like Lebron James or Kobe, so that I like to argue. We argue with our young guys on the team about that once in a while. If you ever want to pick a fight among basketball people, just start arguing about that. It’s, it goes round and around, and people just dig in. But yeah, Michael Jordan has a competitor, practice wise, game wise, the stuff you’re talking about, the number of games he played in a row, and the number of things he did, the consistency of effort, every possession, that kind of stuff, sort of let alone the talent, the ability, and everything that

Jim Beach 47:30
lists them above all others. For me,

Jim Beach 47:33
this is a.. I can’t believe I’m going to ask this question this way. There’s a Curry. Is there a player named Curry in the NBA, yeah.

Eric Reveno 47:44
Yes,

Jim Beach 47:45
she used to babysit my kids.

Eric Reveno 47:48
Did she really?

Jim Beach 47:49
Isn’t that the smallest world ever?

Eric Reveno 47:51
That is. Well, that’s great. Yeah, no, they’re good people. They live near her. They’re good folks. I don’t know them real well, but everyone you know who sees them, they’re very active philanthropically, she’s.. she does a lot of things in terms of feeding underprivileged kids or people in Oakland, as I understand it, and so they’re great. I mean, they’re in terms of a superstar for that team, that the Warriors here, they’re one of the best.

Jim Beach 48:20
Yes, I, and then her father got there, was a big story. He got some sort of discrimination or something, wasn’t allowed into an arena or something, and I don’t remember the exact story about that, but he and I used to drive carpool together. So, oh,

Eric Reveno 48:38
small world, that’s awesome, that’s great, that’s great.

Jim Beach 48:43
Have you ever read a book by Tom Wolf named I Am Charlotte Simmons?

Eric Reveno 48:50
I’ve heard of the book, I don’t think I’ve ever read it. I know Tom Wolfe, and I think I actually have heard of that book, is an interesting title, but yes, I’ve heard of it. No, I haven’t read it, though,

Jim Beach 48:59
from Appalachia, who ends up going to a fictitious school that sounds a lot like Duke, and her boyfriend ends up being the seven foot center of the team, and it’s a, you know, the entire book is not about college basketball, but a huge chunk of it is. I thought it was one of the best books I’ve ever read, ever.

Jim Beach 49:21
Okay,

Eric Reveno 49:22
check that out.

Jim Beach 49:24
Yeah, it’s about Charlotte, you know, it’s about college basketball. I think you would enjoy the daylights out of it. That anyone out there likes Tom Wolf, you know, Tom Wolf is just one of the best ever. He writes, he has two whole pages on the F word in every different type of grammatical use of it. Here it is as a verb, here it is as an adjective,

Eric Reveno 49:45
so it’s educational. It’s educational too. We need that. Yeah, that’s good to make sure we’re to make sure we’re using it right.

Jim Beach 49:52
Don’t want to forget one of the grammatic uses of the F word, but he’s just such a great writer and. Yeah, it’s a really great coming of age book, too. You know, Charlotte loses her virginity, of course, and you know just all of the things about coming of age as a college kid.

Eric Reveno 50:12
Okay, very good.

Jim Beach 50:13
One of my favorite books of all time. So, what’s your record going to be next season?

Eric Reveno 50:21
Great question, I I think we’re going to win 20, or we will be 23 and eight. We played 31 games, I believe it will be 23 and eight in conference. We’ll play 18 games, and we hope we are tougher in conference as 23 and eight, I hope we are 1112 12 and 612 and six. That’s what I’ll say, because the Pac 12. Great question. We are in the ACC because the Pac 12 between television money and greed, and then kind of little mismanagement got fell apart at the end of 10, and Stanford and Cal needed a conference, and the ACC welcomed us in, and it works for really works for football and men’s basketball, and the travel is manageable. It’s a great conference with this, the list of schools that we have in it, you know, between Notre Dame and North Carolina and Duke and Georgia Tech and Florida State, Miami, and Boston College. It’s actually a great list of diverse schools, and Stanford and Cal are good additions. The geography is a little bit odd, but I really love the conference, and really think it’s think it makes a lot of sense that basketball is really important in that conference, so, so we like that it’s good for recruiting, actually, because it’s got a national profile, it’s one of the top four conferences, so Stanford is, although it’s like we’ve talked about, it’s a great school, but we’re committed to being excellent in athletics, it’s got a proud athletic history. We’ve got 36 sports, one more national championships this year. We won our 50th straight year of winning an NCAA national championship. So, for the last 50 years, every year we’ve won at least one NCAA championship. The next highest, I heard this stat the other day from our athletic director. The next highest school, next highest number is seven. Next one, one school’s won seven, but we’ve won 50. The school to one seven is UCLA. So, so it’s got a level of standard and excellence, and like you were talking about, if you get the right kind of people around here, the students that’s that are good learners and work at it, then you put them in this environment and great things, great things can happen, so, so, yeah, it’s an impressed, so at the commitment to athletics is high, and so the ACC makes a lot of sense for that, we’re not ready to sort of commit to an Ivy League standard, where you clearly put academics above academic academics above athletics. We want to hold both athletics and academics very high position and really try to compete at the highest level.

Jim Beach 53:17
How do we find out more about you? Follow you online and learn more about Stanford basketball.

Eric Reveno 53:21
You know, I’ve got the biggest thing I’m doing now is the Substack, Substack Coach Revenue. Check it out, I post up there, and that’s a good place to start.

Jim Beach 53:31
Fantastic, Coach. Wish I wish you the best for next season. I hope all your players stay healthy, and I hope you do well in the big tournament next year. Congratulations.

Eric Reveno 53:43
Thank you. Thank you very much. Great talking to you. Fun conversation, really appreciate

Jim Beach 53:47
it. Likewise, likewise, that’s right. We come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now,