Eric Ries argues that good companies rarely collapse because of competition; they are more often hollowed out by governance, incentives and financial pressure that turn success into a liability. Drawing on examples from Anthropic, Novo Nordisk, Cloudflare and Philip Morris’s disastrous purchase of Vectura, he makes the case that founders must build mission protection into both culture and corporate structure before it is too late.

Two Argentine founders are building AI order-takers for restaurants and hotels, betting that the most valuable automation in hospitality happens in the operational gaps rather than in the human moments guests actually want. Their conversation traces the leap from rough prototypes and painful onboarding to a system that can parse messy customer requests, integrate with point-of-sale software and quietly disappear into the flow of service.

A conversation on Johnson Security Bureau traces how a third-generation family business in the South Bronx has survived where most family firms do not, balancing community responsibility, inherited values, and the hard choices of growth. As CEO Jessica Johnson-Cope weighs doubling down in New York, expanding geographically, or moving into cybersecurity, the discussion turns on what it takes to scale without losing the culture that made the company durable.