Jonathan Bertfield is CEO of Lean Startup Co, the coaching and consulting firm founded by Eric Ries. He works with executive teams at companies like Orange, Mastercard, BT, and the U.S. Department of Defense on a problem most innovation programs never name out loud: they don't have a real system for deciding which ideas deserve funding. Everyone's got ideas. Almost nobody has a way to kill the bad ones before they eat two years of budget.

Jonathan Bertfield is CEO of Lean Startup Co, the coaching and consulting firm founded by Eric Ries. He works with executive teams at companies like Orange, Mastercard, BT, and the U.S. Department of Defense on a problem most innovation programs never name out loud: they don't have a real system for deciding which ideas deserve funding. Everyone's got ideas. Almost nobody has a way to kill the bad ones before they eat two years of budget.

At Orange, that meant four years building a governance framework now used company-wide — 50+ internal startup teams trained, 150+ individuals coached, real decisions on what lives and what gets cut. At BT, a 12-idea portfolio got narrowed down to 3 that scaled and 1 that reached revenue, using the RapidWorks framework his team built and BT still runs today. At a global logistics company, a 12-week sprint ended with the CEO building an entirely new funding model off the results.

Jonathan hosts Lean Stories, a podcast where founders, investors, and operators talk about the bets they made under real uncertainty — not the polished version they tell from a stage. He's based in Athens, Greece, running a team spread across four continents.

Talking Points
Why "innovation theater" survives inside companies that genuinely want to innovate
What it actually takes to get an executive team to kill a project it already funded
The difference between an MVP and a business case wearing an MVP costume
How enterprise innovation portfolios actually get funded — and defunded — at places like Orange, BT, and Mastercard
What coaching 150+ people inside one company teaches you about why training alone never sticks

Sample Questions for Hosts
What's the real difference between an innovation problem and a decision problem?
You've worked inside Boeing, Mastercard, the DoD. What's one thing almost every one of them got wrong before you showed up?
What does it actually look like when a company kills a project the right way?
Why do most MVP experiments fail to test anything real?
What's a decision you talked a client out of — one they were sure about?