Mark Pincus on Consumer Products, Playing Offense, and Building Zynga

Mark Pincus

We've got to be in a mental state where we're playing offence and not defence. You've got to be in this place where you're thinking, "What if everything goes right?" If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defence. You've lost before you're even out of the gates.

Mark Pincus

I think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling, and it's been unexpressed or unmet. When we first experience that, there's something magical to it — it could be an unlock. And a lot of times it's where we're most cynical that we're ready for the most magic.

But I've found that if a product speaks to me, and it makes it onto the front of my iPhone, it has a billion-dollar stick value. Or maybe I should update that — that's what I thought fifteen years ago. Now maybe it's a trillion. But if it's enough to be on the front of my iPhone, to me that's saying a lot — that I'm going to use it more than once. A new app so seldom makes the front of my iPhone; I could go and show you mine, but it's half empty. There are still so few digital consumer products that give us that magical experience, that we feel compelled to use every day.

Mark Pincus

I'm looking for real heat around an idea.

Mark Pincus

Heat is something you know when you see it. It's kind of like being really in love with somebody — when you've found your person, you know it. And every other one who wasn't quite your person, you weren't sure.

Heat is the same thing. You want to see heat, so you're looking for signs of it, and you say, "Look at this click-through rate" or "look at this" — but that's not heat. When you have heat around a product, everything says heat, and you just know it. It's part of what I call true signal. When you have true signal, we all know it — you don't need anyone to tell you. When you don't have true signal, you need lots and lots of stats and other things, because you're not sure if this is the signal or not. But when you see heat in another product, or even better in your own, it's like Christmas morning — everything lights up.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. I grew up in a family that was very competitive around family social games — charades, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit.

Mark Pincus

Almost. My dad was very playful and into games — so much so that he'd start changing the rules if he thought the games weren't made right, and then we all would too. The best one was in Scrabble. It kind of sucks that there's this luck of the draw on your letters, so my dad made a rule that you could take a letter from your tray and swap it for a letter on the board, as long as it still made a word — you could put an O for an A — and then you had to reuse that letter in the same turn. My dad would sometimes take half an hour for a turn with all these intricate moves, but it gave the games a whole extra dimension.

Mark Pincus

We all kind of played a role in his movie. He loved being in a fraternity in college — it was defining for him — and he wanted me to do that. I wasn't into it, and they weren't into me either; it was mutual. I'd gone to a Big Ten school, Michigan, and I wasn't in the right place in any way — I wasn't becoming the kind of man my dad wanted me to be. He wanted me to be just like him.

It got more and more tense, and then our family was on a sailboat in the Caribbean, in the Virgin Islands, bareboating — just us crewing. We'd grown up sailing, and my dad was the worst sailboat captain ever — famously, epically bad. We'd get stuck on a sandbar because he didn't read the tides right. We were in a harbour on Virgin Gorda, the keel got stuck, and something always went wrong — the boat was going in circles, headed eventually for a rock barrier. I got in the dinghy, turned on the engine, grabbed the rope, and pulled the boat into the slip — saved the day. My dad was furious. He said, "You could have killed us all — there could only be one captain." I think he was also a little humiliated, and it escalated into a bigger fight. He said, "I was going to wait until after this trip, but I've decided to take you out of college to finish raising you." And I said, "Fuck you. Bye." I left right there — rented a plane and flew away. I'd also been accepted to transfer from Michigan to Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania. So I packed up my car and drove to Penn.

Mark Pincus

Sure. I had all these great experiences in my twenties — really amazing, but they all happened kind of despite myself, because I had these fatal flaws as an employee. One is that I'm terrible at interviewing, because of an overriding desire to be honest rather than to please the interviewer, even though I wanted the high-paying jobs. Getting out of college, I was the only kid in my section to graduate without a job.

Then I was lucky enough to get a fifteen-minute interview with TCI, John Malone's company — the biggest cable company in the country. I interviewed with Brendan Clouser, the president, and he said, "Why do we need a second MBA here?" There were twenty thousand employees, and they'd hired one other MBA ten years earlier. I said, "Because I read this book by George Gilder called Microcosm, and I think your company is positioned for this coming information superhighway." There was no internet yet. I said, "There must be all these other deals you could do besides cable, and I could go do that." He said, "Well, it's funny you say that — we're having dinner with George Gilder tonight." It was a direct hit. Then they called down to the head of corporate development, who had a cardboard box called "non-cable," and they gave me the box. That was my job.

But then I had a few career-limiting meetings with Malone. At one point TCI was going to buy a third of Prodigy —

Mark Pincus

Yes — AOL had just gone public and was worth 110 million. This deal was to pay 400 million for a third of Prodigy, which Sears and IBM owned. I came back and said, "Why don't we just buy AOL? They're public, they're way better, and they're only worth 110 million." Nobody liked that. Then there was another deal — another public company they were going to put a bunch of money into — and I said, "Not only should we not invest, we should short their stock, because they're just going to go straight down. They have no capital." Malone said, "I don't need some wet-behind-the-ears MBA telling me what's a good deal." My boss, the head of corporate development, just shrank in the corner.

Then, at Bain — I got a great summer-job deal while at HBS: they'd pay for your whole next semester, twenty-five thousand dollars. I was in. They said, "We want to bring in entrepreneurial banking people," and I said, "Great, that's me." It was like the movie Stripes, because my boss left after the first couple of weeks and they said, "We think you can do this project on your own." There was this graph in the company, first drawn by Mitt Romney, that said if your relative market share is high enough, your return on sales — your margin — will be high; basically, that you can have more monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing. I proved that in the snack industry it breaks. No one had checked my work, and near the end of the summer I presented to the partners and all the summer associates. I was so proud — I thought they'd make me partner. This was 1991, and I'd figured out the PowerPoint animation — I showed their graph with a flashing X in it and said, "Look, the graph is wrong. This doesn't work."

Mark Pincus

Yeah — look, Jesus never existed, look, I can prove it, I should be head of this religion. Most people had walked out by the time I finished the presentation, and then they just stopped talking to me for the rest of the summer. I was proud that I was one of two summer associates in the history of the firm asked not to come back, partway through the summer. A lot of evidence was building up that I was not employable.

Mark Pincus

I just felt like I'd made a lot of bad career decisions and was washed up early — there was no next thing this was headed towards. I don't know why, but maybe I wanted a place to think, and I sat there in this temple. I didn't know anybody, didn't understand anything — it was just a good place to sit and think. I started writing in a notebook about why my life sucked so badly, and I ended on this one thing: that I smoked cigarettes. I didn't even smoke much — one or two a day, a pack a night if I was at a bar on weekends — but I hated it, my clothes smelled of it, and I didn't want to do it but kept doing it. It was this sense that my life was a little out of control, and I thought: if I could do one thing to know I'm making some positive change in my life, I'm going to quit smoking. So on 19 October 1994, I did a lifetime quit on cigarettes. Every day after that that I didn't smoke, I could feel good about.

Mark Pincus

Yeah — with honesty.

Mark Pincus

No.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. I think a practice like the book of life — what it's done for me, and what I think it could do for a lot of people — is just to be strategic about your life. I like to say: what would your future self thank you for doing this year? We can be strategic, hold ourselves accountable, and force ourselves to make some tougher decisions now, because we know we'll thank ourselves later.

And right around that time I was brainstorming on the side with a guy, Sunil Paul. Sunil was the only internet product manager, the only internet employee, at AOL. It turned out the one good thing about being in DC was that AOL was there, and they had one guy focused on the internet with the same crazy bug I had. We started talking and came up with a kind of peanut-butter-and-jelly idea — he wanted to build hardware, I wanted to build software, but we both wanted to make the internet easier for people. We said, "Okay, can we start with software and then eventually get to hardware?" and he said okay. Sunil and I got the company going — we each put in thirty thousand, sixty total.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. It was called Freeloader.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. And then possibly everything that could have gone right went right.

Mark Pincus

Yes. I'm very aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. It pains me how much founders — especially I see it in men, not all men; I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters, but I'd say I see it a lot in men, in friends, in people I've grown up with — if they had an initial failure, they get attached to it and start feeling defined by it. It would have been me too, but it wasn't.

Mark Pincus

We've got to be in a mental state where we're playing offence and not defence. I don't know how you get yourself there, but you've got to be thinking, "What if everything goes right? What does right look like? How am I ready for everything going right?" If you're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defence, and you've lost before you're even out of the gates.

Mark Pincus

I think we've all seen founders like this — so attached to an idea that they're going to go down with the ship. It's like a bad relationship: a friend comes to you for the umpteenth time with another version of the same thing, and you're thinking, this is not going to end well. So many of us are like that with our start-ups.

Mark Pincus

But you almost do know it. Yeah. I like to say that with Tribe, I had three winning instincts and one losing idea. We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right and our ideas are usually wrong. That's a really powerful philosophy and tool, if we can hang on to it and actually use it.

I had this instinct I called a "cocktail party," and it started with Napster. Sean Parker worked for me at Freeloader when he was sixteen, amazingly, and he sent me an email when he started Napster with Sean Fanning. I was the first cheque into Napster — he said, "We have two servers and they're full, we need money for more servers," and you always just send money when someone says that in consumer, which is rare. But Napster was this cocktail party where we could connect with each other with nobody in between. To me, that was the beginning of this social web — we're the nodes, we're connecting this peer-to-peer web.

Then Reid Hoffman and I, during this nuclear winter for consumer internet after the dot-com crash — there were maybe six of us still excited about consumer internet, and we'd get together and coined the term Web 2.0. It was this idea that anything on the internet that can be free will be free, starting with data — we've got to set the data free.

We both came to Friendster at the same time and thought it was the perfect science experiment — we didn't think it was a real business, and we both put in the first money because we thought it was such an important experiment. Friendster started to really work within a month, and at the same time we were working on our own social-networking ideas — Reid was close to launching LinkedIn. But Friendster was the first thing I saw work, and I didn't copy it, didn't fast-follow it. Jonathan Abrams was very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close — in fact he doesn't speak to me to this day; he feels like Tribe, that we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we were doing. It's not that I learned anything in particular from Friendster that everyone didn't see within months — it was really successful. So I thought, Tribe — it's Craigslist meets Friendster. I got trust completely wrong. So wrong it's unbelievable. But for some people it wasn't — for extroverts, for Burning Man people, they loved it. For most mainstream people, it was wrong.

Zuck came through my office with Sean Parker about a year after I started Tribe, and I was already struggling — I had amazing virality, amazing user growth, and terrible retention, which should have told me something but didn't. It was like a sinking speedboat, which a lot of viral apps became — we kept putting new users in at amazing rates and losing them at amazing rates. The real answer to a sinking speedboat is to fix the hole in the bottom, not go faster with more people. Zuck and Sean Parker came through, and I saw they'd got it right, and I think it was my ego, and the kind of morality at the time — still there to some extent, though not as much, around the culture of start-ups — that you don't copy people. So I wasn't going to go do the exact thing they'd done. I wasn't even going to take the insight that was so clear to me — that I'd got trust wrong, which at this point Friendster, LinkedIn, and Facebook were all proving. I just wasn't going to do it. I stuck with the same losing strategy.

Mark Pincus

Yeah.

Mark Pincus

Copying sounds bad — you don't want to copy someone's homework, copy someone's work, it's like stealing, sounds bad. But then we juxtapose that with Steve Jobs's famous quote — "great artists copy, and the masters steal." In the context of Steve Jobs, or the best designers who say "I was inspired by," we're okay with it. But then we see other people copy something and there's something icky about it. I think it comes down to a certain aesthetic: is it just blatant copying, or did you add something to the conversation? Did you innovate on some important front? Did you move the world ahead on some front?

From this concept, and from the failure of Tribe, I got to a framework at Zynga that I called proven, better, new. It's based on my philosophy that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. The problem I see with so many products and founders is that they're losing for the wrong reason — they're losing because they didn't stick to their one area of innovation. They tried to reinvent every single part of their product, and you don't have enough time to make every single part of your product better — and what does better even mean?

The concept of proven, better, new was easier to implement in games, where you have lots of features and mechanics and components, but it's true in any product — consumer, enterprise, business-to-business. Slack is a great example. The idea is: take something proven for this audience, this function, this platform. Before Slack, we used a product at Zynga and other enterprises called HipChat — an enterprise chat product with channels and so on. So: proven means these things are proven, and what's proven, you should legally copy — don't mess with anything that's proven, you may not even understand why it works. Better is: is there something about that product that ten out of ten users would say you could do better?

For Zynga Poker, our proven was poker games — we didn't mess with the rules of poker. We copied what the best real-money gambling and other poker games looked like — the table, the dealer, the cards, the sounds — just copied it, legally, and you move much faster. But better for Zynga Poker was no download. Why? Because we had no security issue — no real money, so no security issue. Real-money gambling needed you to download something for security. How do I know ten out of ten users wanted no download? They vote with their clicks. You lose at least half your users every click — every time you say "click here," half don't click — and you lose 80 or 90 per cent or more when you say "download this." So I knew that was statistically better. But better is usually half-price, or free, or no download — something very mundane and basic.

Mark Pincus

That was new.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. So what people think is better is actually new. The new in Zynga Poker was pictures of real people — often your friends. My philosophy, which may sound anti-innovation but is actually in service of innovation, is that all new fails until it finally doesn't. At Zynga today the mantra inside the company is still "all new fails" — if you assume all new fails, you probably won't be let down. It doesn't mean you don't do new, of course you do — it means you take a different approach: you can't try one new idea, because it's going to fail. You can't try one new version of your new idea. You have to try many, many variants of each new idea, and many new ideas, and look in much smaller atomic units of innovation for new. The masters of consumer products know this with their eyes closed.

Mark Pincus

Before you have the right to do better or new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven. I remember at Zynga having a roadmap meeting with the poker team, and a newly minted product manager proudly showed me the new poker profile he was going to launch. I said, "Okay, show me your PhD in profiles. Show me the best game profiles on mobile ever done, and tell me why." He said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, you haven't earned the right to change the profile if you're not an expert. You need to be the world's leading expert in profiles — poker profiles, mobile profiles, game profiles. I want to see a war room full of profiles. You need to care at the pixel level before you have the right." That's what I mean by deconstructing — it's an art form and a science, and we should all get better and better at it. If you want to be a great product maker, you need to commit to a career of deconstructing — anytime a new product comes out, be a student of yourself in that experience: what is it that feels great or doesn't? We have a responsibility to our users — it's sacred. The more we hold that up as our most important purpose, the more we're going to treat this with the respect and care it deserves, and the more they're going to feel that care and intention in our product.

Mark Pincus

At some point I started calling this place the abyss. It's this place we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing dies, or is bought, or is over for whatever reason. It's an amorphous place in your life with no structure — you've been on the hamster wheel of your career.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. My dad used to call this "in between successes." He'd say, "You're not unemployed, you're in between successes." But for us as founders it's so hard. This abyss is usually a dark place, because at first it feels great — freedom, "oh my god, I've been working so hard and now I can sleep in, do all the things I wanted to and couldn't." Then a week or two, maybe a month later, it starts to dawn on you that you may never find gainful employment again — gainful meaning something you want to do. You're not going to work for anyone else, so you're not employable anyway. I don't know if I'll ever come out of this abyss. I've been in it sometimes for multiple years. It doesn't mean you're not working on projects, but you haven't found your thing — not with the passion and conviction of the thing that worked, or went public, or didn't work but you loved it, and you don't know if you'll find that again.

Mark Pincus

I'd like to think not — they're long and painful, and I'd love a short break and then to dive into the next thing and have it work. But I don't know how to avoid it. I think the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon — the ultimate vibe coding is life at the speed of play, where you get to have an idea and bring it to life for almost no capital. So I do think there'll be more and more ways out of this abyss, and it'll get easier, but I think the abyss is for sure there for me, and I think it will be for most founders. All we can do is embrace it and have more process — that's why my book of life is helpful. I find lots of small things to work on that might unlock the passion thing.

I got to Zynga while I was in the abyss — I had side projects, one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling, doing them all wrong. I have a terrible work ethic until I don't — you're either all in or kind of dabbling.

Mark Pincus

It's fierce. My all-in has always been underestimated. The VCs didn't believe it — I'd already been successful and made all this money, and they were like, "This is a lifestyle thing, I don't buy that you're going to really work hard like a twenty-five or thirty-year-old" —

Mark Pincus

Forty-one. When I was all in with Zynga, I was a maniac — I didn't want to stop, didn't want to sleep, it's all I wanted to do all the time. It was the ultimate high, because there was always something more I could do.

Mark Pincus

Part of what I deeply realised in that abyss — as founders we may or may not be faced with having to answer our why. My why was: what I can offer the world is building products that move people, and I'm going to be the most happy doing that. I don't know if I'll ever get to do it again, but I'm going to try to get there. I was looking for a way to get back to building, even though Tribe was an abject failure. And I got there with this little poker game — it was really fun, and it started to take off in ways right away, one of those lightning-in-a-bottle things where everything about it just worked. I think I'd gone through this success-beat-down, and I had to be so beaten down by Tribe to be unambitious enough to start Zynga.

Mark Pincus

I love these markets that are all around us where we think they're mature and over, and they haven't even started yet. That was search before Google — Google was the fifty-sixth search engine, it was a mature, slow-growth business, and Google made us reimagine what search could be in our lives, and turned it into a trillion-dollar company. Games was the same thing. In 2007 the whole video-game industry worldwide was about 23 billion dollars — mature, not interesting. And yet there was, I believed, this latent demand, because people like me would have played games if they'd been made accessible, if I didn't have to go sit on someone's couch or whatever it required. So I thought games had this opportunity to be one of the most important activities on the web — play could be one of the core things we do in our digital life, every day.

What we got right with social gaming was: make it for the mass market, not for gamers, and give people enough value that an adult would give themselves permission to play. The value came from asking very little of you — very little time — and then giving you something of value in your life, not just entertainment, not just empty calories. You're here for this cocktail party to do social networking — what if our game gives you a new dimension to that, that can improve a relationship in your life? We're not going to hit that every session, but what if we get there once a week, once a month, once ever? That became how we thought about our innovation.

The second thing that came into play for social gaming was virtual goods — user pay. I got to pitch our poker game to Steve Jobs when they were just opening the app store. I showed him the demo, and he yelled at his number two, Scott Forstall, "I told you I don't want to see fake demoware." Scott looked at me like, you're not supposed to show anything fake, this is supposed to be live. I said, "Steve, these are real users, from MySpace, from Facebook — type something in the chat if you dare, but I have no idea what they're going to say to you." He said, "Oh, that's cool." Then I thought, okay, maybe I could pitch him on user pay. They didn't have that when they launched the app store — no in-app purchase, just a paid app store and a free app store, and you'd have to buy a version of our poker with chips. So I tried to pitch him on in-app purchase — we were one of the first companies in the Western world to do this virtual-goods thing.

That was the other part of the rocket ship that got us to mass market — we made this useful for adults, and we had a user-pay model that monetised engagement instead of trying to show an ad and get you to leave the game. The more engaged you were, the more likely you were to spend money. We were cash-flow positive right away — I'd never had that before. I put up 350K to start the company. At forty-one, starting a consumer app company on Facebook, there was no dignity in it — people were embarrassed for me. "Mark, really? There's so much you could do — go be a venture capitalist like all your friends, or you've already been successful, you don't have to prove anything."

Mark Pincus

Yeah. I had a chip on my shoulder that I knew I could make these world-class apps — what I call an internet treasure, what John Doerr called an internet treasure. That was my why. Soon after I started Zynga, John Doerr and Bing Gordon said to me, "The greatest thing you could do is build an internet treasure" — that's what they called Google, and eventually the iPhone. The tagline I attached to it was: a service you can't remember life before, or imagine life without. I loved that vision.

This time I had a chip on my shoulder from the multiple bad experiences with VCs, and I made this way harder for myself when it should have been easy — the company was cash-flow positive, I was a two-for-three founder, one sold, one public, one failed. But I made it harder on myself for a reason: I wanted to make sure everyone was aligned on this road trip. I think that's a mistake we make as founders — another thing I like to say is, know your goal or suffer death by a thousand compromises. What I'd done my whole career, what most of us do, is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor — you put a jerk on your board because you're impressed by their firm's name and the valuation, and all your friends will be impressed, and it'll be so much easier. We make all these compromises, contort ourselves, and eventually wake up in a company we don't want to work at. You think, "Well, I guess I did what was right for the company, but now it's not the right place for me," and you leave. I'm like, no — you're the most valuable player; if it's not the right place for you, you've failed.

The first round I raised was impossibly hard. I got caught between a fight between Peter Thiel and Sequoia — he'd just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other. Peter said he'd fund it — he wanted five million. I said great. Then I went and met with Sequoia — it was a funny meeting, because I was asking for twenty million pre and we were doing 200,000 a month in free cash flow. They said, "How do you justify that valuation?" I said, "If you care about this valuation, this isn't the right deal for you, because this is either going to be a multi-billion-dollar company or nothing — it just won't matter." Everyone thinks that way now — call options. But I said, if you're worried about whether it's fifteen pre or twenty pre, don't play, because you're looking for an outcome you're never going to see — we're never selling this company for 200 million, it's either zero or multi-billion. They liked that, but then there was this fight between them and Peter, and they both ended up not investing, and we were damaged goods. It was like a scene from the show Silicon Valley — I started meeting with all these second-tier VCs, and eventually Fred Wilson, and fun to meet with, terrible terms — fifteen million pre — but I love Fred, and he negotiated a hard deal because he could. The funniest thing is, I never used the dollar I raised the whole time.

Mark Pincus

There were rocket boosters — each one went into a bigger outer orbit. It started with Zynga Poker, then Mafia Wars — they were big, but nothing like what we saw with FarmVille. FarmVille was the first time we hit this mass-market consumer tipping point. Lots of people knew about Mafia Wars, but with FarmVille we hit this density on the social network and the feed with Facebook — something like 20 per cent of Facebook users were playing the game, so it felt like a hundred per cent were. That's when social gaming, and Zynga, kind of left orbit.

Mark Pincus

The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience — and not just for us, for everyone in their app ecosystem. It was the least stable app ecosystem ever invented, and many companies did die in it — I'd say only two companies actually survived it, Spotify and Zynga. My experience building Zynga, and the reason I kept raising money even though we were profitable, was that I felt like I was on a five-storey-high unicycle and kept adding another storey — it's going to be really far to fall if we fall now. There wasn't a stable platform, no stable agreement between the companies — they could and would change their platform all the time. Some low-level product manager who wanted to promote events would deprecate the whole left rail of their homepage where all the apps were, put them behind a "more" button, and we'd be, "Oh my god, nobody can find us anymore." They had a move-fast-and-break-things culture, and most of what they broke was their app ecosystem. I would walk their hallways every week trying to convince them games and apps were a great business for them, and they didn't believe it — they didn't think that was what their platform was for. Eventually they did.

It wasn't even the 30 per cent of revenues that was the problem — it was that they walked in and handed us terms we couldn't accept; we'd have been a captive company.

Mark Pincus

Yeah. They gave it to us on a Friday and said, "You have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're going to take down your apps" — which was their right. That could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because at this point we were huge on their platform. By the time they went public, a year later, they had to put the Zynga dependency in their risk factors, because we were about 20 per cent of their page views and 10 per cent of their revenues —

Mark Pincus

Yes, huge. I don't know if they'd have shut us down and had people navigate to zynga.com — we didn't want to find out. It was really terrifying.

Mark Pincus

Right. It was a weird situation.

Mark Pincus

I got to failure machines through a lot of painful, slow failure. When I came back to Zynga as CEO for the second time, I had to move fast to make the turnaround happen. I was going to start my fight with our core franchises. The CEO before me had bet on a whole slate of new games that looked like it was going to fail, and our franchises had been neglected. I said, I'm going back to Words with Friends — people love that game, I want them to fall in love with it again. When I came back, the game was projected to drop from 120 million in revenue to 79 million over the next twelve months, and everyone was saying, let's pull resources off, send the game to our team in India to shutter it. I said, no — this is the beginning of the turnaround, we're going to turn around this game and then the whole company.

I started meeting with that team every week. We went through their app reviews and ratings — the ratings had fallen to the mid-threes from the high fours. I started and ended every meeting with, "What will our players thank us for?" The team thought that was an unfair question. Eventually we put a neon sign in the lobby that said, "What will our players thank us for?" That's the right place to start — what's the intuition, the instinct, what do I know anecdotally is broken? Then how do I get to my ideas and rank them?

The team had been working on a "fast play" version — a bunch of mostly twenty-something guys making a game for middle-aged women. They said the game was too slow, they wanted more adrenaline. But that's not why middle-aged women were playing Words with Friends or Candy Crush Saga — they wanted a zen moment, a me-moment, escape. The team had spent six months on this, hundreds of engineering days, and never really tested the top of the funnel. I asked, "What percentage of our players clicked on this?" I used to say we need 25 per cent minimum. They said, "We think we can get to five per cent." I said, "So the best you can get to is five per cent — what did you get in your click test?" "We're currently at about one per cent." So 99 per cent of Words with Friends players said no way when shown this game we were building. I said, that's a crime — a crime to our players. We need to start at the top of the funnel: what will they click on, what do they want, what will they hug us for? Probably much smaller things — they don't want a different game, they came here for this game.

The team, to their credit — and V, who ran the team and went on to become a terrific product maker, ran product at Reddit — shifted gears, and they started click-testing hundreds of ideas every day, starting with what will our core audience thank us for. They got to one idea: weekly achievements. They realised these players wanted to feel like they were getting better every week, and a huge percentage of players clicked on and engaged with it. Because of V and the team committing to this testing machine, that first game did 180 million in revenue and 100 million in contribution — more dollars in contribution than they'd projected in revenue — and that was the beginning of the whole turnaround.

So I believe in failure machines. How does that play out today? I see too many founders stuck in what I call the MVP trap. I love Eric Ries, and the whole body of work around the lean start-up — he and I have talked about this, and I know by MVP he meant we have to move fast, it was a mantra to move fast. But too many teams waste time getting to a minimum viable product they can put in the market, and we don't have time for that anymore. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel — a minimum idea state that gets vibe-coded, however you get to something that gets the idea across, so people say "meh" rather than something worse. Actually, the worst thing people can say is meh — no is better, meh is like...

Mark Pincus

Yeah, it's a five to seven, exactly. We've got to get to a new standard, and I think we are, with AI — we can get to the gist of it fast. I like to say: build it wrong before we don't have time to build it right. Don't build it right — build it wrong, and build it fast, and don't make it viable. Viable is the bad word — let's take viable off the table, because it's probably wrong. We don't have time to build viable. Let's build wrong and see if it proves right. Then let's build right.

Mark Pincus

Founder mode is why we became founders in the first place. We were all expert witnesses — we were closest to the answer and furthest from the decision, suffering under the adults. Now we get to be the founder, and hopefully you've positioned yourself to have total agency, not to be under a new boss — your VCs, your board, your employees you're now working for in some false democracy. I like to say to founders: you've gone through so much to be here, you owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct, you owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself — it's your right to be wrong. You owe it to yourself to control your own destiny, and take half the valuation if it's all of the control. It means you have the right to do it your way — it doesn't mean you have the right to be a jerk; if you are, people will leave. You've earned the right to your own style, not to have a CEO coach chopping your balls off or homogenising you into what you're supposed to be. You have your own quirkiness, your own bet-the-company moments, and the more rope you have, the more you're probably going to want to learn, because you're going to think, holy — I could really mess this up and no one's going to stop me, and that's awesome, in retrospect.

I thought I was clear from the beginning with Zynga, and then I gave it up — there was a moment where I gave up my voting control. Even before that, there was a moment in the fall of 2012, after we'd gone public and were like a two-dollar stock, being sued. We'd made an acquisition — the company that made Draw Something, which was the hottest game in the app store until it wasn't —

Mark Pincus

OMGPOP. Yeah — and it failed right around the time Supercell came out. They had Hay Day, which was a top game not making a lot of money yet, and Clash of Clans, which was number twenty-five or eighteen but was amazing. I had a handshake with Ilkka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for 400 million in cash. I went back to my board — we easily had the money — and they said, "Until you show us you can manage what you've got, you can't buy anything else." Very patronising — the board had gone from "you walk on water" to questioning everything I did. I had voting control, and I went to the lawyer — who I learned later wasn't my lawyer, he was the company's lawyer — and asked, "Can't I just override them? I have voting control." He said, "Technically, yes. Really, no." He said I could fire all the board members and put in place who I wanted, and they might vote for my deal, and then I'd for sure be sued personally — he didn't say exactly why, but personally liable. I said, "Okay, I won't do it." Supercell made 500 million in profit the next year. That was our Instagram moment — like when Facebook bought Instagram — and it would have been a different trajectory. If I'd had the conviction — Elon would have just said, "Fine, sue me." I didn't have Elon's balls. There were moments along the way where I didn't really stick to my founder mode. But I love the concept, and it's my own coaching to myself, to have even more belief in myself.

Mark Pincus

It's false to believe a company is a democracy. The way I ran the company, I called a democratic dictatorship — I wanted everyone's voice to be heard, and then I'd be the single vote. I think that's how a company should be run. There's one CEO, one chef. A good CEO seeks out the intellectual honesty, the truths, from everywhere, hears from everybody, and then makes the decision — not because it's most popular in the company.

Mark Pincus

So many places. I don't really believe in management, but I believe in principles, or hacks, that stand in place of having to manage. I say every day I "manage the day of work," and I think no one should really have to manage or feel managed.

Two things: early on, building my second company, support.com, I didn't know how to scale past thirty-five people. I put a sticky note on the wall with everyone's names and said, "By the end of the week, write down what you're CEO of" — it should be something everyone else understands and believes is important. I said, "Everyone's going to be a CEO — everyone here needs to own something that matters," and that way we all know what everyone's doing and can get more done. It really worked, and people liked it. I learned that if you give people way more responsibility than they think they deserve, they're going to be a little scared, feel some adrenaline, and probably really like their job — not because of the title or the money, but because they're actually challenged. I carried that lesson on — at Zynga we had a value on the wall: "be a CEO, own outcomes."

The other thing I learned early on, about why engineers hate their jobs and their bosses, is what I call the moral contract. When I first started working with engineers — Scott and Kadir — I saw how much engineers get screwed in these companies. They're the ones who work the most hours, and they constantly get screwed because they build a whole product and then the salesperson doesn't sell it, or the CEO says, "I know I asked you for that, but that was wrong, now we need something else." They just took the hill — they think they killed themselves to do it — you owe it to them. In the same way we have a responsibility to our users, we have a responsibility to our engineers, our builders, the people in the factory building. I said there should be a moral contract: if you're going to take that hill, I'm going to show you I'll work just as hard to unlock value out of the work you did. That stuck with me — if I can show you I'm in the trenches with you, really valuing your work, you're going to feel better and do more work next time.

Mark Pincus

You owe it, in that moral contract, to your good employees, to fire the weak people. They're not bad people — they may be really smart — but they're not effective in your organisation, they're not taking hills. I don't care if they're working more or fewer hours, harder or less hard — there are backbone people making this thing work, and the more you act like socialism, communism, false democracy, the more you're crushing the culture of meritocracy. I don't believe in paying your dues. The more you see people in an organisation getting promotions and title and pay that isn't obviously deserved to everybody else, the more you're eroding the real culture.

Mark Pincus

So many things lead to politics. One lesson I learned — I hate management, so I don't do one-on-ones. My friend Bing told me Jeff Bezos never did one-on-ones, because it created politics and was a huge waste of his time. I loved that — no one-on-ones. The whole point about style and politics in a company is that as long as you're consistent, everyone shapes around it and doesn't care — "oh, Mark doesn't do one-on-ones, don't take it personally." If anyone did finally get my ear and complain about someone else, you'd stop, call the other person, and say, "Hey, so-and-so is complaining about you, I think you should go talk to them," and walk away. Then everyone knows there's no politics.

Mark Pincus

Yeah, they know to stop doing it to me. I do it with my kids too.

Mark Pincus

I was lucky enough to meet Bing Gordon, who was at EA — our arch enemy in the beginning. He was part of the founding team there, and he became an advisor, board member, coach, godfather to my kids, and he was on the board of Amazon —

Mark Pincus

Yeah. He gave me all this brilliant wisdom, indirectly from Jeff Bezos. He'd say, "Let me tell you what Jeff does," and I'd be taking notes. One of the best things I got — eventually I got to sit down with Jeff, and he generously spent two hours explaining his concept of tech assistants, which Andy Grove originally had, then Bill Gates, then Jeff Bezos. I loved it — it's this non-scalable way to scale your organisation, through passing your "vampire blood," which is what they called it inside Zynga — Pincus's vampire blood. What I started to do is pick someone from the organisation who's promising — I usually picked the smart misfits who didn't fit in — and they become your tech assistant, which is not your chief of staff or executive assistant. They're your shadow — they go to every meeting you go to, and they work on product stuff for you: things you want to double-click on, side projects, things to research more. You're doing these meetings anyway, so it becomes a really efficient way to train up a mini-me. I believe every S-team member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos's tech assistant, including Andy Jassy. Over time it was an efficient way to train up big leaders, product leaders.

I started doing that, and all my tech assistants went on to be very successful entrepreneurs. This kid, Ian Cinnamon — I personally fought Meta to hire him, he was the star recruit from MIT — I said, "I'm going to personally manage your career at Zynga," and he joined. I put him in poker, and within a year poker was trying to fire him from the company. I met with him — it was organ rejection, because he was too entrepreneurial, like me at Bain — and I said, "Fine, I'll pluck you out, you're going to work for me." He worked for me, and then I left and did an incubator, and he worked for me there too. Then he went off on his own, and now he has a — I wish I'd invested in it — a really successful, multi-billion-dollar satellite launch company.

Mark Pincus

Anything that can be free on the internet will be free. Anything that can have less friction will have less friction. I think voice is one of those places — Reid Hoffman had a great post about being "voice-pilled," beginning of last year, and voice became a meme for a while and then died down. A lot of the new devices people are working on are based on a voice interface. I think voice will be the biggest thing that'll feel obvious in retrospect — that we wasted so much time typing and texting and reading, and we're going to turn on our ears and our voices a lot more.

Mark Pincus

Success for me isn't a point in time or an achievement. I'd like to be spending my time building products that I'm addicted to, that I find meaning in, and that millions of other people find meaning in, surrounded by great, talented people who are bringing their best.