0:04 spk_0
All right. Welcome to a new episode of Power Players. Uh, I’m really excited, uh, for my next guest because all of this feels right. Zynga and Yahoo and Yahoo Finance in the same, uh, interview, I got Zynga founder, uh, Mark Pincus here and he’s the author of a new book, uh, Life at the Speed of Play.Mark, it’s good to see you. I still remember listening to you on earnings calls as a young video game stock analyst. Uh, we never connected before, but I assure you I was on those earnings calls.
0:34 spk_1
Well, thank you for being there, and I, I wanna say I spared you some pain because I switched to the letter instead of reading out the Kabuki theater script.
0:43 spk_0
I appreciate, we we trust me, we appreciated that. Um, you know, I was dating, I’m dating myself, Farmville, like I remember when that came out, Mark. I’m gonna get into the book, but holy cow, it feels like yesterday to me I was playing this. What does it feel like toyou?
1:00 spk_1
Yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, I guess it’s, it’s been a few lifetimes, but I’d say I, I miss being in the mix of this weekly iteration of, you know, innovating, ideating, putting it out to our users, seeing metrics, like, like running, I’ll say being inside at that time, running not just Farmville, but 14 studios was like the ultimate video game.
1:32 spk_0
Um, so let’s look at this book, uh, Life at the Speed of play. What does that exactly mean?
1:39 spk_1
Well, for me, life at the speed of play is a mindset, and it is a mindset how to approach life itself. Uh, I think we all want to, uh, live our lives in more playful ways, but in the context of this book, I really mean it’s a product mindset.It’s, it’s a way that we can approach making products, iterating fast, and really going for, um, the biggest hits with, with the least consequences, and I’d say.That probably every one of your listeners has some idea that may have haunted them for a while, and they’ve wondered if I should go do it. A smaller number will actually go do it, and the odds of them succeeding feels close to zero, and I put this book out to give people a cheat code, to say, the odds are not the same for everybody. If you take a fundamentally different approach, if you commit to a lot of the principles in this book.I believe that you can 4 or 5x your odds of success.
2:49 spk_0
You know, I, I must give credit where credit’s due, um, you know, for those newer viewers and listeners to this podcast, even the next, you know, the, the, the younger generation, uh, I know Mark is a a true internet pioneer. Um, I, what he created Zynga was off the charts. Mark, for those not familiar with your story, take us back to like why you, why you founded Zynga and what, what were, what were you hoping to achieve?
3:13 spk_1
Sure, and, and I remember, uh, spending time with your CEO Jim Lanzone in that period of time just before I started Zynga, and shout out Jim and.Hopefully he’s listening right now to your show, right, in his office. Um, and I’d say, you know, if you go back to that era of 2006, 2007, um, consumer, similar in some ways to today, it felt not like it wasn’t investable, and it was because distribution was broken or non-existent.And the, the amount you had to invest just to even get up to the plate and take a swing was huge. You needed venture capital. It wasn’t like today. And I, I founded Zynga because of the failure of Tribe.net. I should say it doesn’t, one does not go without the other. I managed to start one of the 1st 3 social networks and fail, OK.At a time when probably there was 10 social networks launched and 8 succeeded in some way. There was Bebo, Tagged, Friendster, MySpace, you know, more than we can remember. We definitely don’t remember Tribe.net. So I managed to be one of like the 2 out of 10 that failed, and that was like an act of willpower, andIt was the painful lessons of that, of taking three world changing instincts, right? One became a $1.6 trillion dollar company today, uh, three really winning, deeply winning instincts, and combining them with one losing idea, and, and sticking with that. And so, I was so determined.To change my approach after that, that when Facebook and MySpace, they opened up their APIs and I saw a way that I could skip a lot of what required all the venture capital to to build the infrastructure, and I’ve got immediate access to distribution. I said, OK, this time I’m going to take a fundamentally different approach, and I started, II committed to what I say in the book is my framework of proven better new. My very first game, which was the first social game, Zynga Poker, which I’m happy to say is still a big successful game today, uh, was not, would not look innovative. It didn’t look innovative then, it, it wouldn’t look innovative today, but it was, we, we, we innovated on the parts that mattered most to our users. We didn’t reinvent the game poker, right? WeWe made it accessible to people, but we made it social. That was the one new thing. And then we put user pay in, which was at the time, now that’s called in-app purchase, a pretty big business.Um, so we had a few new ideas, but, but we, we, we were more committed to the success to getting to a hit, than whether or not that one game or that one shot on goal, uh, succeeded, and, and we were more committed to success than being respected as innovators by our peers.
6:20 spk_0
Why, what did you see in the market at the time, Mark, that said,We need digital games, and where did that come from? Where did that idea come from?
6:29 spk_1
That’s a great question. You know, I love, I love mature markets. I love markets that already are big, they already have revenues, they already have user behavior established, but they’re kind of left for dead. They’re not growth markets, they’re not areas that ventures interested in. You know, that was the search market before Google showed up. They were the fifty-sixth search engine.The market was growing 10 or 15% a year. Similarly, the video game industry in 2007 was $23 billion worldwide. It was mature, it was a big niche, and my insight was,It’s not small, that’s, you know, that was as big as the movie industry, by the way, but, but from a consumer standpoint, it wasn’t a top 10 behavior, and I said, it’s not because we don’t want it. So my fundamental thesis was that we have a latent demand to play, but as adults, we need to give ourselves permission to play, and you could think about that as one of these deep instincts I had.And I said, what if we put games in the middle of this cocktail party where everyone’s hanging out, and we make them short, make them familiar, make them social, um, maybe that will work, and, and it did. And, and, you know, the video game industry today is 280 billiondollars.
7:51 spk_0
Within that first year of building Zynga.Did you have a near death moment, and what did you learn from that that you applied to your continued running of the company?
8:03 spk_1
UmWe had, believe it or not, near death moments almost monthly because we were living.Uh, you know, on top, we were living at the, at the leisure, at the pleasure of, you know, the, of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, you know, and MySpace, um, and they, they could change, uh, any, they, they would change their homepage navigation and all of a sudden we were gone. Literally, a lot of our users only were able to get back because they had us open in a browser tab. I mean, there was no.Icon on your desktop or your phone, we were buried, and I, I thought about it as like, I was building this 5, I was on this 5 story high unicycle, and I was like, should I add another story? I don’t know, it’s getting, it’s getting pretty tippy, and what’s funny though about it isThat we are profitable from our first month. We never spent a dollar of the venture capital or any of the capital that we raised through our IPO, but we kept raising more and more because we kept growing so much, and so our, our scope, you know, our worldwide studios, our X kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Luckily, so did our revenues, but we were veryWe were very cognizant of, of, you know, how fragile that relationship was, and in fact, after IPO, uh, Facebook did change their algorithms and navigation, and, and the company lost a third of its traffic, you know, in a day, so it did happen eventually.
9:44 spk_0
Out of everything that you could have created in those early in that early going, why, why a Farmville?
9:53 spk_1
Oh, well, first of all, I had a farm fantasy. I, I had a ranch fantasy. I, I was like, I want to have Pincus Valley Ranch and I want to produce our own.Cool organic vegetables that are served at Chez Panisse, um, so, so I had that, but I also just thought that, uh, it, it, it just fit perfectly for a mass market. I wanted something that everybodyCouldn’t figure out how to play without any tutorial or instructions, you know, you had to be in it in 3 clicks, and, you know, our, our audience was middle-aged women, and we were giving them their zen, their hobby moment, and it was a nurse who had this open in a browser tab, um, that she could come back to, you know, in between, um, you know.Wait, you know, helping patients, um, but she, she could have a little bit of a moment of relaxation, and, and this was not a game for her. This was, you know, a hobby or pastime, and it was also like an etch a sketch that uh she could, she could feel creative, you know, she could just um change the crops, the layout, the decorating all the time.And, and we, we tried to give what she did meaning, and that we called it Invest and express, so, um, her friends would see what she did, you know, and comment on it. So it, it fit everything that we were looking for at the time. The video game industry said this isn’t even a game, we’re never gonna give you an award, and I said, that’s cool, like, I don’t, I don’t need your respect. I’m OK.
11:36 spk_0
How did you know you had a hit? Was there a metric that you saw?At your HQ taking off, you’re like, well, I better order more servers.
11:45 spk_1
Well, it’s funny, we had, that, that team went rogue, and they were the first team in the company actually that just went and started using AWS and not our own internal uh data centers, and our internal team had told Farmville, we can’t give you any servers for 6 months, and so, you, you got to delay your lunch, and they said, can we just go to AWS and use our credit card? I said, go for it. And it was lucky becauseThey did need more servers, you know, by the day. How do you know it’s a hit?You know, it’s kind of like, uh, you know, finding your partner and your true love, and someone saying, well, how did you know his love? Like, what was the sign? What was the metric, you know, when it’s when you hit true signal and you have a hit, everything says yes. It’s, it’s not, there was one, you know, sneaky little metric that told us, in the case of Farmville, we turned it on on a Sunday, um, I think itIt hit 171,000 installs the first day, just through virality, um, and, and was doing a million installs a day by the end of the first week, and it, so it was viral, it was, the servers were just kind of hot, and the metrics were lighting up on every front, andAnd, you know, the other side of it was that it was so, even though we built it fast, it was so polished and fun. I was addicted to it. Everyone I showed it to, so, yeah, it’s unfortunately, I’d say, you know, that if you’re not sure if it’s hit and you’re looking for the metric, it’s not.
13:28 spk_0
How did you,during that time where you have this, these, this title.Uh, going viral and, and everyone is heaping praise on you, uh, externally, and I’m sure to some extent internally. How did you as a founder, handle success, and what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs that are, that are dealing with that, that moment today?
13:51 spk_1
One of my mantras that I started saying even before we launched Farmville is make sure you spend as much time planning for what if everything goes right, if everything goes wrong, um, because there’s, you know, we can be in a place of hope, OK, which is not good, right? We all know kind of kill hope before hope kills you. So hope is not a strategy, butNeither is, you know, pessimism, right? Neither is planning for, you know, um, what do I do after this? What are all my contingencies? And so I can’t say that we had planned enough for the level of hit that Farmville is gonna have and then social gaming, but it’s, it’s, it’s an amazing time, and I wish, I wish that for every one of the founders listening.Um, you know, I have a chapter in the book that I’ll say is called F Scale. Um, I had a more colorful title. Oh, I’m
14:51 spk_0
just gonna say it’s, it’s fuck scale. I was excited to even bring that up, you know, oh, well, we’re doing a podcast. We can do whatever we want.
14:57 spk_1
Oh, great, this is like pirate shit. OK, so my, my favorite chapter in the book to write was fuck scale, and it was just because.With so much of, you know, people talk about founder mode and, and so much of that is about.Giving ourselves permission and having the confidence to be our, our own kind of found our own kind of product maker, andNot looking for approval from our board or even from our teams, and it’s not a license to be a jerk, but, but it does mean that if you’re the best player on the field, you ought to try to play every position until you can’t anymore, and then you should try to figure out how do you make sure everyone else plays that position.Maybe not the exact way that you would, but at least with the same effectiveness and outcomes, and so the there’s too often that founders are not ready for this, you know, rocket ship and scale, and they turn to experts, they hire someone who was at a scalable company like an Amazon or a Google. That is, I know so many founders who have gone through painful, you know, disasters that way and come out on the other side, becauseNobody can come in and teach your organization to scale. Every single organization is going to scale in a different way. Yahoo, I saw, I was at Yahoo when they had 35 employees, you know, I, I counted the phone list, and Yahoo scaled in its own way, and that’s beautiful, and so did Amazon. So you, you can’t bring that DNA in, you’ve gotta unfortunately develop it, and so I would say.Learn from the outside, find best practices, and then test them, you know, inside your own organization, and some, I love this idea that uh someone who worked close with me said spreading my vampire blood. So I would, I would use these non-scalable ways to scale. I would pick someone from the ranks who was like me, they were this kind of expert witness, they talked when they shouldn’t, you know, they thought they had all the right answers, and sometimes they did.And I would make them my tech assistant, and I would have them follow me around, learn everything I did, and then I would give them a really big responsibility and see if they, you know, sank or swam. Um, I like to overpromote people. That’s a great game mechanic, because if you overpromote somebody to the point that they’re scared, they’re like, holy shit, they go home, they’re like, they gave me this whole P&L. What are they doing?They’re, I guarantee you they’re gonna put way more time and effort into it than someone who’s doing you a favor because they’ve been doing this with their eyes closed at Amazon. So there’s so many of these mechanics, but you’re gonna have to try them and see if they stick and reinvent them inside of your own organization, and that’s beautiful, and that’s what culture is, you know, culture isn’t something that you get out of a book or youCome up with out of thin air, culture is, you know, Yahoo has a unique culture, and so did Zynga, and so does it, you know, does today, and it’s something that that is earned, you know, with blood and, you know, sweat with every hill that you took. No,
18:30 spk_0
I tell everyone here, um, Mark, you’re right on unique culture, and this place is, um, this place is fabulous and very unique, you know, just staying on the founders’ perspective, what was it like?Living in or living with a founder’s mindset, and what toll does that did that take on you personally?
18:52 spk_1
Um, it’s, it’s a lot. There’sThere’s, I, you know, I write in the book about, you know, my version of founder mode is, it’s, there is such a level of courage and fortitude, and it’s not what you’d think. To me, the courage is not standing up against your competitors or the outside world. Some of the hardest moments we face as founders and the loneliest moments are when we know in our gut.ThatWe need to change directions, and nobody agrees with us. Our board, our investors, our, I mean, this will sound silly, but even writing this book, I had a founder mode moment or a few, but one was the title. We originally called it proven Better new, that’s the framework, that’s what I sold to my publisher, HarperCollins, and late in the game, I mean, they had already come up with the title or, you know, book, whatever cover.I said, guys,It’s just not right. It’s, it’s life at the speed of play. That’s, that’s the vibe of this, that’s so much more important, but the world doesn’t like change, especially not people who’ve put a lot of work in one direction. You, if your team has been building this one product.They don’t want to hear on a Monday morning that you just changed your mind in the last week, even if, and, and part of the battle is bringing them along, part of the battle is.Realizing the speed that you need to move at and not losing too many soldiers on the way, but I, I think that we’ve got to be committed to, you know, have the intellectual honesty and the commitment to the most successful true signal outcome, not harmony, and you’ve got to decide, am I, am I tuning to harmony, or am I tuning to winning, and can I accept.The pain, I mean, I’ve been called by, you know, I’ve heard that venture capitalists call me a controversial CEO. I am, because, you know, I, I do disruptive things, and, you know, if you do disruptive things and they’re wrong, well, I’d say you’re controversial for a bad reason, but if, if you have a high hit ratio, if you’re right, then that should be the kind of CEO that, you know, good VCs.And investors want back. It’s just that in the moment when you’re a $2 stock, and, you know, nobody thinks what you’re doing is right, it’s, it’s hard to find anybody who believes in you, and, and I, and I think that’s, I think that’s justThe hardest part about being a founder.
21:43 spk_0
Work-life balance, not even a thing, right?
21:46 spk_1
You know, work-life balance is such a funny concept. It’s at Zynga, when everyone was working the hardest.When I mean, literally there are times that I had to make people go home and get sleep, and nobody ever brought up work-life balance. It was after the IPO, after the growth had stopped, after the stock went down, and it didn’t feel fun, that everybody said, oh, work-life balance, and people started worrying about all this other stuff, and I think the answer to that is like,When the fish are running, we’re up all night throwing nets, and it’s exhilarating, and when they’re not, it’s painful to go out and fish, and so, what they’re really saying when they complain about work-life balance is the work isn’t that good anymore, it’s not that fun, and, and so now I want to balance it.You know, with life
22:44 spk_0
I, um, just continuing on.
22:47 spk_1
I, I aspire to be back in that place where I have no work-life balance. I think work-life balance is like the abyss for a founder.
22:55 spk_0
Yeah, no, that’s a good point, um, you know, continuing this theme of, I guess, of me dating myself a little bit, um, this generation.You know, this younger generation, I think knows Mark Zuckerberg as the guy investing in AI CapE and hopping on an earnings call and raising his AI CapE guidance, but you were on the ground floor of this really young guy with curly hair, um, building something called Facebook. What did you see in him in those early days, and are you surprised by how fast he is moving today when it comes to building out AI infrastructure?
23:31 spk_1
II saw this kid, I mean this like.Pretty developed teenager, um, who walked in my office with Sean Parker in, uh, 2004
23:47 spk_0
and Napster, right? Napster Sean Parker,
23:48 spk_1
wow, well, no, Sean Parker, yeah, Sean worked for me when he was 16 and then I sent him the first check for Napster and I was lucky enough that he decided to bring Zuckerberg in my office.Uh, when they were doing their very first, uh, preseed round or whatever it would be called today, but they raised 500K from Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and me, and he came in, and he was wearing those Hawaiian flip flops and like basketball shorts, and he had his feet up on my conference table and handed me a card that said, I’m CEO bitch, um, and he was just having fun, did not care, andAnd was not looking to impress me in any way, and I was really impressed, and I was like, and I, they pulled up the Facebook, and I said holy shit, everything I’ve been failing at with Tribe, they were getting right, which was trust. They, because it was edu they hadPreppy kids from Stanford, putting up their mobile phone numbers, and, and I was having trouble like keeping mainstream people on tribe, and, and they at the time they were in 3 or 4 schools, and they just nonchalantly said, yeah, you know, we have a waitlist of schools, and when we turn on a new school, we get 80% of the students in the first week, and the other 20% the next week, and then 60% sign on every single day, andAnd what’s amazing is that metric of 60% of your daily users, of your monthly users signing on every day.Every time I see that metric, it’s what I saw with Raya, um, that is just invest with your eyes closed. That is the number one metric I’ve seen for for sustained heat, and in terms of Zuckerberg, um,He developed so fast. I mean, it was like faster than fable or faster than mythos, you know, faster than uh than we see the the the top AI today, and he just, he just morphed and learned, and he had a confidence in himself, um, that I really had never seen in in a young entrepreneur, and, and we had an ongoing lunch about once a month.Um, and my kind of outside role was that I would always tell him the truth, and he is always surrounded by some truth tellers, but a lot of sycophants, and not in a bad way, but just, it just happens, you know, um, there’s a lot of people that are drinking his Kool-Aid, so they don’t even know they’re, you know, they, and that’s the danger when you’re a really successful founder that people around you.I think if you believe it, they believe it. And one thing I try to do for, you know, peers and, you know, really successful product owners is try to at least give them my deeply honest truth, cause I’m not sure they’re getting it, and so I kept saying,I think this thing you’re doing is amazing. I think these things aren’t, and he would take notes, and it got to the point that both our organizations would kind of have ripples after we had a lunch or a dinner. Um, and yeah, I, I’d say.At every, it was like every, it was like, I like to say that winning these things is like a marathon made up by sprints, by heats, and you gotta win every heat, and he keeps winning every heat, and he keeps getting better with every heat, and, you know, I’d say that what I saw by long before he went public, but by like 09 and 10 is he had such a sense of destiny of that company of that this is going to be an important company.AndIt was almost like this thing that was going to live in the third person. It wasn’t his company or him, and he was not gonna let anything get in the way of that destiny, and, and ultimately, there was a moment, you know, after IPO where Zynga.It was just a little bit, uh, a little bit annoying for them, you know, they had to include us in their IPO prospectus and the risk factors, because we, you know, when they went public, Zynga was something like 20% of their page views and 10% of their revenues, and so they had to have a Zynga dependency, uh, section, andYou know, I, I think we were just like a, a, a, a gnat on their ass, um, but you know,
28:37 spk_0
are you friends with him?Are you friends with him? You talked to him,
28:40 spk_1
but, but.We don’t, we don’t talk that often, you know, we text once in a while on, on something or other, you know, I, I sent him the book Ready Player One, just before we bought Oculus, um, it was kind of a funny moment. I think they still give it out to their employees, but, um.You know, I was at his wedding, um, I was one of the, the few non-Facebook friends, andFor me, when I’ve had the the small number of friends who’ve who’ve gotten, you know, uber successful, I, I don’t wanna like be a sycophant, and I want like, I’m kind of like, OK, you’re doing amazing, but I’m, I don’t want anything from you, so I’m not gonna likeYou know, I, I tend to kind ofMove a little the other direction.
29:34 spk_0
Um, if I had, lastly, if I had to wrap your career in a bow, you know, what do you?What is your legacy in the world of of the internet and digital?
29:47 spk_1
Uh, wow, that’s a, that’s a big question. I’d say that.What myHopefully my my ongoing legacy is, I’m, I hope to build one of these internet treasures, one of these services we can’t remember life before or imagine life without that make up our digital life stack, like Yahoo is in there for a lot of people, but, you know, Google, now it’s chat GBT and I would like to uhYou know, invent and take one of those services to the mass market, and I think that we, we came close, and some, some of our games, Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, still are important parts of people’s lives, but, but that’s, that’s like the thing that that matters most to me in this whole thing.
30:42 spk_0
Are you still trying to create, it sounds like just listening to you. What are you doing today? Are you, are you trying to found the next big thing? Are you an investor, or are you all the above?
30:53 spk_1
I’m all the above. That’s what I was when I created, you know, Zynga. I, it’s like a bad addiction, like I, I can’t retire and just go be an investor. I do invest and I have a lot of fun at it, but I love.Being in the hunt. I love building products. I love when you get to heat and a product that resonates with people, and it, even though it’s not scalable, and there’s higher leverage things I could do with my time, that’sThat’s what I love doing the most and so I’m, I’m still doing it. I’m, I’m still rubbing sticks together. I can’t help it.
31:33 spk_0
Well, when that fire starts, you come to me, my friend. Uh, we’ll get you on here and we’ll talk all about it. It was a real treat to talk with you, and, uh, the book, I, I encourage everyone to read this, Life at the Speed of Play by, uh, Zynga founder Mark Pincus. Uh, I appreciate it, Mark. Thanks for making time for me.
31:48 spk_1
Yeah, thanks for having me on. We’ll keep talking.
31:50 spk_0
All right, that’s it for the latest episode of Power Players.
