The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Proven, Better, New: Mark Pincus on the Rules of Product Innovation

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Mark Pincus is the creator behind Farmville and Words with Friends. He built Zynga into one of the biggest gaming companies in the world and helped shape the early era of social products on the internet. In this conversation, he breaks down how great founders spot winning ideas early, why most startups build the wrong thing, and how products become part of people’s daily lives. He shares lessons from building Zynga, missing the opportunity behind social networking before Facebook took off, navigating platform risk during Zynga’s explosive growth, and rebuilding his confidence after major failures. You’ll learn how to test ideas faster, what separates products people try from products people love, how to avoid “death by compromise” as a founder, and why the best builders stay obsessed with what users actually want. + Members get the longer, extended version of this conversation, with additional content not included in the public release. Join Now. + +Pre-order Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! ------ Timestamps: (00:00) The Principles of Great Products (01:34) How to Test if Your Idea Has "Heat" (04:02) Falling Out with His Father (06:14) Early Career Fails (09:27) The Presentation that Kicked him out of Bain (12:04) The Book of Life System for Making Strategic Decisions (17:56) Why Your Instincts are Good and Your Ideas are Bad (22:29) Copying is the Key to Great Product Design (23:22) System for Building Great Products (24:05) How to Use "Proven Better New" to Build Ideas (27:39) Why Deconstruction Leads to Better Products (29:33) All Founders Go Through This (35:14) How Zynga Changed Social Gaming (37:25) Pitching Zynga to Steve Jobs (40:36) The Fatal Mistake Founders Make (41:24) The Fight Between Peter Thiel and Sequoia (43:03) The Explosion of Farmville (45:45) Zynga's Near-Death Experience on Facebook (48:36) Why Failure Machines Reveal Your Best Ideas (49:28) The Thing that Almost Killed Words with Friends (53:05) Why the Minimum Viable Product Approach is Hurting You (54:03) Building Fast is More Important than Building Right (56:19) How Zynga Missed Their Instagram Moment (58:50) Your Company Should Be a Democratic Dictatorship (1:02:25) How to Build a Meritocracy in Your Company (1:03:44) Jeff Bezos' Invaluable Management Trick (1:05:25) Bezos Hack: Scaling Leadership with Tech Assistants ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠ Insta: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠ Follow Mark Pincus LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markpincus/ X: https://x.com/markpinc ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +CoinShares: Delivering Reason to Digital Asset Investing. ⁠https://coinshares.com/⁠ +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/ Join the salty rebellion: https://drinklmnt.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've got to be in a mental state where we're playing offense and not defense. You've got to be in this place that you're thinking, what if everything goes right? If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defense. You've lost before you're even out of the gates. What are the first principles of great products? 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 experienced that, there's something magical to it, that it could be an unlock. And lots 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 you, or at least this is my experience,

if this product speaks to me and it makes it on the front of my iPhone, I think it has a billion dollar stick value. Or maybe I should update that. That's what I thought 15 years ago. Now maybe it's trillion. At least two billion, but if it's enough to be on the front of my iPhone, to me, that's saying a lot, like that I'm going to use it more than once, a new app that's so seldom.

And the front of my iPhone is, I could go get and show it to you, but it's half empty. So I still think that there's so few, at least digital consumer products that give us that magical experience that we feel compelled to use every day. You have a system for sort of proving ideas before you know that they're going to work, really. Talk to me about that. How do you do that? I'm looking for real heat around an idea. What does heat mean?

Heat is something that you know it when you see it. It's kind of like being really in love with somebody. When you found your person, I believe you know it. And then every other one that was not quite your person, you're not sure. And heat is the same thing. And it's like you want to see heat. So you're looking for signs of heat. And you're like, look at this click-through rate or look at this.

But it's not heat. When you have heat around the product, everything says heat. And you just know it. It's part of what I call true signal. Right? It's when you have true signal, we all know it. You don't need anyone to tell you. And when you don't have true signal, you need lots and lots of stats and other things because you're like, is this the signal? Isn't it? It's not. When you see heat in another product or even better when you see heat in your own, it's like Christmas morning. Like everything lights up. Were you always playful? Yeah, I grew up in a family that was very competitive around these kind of, you know, family social games like charades and scrabble and trivial pursuit. Competitive like tipping the board over if you lose?

Almost. Like my dad was very playful and into games and so much so that he first did this and then we all did. We'd start to change the rules if we thought the games weren't. made right. The best one was in Scrabble. It kind of sucks that there's this luck of the draw on your letters. And my dad made this rule that you could take a letter from your little tray, yeah, thank you, and change it out with letter on the board as long as it still made a word. So you could put an O for an A, and then you had to reuse that letter in the same turn. And so my dad sometimes would take a half an hour for a turn and all these intricate things. But it made it more, you had more, I like to talk about what's the dimensionality, you know, to games, and it added a whole dimension.

You had a falling out with your dad, and that seemed to be one of the pivotal early moments in your life. What happened? My dad, we all kind of played a role in his movie, and he loved being in a fraternity in college and was like defining for him. And he wanted me to do that. I wasn't into a fraternity, and they weren't into me either. It was like mutual. And I initially went to this Big Ten school, University of Michigan, and I was just not in the right place in any way. And I just was not, on lots of fronts, becoming the kind of man that my dad wanted me to be.

He wanted me to be just like him. This got more and more tense, and our family was on a sailboat in the Caribbean, in the Virgin Islands, and we were bareboating. So it was just us crewing. And we had grown up sailing, and my dad was the worst sailboat captain ever. I mean, just famously, like, epically bad captain.

Like, we would get stuck on a sandbar because he didn't read the tides right, you know. We were in this harbor in this island, Virgin Gorda, and the keel got stuck. And we always had something go wrong. And the boat was going circles and headed eventually for this, like, rock barrier, And I got in the dingy, and I turned on the engine and grabbed the rope, and I pulled the boat into the slip and saved the day.

And my dad was furious, and he said, you could have killed us all, and it could only be one captain. And, you know, I think he was also a little humiliated. And that escalated to this bigger fight. And 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. And I left right there. I went and rented a seaplane and flew away. And I also had transferred, been accepted to transfer to Wharton, University of Pennsylvania from Michigan.

And so then I just packed up my car and left and drove to Penn. So after school, you had some formative experiences. It's sort of Bain and you worked with John Malone. I'd love to spend a few beats on those. Sure. I had all these great experiences in my 20s. Really amazing, but they were all kind of despite myself because I had these kind of fatal flaws as an employee.

One is I'm terrible at interviewing because of this like over-indexing desire to be honest more than to please the interviewer, even though I wanted to get these, you know, high-paying jobs. So getting out of college, I was the only kid in my section to graduate without a job, and then I got, I was lucky enough to get a 15-minute interview with TCI,

John Malone's company, the biggest cable company in the country, and I interviewed with Brandon Cluzen, and he said, why do we need a second MBA here? It was 20,000 employees, and they had one other MBA. They'd hired 10 years earlier. And I said, because I read this book by this guy, George Gilder, called Microcosm,

and I think that your company is positioned for this coming information super highway. There was no internet yet. And I said, there must be all these deals, other things you could do besides cable, and I can go do that. And he said, well, it's funny you say that. we're having dinner with George Gilder tonight. So it was like a direct hit. And then they called down to their head of corporate development.

And he had a cardboard box called non-cable. And they gave me the box. So that was my job. But then I had a few career limiting meetings with Malone where I was so proud. At one point, TCI was going to buy a third of prodigy. It was the biggest online provider at the, at the time, and it was terrible. Wasn't AOL around this time?

Yes, an AOL had just gone public and was worth $110 million. Prodigy, this deal was to pay $400 million for a third of Prodigy, which Sears and IBM owned. And I came back and I said, why don't we just buy this company AOL? They're public. They're way better. It was $110 million. And nobody like that.

And then they had another deal, this other public company, they were going to put a bunch of money in and I said, not only should we not invest or take equity in this company, we should short their stock because they're just going to go straight down. They have no capital. And Malone said, I don't need some wet behind the ears, MBA telling me what's a good deal. You know, and my boss, who's the head of corporate development, was just like shrinking in the corner. So, and then, yeah, at Bain, I got this great deal for a summer job at Bain when I was at HBS that they'll pay for your whole next semester is $25,000. It's like, I'm in. And they said, we want to bring in entrepreneurial banking people.

I said, great, that's me. And it was like the movie Stripes, because my boss left after like the first couple of weeks, and they said, we think you can do this project on your own. And it, a long story, but they had this graph in the company that Mitt Romney had first made that said, they probably still have it. This is if your relative market share is high enough,

your return on sales, your margin will be high, which is basically saying you can have like more monopolies. pricing or oligopolistic. I proved that in the snack industry, it breaks. So I presented, no one had checked my work, and I presented near the end of the summer to like the partners and all the summer associates and I'm so proud.

I thought they'd make me a partner. This is like, you know, 1991, and I figured out like the PowerPoint animation and I showed their graph with a flashing X in it. I said, look, the graph is wrong. This doesn't work. It's like going to church and being like, I don't believe in God.

Yeah, look, Jesus never existed. Look, I can prove it. I should be head of this religion. So most people had walked out by the time I was done with my presentation. And then they just stopped talking to me for the rest of the summer. And I was really proud that I was one of two summer associates in the history of the firm that they asked not to come back, you know, by partway through the summer. So a lot of evidence was building up that I was not employable.

At 28, you realize you're not getting the results you want. things aren't working out. You find yourself in a synagogue again. Walk me through what was going on. Paint the picture for me. I just felt like I'd made a lot of bad career decisions and I was washed up early. There was nothing.

There was no next thing this was headed towards. And I don't know why, but I just, maybe I wanted a place to think. And I just sat there in this temple. I didn't know anybody. I didn't understand anything. It was just a good place to sit and think. And I just started writing it.

notebook about why my life sucked so badly. And I just ended on like this one thing that I smoked cigarettes. I didn't even smoke smoke. I smoked like one or two a day, a pack a night if I was at a bar on weekends, but I hated it. And my clothes smelled like it. And it just, and I didn't want to do it, but I kept doing it. So it was the sense of like my life was a little out of control. And I just was like, If I could do one thing to, like, know that I'm making some positive change of my life, I'm going to quit smoking. So on October 19th, 1994, I did a lifetime quit on cigarettes. And then every day for that year after that that I didn't smoke, it was something I could feel good about.

Well, at this point, you had, like, huge ambitions that weren't being realized, and you're evaluating your life effectively with honesty. And it wasn't coming up good. And so you reflect, you have that one year, you don't smoke, you stop smoking, you prove to yourself every day that you're sort of in control of your circumstances

and a lot of ways. And then you do it again. You call this your Book of Life. Yeah. And you've done it every year since. Yeah. I think that a practice like the Book of Life what it's done for me,

and I think it could do for a lot of people is just be strategic about your life. Like, be thoughtful about, like, I'd 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 you know you'll thank yourself later. And right around the time,

I was brainstorming on the side with this 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 D.C. is there was this company AOL there. And they had one guy who was focused on the internet and had the same kind of crazy bug I did. And so we started talking and we came up with this kind of,

you know, peanut butter and jelly idea that like he wanted to build hardware, I wanted to build software, but we both wanted to make the internet easier for people. And so we were like, 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 60,000.

This is freeloader, right? 30,000. Yeah, 30,000. 60 total. Yeah, it was called freeloader. And you guys sold that company for 30,000? Eight million, was it? Yeah, and then everything possibly,

everything that could have gone right went right. Do you feel like you were lucky? Yes, I definitely think. I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And it's so, it pains me how much founders, and especially I see it in men, not all men, I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters,

but I would say I see it in a lot in men and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with, that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it, and they start feeling defined by it. And it would have been me too, but it wasn't. Do you have any advice for people in that position, or they're sort of maybe attached to it?

We've got to be in a mental state, where we're playing offense and not defense. And I don't know how you're going to get yourself there, but you've got to be in this place that you're thinking, you're also thinking, what if everything goes right? What does right look like? How am I ready for everything going right? If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong,

you're playing defense and you've lost before you're even out of the gates. The sponsor of this show is Coin Chairs. While most of the industry was still arguing about whether digital assets were legitimate, The coin shares was quietly building the infrastructure to invest in them properly. They now manage over $6 billion in assets and have stayed profitable through every market cycle, fully regulated with the kind of transparency and governance that serious investors actually expect. Whether it's crypto-etef's active strategies or Bitcoin mining ETF exposure, you can access all of it through your existing brokerage account.

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So you have the right instinct for a social network. And then you meet Zuck. And he's got the right idea for a social network. Talk to me about that tension, and you didn't change course after meeting that, even though you realized it. I think we all know, we've all seen founders like this that are just, they're so attached to this idea

that they're going to go down with the ship. We've also seen people in bad relationships like this, right? So it is like a bad relationship, and you have a friend, and they're coming to you for the umpteenth time with another version of the same thing and you're just like, ah, this is not going to end well, right?

And we've, and that's so many of us with our startups. But you can't see it because you're in it in a way, but you saw it. 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. And so that is a really powerful, that's a powerful philosophy and tool if we can hang on to that and really use that. And so I had this instinct I call a cocktail party and it started with Napster. And Sean Parker worked for me at Freeloader when he was 16 amazingly and sent me an email when he started Napster with Sean Fanning. And I was the first check into Napster because he said we have like two servers and they're full and we need money for more servers. And you always just send money when someone says that

in consumer. That's rare. But Napster was this cocktail party where we could connect with each other with nobody in between. And to me, that was the beginning of this social web, of were the nodes, we're connecting this peer-to-peer web. And then Reed and I, Reed Hoffman and I, were during this nuclear winter for consumer internet. After the dot-com crash, there was like six of us who were still excited about consumer internet, and we would get together and re-coign the term web 2.0. And it was this idea that anything on the internet

that can be free, will be free, starting with data. And we got to set the data free. But so we both came to Friendster at the same time, and we just 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 in a month started to really work. And at the same time, we were working on our own social networking ideas,

and Reed was close to launching LinkedIn. But Friendster was the first thing I saw work and didn't copy it, didn't fast follow it. And 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. He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we were doing.

And it's not like I learned anything in particular from Friendster that everyone didn't see within, you know, months that it was working. It was really successful. And so I thought, Tribe, it's Craigslist, you know, Craigslist meets Friendster. I got trust completely wrong. I mean, like, so wrong, it's unbelievable.

But for some people it wasn't. For extroverts, for Burning Man people, they loved it. But for most of mainstream people, it was wrong. Zuck came through my office with Sean Parker about a year after I started Tribe. already, I think, struggling because I had amazing virality and I had amazing user growth and I had terrible retention and should have told me something, but it didn't. It was like a sinking speedboat, which a lot of viral apps became, you know, that we kept putting new users in at amazing rates and we'd lose them at amazing rates. And the real answer to sinking speedboat is to fix the hole

in the bottom, you know, not go faster. more people. So Zuck and Sean Parker came through and I saw they got it right. And I think it was my ego and the kind of morality at the time that's still there, not as much around the culture of

startups and internet that you don't copy people. And so I wasn't going to go do the exact thing that they had done. I wasn't even going to take the insight that was so clear to me that I'd gotten trust wrong, which at this point, Friendster, LinkedIn, Facebook, all were proving the trust thing.

And I just wasn't going to do it. And so I just stuck with the same losing... Double down on the losing strategy. Yeah. Double click on copying and sort of how you think about that. Copying sounds bad. You don't want to copy someone's homework. You don't want to copy someone's work.

It's like steal. feeling sounds bad. But then we juxtpose that with like Steve Jobs, his famous quote, like, you know, great artists copy and the master's steal, right? Like the best artist steal. And so in the context of Steve Jobs or the best designers who say I was inspired by, we're okay with it. but then we can see other people copy something and there's something icky about it, right? And I think it comes down to there's a certain aesthetic that we feel of,

is it just copying and blatant copying or did you add something to the conversation? Have you innovated on some important front? Have you moved the world ahead on some front? From this concept and the failure of tribe, I ended up getting to this framework at Zinga that I called Proven Better New. And it's based on my philosophy

that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. And the problem is that I see with so many products and founders is that they're losing for the wrong reason. So they're losing because they didn't just stick to their one, isolate 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?

So the concept of proven better new was it was much easier to implement in games where you have lots of features and functions and mechanics and components, but it's true in any product, consumer, enterprise, business to business. I mean, Slack is a great example of proven better new. The idea is take something proven for this audience and this function and this platform. So before Slack, there was a product we used at Zinga and other enterprises called HipChat, which was an enterprise chat product with channels and stuff like that. And so proven means these things are proven, and what's proven, you should legally copy.

Like you should don't mess with anything that's proven. You may not even understand why that works. Better is, is there something about that product that 10 out of 10 users would say you could do better? Okay, so for Zingga Poker, our proven was poker games. We didn't mess with the rules of poker. We didn't, we copied what the best, you know, real money gambling and other poker games looked like.

the table, the dealer, the cards, the sounds, just copied it and you can move much faster. Legally copied it. You don't take someone's art. But better for Zinga Poker was no download. Okay? Why do we have no download? Because we had no security issue.

We had no security issue because there was no real money. Real money gambling needed you to download something for security. So how do I know 10 out of 10 users want no download? They vote with their clicks. you lose at least half your users every click. Every time you say click here, half people don't click. And you lose 80% when you say download this, at least. It's probably 90% or more, 90% or more in the app store.

And so I knew that was better, like statistically proven better. But better is usually half price or free or no download. It's something very mundane and basic, usually. What was Zingapoker? The better was you put images on, too, around the table? That was new. Oh, that was new. Sorry.

Yeah, okay. So what you, I like to say to people, what you think is better is actually new. The new in Zingka poker was pictures of real people, often your friends. And my philosophy, which may sound anti-innovation, but it's actually in service of innovation, is all new fails until it finally doesn't. and at Zinga today, the mantra inside the company is still all new fails. If you assume all new fails, you probably won't be let down, okay? It doesn't mean you don't do new. Of course not.

It means you take a different approach to new, which is 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. And the best, the masters of consumer products know this with their eyes closed. So part of proven better and new then is being able to deconstruct what's proven and what works, because it's not always obvious. Yes.

What's the process for deconstructing something? Before you have the right to do better or new, you need to be a piece. and what's already proven. So I remember it at Zinga having a roadmap meeting with the poker team and a newly minted product manager proudly showed me the new poker profile that he was going to launch. And I said, okay, show me your PhD in profiles.

Show me what are the best game profiles on mobile ever done and tell me why? He's like, I don't know. And I'm like, 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. And that's what I mean by proven and deconstructing. And it's deconstructing is 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. And just anytime a new product comes out, like, be a student of yourself in that experience and, like, what is it that feels great or doesn't? And we have a responsibility to our users. Like, it's sacred.

And the more we take that really, hold that up as our as our most important purpose in this, the more we're going to treat this with the level of respect and care that it deserves, and the more they're going to feel

that care and intention in our product. I want to talk about the abyss a little bit. So after Tribe and before Zenga, you went into this hole. Can you describe how you felt what was going on? Yeah. At some point,

I started calling this place the abyss. The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure. it's where we've been on this hamster wheel of our career. Plus it's your identity, right? You're a founder. You're running this company. Yeah.

My dad used to call this in between successes. He's like, you're not unemployed. You're in between successes. But for us as founders, it's so hard. This abyss is this usually dark place because at first it feels great. Maybe freedom. Oh, my God. I've been working so hard.

I can just sleep in and I can do all the things I've wanted to do and couldn't. And about a week or two later, maybe a month later, it starts to dawn on you that I may never find gainful employment again. I mean, gainful meaning something I want to do. I'm not going to ever go work for anyone else, so I'm not employable anyway. So I don't know if I'll ever come out of this abyss. I've been in this abyss sometimes for multiple years. and it doesn't mean you're not working on projects and things,

but you haven't found your thing. You haven't found the thing, and it's maybe not the level of, you're not working on something with as much passion and conviction as the thing that you built that worked or went public or didn't work, but you loved it. And you don't know if you'll ever find that again. Do you think these periods like this abyss

is necessary for what comes next in life? I'd like to think it's not because they're long and painful, and I'd love to just have a short break and then dive into the next thing and have it work. But I don't know, I personally don't know how to avoid it. I think that the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon. The ultimate vibe coding is life of the speed of play, and it's that you get to have an idea and bring it to life in some way

for almost no capital and get to instantiate your idea, maybe not with billions of capital. So I do think that there are going to be more and more outs from this abyss, and it's going to be easier in a lot of ways. But I think the abyss is for sure there for me, and I think it will be for most founders. And so all we can do is embrace it

and have more process. That's where my book of life is helpful. I find finding lots of small things to work on that are maybe going to unlock the passion thing. I got to Zingha. I was in the abyss, and I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling.

I was doing them all wrong. I was not intense. I have a terrible work ethic until I don't. You're either all in or kind of like dabbling. Yes, I just dabble and I'm terrible. I'm like, I know I should be putting time on this, but I'm not.

I'm not drawn to it. What does it look like when you're all in? It's fierce. I think that my all-end has always been underestimated. So we'll get to like when I, life when I started Zinga, but the VCs didn't believe, like I'd already been successful and made all this money and they just were like, this is a lifestyle thing.

I don't buy that you're going to really. work hard like a 25-year-old or a 30-year-old. Because you were 40 when you started Zing. 41, yeah. When I was all in with Zinga, I was a maniac. I mean, I just, I didn't want to stop, I didn't want to sleep. It's all I wanted to do all the time. And it was the ultimate high because there was always something more I could do. So you are in the abyss and you come out of it and you have, I mean, by all objective standards, all this money and success, and you want to go do it again.

Why did you do that with Singer? Part of what I deeply realized in that abyss, as founders, we may or may not be faced with having to answer our why. So my why I got to is like, what I can offer the world is building products that move people. And I'm going to be the most happy doing that. and I don't know if I'll ever get to do it again,

but I'm going to try to get there. And I was looking for this way to get back to building again, even though Tribe was an abject failure. And I got there with this little poker game, and it was really fun, and it started to take off in ways right away. And it was one of these, like, lightning in a bottle things that it just worked

and everything about it worked. But also I think I've gone through this like success beat down, success beat down. And I think I had to be so beat down with Tribe to be so unambitious to start Zinga. What was the big idea with Zenga? Well, I love these markets and they're all around us where we think they're mature and over and they haven't even started yet. And that was search before Google. You know, Google was the 56th search engine.

It was a mature, slow-growth business. Google made us reimagine what search could be in our lives. And obviously turned it into a trillion-dollar company value. And Games was the same thing in 2007. The whole video game industry worldwide was like $23 billion. It was mature, not interesting. and yet there was, I believe, this latent demand because people like me,

I would have played games if they were made accessible for me and I didn't have to go be on someone's couch or whatever it required. And so I thought games had this opportunity to be one of the most important activities on the web. I started saying play could be this one of the core things that we do in our digital life stack or every day. And I think that what we got right with social gaming

was make it for the mass market, not for gamers, and give you enough value in it than an adult would give themselves permission to play. And the value came from asking very little of you, so we're going to ask very little time from you, and then giving you something of value in your life, just entertainment. So not just being dead, empty calories, but actually you're here for this cocktail party to do social networking. What if in our game we give you a new dimension to your

social networking that can improve a relationship in your life? We're not going to hit that every day, every session, but what if we get there once a week or once a month or once ever? And that became how we thought of our innovation. And then the second thing that came into play for social gaming with us was virtual goods, user pay. And I remember actually when I got to pitch our poker game to Steve Jobs when they were just opening up the app store. And I showed him the demo of our poker game and he yelled at his number two guy, Scott Forrestall, and said, I told you I don't want to see fake demo where. And Scott looked at me and he's like, you're not supposed to show anything fake or, you know, this was supposed to live. I was like, Steve,

these are real users from MySpace, from Facebook. Type something in the chat if you dare, but I have no fucking idea what they're going to say to you. And then he was like, oh, that's cool. And then I thought, okay, maybe I could like pitch him on user pay. They didn't have user pay when they launched the app store. There was no in-app purchase. There was a paid app store and a free app store,

and you'd have to buy a version of our poker with chips. And so I tried to pitch him on in-app purchase. We were one of the first companies in the Western world to do this in-app purchase thing, this virtual goods thing. And so that was the other part of the rocket ship that we got to mass market. We made this something useful for adults. And we had this user pay model that could monetize your engagement. Instead of trying to show you an ad and getting you to leave the game to go somewhere else,

it actually, the more engaged you were, the more likely you were to spend money. money. We were cash flow positive right away. I've never had that before. I put up 350K to start the company. And at that point, to be like 41 and starting a consumer app company and doing it on Facebook, it's like there was no dignity in it. Like, I think people were embarrassed for me. It was like, Mark, really? Like, so much you could do in the world. Like, go be a venture capitalist, you know, like all my friends had done. Or you've already been successful. You don't have anything. You don't have to prove anything. Why are you doing this?

But you have a chip on your shoulder. Yeah, yes. I'd say that I did and have. And I had a chip on my shoulder that I knew I could make these world-class apps. I knew I could make what I call an Internet treasure, what John Doer called an Internet treasure. And that was my why. Soon after I started Zinga, John Doer and Bing said to me,

the greatest thing you could do is build an Internet treasure. Okay. And that's what they call it Google. and eventually like the iPhone. And what I attached, the tagline I attached was, it's a service you can't remember life before or imagine life without.

And I love that vision. And I said, yes, yes, yes. That's what I want to do. And, but I said, okay, this time, I had a chip on my shoulder. I had like the multiple bad experiences with VCs. I made this way harder for myself. When, it should have been easy

at this point to raise money for Zing. It was cash flow positive. I was a multi-time, you know, I was a two-for-three founder, like one sold, one public, one failed, right? And I made it so much harder on myself. But for a reason, because I said, I'm going to make sure everyone's aligned on this trip, this road trip.

And I think that's one mistake we make as founders. And another quote I like to say is, know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name

and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's a company we don't want to work at. You're like, well, I guess I did what was right for the company but now it's not the right place for me and you leave and I'm like no

you're the most valuable player if it's not the right place for you we've fit you failed the first round I raised was impossibly hard and I got caught in between a fight in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia and he had just

started Founders Fund and Sequoia didn't like that and they were mad at each other and Peter had said I'm going to fund I want it five million He's like, I'll fund it. And I said, great. And then I went, and I had this meeting with Sequoia. And it was really funny meeting because I was asking for 20 million pre.

And we were doing $200,000 a month and free cash flow. And they said, how do you justify that valuation, which at that time was a lot? And 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. And it just won't matter. And now everyone thinks that way, call options. But I was like, if you're worried about whether it's 15 pre or 20 pre, don't play because you're looking for an outcome that you're never going to see. We're never selling this company for 200 million.

It's either like zero or multi-billion. And they like that. But then there was this fight between them and Peter. And then they both ended up not investing. And then we were damaged goods. And then it was like out of a scene from Silicon Valley, the show. And I started meeting with all these second-tier VCs. And eventually Fred Wilson, fun to me, with terrible terms, like 15 million pre.

But I love Fred. And he negotiated a hard deal because he could. And the funniest thing is I never used the dollar I raised the whole time Zinga. Was Framfield the first product that really just instantly took off, like crazy? Well, there was like rocket boosters. Okay, and each one went into a bigger, you know, outer orbit. So it started with Zingha Poker and then... Yeah, Mafia Wars, poker, they were big, but nothing like what we saw with Farmville.

And Farmville was the first time that we hit this like mass market consumer tipping point where lots of people knew about Mafia Wars. But with Farmville, we hit this density on the social network and the feed with Facebook that something, I think like 20% of Facebook users were playing the game, and so it felt like 100% were. And that then made it like what everybody, it was in the zeitgeist. And that's when social gaming and Zinga kind of left orbit. I wanted to see if an AI version of me could actually hold its own.

So I built one with Hey Jen. Let's see if it was paying attention. Hi, Shane. Digital You. Every book, every episode, every newsletter, I've read it all. Try me. Pick a book I recommend constantly. Tell me one idea from it that I actually use. Annie Duke. Thinking and bets. Resulting. A good decision can have a bad outcome. A bad decision can get lucky. Judge the process, not the result. You taught me that one. I just remember it better.

Okay. That landed. That's Hey Jen. Record yourself for 15 seconds and get an AI avatar that delivers professional video on demand. No camera, no crew, and over 175 languages. Already used by 30 million people, including 85% of the Fortune 100. Your first three videos are free at hagen.com. That's h-e-y-g-en.com. Ever hit 3pm and feel like your brain just quit? For a lot of people, that's not caffeine or sleep, it's electrolytes.

and water alone won't fix it. That's why I drink Element, every day after lunch. Zero sugar, no dodgy ingredients, just a real dose of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. I know you're all thinking electrolytes are for athletes, but you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it, and it tastes great. Stay sharp in the afternoon and grab a free eight-count sample pack with any purchase at drinkelement.com slash tkp. That's drinklmn tk.com slash tkp. You had a near-death experience with Facebook and Zinga.

Can you walk me through what happened there and how you navigated that? The entire Facebook experience for Zingo was a near-death experience. And not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented. and many companies did die in it most. There's only two companies that ever actually survived out of it and was Spotify and Zinga. And I'd say my experience in building Zinga,

and the reason I kept raising money, even though we were profitable, was I felt like I was on a five-story-high unicycle, and I kept adding another story. And it was like, whoa, it's to be really far if we fall now. and we didn't have any stable, there was not a stable platform, we didn't have a stable agreement

between the companies. They could and would change their platform all the time. And some low-level product manager who wants to promote events would deprecate the whole left rail of their homepage where all the apps were, like they'd been behind a more button. And you're like, oh my God, nobody can find us anymore,

you know, or it would just, always be moving. They had to move fast and break things. Most of what they broke was all of their app ecosystem. I would walk their hallways every week trying to convince them that games and apps were this great business for them and they didn't believe it.

They didn't think that was what their platform was for. And then eventually they did. And it wasn't even the 30% of revenues that was the problem. It was they walked in and handed us terms that we couldn't. we would have been a captive company if we had accepted these terms that they...

And they threatened you, too. Yeah, and they said you have till... They gave it on Friday, and they said you have till Monday to sign this agreement or we're going to take down your apps, which was their right. And that could have happened the whole way through. And who knows what would have happened

because, you know, at this point, we were huge on their platform. And at the point that they went public a year later, they had to put in their risk factors, like the Zinga dependency, because we were like 20% of their page views and 10% of their revenues. And a huge portion of the time spent on the up.

Yes, yes, huge. Yeah, and I don't know if they'd shut us down and people had to navigate to zinga.com. We didn't want to find out. It was really terrifying. And they probably didn't want to find out if you left, right? Right, right. So you had this sort of weird situation.

Yeah. You said the fastest way to get to a winning idea is to sort of build a failure machine. So how do you determine whether your ideas are winning or not? And course, correct, because you might have the right instinct, but like how do we touch reality and get feedback from the world? I got to failure machines through a lot of failure, painful, slow failure. I'd say when I came back to Zinga's CEO for the second time and I had to move fast to make this, turnaround happen. I was going to start my fight with our core franchises. And the CEO before me had bet on all these new games and this whole slate of games looked like it was going to fail.

And our franchises had been neglected. And I said, I'm going to go back to words with friends. People love that. I want them to fall in love with that game again. The game, when I came back, was projected to do, to drop from 120 million revenue. to 79 million in revenues in the next 12 months. And everyone's saying, let's pull resources off, let's send the game to our team in India,

to shudder it. And I said, no, we're going to, this is the beginning of the turnaround. We're going to turn around this game and then the whole company. So I started meeting with that team every week. We started going through their app reviews and ratings. It's amazing how dumb this shit is.

But the ratings had fallen to like the mid-3s from the high fours, so we would read the ratings. I started and ended every meeting with, what will our players thank us for? And the team thought that was like an unfair question. Eventually, we put a neon sign in the lobby that said, what will our players thank us for? And that might sound like a weird place to say,

how did I get to a failure machine? But it's the right place to start, is that what's the intuition, what's the instinct? What do I know anecdotally is broken? then how do I get to my ideas and rank them? I don't just do anything. The team had been working on this fast play. Now the problem was that this team was a bunch of mostly 20-something dudes

making a game for middle-aged women. That's the first problem, right? So they wanted fast play. They said this game is too slow. We want more adrenaline. That's not why middle-aged women were playing words of friends or Candy Crush Saga. They actually wanted a Zen moment.

a me moment. They wanted to escape. They'd spent six months on this, hundreds of engineering days, and they never really tested the top of the funnel. And I said, well, what percent of our players clicked on this? And I used to say we need like 25 percent minimum. And they said, well, we think we think we can get to 5 percent. I'm like, so the best you can get to is 5 percent. What did you get in your click test? They said, well, we're currently at about 1 percent. So 99% of words of friends players say no fucking way when you show them this game

and you're building this game. I'm like, that's a crime. That's a crime to our players. So I said, we need to start at the top of the funnel. We need to go to like, what will they click on? What do they want? Where they got hug us for?

And it's probably much smaller things. They don't want a different game. They came here for this game. And the team, to their credit, and V, who ran the team, who ran on to become a terrific product maker, and he ran product for Reddit. He shifted gears,

and they did start click testing every day hundreds of ideas, starting with what our core audience thank us for. And they got to one idea which was weekly achievements, and they realized that these people playing want to feel like they're getting better every week, and a huge percentage of players clicked on it, engaged with it, and because of V and the team and committing to this failure machine, this testing machine first, the game did 180 million in revenues,

did 100 million in contribution. So it did more dollars in contribution than they were projecting it would do in revenues, and that was the beginning of the whole turnaround. So I believe in failure machines. And I would say, how does that play out today? I see too many founders get stuck in what I call the MVP trap. And I love Eric Reese.

And he gave us this whole body of work around the lean startup. And he and I've talked about this. And I know by MVP that he meant, he meant we have to move fast. And it was a mantra to move fast. But unfortunately, too many teams waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market. And we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel.

We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded. However the fuck you get to something that gets the idea across so that people say, meh, it's the worst thing people can say is meh. No is better. Meh is like, eh. It's a seven. Yeah, it's a five to seven. exactly. And so we've got to

we got to get to a new standard and I think we are with AI where we can get to the gist of this and I'd like to say build it wrong before we don't have time to build it right. Don't fucking build it right build it fucking wrong and build it fast and don't make it viable. Viable is the bad word. Let's take viable off the table because we got because it's probably wrong.

We have time to build viable. Let's build wrong and see if it proves right. Then let's build right. What does founder mode mean to you? Founder mode is why we became founders in the first place. We were all expert witnesses. We were all in one way or another in these jobs where we were closest to the answer

and furthest from the decision. We were all suffering under the adults. And now we get to be the founder. and hopefully you've positioned yourself to be a complete founder and have total agency and not be now under a new boss, your VCs, your board, your employees that you're now like working for in some false democracy. And 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 as a founder,

owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control. And it means you have the right to do it your way. It doesn't mean you have the right to be a jerk. And if you are, people will leave. You've earned this right to have your own style and not have a CEO coach that's going to like chop your balls off

or homogenize you to be like what your, supposed to be. So you have your own corkiness and style and you and you have your own bet the company moments and the more you have that rope probably the more you're going to want to learn because you're going to be like, holy shit, I could fuck this up and no one's going to stop me. And that's awesome. In retrospect, you know, going through my own founder mode the whole way and I thought I was clear from the beginning with Zinga 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 were public and we were like a $2 stock, we were being sued, we had made this one acquisition of the company

that made draw something, which was the hottest game in the app store until it wasn't. That was like the $200 million acquisition, OK Pop or whatever it was? The OMG Pop. OMG pop, yeah. And it failed. Right at the time Super Sell came out, and they had Hayday that was like a top game, not making a lot of money yet, and they had Clash of Clans that was like number 25 or 18, but it was amazing.

And I had a handshake with Ilka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for 400 million in cash. And I went back to, we easily had the money. And I went back to my board, and they said, until you show us, you can be, manage what you've got, you can't buy anything else. So it was very patronizing the board had gone from like you walk on water to allow like question everything you do. And I had voting control. And I went to the lawyer who was actually I learned later, not my lawyer, he was the lawyer to the company. And I said, can't I just override them? I have voting control. And he said, technically yes, really no. He said, you could fire all the board members and put in place who you want,

and they might vote for your deal. And then you'll for sure be sued personally for, I don't know why, but he said I'd be sued personally for that. You'd be personally liable. And I was like, okay, okay, I won't do it. You know, in Supercell made 500 million in profit the next year. And that was like our Instagram moment, like when Facebook bought Instagram. And it would have just been a different trajectory. And if I had had the conviction, Elon would have just said, fine, sue me. I didn't have Elon's balls. There was moments long the way that I didn't really, 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. What does false democracy mean? It's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I ran the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone, everyone's voice to be heard, and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere, and hear from everybody.

And then they're going to make the decision. And they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular. in the company. What would you say, like when I talk to people who work in organizations, a lot of them hate their bosses, do you think that comes from unclear objectives, or where do you think that comes from? So many places. I don't really believe in management, but I believe in these that we can have some principles or hacks or things we do that are kind of in place of having to manage. I don't like, I say every day I manage the day of work, and I think no one should really have to manage or feel managed. But two things I'll say. Early on when I was building my second

company support.com, I didn't know how to scale past, we were 35 people. I wrote, I put a sticky note on the wall. I wrote everyone's names. And I said, by the end of the week, write down what you're CEO of. And 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 you're doing and we can all get more done. And it really worked and people liked it.

So I learned this idea like, oh, if I give people way more responsibility than they think they deserve, they're going to be a little scared and they're going to feel some adrenaline and they're going to probably really like their job and not like it because of the title or the money or the accolades,

but actually be challenged. And so I learned that people like that. That was one lesson that I carried on. And at Zingo, we had this value on the wall be a CEO, own outcomes. The other thing I learned early on about the way engineers hate their jobs and hate their bosses is what I call the moral contract. And when I first started working with engineers, these guys, Scott and Kadir, I saw how much the engineers get screwed in these companies.

They're the ones who maybe it'll change. but I don't think so. They're the ones who have to work the most hours, and they constantly get screwed because they build this whole product, and then the CEO doesn't, the salesperson doesn't sell it. The CEO says,

you know what, I know I asked you for that, but that was wrong. Now we need something else. But they just took this hill, they think, they kill themselves to do this. You owe it to them. The same way we owe our, we have responsibility to our users,

we have a responsibility to our engineers, or builders, people who are in the factory building. And as I said, there should be a moral contract. If you're going to take that hill, I'm going to show you that I am going to work just as hard to unlock value out of the work you did. And that stuck with me. And I said, if I can show you that I'm in the trenches with you

and I'm really valuing your work and doing something, I think you're going to feel better and you're going to do more work the next time. How do you separate people who were along for the ride? Because out of the first 100 people a company hires, they're going to have some mis-hires. So how do you separate people who are along for the ride and then take credit for it versus people

who actually contributed it and made it happen? I think that you owe it to, in that moral contract, to your good employees to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. they may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills. They, I don't care if they're working more or less hours, harder or less.

But there's backbone people that are making this thing work. And the more that you act like socialism, communism, false democracies, the more you're crushing the culture of meritocracy. I don't believe in paying your dues. and the more that you see people in an organization who are getting promotions and title and pay that it's not obvious to everybody else they deserve, the more I think you're eroding,

you know, the real culture. Do you think one of the byproducts of that is that politics start to take over internally too? So many things, yeah, that lead to politics. And one lesson I learned that really, I hate management, so I don't do one-on-ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on-ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one-on-ones.

And the whole point in style and politics in a company is as long as you're consistent, everyone shapes around it and they don't care. They're like, oh, Mark doesn't do one-on-ones. Don't take it personally. So I was like, I'm never doing one-on-ones. And if anyone did finally get my ear and complain about someone else, you stop, you call the other person and you say, hey, Shane's complaining about you. I think you should come up and talk to him and you walk away. And then everyone knows there's no politics. They stop complaining to you. Yeah, they stop doing it to me. I do with my kids too.

Double click on how you learned about that, though, because that sounds counterintuitive. And a lot of people are doing it now. Jensen's doing it. Jeff did it. Like, what did you learn about it? How did it start? I was lucky enough to meet Bing Gordon, who was at EA. They were like our arch enemy in the beginning. He was part of the founding team there. And he became an advisor, board member, coach, godfathered of my kids. And he was on the board of Amazon.

For like 20 years, wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And he gave me all this brilliant wisdom indirectly from Jeff Bates. So he was like, let me tell you what Jeff does. And I was like, oh, I love that. I'd be taking notes. So it was like, what did you learn?

Well, one of the best things I got was, and eventually I got to sit down with Jeff, and he took like, he generously spent two hours explaining to me his concept of tech assistants, which originally Andy Grove was the first one of a tech assistant, and then Bill Gates, and then Jeff Bezos. And I learned about it, and I loved it. And it's this non-scalable way to scale your organization. organization. And it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga, they called it, Pinkus's vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone

from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in, the smart misfits. And they become your tech assistant, which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant. They're like working, they're your shadow. They go to every meeting you go to. And they are working on just, this way I interpret it, they're working on just product stuff for you. So if there's things that you want to double click on, side projects, things you want to research more, they work on that. And they mainly just go to every meeting with you and they absorb. You're doing these meetings anyway. It becomes this really efficient way to train up a mini-me.

And in fact, I believe every C-staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos's tech assistant and Andy Jassiz. was and the CEO. So it over time was actually an efficient way to train up big leaders, you know, product leaders. And so I started doing that. And all my tech assistants were great and went on to be very successful as entrepreneurs and this kid Ian Sinnaman who was like, I fought, I personally fought with META to hire him. He was like the star recruit from MIT. And I said, I'm going to personally manage your career at Zinga. And he joined.

I put him in poker. And within a year, poker was trying to fire him from the company. And I met with him. And it was Oregon rejection because he was too entrepreneurial. It was like me at Bain. Right. And I said, fine, plucking out, you're going to just work for me. And he worked for me.

And then I left eventually and did an incubator. He worked for me at that. Then he went off on his own, and now he has a, I wish I had invested in it. He has a really successful, like, multi-billion dollar satellite launch company. What do you think we're going to look back on and say it's obvious today that we don't quite see in real time or something that you think differently about? Anything that can be free on the internet will be free. Anything that can be less clicks, less friction will be less friction.

I think voice is one of those places. And I know Reid Hoffman had a great post about being voice. pilled about, I don't know, beginning of last year and voice became a meme really hot beginning of last year and then it died down. But, and I think a lot of these new devices that people are working on are all based on a voice interface. But I do think that voice will be the, the biggest thing that'll feel obvious, that we wasted so much time typing and texting and reading. And I think we're going to turn on our ears and our voices a lot more. We always end these interviews with the same question, which is, what is success for you?

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