Mark Pincus: If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. [00:00:00]
Mark Pincus: You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. [00:00:02]
Mark Pincus: Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. [00:00:06]
Mark Pincus: We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea. [00:00:10]
Mark Pincus: How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following? [00:00:15]
Mark Pincus: If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. [00:00:17]
Mark Pincus: When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. [00:00:21]
Mark Pincus: Most products are better versions of things that existed before. [00:00:25]
Mark Pincus: Talk about how you get over that hump of copying. [00:00:29]
Mark Pincus: It's almost a moral arbitrage. [00:00:31]
Mark Pincus: You became a founder, an entrepreneur, because you wanted to go be an innovator. [00:00:33]
Mark Pincus: But you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville. [00:00:37]
Mark Pincus: You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. [00:00:43]
Mark Pincus: Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer. [00:00:46]
Mark Pincus: Building a consumer social app. [00:00:50]
Mark Pincus: Very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. [00:00:52]
Mark Pincus: We have beyond a latent demand for social. [00:00:55]
Mark Pincus: it's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not [00:00:57]
Mark Pincus: missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when [00:01:02]
Mark Pincus: we see a great cocktail party. You feel it. You're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. Today, [00:01:08]
Mark Pincus: we're all hanging out on our clod, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to [00:01:12]
Lenny Rachitsky: your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Today, my guest is Mark Pincus, [00:01:19]
Lenny Rachitsky: founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in [00:01:25]
Lenny Rachitsky: history, over a dozen, both within Zynga and before Zynga. And over the past five years, [00:01:31]
Lenny Rachitsky: he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building [00:01:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks [00:01:41]
Lenny Rachitsky: and it is so good. And it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, [00:01:46]
Lenny Rachitsky: the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is [00:01:51]
Lenny Rachitsky: knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this. And after reading this book and having this [00:01:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really [00:02:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product [00:02:07]
Lenny Rachitsky: ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. [00:02:11]
Lenny Rachitsky: why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you, why your instincts are usually right, [00:02:16]
Lenny Rachitsky: but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids. He's got five [00:02:22]
Lenny Rachitsky: and so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking [00:02:27]
Lenny Rachitsky: about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's Product Pass.com [00:02:32]
Lenny Rachitsky: for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, [00:02:37]
Lenny Rachitsky: Available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. [00:02:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: With that, I bring you Mark Pincus. [00:02:45]
Lenny Rachitsky: Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. [00:02:50]
Lenny Rachitsky: I've been a big listener. [00:02:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, wow. Thank you. [00:02:57]
Lenny Rachitsky: And I'm excited to finally be on. [00:02:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: I'm excited to finally have you on. [00:03:02]
Lenny Rachitsky: You just put out a book. [00:03:03]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. [00:03:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's called Life at the Speed of Play. [00:03:08]
Lenny Rachitsky: there's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed [00:03:09]
Lenny Rachitsky: called Proven Better New. And the framework is basically designed to help you come up with [00:03:16]
Lenny Rachitsky: and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your [00:03:23]
Lenny Rachitsky: idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea. It's such a simple idea with [00:03:28]
Lenny Rachitsky: so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the [00:03:33]
Lenny Rachitsky: overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas. [00:03:39]
Lenny Rachitsky: Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion [00:03:44]
Mark Pincus: and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management [00:03:51]
Mark Pincus: at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book, [00:04:00]
Mark Pincus: we called it proven better new but then i was like oh that's too dry in name and i love this [00:04:07]
Lenny Rachitsky: concept of life at the speed of play which we can talk about but is the bigger gestalt of the book [00:04:14]
Mark Pincus: so but proven better new is this core philosophy that i've had around products since i started [00:04:19]
Mark Pincus: zynga which is that we have these we have these instincts like in our gut these human level [00:04:28]
Mark Pincus: instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts [00:04:35]
Mark Pincus: that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time, [00:04:41]
Mark Pincus: your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of Proven Better New [00:04:47]
Mark Pincus: takes that philosophy and says, okay, what do we do with that? Okay, let's isolate your innovation [00:04:55]
Mark Pincus: zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut. And let's just test many, many ideas around [00:05:03]
Mark Pincus: that. And let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason. It might be, I mean, at Zynga, [00:05:12]
Mark Pincus: we'd see new game launches. Sid Meier's like the, you know, godfather of game design, who's the most [00:05:20]
Mark Pincus: revered game designer. He came out with, I think, a social civilization on Facebook. And we thought, [00:05:28]
Mark Pincus: oh God, here comes the ultimate game designer. And 10 minutes after the game came out, [00:05:35]
Mark Pincus: the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said it's dead on arrival because [00:05:42]
Mark Pincus: his Fatui, his first time user experience was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever [00:05:47]
Mark Pincus: going to see is great game design. Even Sid Meier's tripped over what were understood by the [00:05:54]
Mark Pincus: most junior product managers at Zynga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user, [00:06:00]
Mark Pincus: to the first time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy [00:06:08]
Mark Pincus: that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody. [00:06:15]
Lenny Rachitsky: WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning [00:06:24]
Lenny Rachitsky: companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the [00:06:31]
Lenny Rachitsky: enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other [00:06:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a [00:06:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an [00:06:48]
Lenny Rachitsky: investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they [00:06:54]
Lenny Rachitsky: are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer [00:06:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and [00:07:03]
Lenny Rachitsky: unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get [00:07:09]
Lenny Rachitsky: started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your [00:07:15]
Lenny Rachitsky: questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, [00:07:19]
Lenny Rachitsky: and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. [00:07:24]
Mark Pincus: And so the point of Proven Better New is to say, let's take all the proven off the table. [00:07:30]
Mark Pincus: If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, [00:07:36]
Mark Pincus: AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. You're the icon. Maybe just [00:07:43]
Mark Pincus: the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or [00:07:53]
Mark Pincus: Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally. And with hopefully some taste, we can get into [00:07:59]
Mark Pincus: great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. [00:08:08]
Mark Pincus: And I like to say, we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's [00:08:18]
Mark Pincus: leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is, usually we [00:08:25]
Mark Pincus: can't find better. Better is usually very small increments in innovations. And better is something [00:08:34]
Mark Pincus: that 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, fuck yeah. 10 out of 10, not [00:08:42]
Mark Pincus: you. What you think is better is called new. What we think is better is new. We usually are too [00:08:49]
Mark Pincus: ambitious on the new. And so better could be, it's now free. There's no download. There's [00:08:56]
Mark Pincus: something that you can both statistically show works, you know, is better. And every user would [00:09:04]
Mark Pincus: say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polished and it's things that intense users, [00:09:11]
Mark Pincus: power users will notice the most. And in our game Words with Friends, it was Scrabble. [00:09:20]
Mark Pincus: But if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself [00:09:28]
Mark Pincus: wasn't? There must have been something better and novel about it, but it had such a polish for [00:09:35]
Mark Pincus: mobile was the better and the new. What's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's [00:09:43]
Mark Pincus: going to get people to download and try it. And in the case of Words With Friends, it was social. [00:09:50]
Mark Pincus: It was your friends are just, it was attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just [00:09:56]
Mark Pincus: already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that, which you'd think, of course I [00:10:00]
Mark Pincus: want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes. And we have to accept that that new idea [00:10:07]
Mark Pincus: is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. [00:10:15]
Mark Pincus: And if we do proven better new right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, [00:10:20]
Mark Pincus: not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new [00:10:29]
Mark Pincus: is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, [00:10:35]
Mark Pincus: then we just prosecute it in a different way and we really it's i like to think if you do [00:10:39]
Mark Pincus: proven better new right it's it's like a time machine because what if i could go back to mark [00:10:47]
Mark Pincus: you know 2003 and 4 and say dude you don't even realize how right you are like one of your [00:10:55]
Mark Pincus: instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them, [00:11:04]
Mark Pincus: you're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. I'm not going to tell you which, I'm not going to [00:11:11]
Mark Pincus: totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's another answer in this that you could [00:11:18]
Mark Pincus: pursue that'd be worth $1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your tribe's idea, that's Reddit, [00:11:24]
Mark Pincus: That becomes a whole company, industry, listings. [00:11:30]
Mark Pincus: So there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. [00:11:35]
Mark Pincus: Our D30 retention was terrible. [00:11:39]
Mark Pincus: We were sinking speedboat. [00:11:42]
Mark Pincus: And if I had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. [00:11:44]
Mark Pincus: If you're doing proven better new, you're also looking around you for what are you finding heat? [00:11:50]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's proven in the market that you can also go test. [00:11:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: and I would have massively changed my odds of success. [00:11:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, there's so much here. [00:12:04]
Lenny Rachitsky: So just to summarize how I think about this framework, [00:12:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: which is so good. [00:12:07]
Lenny Rachitsky: Like if you start to really think through [00:12:09]
Lenny Rachitsky: all the products that have succeeded [00:12:11]
Lenny Rachitsky: and how many of them actually follow this, [00:12:13]
Lenny Rachitsky: whether they were conscious or not, it's wild. [00:12:15]
Lenny Rachitsky: So kind of the steps that I hear is, [00:12:18]
Lenny Rachitsky: so proven better than you. [00:12:20]
Lenny Rachitsky: Proven is make a list of the things [00:12:21]
Lenny Rachitsky: that are proven to be working already in the market. [00:12:22]
Lenny Rachitsky: Things people love about this sort of space. [00:12:24]
Lenny Rachitsky: better is make something that is not just better, but that 10 out of 10 people will say, [00:12:27]
Lenny Rachitsky: F yeah, I would switch. This is better. And then add something new that nobody's tried before that [00:12:33]
Lenny Rachitsky: adds a little wrinkle. And I think a little bit like you have a bunch of examples in the book, [00:12:39]
Lenny Rachitsky: Slack and threads. There's also like, if you think about the iPhone and the iPod, [00:12:44]
Lenny Rachitsky: like you don't think, you don't think about them that way, but basically the iPod, [00:12:47]
Lenny Rachitsky: there was a music player, they made it better and they added some new stuff. [00:12:51]
Mark Pincus: Yeah. And I was there at the TED conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen and they did it on a gigantic whiteboard. And Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it. And I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their touch. [00:12:53]
Mark Pincus: I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it. [00:13:19]
Mark Pincus: Like, okay, there's his new idea is a touchscreen. [00:13:23]
Mark Pincus: It's a whole new idea. [00:13:27]
Mark Pincus: And I want to say Proven gets so misused. [00:13:30]
Mark Pincus: And what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use Proven Better New to justify a wrong idea. [00:13:34]
Mark Pincus: And they're like, look, Mark, I'm doing Proven. [00:13:43]
Mark Pincus: proven is this game that was popular in the 90s proven is and they they pick something [00:13:46]
Mark Pincus: that and it's to their own detriment they're they're not using proven you we have to be [00:13:54]
Mark Pincus: precise we have to think at the pixel level of this experience proven is on this platform for [00:14:03]
Mark Pincus: this audience, for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources [00:14:08]
Mark Pincus: of new ideas, but if it's not on this platform, it doesn't count as proven. And yet, the masters [00:14:17]
Mark Pincus: at this product craft do proven better new, whether they call it that or not, and they do it [00:14:28]
Mark Pincus: at such a beautiful level that nobody even thinks, [00:14:36]
Mark Pincus: no one realizes what it's derivative of. [00:14:41]
Mark Pincus: And Slack was a great example [00:14:44]
Mark Pincus: because I think Slack might've just been proven [00:14:46]
Mark Pincus: and better and no new, and that's even better. [00:14:49]
Mark Pincus: If you can have a successful product, [00:14:52]
Mark Pincus: and I don't want to sound anti-innovation, [00:14:55]
Mark Pincus: but people don't like change. [00:14:57]
Mark Pincus: So if you take a behavior they like, [00:15:01]
Mark Pincus: but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it. Like in the case of Slack, [00:15:03]
Lenny Rachitsky: people love that even more. There's this thread of copying that comes through this framework that [00:15:10]
Lenny Rachitsky: will turn a lot of people off. Talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over [00:15:17]
Mark Pincus: that hump of like, this is actually the right approach in most cases. In the Peter Thiel sense, [00:15:24]
Mark Pincus: it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You [00:15:29]
Mark Pincus: became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel [00:15:36]
Mark Pincus: like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we [00:15:43]
Mark Pincus: You're taught in school copying is cheating. [00:15:50]
Mark Pincus: So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. [00:15:52]
Mark Pincus: But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. [00:16:05]
Mark Pincus: And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. And if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. [00:16:13]
Mark Pincus: you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville, [00:16:31]
Mark Pincus: you're going to define innovation differently. And you're not going to worry about whether [00:16:38]
Mark Pincus: you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her [00:16:46]
Mark Pincus: an experience that she loves more. And so if, you know, so if you, if all you did was copy, [00:16:53]
Mark Pincus: there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves [00:17:02]
Mark Pincus: and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's [00:17:09]
Mark Pincus: never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And so, and, and I think that the, [00:17:17]
Mark Pincus: the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it. Cause I think consumer [00:17:24]
Mark Pincus: taste also resists just a copy. I think that consume, if movies, TV shows, you know, books, [00:17:31]
Mark Pincus: if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, [00:17:40]
Mark Pincus: then it could go against our consumer taste. [00:17:45]
Mark Pincus: But the best product makers, [00:17:51]
Mark Pincus: and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark [00:17:53]
Mark Pincus: and Craigslist who took two years [00:17:57]
Mark Pincus: to add photos to Craigslist listings. [00:17:59]
Mark Pincus: And I was like, and he lived in my neighborhood [00:18:02]
Mark Pincus: and he was friends with my dog Zynga [00:18:04]
Mark Pincus: more than he was friends with me. [00:18:07]
Mark Pincus: He was a little awkward socially [00:18:08]
Mark Pincus: and he connected more with the dog. [00:18:10]
Mark Pincus: And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. [00:18:12]
Mark Pincus: and so he would sit and talk to me [00:18:14]
Mark Pincus: and he was working on, [00:18:16]
Mark Pincus: I was like, what are you working on? [00:18:18]
Mark Pincus: He said, I've been working for two years [00:18:19]
Mark Pincus: on adding photos to listings. [00:18:21]
Mark Pincus: I'm like, what do you mean two years? [00:18:22]
Mark Pincus: He's like, well, I really want to make sure [00:18:24]
Mark Pincus: that people like it [00:18:26]
Mark Pincus: and that the photos come up in the right ways. [00:18:28]
Mark Pincus: I don't know. [00:18:30]
Mark Pincus: I honestly don't even understand [00:18:31]
Mark Pincus: what he did for two years. [00:18:32]
Mark Pincus: But if you're driving across San Francisco [00:18:34]
Mark Pincus: to buy someone's couch, [00:18:36]
Mark Pincus: why wouldn't you want to, [00:18:39]
Mark Pincus: why isn't that better? [00:18:40]
Mark Pincus: In his mind, it was new. [00:18:41]
Mark Pincus: And like, that's a world-class product maker because he, what he gets is that his, there's, we feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day. And we're angry when they change, even if they change for the better, we're like angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition. [00:18:43]
Mark Pincus: and we don't want to think about these things. [00:19:04]
Mark Pincus: And what if by adding photos to his listings, [00:19:07]
Mark Pincus: he moved where the text was? [00:19:10]
Mark Pincus: And what if you rifle through listings [00:19:12]
Mark Pincus: and now the text is below the fold? [00:19:14]
Mark Pincus: You know, and a junior product maker [00:19:17]
Mark Pincus: might make the whole thing a picture [00:19:19]
Mark Pincus: and not realize that what people liked most [00:19:20]
Mark Pincus: was being able to see the text real quick [00:19:24]
Mark Pincus: and they were trying to compare prices on the couch. [00:19:27]
Mark Pincus: They already knew that. [00:19:29]
Mark Pincus: I don't know. [00:19:30]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, I'm thinking like as you're talking, [00:19:30]
Lenny Rachitsky: I'm just thinking, [00:19:32]
Lenny Rachitsky: what are all the best products and are they all just kind of one word? [00:19:32]
Lenny Rachitsky: Are they copies and evolutions of existing products or how many are just completely brand [00:19:37]
Lenny Rachitsky: new? [00:19:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: And I'm looking around like the iPhone that was, you know, there's phones before and they [00:19:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: kind of took the elements of what was great, made them awesome. [00:19:46]
Lenny Rachitsky: My wall, I don't know, water bottle, like there was water bottles that worked and then [00:19:49]
Lenny Rachitsky: they added things to make it better. [00:19:53]
Lenny Rachitsky: Chrome. [00:19:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: I don't know. [00:19:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: I'm just like looking around like it's so interesting how once you start to think about [00:19:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: it through this lens. Most products are better versions of things that existed before. And then [00:19:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: I'm thinking about as a product team, what do you often do? You go look at the competitors, [00:20:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: look at all their flows. Here's what they're doing. Here's what's working. Look at all these [00:20:09]
Lenny Rachitsky: great ideas. And then you build on that. So I think there's like, it's easy to get turned off [00:20:12]
Lenny Rachitsky: to this idea of like the word copy, but like, as you think about it, this is mostly how products [00:20:16]
Lenny Rachitsky: end up getting built anyway. Well, there's so much on this that we could, we could literally [00:20:21]
Lenny Rachitsky: spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with too, or do a whole episode just on this, [00:20:27]
Mark Pincus: because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on. [00:20:32]
Mark Pincus: And I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven [00:20:39]
Mark Pincus: in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the [00:20:47]
Mark Pincus: Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of [00:20:54]
Mark Pincus: offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried [00:21:02]
Mark Pincus: power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow [00:21:10]
Mark Pincus: that I was like, oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature. Nikita saw [00:21:19]
Mark Pincus: his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version, right, of his product. And he said, [00:21:24]
Mark Pincus: oh my God, they nailed it. So I think when we can see something that is proven already [00:21:31]
Mark Pincus: in someone else's product, but they have, you know, the wrong idea around it, that's gold. [00:21:39]
Mark Pincus: You know, that's one. And then to your question of, is every product derivative? Is every product from Proven Better? My answer is no. And I talk about this a little bit in the book and in my course. [00:21:47]
Mark Pincus: But the question is, at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? [00:22:04]
Mark Pincus: And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard, [00:22:10]
Mark Pincus: don't look at any other products, that is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. [00:22:18]
Mark Pincus: They made 45 games. [00:22:24]
Mark Pincus: Every single game was totally different. [00:22:25]
Mark Pincus: Not, as far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures or the market. [00:22:28]
Mark Pincus: and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds, [00:22:32]
Mark Pincus: and it was a hit, and it was innovative. [00:22:36]
Mark Pincus: But the odds, that's Wildcat drilling, [00:22:39]
Mark Pincus: and do you want to have those odds? [00:22:42]
Mark Pincus: Or do you want to do what OMG Pop did, [00:22:45]
Mark Pincus: which is a very similar story but opposite path, [00:22:49]
Mark Pincus: which was OMG Pop created the hit game Draw Something, [00:22:54]
Mark Pincus: and Zynga bought them. [00:22:59]
Mark Pincus: They were the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 days in 2012. [00:23:00]
Mark Pincus: But OMG Pop was on their last dollar. [00:23:09]
Mark Pincus: They had tried something totally innovative. [00:23:12]
Mark Pincus: No one had ever seen or tried it before. [00:23:14]
Mark Pincus: It failed completely. [00:23:16]
Mark Pincus: And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. [00:23:18]
Mark Pincus: And now they did Proven Better New perfectly. [00:23:23]
Mark Pincus: They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile. [00:23:26]
Mark Pincus: And they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends, and they made a massive hit. [00:23:41]
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this idea of moral arbitrage. [00:23:49]
Lenny Rachitsky: That's such a funny way of thinking about this. [00:23:52]
Lenny Rachitsky: Peter Tillian, you know. [00:23:54]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. So there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this. One is, [00:23:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: and you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. [00:24:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious [00:24:05]
Mark Pincus: products. I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say [00:24:10]
Mark Pincus: there's so many paradoxes in this. And one that I've had to learn over and over again is [00:24:18]
Mark Pincus: is if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset [00:24:26]
Mark Pincus: and too ambitious and visionary [00:24:32]
Mark Pincus: about the product we want to build, [00:24:34]
Mark Pincus: then we will probably miss product market fit [00:24:36]
Mark Pincus: because we won't start at a small enough, [00:24:40]
Mark Pincus: humble enough place because it might, [00:24:43]
Mark Pincus: usually that the starting point for these products [00:24:47]
Mark Pincus: is embarrassingly small. [00:24:50]
Mark Pincus: So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. And the Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. [00:24:52]
Mark Pincus: And the irony for me is that I've found that my career has gone in these waves, and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of I just want to get to anything, any product market fit. [00:25:13]
Mark Pincus: had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. [00:25:35]
Mark Pincus: They both started with very, very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can [00:25:42]
Mark Pincus: do anything. And I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise [00:25:50]
Mark Pincus: magical, unlimited amounts of capital, which helps. And he does not start in humble places at all. [00:25:56]
Mark Pincus: But for the rest of us mortals, I'd say that we tend to, after success, feel the need to do something bigger the next time. [00:26:03]
Mark Pincus: That's human instinct. [00:26:17]
Mark Pincus: And we want to be more ambitious. [00:26:18]
Mark Pincus: And so when I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. [00:26:20]
Mark Pincus: It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. [00:26:32]
Mark Pincus: And there was multiple inside tribe that worked. [00:26:35]
Mark Pincus: The tribes, the idea of these urban tribes worked. [00:26:39]
Mark Pincus: People loved it, but I was too ambitious. [00:26:42]
Mark Pincus: And so we failed. [00:26:46]
Mark Pincus: And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long. [00:26:48]
Mark Pincus: And I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, [00:26:54]
Mark Pincus: I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41 multi-time successful founder that [00:27:00]
Mark Pincus: could go do something important in the world. And what did I do? I made a Facebook app, [00:27:08]
Mark Pincus: like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I made a poker game. It was, people thought I had [00:27:14]
Mark Pincus: no dignity. I mean, people were like, Mark, there's so much you could do in the world. [00:27:19]
Mark Pincus: But I'd say my ambition came down to like a thousand foot altitude, not a hundred thousand foot. And that was the key to that being successful. And I see this with, it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders. [00:27:23]
Mark Pincus: And it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. [00:27:45]
Mark Pincus: It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit. [00:27:54]
Mark Pincus: But the world doesn't care about your resume. [00:28:01]
Mark Pincus: That's the good news for everyone watching. [00:28:05]
Mark Pincus: Everyone has the same chance. [00:28:07]
Mark Pincus: And in a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. [00:28:10]
Mark Pincus: So the paradox is the more ambitious you are, the more humble you should be and the smaller place you should be willing to start. [00:28:14]
Lenny Rachitsky: One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup is to be less ambitious because a Zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. [00:28:25]
Lenny Rachitsky: Anything they take on needs to be many billion dollar business opportunity. [00:28:35]
Lenny Rachitsky: And as a startup, you don't need to do that. [00:28:39]
Lenny Rachitsky: And this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end. [00:28:41]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, yeah, being willing to pursue these little threads [00:28:44]
Lenny Rachitsky: when they're flaky, when they're not a business, [00:28:47]
Lenny Rachitsky: when they're so much earlier, [00:28:52]
Lenny Rachitsky: and so many of the successful companies today started there. [00:28:53]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, is there an example that comes to mind? [00:28:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: Because, yeah, what's a company or two that started very unambitious? [00:29:00]
Mark Pincus: I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. [00:29:05]
Mark Pincus: I loved it so much I cold mailed the founder [00:29:09]
Mark Pincus: because I was just so impressed with it. [00:29:12]
Mark Pincus: Yeah. And they toiled in obscurity on something that they were into, and then they open sourced it. [00:29:13]
Mark Pincus: I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. [00:29:23]
Mark Pincus: And then they had this realization one day of, wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, [00:29:29]
Mark Pincus: but we actually add that to an AI coding co-pilot, [00:29:40]
Mark Pincus: we now have something that's better than what anybody else has. [00:29:46]
Lenny Rachitsky: And I think that was just a great story [00:29:51]
Lenny Rachitsky: that they were passionate about one thing [00:29:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: and they stuck with it. [00:29:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, Eric was on the podcast. [00:29:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: We talked about that. [00:30:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, he was. [00:30:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: So impressed. [00:30:02]
Mark Pincus: in a lot of ways slack also you know was humbled stewart keeps trying to start game [00:30:03]
Mark Pincus: companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies we'll see what he does next he [00:30:13]
Mark Pincus: now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time but i think [00:30:21]
Lenny Rachitsky: your point like he might try again to unhumble go big yeah but each time right so he started a [00:30:27]
Mark Pincus: a big idea for the mass market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. [00:30:33]
Mark Pincus: And they were humbled in that enough to say, okay, wait, there's this little teeny thing [00:30:43]
Mark Pincus: that our engineers use. [00:30:50]
Mark Pincus: Let's build a product around that. [00:30:52]
Mark Pincus: And it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. [00:30:53]
Mark Pincus: I mean, I can't imagine, I mean, I can imagine, I guess, I've been there, how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction. [00:31:04]
Mark Pincus: And you have to, we have to express confidence as founders. [00:31:17]
Mark Pincus: Whether or not we have actual confidence inside, that's part of, I think, the dissonance of this. [00:31:20]
Mark Pincus: How do you express confidence? [00:31:28]
Mark Pincus: How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? [00:31:30]
Mark Pincus: How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team? [00:31:32]
Mark Pincus: And I'm still learning. [00:31:40]
Mark Pincus: I had people. [00:31:44]
Mark Pincus: I err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault. [00:31:45]
Mark Pincus: And I burn out people in that process. [00:31:54]
Mark Pincus: And I did at Zynga and I have since because, you know, people will say the negative critique I'm working on is, oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer. [00:31:56]
Mark Pincus: And every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea. [00:32:08]
Mark Pincus: And they're not wrong. [00:32:12]
Mark Pincus: But where I can get better at this maybe is if we can build a culture with our team that says, okay, we are ambitious. [00:32:14]
Mark Pincus: We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold on to a B plus. [00:32:28]
Mark Pincus: even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction. [00:32:31]
Mark Pincus: We have a North Star that we are not going to stop [00:32:35]
Mark Pincus: until we find product market fit against our North Star. [00:32:40]
Mark Pincus: And this isn't it. [00:32:45]
Mark Pincus: And it's going to take courage on our part. [00:32:47]
Mark Pincus: And hey, let's look around the room. [00:32:48]
Mark Pincus: Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? [00:32:50]
Mark Pincus: Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else [00:32:52]
Mark Pincus: who's already a rocket ship? [00:32:55]
Mark Pincus: which that's a fair career choice for you to make. [00:32:58]
Mark Pincus: But I think that's, to me, the real founder mode [00:33:03]
Mark Pincus: is can you have the courage to tell your team [00:33:07]
Mark Pincus: and your investors that this isn't it? [00:33:14]
Lenny Rachitsky: That's exactly where I wanted to go, [00:33:17]
Lenny Rachitsky: which is this other piece of advice you give, [00:33:19]
Lenny Rachitsky: which is kill hope before hope kills you. [00:33:21]
Lenny Rachitsky: Talk about just what that is [00:33:24]
Lenny Rachitsky: because so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly. [00:33:26]
Lenny Rachitsky: So just kind of talk about that. [00:33:29]
Lenny Rachitsky: And then I'm really curious to know when you kind of, [00:33:30]
Lenny Rachitsky: what it takes to realize an idea is bad. [00:33:33]
Lenny Rachitsky: When do you decide, okay, this is B+, let's move on. [00:33:35]
Lenny Rachitsky: I don't know if I get credit for, you know, making up that quote, [00:33:37]
Lenny Rachitsky: but I love it. [00:33:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: Kill hope before hope kills you. [00:33:43]
Mark Pincus: It's, there's a difference between belief and hope. [00:33:45]
Mark Pincus: Hope is confidence without basis. [00:33:51]
Mark Pincus: Hope is just a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience. [00:33:56]
Mark Pincus: It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. [00:34:12]
Mark Pincus: And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. [00:34:19]
Mark Pincus: And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings. [00:34:32]
Mark Pincus: They're not making bets. [00:34:37]
Mark Pincus: They already know. [00:34:39]
Mark Pincus: You know, if you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. [00:34:41]
Mark Pincus: He's not launching it to find out if people like it. [00:34:48]
Mark Pincus: And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. [00:34:52]
Mark Pincus: Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP, minimum viable. [00:35:00]
Mark Pincus: The viable is the word we got to kill along with hope. [00:35:06]
Mark Pincus: Because viable is where hope comes from, right? [00:35:11]
Mark Pincus: If it's viable, it might make it, right? [00:35:14]
Mark Pincus: And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn, you're putting a product out that you're going to learn from, and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch, that you think, you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. [00:35:16]
Mark Pincus: And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. [00:35:32]
Mark Pincus: And AI is a dangerous tool today. [00:35:37]
Mark Pincus: It's so powerful that it's dangerous. [00:35:42]
Mark Pincus: It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. [00:35:44]
Mark Pincus: And that's a dangerous drug because it means that what I thought would happen where we'd be today is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like to say, more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. [00:35:53]
Mark Pincus: How are you testing 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than 100 ideas in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. [00:36:13]
Mark Pincus: And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that. [00:36:35]
Mark Pincus: Because if we start off, if we say, okay, what can I believe today? [00:36:40]
Mark Pincus: I believe this is the wrong product. [00:36:45]
Mark Pincus: What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? [00:36:47]
Mark Pincus: You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. [00:36:50]
Mark Pincus: Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. [00:36:54]
Mark Pincus: But the point of what I'm building is to learn. [00:36:57]
Mark Pincus: So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? [00:37:00]
Mark Pincus: And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. [00:37:04]
Mark Pincus: So often it could be an ad. [00:37:11]
Mark Pincus: I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put in the markets. [00:37:13]
Mark Pincus: It's an afterthought. [00:37:21]
Mark Pincus: And it was so often at Zynga, it blew my mind. [00:37:23]
Mark Pincus: I mean, I'll give you one story from Zynga. [00:37:25]
Mark Pincus: When we were launching our first expansion pack for Farmville, which became a mass, these became massive business drivers for us. [00:37:27]
Mark Pincus: It was, I think it was Farmville, English countryside or something. [00:37:36]
Mark Pincus: The team came to me and they said, okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch. [00:37:42]
Mark Pincus: I'm like, wait, you have 25, 30 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads somewhere else for coming soon. [00:37:51]
Mark Pincus: You have these people engaged. [00:38:03]
Mark Pincus: What if you just put something on the game board? [00:38:06]
Mark Pincus: And what if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat? [00:38:10]
Mark Pincus: What if you start putting different art forms of your English countryside locked on the game board and you just see how many clicks you get? [00:38:16]
Mark Pincus: And you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. [00:38:27]
Mark Pincus: And at the same time, when people click on it, it says, coming soon, click here to be a pre-user. [00:38:33]
Mark Pincus: Click here to get access two weeks before anybody else. [00:38:41]
Mark Pincus: and it turned out everybody clicked on it, right? [00:38:45]
Mark Pincus: Because it's a change on your game board. [00:38:50]
Mark Pincus: And it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing [00:38:51]
Mark Pincus: and the right variant of the product. [00:38:55]
Mark Pincus: But the unintended consequences was we started selling keys to people [00:38:57]
Mark Pincus: for you and a friend and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys [00:39:03]
Mark Pincus: to get early access to the new expansion pack. [00:39:07]
Mark Pincus: And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn it into something that gave us signal and direction in the product and revenues. [00:39:11]
Mark Pincus: And so often, this is an existing product, but you can turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat-driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. [00:39:26]
Mark Pincus: So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, quad code, but build the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on. [00:39:46]
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I want to ask about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when they think Zynga, they're not like, this is the product I want to build. And there's a spectrum of products you guys have built. There's like Farmville and Cityville and all these things that I think turn some people off. Then there's like Poker, Words with Friends, Mafia Wars that I think people are like, oh, that's amazing. I love that. Can you just speak to that? [00:40:07]
Mark Pincus: Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that, when you say that the privates turn people off, it's funny you say that because Farmville and Cityville were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. [00:40:33]
Mark Pincus: Now, Words with Friends and poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and other games didn't. [00:40:53]
Mark Pincus: There's a whole other story. [00:41:02]
Mark Pincus: But I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success. [00:41:04]
Mark Pincus: That it was, our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. [00:41:12]
Mark Pincus: And that's fair. [00:41:28]
Mark Pincus: But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 large game launches. [00:41:31]
Mark Pincus: We had a very high hit rate. [00:41:46]
Mark Pincus: It wasn't that we were good at virality. [00:41:48]
Mark Pincus: It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. [00:41:51]
Mark Pincus: And we had lots of competitors, lots, and copying, and we still managed to keep winning. [00:41:56]
Mark Pincus: And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. [00:42:03]
Mark Pincus: First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games. [00:42:08]
Mark Pincus: And Bing Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love, and I want your founders, [00:42:14]
Mark Pincus: product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more [00:42:21]
Mark Pincus: dimensionality? I love this idea of, it's what I call a bold beat. It's how do I take this thing [00:42:27]
Mark Pincus: that's kind of gotten boring and rote, poker or whatever, how do I add a whole new dimension to [00:42:36]
Mark Pincus: it? And by adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing [00:42:41]
Mark Pincus: social networking, you're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet [00:42:46]
Mark Pincus: new people or improve your relationships in a game. Well, the reason why people, so many, [00:42:53]
Mark Pincus: especially middle-aged women, love Farmville and these games was because they had this kind of [00:43:00]
Mark Pincus: hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. And they were doing it with their good friends, [00:43:06]
Mark Pincus: making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There are [00:43:11]
Mark Pincus: things that let you do gifting and do things of value for your friends. And so we called the games [00:43:18]
Mark Pincus: invest, express, and connect. You could do something that was, you were being seen as [00:43:29]
Mark Pincus: creative. I like to say, people don't want to be creative. They want to feel creative. [00:43:35]
Mark Pincus: So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. [00:43:40]
Mark Pincus: It's what mid-journey does for me today. [00:43:44]
Mark Pincus: And then we were letting you, so you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting [00:43:47]
Mark Pincus: with people around it. [00:43:51]
Mark Pincus: So that was the first thing. [00:43:54]
Mark Pincus: And then if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not [00:43:55]
Mark Pincus: virality. [00:44:02]
Mark Pincus: We grew, we outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. [00:44:03]
Mark Pincus: I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. [00:44:08]
Mark Pincus: I don't think anyone tracks it today. [00:44:14]
Mark Pincus: I talk about it in the book. [00:44:16]
Mark Pincus: I think it's a gift to your founders. [00:44:17]
Mark Pincus: I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically, this is true, they have the highest day 365 retention. [00:44:20]
Mark Pincus: Can you build against day 365 retention? [00:44:29]
Mark Pincus: Yes. [00:44:32]
Mark Pincus: We can't wait till day 365. [00:44:33]
Mark Pincus: we can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. [00:44:35]
Mark Pincus: If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high day 365. So those track, those are [00:44:44]
Mark Pincus: correlated, but you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and a zero day 365, [00:44:54]
Mark Pincus: which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, [00:45:00]
Mark Pincus: if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that [00:45:06]
Mark Pincus: way too. They kind of think, is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera, [00:45:12]
Mark Pincus: am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this? Or should I bother [00:45:18]
Mark Pincus: investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever? And I think there's a [00:45:25]
Mark Pincus: mentality to that. And I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, be real. [00:45:31]
Mark Pincus: We've seen these. They're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're [00:45:39]
Mark Pincus: sinking. They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, [00:45:46]
Mark Pincus: you know we just try to get people back or plug the hole in the boat and you know or build a [00:45:52]
Mark Pincus: better boat that doesn't have a hole but yeah so we were tracking both in our games in our [00:45:58]
Mark Pincus: network what what was the retention and we were we were really constantly thinking about you know [00:46:04]
Mark Pincus: about that and i think the two things to take away from zynga success in my opinion that i hold [00:46:10]
Mark Pincus: is to have a strong innovation vision [00:46:19]
Mark Pincus: that translates to what your teams are doing every week. [00:46:22]
Mark Pincus: And we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone. [00:46:26]
Mark Pincus: This is an Easter egg if anyone, [00:46:31]
Mark Pincus: if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. [00:46:33]
Mark Pincus: We built a metric called ASN and it stood for, [00:46:36]
Mark Pincus: we measured what was your active social network. [00:46:40]
Mark Pincus: So we looked at how many round trips you had [00:46:43]
Mark Pincus: with a friend or another player, [00:46:47]
Mark Pincus: Meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. [00:46:49]
Mark Pincus: You gifted them and they gifted you back. [00:46:52]
Mark Pincus: And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you [00:46:55]
Mark Pincus: again in the next month. [00:47:01]
Mark Pincus: And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next [00:47:02]
Mark Pincus: 30 days. [00:47:08]
Mark Pincus: And so we could actually build and innovate against that metric. [00:47:10]
Mark Pincus: And it made sense, right? Because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments, you know, that's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get. [00:47:15]
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Lenny Rachitsky: Let's talk about building a consumer social app. Very hard. Very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. We talk about this on the podcast a bunch. It's like nothing works in consumer. It works for a little bit and then dies. And you've maybe built more social consumer products than anyone. There's like a dozen that have worked. [00:48:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: AI obviously changes the game in theory. What do you think needs to be true for something to [00:48:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: work again in today's world? It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing [00:49:05]
Mark Pincus: in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that a [00:49:14]
Mark Pincus: social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often. And they'd give up for good [00:49:24]
Mark Pincus: reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there [00:49:30]
Mark Pincus: latent demand? So if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we [00:49:36]
Mark Pincus: don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. And [00:49:43]
Mark Pincus: And in 2007, when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business. [00:49:49]
Mark Pincus: But I had stopped playing games. [00:49:55]
Mark Pincus: I didn't know anyone who played games. [00:49:57]
Mark Pincus: It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. [00:49:58]
Mark Pincus: And I thought there's a latent demand. [00:50:02]
Mark Pincus: I love games. [00:50:07]
Mark Pincus: I love playing my family. [00:50:08]
Mark Pincus: But I can't get people to play games with me. [00:50:09]
Mark Pincus: And it's too much investment. [00:50:12]
Mark Pincus: It's too hard. [00:50:14]
Mark Pincus: It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. [00:50:15]
Mark Pincus: You literally, I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me. [00:50:18]
Mark Pincus: And we set up two machines for them and two for me. [00:50:28]
Mark Pincus: And we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game. [00:50:32]
Mark Pincus: And we were on a game server. [00:50:37]
Mark Pincus: And we did that one time. [00:50:38]
Mark Pincus: I was like, that is a lot of effort. [00:50:40]
Mark Pincus: And it was fun, but we did it once. [00:50:43]
Mark Pincus: And I said, my premise was, okay, I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them. [00:50:45]
Mark Pincus: free, not just free even, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So I made it free and I said, [00:51:04]
Mark Pincus: I'm going to make it a game you already know, three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask [00:51:11]
Mark Pincus: five to 15 minutes of you to do this. And you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb [00:51:17]
Mark Pincus: somewhere. You're not going to, like say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were [00:51:23]
Mark Pincus: in the newspaper, we'd read them. So I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, [00:51:27]
Mark Pincus: gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, [00:51:33]
Mark Pincus: I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. [00:51:39]
Mark Pincus: And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting [00:51:46]
Mark Pincus: in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it. They must be [00:51:51]
Mark Pincus: some. It's very big, but none that I know. Social and consumer. I believe that we have, [00:51:58]
Mark Pincus: beyond a latent demand for social, we are being social online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram [00:52:08]
Mark Pincus: and TikTok. I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Is there a heat [00:52:15]
Mark Pincus: in it. Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram or, or do you feel a little bit like [00:52:25]
Mark Pincus: you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories, [00:52:31]
Mark Pincus: or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing I, we looked at NPS net [00:52:37]
Mark Pincus: promoter scores and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus [00:52:43]
Mark Pincus: 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell [00:52:51]
Mark Pincus: you they're not on Instagram, right? They're not missing the party. They're like, whoa, I got off [00:53:00]
Mark Pincus: it. So I think all that's to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on [00:53:04]
Mark Pincus: the internet. I mean, I think I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent [00:53:13]
Mark Pincus: this social experience for the agentic AI age. But how are they going to do it? I would guess [00:53:20]
Mark Pincus: that they're going to give us productivity again. Part of what we got, people forget, [00:53:29]
Mark Pincus: Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or [00:53:37]
Mark Pincus: a thousand friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity and they still do, but they started [00:53:44]
Mark Pincus: to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more [00:53:50]
Mark Pincus: and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely Instagram [00:53:58]
Mark Pincus: had TikTok envy. So they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function [00:54:04]
Mark Pincus: of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay [00:54:12]
Mark Pincus: even more in the loop with the people we care about or, you know, but not wasting our time as [00:54:22]
Mark Pincus: much. So, and I'll also say this, there's a side of this, I call this social thing, the cocktail [00:54:26]
Mark Pincus: party. Okay. That's, that's the big, instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party [00:54:33]
Mark Pincus: And I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen? [00:54:42]
Mark Pincus: And how do we add things to the cocktail? [00:54:45]
Mark Pincus: We'd love to host the cocktail party. [00:54:48]
Mark Pincus: And if we're not, we'd love to be at it. [00:54:50]
Mark Pincus: We know it when we see a great cocktail party. [00:54:52]
Mark Pincus: You know it. [00:54:55]
Mark Pincus: You feel it. [00:54:55]
Mark Pincus: You're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. [00:54:56]
Mark Pincus: And it moves from like obligatory, I'm at this party, it's the birthday party, to almost [00:54:57]
Mark Pincus: like greed. [00:55:04]
Mark Pincus: Like, I love this party. [00:55:05]
Mark Pincus: I love the people I'm meeting. [00:55:06]
Mark Pincus: And what do you get at a great cocktail party? [00:55:09]
Mark Pincus: you often get great leads. And so that cocktail party that for me, it started with Napster when [00:55:10]
Mark Pincus: all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. [00:55:18]
Mark Pincus: But then Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. [00:55:23]
Mark Pincus: That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or [00:55:30]
Mark Pincus: Craigslist and it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, oh my God, I could get on [00:55:36]
Mark Pincus: Friendster and find a date. And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Friendster. [00:55:42]
Mark Pincus: So what I would say to people is like, look, if you want to reinvent social, [00:55:49]
Mark Pincus: look for where the cocktail is or you could host and then think about how is lead generation [00:55:54]
Mark Pincus: happening. It might sound weird when I say lead gen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn started with [00:56:01]
Mark Pincus: lead gen. All the productivity, the value started in a utility in being in this cocktail party. [00:56:07]
Mark Pincus: Today, and by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's [00:56:15]
Mark Pincus: hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension [00:56:21]
Mark Pincus: to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do. [00:56:26]
Mark Pincus: Today, we're all hanging out on our clod, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. [00:56:32]
Mark Pincus: So my Easter egg to people is it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before [00:56:41]
Mark Pincus: social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy [00:56:49]
Mark Pincus: figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive and you will probably you [00:56:56]
Mark Pincus: know find gold there i want to come back to your thread on your your question was how do you how [00:57:03]
Mark Pincus: do you know when an idea is a b plus right yeah okay i love the question on well how do you know [00:57:10]
Mark Pincus: if it's a b plus and what i would say to you is how do you know if you're with the right person [00:57:17]
Mark Pincus: Like you're dating. What was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, is this the right person? I'm like, fuck yeah. I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that. [00:57:24]
Mark Pincus: when you're with the A minus person, you're with the B plus, you're asking, could this be the one? [00:57:52]
Mark Pincus: You're like, you're, and, you know, Osho said, if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. [00:58:00]
Mark Pincus: You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, [00:58:06]
Mark Pincus: it's not an A. And you're full of hope. You hope it's an A. It doesn't mean you might not have the [00:58:11]
Mark Pincus: chance to turn that into an A. But the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, [00:58:18]
Mark Pincus: it's not. And then, well, how do you know, how are you getting validation that it's not? [00:58:24]
Mark Pincus: You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, [00:58:29]
Mark Pincus: when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotally, you love your product. You're [00:58:34]
Mark Pincus: addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. [00:58:42]
Mark Pincus: I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? [00:58:48]
Mark Pincus: Did we say, oh, is GPT it? [00:58:53]
Mark Pincus: I'm not sure. [00:58:55]
Mark Pincus: We're like, no, I'm fucking living on that, and it's making me dream of new things to do. [00:58:56]
Mark Pincus: So I'd say the hard part about this is what do you do with a B plus? [00:59:03]
Mark Pincus: First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B plus? [00:59:12]
Mark Pincus: And then what do we do with a B plus? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B plus. That's the first point is, okay, this is not it. Now, what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? Do I see examples that are near this that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven? [00:59:16]
Mark Pincus: And when we realize it's not it, we look for more things to do. [00:59:43]
Mark Pincus: And it's such a hard lesson. [00:59:49]
Mark Pincus: Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my dot-earth project for like the fourth time. [00:59:52]
Mark Pincus: I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. [00:59:57]
Mark Pincus: It's what led me to Zynga. [01:00:02]
Mark Pincus: I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. [01:00:04]
Mark Pincus: We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. [01:00:07]
Mark Pincus: And by the way, I define the metaverse, I give Reid Hoffman credit for this definition as blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. And that is where our lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaverse-ian. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world. It's that the virtual and the real completely blur together. [01:00:10]
Mark Pincus: but I kept coming at it from the game side [01:00:34]
Mark Pincus: and I went native, not in the good way. [01:00:37]
Mark Pincus: I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience [01:00:40]
Mark Pincus: that I was building this game engine, web browser-based game engine [01:00:45]
Mark Pincus: and I was not getting a product market fit. [01:00:50]
Mark Pincus: I was being too ambitious. [01:00:53]
Mark Pincus: I was not going for a small, small idea. [01:00:55]
Mark Pincus: I was going for a really big idea and it was really hard [01:00:58]
Mark Pincus: and I pulled the plug on it after four years and $25 million in just this one version of it. [01:01:01]
Mark Pincus: And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in [01:01:10]
Lenny Rachitsky: four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B plus and even more on a D. [01:01:17]
Lenny Rachitsky: There's a whole discussion I have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book, [01:01:26]
Lenny Rachitsky: of how that's such a source of good ideas. [01:01:29]
Lenny Rachitsky: But I want to touch on distribution [01:01:31]
Lenny Rachitsky: just as we're on this thread. [01:01:32]
Lenny Rachitsky: Something that's come up a lot on this podcast [01:01:34]
Lenny Rachitsky: is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff, [01:01:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: one of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. [01:01:40]
Lenny Rachitsky: Always been a challenge, always been hard, [01:01:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: harder than ever [01:01:45]
Lenny Rachitsky: because there's so much happening in the market constantly. [01:01:45]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's so much trying to get your attention. [01:01:47]
Lenny Rachitsky: All the channels are full paid and SEO. [01:01:50]
Lenny Rachitsky: What's your just like advice to founders? [01:01:53]
Lenny Rachitsky: What do you think needs to be true [01:01:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: for a startup to break out? [01:01:56]
Mark Pincus: because it's so hard now. [01:01:58]
Mark Pincus: Let's start with talking about consumer distribution, [01:02:00]
Mark Pincus: which I understand better. [01:02:04]
Mark Pincus: Yes. [01:02:06]
Mark Pincus: There's one question we got to back up and really explore, [01:02:07]
Mark Pincus: which is, is AI a new platform? [01:02:13]
Mark Pincus: And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. [01:02:17]
Mark Pincus: It is an important technology. [01:02:22]
Mark Pincus: We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use, AI chat. [01:02:24]
Mark Pincus: But it's not, in my mind, a platform. [01:02:31]
Mark Pincus: A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. [01:02:35]
Mark Pincus: Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. [01:02:41]
Mark Pincus: People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. [01:02:45]
Mark Pincus: And then it became at least an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. [01:02:50]
Mark Pincus: And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. [01:03:00]
Mark Pincus: We're not at that point yet. [01:03:06]
Mark Pincus: I believe we will get there. [01:03:09]
Mark Pincus: I don't know how. [01:03:11]
Mark Pincus: I have ideas. [01:03:12]
Mark Pincus: But we're not there yet. [01:03:13]
Mark Pincus: And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. [01:03:16]
Mark Pincus: We still use a browser. [01:03:22]
Mark Pincus: And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. [01:03:24]
Mark Pincus: It could be. [01:03:34]
Mark Pincus: I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. [01:03:36]
Mark Pincus: And we're kind of like halfway to a platform. [01:03:39]
Mark Pincus: We are in a point of discovery. [01:03:43]
Mark Pincus: new technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. [01:03:46]
Mark Pincus: That's really important. [01:03:51]
Mark Pincus: Discovery means when we first got our phones, [01:03:53]
Mark Pincus: we were installing new apps all the time. [01:03:57]
Mark Pincus: Now we don't ever install new apps. [01:04:00]
Mark Pincus: The average app installs per user per month is zero. [01:04:02]
Mark Pincus: So it's really important to think about that, [01:04:06]
Mark Pincus: that not only are we not in discovery, [01:04:09]
Mark Pincus: but even when we are, it doesn't stick. [01:04:12]
Mark Pincus: There was something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the App Store, and zero became top 10 hits, and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. [01:04:15]
Mark Pincus: So your odds are bad. [01:04:28]
Mark Pincus: Okay. [01:04:30]
Mark Pincus: So it's not an ideal moment to be – you can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. [01:04:31]
Mark Pincus: And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. [01:04:43]
Mark Pincus: And it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. [01:04:46]
Mark Pincus: They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. [01:04:53]
Mark Pincus: It's much easier to be prosumer or enterprise now, but for good reason, because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly. [01:04:59]
Mark Pincus: So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas. [01:05:10]
Mark Pincus: And you asked about distribution. [01:05:17]
Mark Pincus: Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer, any business idea, but any consumer idea. [01:05:20]
Mark Pincus: And it can't be an afterthought. [01:05:29]
Mark Pincus: It's not I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come. [01:05:31]
Mark Pincus: distribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply [01:05:34]
Mark Pincus: and proven from the beginning. [01:05:42]
Mark Pincus: And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread [01:05:45]
Mark Pincus: virally or word of mouth, that's hope strategy, not a belief strategy. [01:05:50]
Mark Pincus: and it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting [01:05:57]
Mark Pincus: and now is a great time to experiment. [01:06:02]
Mark Pincus: And in fact, it'll be 100 times more expensive [01:06:05]
Mark Pincus: to try to get the same things in the market in a year [01:06:09]
Mark Pincus: because it'll be 100 times more noise. [01:06:13]
Mark Pincus: And once there is distribution, [01:06:16]
Mark Pincus: there'll be a flood of competition. [01:06:18]
Mark Pincus: But when distribution is this broken, [01:06:20]
Mark Pincus: it is even more core to your product [01:06:24]
Mark Pincus: and your strategy. And I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer [01:06:26]
Mark Pincus: approach, that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, [01:06:34]
Mark Pincus: care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business long before we can [01:06:40]
Mark Pincus: get out to consumer. And there is a great idea that I got to, that Gary Tan had that [01:06:47]
Mark Pincus: I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week, that if we get in the mindset of [01:06:56]
Mark Pincus: basically intelligence on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens [01:07:04]
Mark Pincus: that we're buying today, that will basically be free in a year or two. The token supply is going [01:07:12]
Mark Pincus: to go up so much. Our demand will too. But if today we start building, reimagining consumer [01:07:22]
Mark Pincus: services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone. And it [01:07:30]
Mark Pincus: It could sound like a dot-com business plan when I remember ordering pig ears for my dog, Zynga, and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco, right? [01:07:38]
Mark Pincus: That's not a good business plan. [01:07:49]
Mark Pincus: So giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be in a phenomenal business. [01:07:51]
Mark Pincus: Because what the dot-com thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't going to come down or delivery wasn't going to come down, but the price of tokens will. [01:07:58]
Mark Pincus: And so I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight that I'm intrigued by. And I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it. Because games don't work, freemium games and freemium apps that have to go and hit the AI. [01:08:06]
Mark Pincus: Even if you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits, right? [01:08:25]
Mark Pincus: So getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation. [01:08:30]
Mark Pincus: And also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. [01:08:38]
Mark Pincus: I love the idea of the agent being in the middle on brokering our social relationships and getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, general listings. [01:08:42]
Mark Pincus: But I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context. And we have this membrane, I call it the social membrane, this intelligent membrane of trust. And it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to change, dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us, like a great chief of staff. [01:08:57]
Mark Pincus: and it could share less information with both of us than it knows. [01:09:22]
Mark Pincus: It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, Lenny, let's hang out. [01:09:28]
Mark Pincus: You're like, Mark, I'd love that. [01:09:33]
Mark Pincus: So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. [01:09:35]
Mark Pincus: There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest [01:09:38]
Mark Pincus: in any given weekend and hanging out. [01:09:42]
Mark Pincus: And how do we broker that without hurting one of our feelings? [01:09:44]
Mark Pincus: There's some really interesting spaces that the AI and the agent can broker between us in ways that start to give us both productivity. [01:09:50]
Mark Pincus: They find ways for us to get together without getting in a bad place of, you know, you see me on your calendar for Saturday and you want to be with your kids. [01:10:03]
Mark Pincus: I love all these ideas you're sharing. [01:10:15]
Lenny Rachitsky: Like what I'm hearing there, there's always this idea of why can't we just, here's my calendar, here's your calendar, let's just find time. [01:10:17]
Lenny Rachitsky: And like the issue there is you don't want to ever feel like, you don't want to look like you got nothing going on and you're like the most boring person. [01:10:22]
Lenny Rachitsky: Like you don't want the other person to know all this free time. [01:10:28]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, it's totally open and available to you. [01:10:29]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, exactly. [01:10:31]
Mark Pincus: And even worse, you don't want it to schedule you for a meeting, you know, that was not your priority. [01:10:32]
Mark Pincus: Yeah, that's right. [01:10:41]
Lenny Rachitsky: Just to close the loop on the distribution part, what I'm hearing is like we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you. [01:10:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's not there yet. [01:10:51]
Mark Pincus: I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it. [01:10:53]
Mark Pincus: And it's a little more likely to me than just hope. [01:10:57]
Mark Pincus: I think right now there's a obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. [01:11:00]
Mark Pincus: I think they're going to get back to consumer and prosumer and developers' hearts and minds. [01:11:08]
Mark Pincus: And I think they are interested in developers' hopes and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. [01:11:15]
Mark Pincus: But I think where we will get to in one way or another is that there will be some kind of consumer-facing platform for AI apps and agents. [01:11:21]
Mark Pincus: I can see so many consumer-facing agentic services that make so much sense to me that I think consumers will want, but they're not going to get it because if it's just buried in – I doubt they're going to get it buried in the mobile app store. [01:11:40]
Mark Pincus: And I think it's going to be in OpenAI's interest, Claude, Grok, to see these apps, consumer-facing agentic service apps, happen and see them be successful with their LLM baked in. [01:12:03]
Mark Pincus: And the more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition. [01:12:20]
Mark Pincus: One example that is my number one, is my Easter egg on this, is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. [01:12:28]
Mark Pincus: So a perfect example to me of a place where I think there is latent demand and the only reason we don't have it is because it doesn't make economic sense to offer it to us because we won't pay enough for it, is a travel agent. [01:12:40]
Mark Pincus: I believe if I offered you a free 24-7 travel agent that was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you, and will actually book, not just book travel, but I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a travel, a trip, be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of, you know, your travel logistics as they're happening. [01:12:54]
Mark Pincus: and often failing. And I think that's valuable to all of us, but not available to all of us because [01:13:23]
Mark Pincus: travel agents couldn't make a living. They weren't getting enough commissions and we weren't ready to [01:13:31]
Mark Pincus: pay enough. So the internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think the next area [01:13:37]
Mark Pincus: of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services [01:13:46]
Mark Pincus: And that's my prime example. But if someone built the best travel agent today, maybe we'd find out about it, but it's a tough road. But if it was specifically baked into OpenAI or Claude and gave me a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond... [01:13:52]
Mark Pincus: And there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating. [01:14:19]
Mark Pincus: And it's just I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT. [01:14:28]
Mark Pincus: And that's why they're differentiating themselves right now on coding. [01:14:34]
Mark Pincus: And there's real value and that's an amazing business. [01:14:41]
Mark Pincus: but they're not differentiating themselves [01:14:46]
Mark Pincus: very much at the consumer level. [01:14:50]
Mark Pincus: Yeah, to me, the question is, [01:14:52]
Mark Pincus: are they just going to do it [01:14:54]
Lenny Rachitsky: or why do they need anyone to do it? [01:14:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: If they are building this 通用人工智能, [01:14:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: they could just do all the things. [01:14:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: So I think it's going to be interesting [01:15:00]
Lenny Rachitsky: to see if they just want to eat [01:15:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: the entire market of everything [01:15:02]
Lenny Rachitsky: or they play nice with other startups. [01:15:03]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that is going to be interesting. [01:15:06]
Mark Pincus: And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. [01:15:07]
Mark Pincus: Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. [01:15:12]
Mark Pincus: They were a brutal platform. [01:15:16]
Mark Pincus: You know, they ate everything around them. [01:15:17]
Mark Pincus: And then, you know, with us, you know, we saw it on Facebook. [01:15:20]
Mark Pincus: You know, the two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music because it was really painful with IP rights and games because they didn't want to, like, hire artists. [01:15:25]
Mark Pincus: But everything else they did absorb. [01:15:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to go in a different direction and touch on. [01:15:38]
Lenny Rachitsky: You have all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. [01:15:40]
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to just kind of touch on a bunch of these. [01:15:46]
Lenny Rachitsky: One is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. [01:15:49]
Lenny Rachitsky: Talk about that lesson. [01:15:54]
Lenny Rachitsky: All my management principles I got to through desperation. [01:15:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: I don't like managing people. [01:15:59]
Mark Pincus: I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. [01:16:01]
Mark Pincus: and it's a necessary evil for us as product makers [01:16:04]
Mark Pincus: because we can't abdicate [01:16:07]
Mark Pincus: and just have someone else be CEO [01:16:09]
Mark Pincus: because all of a sudden the priorities get messed up [01:16:11]
Mark Pincus: and teams don't have to listen to us [01:16:16]
Mark Pincus: and we're now feedback, not direction. [01:16:19]
Mark Pincus: So that's a failing path. [01:16:21]
Mark Pincus: So we have to be a CEO, [01:16:23]
Mark Pincus: but then the question is, [01:16:25]
Mark Pincus: how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love [01:16:26]
Mark Pincus: and the least time doing what we don't? [01:16:29]
Mark Pincus: The bigger principle to me [01:16:31]
Mark Pincus: that I started to get to was that, oh, I'm like, all of management is just how do we get people [01:16:32]
Mark Pincus: to do the right thing when we're not in the room? So I was like, okay, if I give them a hill to take [01:16:39]
Mark Pincus: and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO. I mean, they have operating control, [01:16:45]
Mark Pincus: degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want. And they can give me a plan, a budget, [01:16:53]
Mark Pincus: and then do whatever they want within that. [01:16:58]
Mark Pincus: What I found was I didn't have to manage them. [01:17:02]
Mark Pincus: So they're not coming back to me with questions. [01:17:05]
Mark Pincus: And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. [01:17:08]
Mark Pincus: What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. [01:17:11]
Mark Pincus: It's motivating to me. [01:17:14]
Mark Pincus: I always say I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. [01:17:16]
Mark Pincus: So can I hire other people like that? [01:17:22]
Mark Pincus: And I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. [01:17:24]
Mark Pincus: And those are the best people to turn into a CEO. [01:17:32]
Mark Pincus: They're kind of a little bit of a know-it-all. [01:17:34]
Mark Pincus: They think they have the right answers. [01:17:36]
Mark Pincus: And we're going to find out if they do. [01:17:39]
Mark Pincus: And so we let them actually be a CEO. [01:17:41]
Mark Pincus: And they have all this pent-up demand to actually go and prove that they were right. [01:17:44]
Mark Pincus: And that's a beautiful thing. [01:17:49]
Mark Pincus: So yeah, I love this principle of make everyone a CEO. [01:17:51]
Mark Pincus: And we're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. [01:17:55]
Mark Pincus: You know, Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor. [01:18:00]
Mark Pincus: Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. [01:18:05]
Mark Pincus: That's really kind of, to me, the best CEO is like the best player at the position and is doing the thing they're great at and they're not wasting their time on management. [01:18:08]
Lenny Rachitsky: You mentioned this idea of an expert witness, and you also have this nugget of advice of staying close to the metal. I love this general advice. Talk about what you mean there, why that's important for someone in their career. [01:18:18]
Mark Pincus: They go together. We start our careers in our 20s very close to the metal, meaning we are individual contributors and we are working on getting the primary data and building the actual product usually. We're in the trenches. [01:18:30]
Mark Pincus: and the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data closest to probably the right answer [01:18:48]
Mark Pincus: but they're also usually furthest from making the decision and that's what i call the expert [01:18:58]
Mark Pincus: witness syndrome because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you [01:19:03]
Mark Pincus: passionately believe is the right answer and then you're excused and then they make a decision [01:19:10]
Mark Pincus: and then you have to deal with the consequences and disagree and commit. [01:19:15]
Mark Pincus: What if I'm disagreeing because I'm fucking right [01:19:20]
Mark Pincus: and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong? [01:19:24]
Mark Pincus: And that's why many of us become founders [01:19:28]
Mark Pincus: because we just are sick of being in that position. [01:19:31]
Mark Pincus: You're also closer to the metal. [01:19:34]
Mark Pincus: And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, [01:19:37]
Mark Pincus: part of the paradox of it that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the [01:19:40]
Mark Pincus: metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutia of the details. All the stories about [01:19:49]
Mark Pincus: Steve Jobs, I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the [01:19:58]
Mark Pincus: conference rooms. And I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small [01:20:05]
Mark Pincus: pixel level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord. [01:20:15]
Mark Pincus: And they came to this conclusion too, that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And [01:20:19]
Mark Pincus: they said, we realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, [01:20:24]
Mark Pincus: the UX to our least experienced people. [01:20:32]
Mark Pincus: And they're doing this every day. [01:20:35]
Mark Pincus: And we decided to turn that upside down and say, [01:20:37]
Mark Pincus: we as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product. [01:20:40]
Mark Pincus: And we have to be the ones who bless. [01:20:46]
Mark Pincus: Our best use of our time is making these minute decisions [01:20:49]
Mark Pincus: that change the product user experience. [01:20:54]
Mark Pincus: And so to me, that's being close to the metal. [01:20:57]
Mark Pincus: Brian Chesky believes in, you know, in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself [01:20:59]
Mark Pincus: with a team by hand. You know, there's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing [01:21:06]
Mark Pincus: that mattered most, they would go and work, you know, two days a week deeply with the team on it. [01:21:14]
Mark Pincus: And it makes sense. If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. [01:21:20]
Mark Pincus: You know, we want to put you on the ice. [01:21:26]
Mark Pincus: We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling. [01:21:29]
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. [01:21:34]
Lenny Rachitsky: Elon famous for this, too. [01:21:35]
Lenny Rachitsky: You have this line in the book along these lines. [01:21:37]
Lenny Rachitsky: Micromanagement is beautiful. [01:21:39]
Lenny Rachitsky: You should micromanage as long as you can. [01:21:41]
Lenny Rachitsky: I believe that. [01:21:43]
Lenny Rachitsky: And I did that building Zynga to a fault. [01:21:44]
Mark Pincus: I mean, we got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees. [01:21:47]
Mark Pincus: We had a stand up call that had gone for two hours. [01:21:51]
Mark Pincus: and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet [01:21:54]
Mark Pincus: and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday [01:21:56]
Mark Pincus: and what they're going to do today. [01:21:58]
Mark Pincus: And I go through name by name and say, [01:21:59]
Mark Pincus: okay, did you get that done? [01:22:01]
Mark Pincus: Can everyone else verify they got that done? [01:22:02]
Mark Pincus: Okay, what are you going to do today? [01:22:05]
Mark Pincus: And I completely micromanaged, [01:22:06]
Mark Pincus: but we were much more effective. [01:22:09]
Mark Pincus: And then I kept micromanaging things as, [01:22:13]
Mark Pincus: I'm like, if you can be in the room, [01:22:17]
Mark Pincus: be in the room, assuming that you are the best player. [01:22:19]
Mark Pincus: So, yeah, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. [01:22:22]
Mark Pincus: But when I was building Zynga, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or, you know, expecting, you know, massive results from our teams. [01:22:28]
Mark Pincus: And I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as more, it's closer to best practices today, I think. [01:22:42]
Mark Pincus: But my point about like that management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. [01:22:51]
Mark Pincus: The first principle is be in the room if you can be as much as you can be. [01:22:58]
Mark Pincus: And then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. [01:23:03]
Mark Pincus: And then all these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. [01:23:12]
Mark Pincus: And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. [01:23:21]
Mark Pincus: And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistance and this idea of a teaching hospital. [01:23:32]
Mark Pincus: How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? [01:23:38]
Mark Pincus: Like you have this burning mission and passion around your product. [01:23:42]
Mark Pincus: How do you spread that to other people and have them spread in the organization? [01:23:47]
Mark Pincus: The first thing is put them in the room with you. [01:23:51]
Mark Pincus: So the idea of this teaching hospital was, okay, I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings and have my passion and ideas and approach spread to all of them too. [01:23:54]
Mark Pincus: And that worked. [01:24:11]
Mark Pincus: And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. [01:24:13]
Mark Pincus: Have them just follow you around for six months or 12 months and make it the mini me, the person who is you in your 20s, who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know-it-all. [01:24:17]
Mark Pincus: And start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, absorb everything you do and give them projects to test them. [01:24:31]
Mark Pincus: and then hopefully you've created a mini-me [01:24:40]
Mark Pincus: that you can now put in a much bigger role somewhere else. [01:24:45]
Mark Pincus: And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, [01:24:49]
Mark Pincus: everyone on the C staff used to be someone [01:24:52]
Mark Pincus: who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos. [01:24:54]
Lenny Rachitsky: So that idea actually scales [01:24:57]
Lenny Rachitsky: and you kind of get it for free. [01:24:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. [01:25:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh man. [01:25:04]
Lenny Rachitsky: Maybe one last nugget from the book along these lines [01:25:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: is you have this line of just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that. [01:25:08]
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, [01:25:13]
Mark Pincus: I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that [01:25:23]
Mark Pincus: well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than your phenomenal [01:25:31]
Mark Pincus: execution or inspiring people or managing. [01:25:40]
Mark Pincus: Because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. [01:25:43]
Mark Pincus: And a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. [01:25:48]
Mark Pincus: And so I look for that in people. [01:25:54]
Mark Pincus: Are they right? [01:25:57]
Mark Pincus: That's the best resume. [01:25:58]
Mark Pincus: I could see that you were right about something. And, and I look for that in the team and it's [01:26:00]
Mark Pincus: less, do I like your style or approach or your, you know, personality fit? I'm like, I'll take, [01:26:06]
Mark Pincus: I'll take misfits who are right. I'm like, I want, I want those really smart expert witnesses who [01:26:16]
Mark Pincus: are intellectually honest. And, and, you know, the more people you have around you who [01:26:22]
Lenny Rachitsky: are right, you know, that's, they're putting balls in the net. [01:26:29]
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people [01:26:34]
Lenny Rachitsky: that know you well in preparation for this conversation and every single person commented [01:26:39]
Lenny Rachitsky: on just how wonderful a dad you are and how much time you put into that part of your life. [01:26:42]
Lenny Rachitsky: And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents and great parents in this AI era, [01:26:49]
Lenny Rachitsky: and there's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here is just, [01:26:55]
Lenny Rachitsky: what's something that you are teaching them or helping them to develop that you think is going [01:26:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: to be important to them in this crazy world where we're entering of ai thank you for asking about [01:27:02]
Mark Pincus: this i it's i think my greatest role and job and service to the world is trying to grow good [01:27:07]
Mark Pincus: humans it's like really really put a lot into it and take it seriously and i get so much out of it [01:27:16]
Mark Pincus: I like to say I'm growing my best friends. And so far it's true. So there's a couple of principles [01:27:22]
Mark Pincus: that have come in philosophies that have been important to me as a parent that I've just seen. [01:27:28]
Mark Pincus: I do them naturally and I see that they work over time. The first one for me is I have five kids. [01:27:37]
Mark Pincus: every one of them is just such a different version of a human. And I have a special needs son [01:27:44]
Mark Pincus: who's fairly extreme special needs. Our new one-year-old baby has a gene mutation and she [01:27:53]
Mark Pincus: actually may also end up being very neurodivergent. So you just have this wide range. My 15-year-old [01:28:01]
Mark Pincus: girls or they're twins and they're completely divergent from each other this first principle [01:28:09]
Mark Pincus: that i've found is meeting them where they are and and it's with kids i find we can [01:28:14]
Mark Pincus: kind of talk down to them we could talk to them as kids and or we can kind of treat them like [01:28:24]
Mark Pincus: adults and neither of those are right it's like we gotta like find engage with them at the altitude [01:28:31]
Mark Pincus: that they're at, but as human to human and find the way to do that. And then once we do that and [01:28:36]
Mark Pincus: meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that [01:28:45]
Mark Pincus: may be way beyond where they're supposed to be in that moment. Like my twins, I started playing [01:28:52]
Mark Pincus: with math with them when they were really, really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught [01:29:01]
Mark Pincus: daddy math because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So I [01:29:06]
Mark Pincus: taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain. And I [01:29:12]
Mark Pincus: didn't know where they were supposed to be. They were in fifth grade. But I just started for them [01:29:17]
Mark Pincus: and their friends just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. [01:29:22]
Mark Pincus: And then I found out, we found out later, I taught them all the way through eighth grade math. [01:29:28]
Mark Pincus: And I didn't know it, and they didn't know it, and that was cool. [01:29:32]
Mark Pincus: And I'd say, how does this apply in the age of AI and where we are? [01:29:36]
Mark Pincus: I feel like we're at the end of this 100-year cycle of mass-produced education, [01:29:41]
Mark Pincus: which was get the most knowledge in, get everyone's averages up to the best place we can, [01:29:47]
Mark Pincus: educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number. [01:29:54]
Mark Pincus: but it was factory produced and it was for a certain kind of work. First factories, [01:29:57]
Mark Pincus: then knowledge workers. Knowledge working is going away. It's changing, but we're still [01:30:05]
Mark Pincus: teaching knowledge education. And I feel badly about it with my kids. And what I've tried to do [01:30:11]
Mark Pincus: with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than, and I say, [01:30:17]
Mark Pincus: with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than, and I say, [01:30:17]
Mark Pincus: I don't care if you go to college, which is a little hard for them because they're kind of [01:30:25]
Mark Pincus: achievers. And like, I don't care if you go to college. What I care about is that you develop [01:30:29]
Mark Pincus: critical thinking and you find a way to be useful to people in the world. And my one daughter, [01:30:36]
Mark Pincus: Carmen, she's also neurodivergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia. And she created, [01:30:43]
Mark Pincus: she's created a brand of sweatshirts called comfy fancy and she also has created a [01:30:49]
Mark Pincus: gathering a grouping a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called neuro sparkly and [01:30:58]
Mark Pincus: and it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit and it's making it a way [01:31:08]
Mark Pincus: that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. [01:31:15]
Mark Pincus: I'm proud to see that. [01:31:18]
Mark Pincus: I've also, the dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent [01:31:19]
Mark Pincus: is that my kids are in this educational system [01:31:26]
Mark Pincus: that is trying to prep them to get into a good college [01:31:31]
Mark Pincus: and to be a knowledge worker. [01:31:35]
Mark Pincus: And I know that game is over. [01:31:37]
Mark Pincus: And I know, so what do I want my kids doing? [01:31:39]
Mark Pincus: I try to teach them to when when in a look at the deeper the meta of what's going on when an adult [01:31:42]
Mark Pincus: is trying to convince you of something when a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree [01:31:52]
Mark Pincus: with try to understand why what's their agenda where they come what's their lived experience and [01:31:58]
Mark Pincus: how has that impacted it so I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions not no more answers [01:32:04]
Mark Pincus: And I think that's, you know, and I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online [01:32:12]
Mark Pincus: use and what I try to promote and discourage, it's, I try to promote how can you be generative [01:32:18]
Mark Pincus: in what you're doing and not consumptive? [01:32:25]
Mark Pincus: So what can you do online or offline that is generative, that is actually putting something [01:32:28]
Mark Pincus: new out in the world, because that's how you're going to get something back and not consuming, [01:32:35]
Mark Pincus: not being a passive consumer of content and experiences. [01:32:41]
Mark Pincus: And sometimes it works, and I see them doing that, [01:32:46]
Mark Pincus: and sometimes it doesn't. [01:32:49]
Mark Pincus: But that's how I'm trying to navigate this. [01:32:51]
Mark Pincus: I also tried to make it till they were 16 with no phones, [01:32:54]
Mark Pincus: no smartphones, and I got to 14. [01:32:58]
Mark Pincus: I got them flip phones, [01:33:01]
Mark Pincus: and they had internships at Niantic working on Pokemon Go. [01:33:03]
Mark Pincus: They built a first-time user experience. [01:33:07]
Mark Pincus: It's really good. [01:33:09]
Mark Pincus: that they were, I think, used, [01:33:11]
Mark Pincus: but they had to get smartphones for that, [01:33:13]
Mark Pincus: and they still have them. [01:33:15]
Mark Pincus: And so, you know, I tried to make it, and I didn't. [01:33:16]
Mark Pincus: Oh, man, that's hilarious. [01:33:20]
Mark Pincus: Oh, and also, I'll say one more thing. [01:33:22]
Mark Pincus: For my older girls, [01:33:24]
Mark Pincus: I keep a running Google Doc of life philosophies, [01:33:26]
Mark Pincus: and anything I say to them is like a quote I say over and over. [01:33:32]
Mark Pincus: I'm like, okay, I'm going to actually, like, [01:33:38]
Mark Pincus: write that up with stories and I keep it in this document for them and who knows if they'll use it, [01:33:39]
Mark Pincus: but they do start to repeat some of them. So I know they read it. You know, one is nothing's [01:33:45]
Mark Pincus: personal. Don't, don't ever take anything personal. And if you assume nothing's personal, [01:33:52]
Mark Pincus: you're probably right 19 out of 20 times. And the 20th time you probably handled it right [01:33:58]
Mark Pincus: because of that. So that's one, you know, and don't be a victim. You know, the world doesn't [01:34:03]
Mark Pincus: happen to you. It's happening around you. And, you know, we're defined how we react to the world, [01:34:10]
Mark Pincus: not by the events that happen to us. So I'm trying to, you know, give them these, [01:34:15]
Mark Pincus: you know, and, and it's, and I'm, and they're teenagers, the older two, and, you know, and I'm [01:34:23]
Mark Pincus: in it and learning. And, and I've got two littles that, you know, a one-year-old, [01:34:30]
Lenny Rachitsky: a four-year-old who sleep with me every night. Oh man, you're busy. I feel like it's clearly [01:34:36]
Lenny Rachitsky: what your next book is going to be is these life philosophies. I feel like these are useful for [01:34:44]
Mark Pincus: people, for human, for adults. I mean, yeah, I wanted to write a book on parenting saying [01:34:47]
Mark Pincus: everything, everything I know about parenting. I learned from my dog Zynga because I had her [01:34:52]
Mark Pincus: before I had kids and she was like a person and, you know, I gave her clear boundaries and freedom [01:34:58]
Mark Pincus: and love in between. And, you know, she, she believed that she was a person. So is there [01:35:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up? The thing that I've gotten that it's resonated [01:35:14]
Mark Pincus: most in writing in my book of life for the last 30 years. It took me a long, long time. It took [01:35:22]
Mark Pincus: me until I started Zing at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. And I think for all of us, [01:35:30]
Mark Pincus: it's so important to get there. And we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why. [01:35:38]
Mark Pincus: But I figured out that mine, what I talk about in the book, is I want to create an internet [01:35:44]
Mark Pincus: treasure. Like, you know, when people say, Mark, how do I know that you're going to work hard on [01:35:50]
Mark Pincus: this next thing? Or, you know, you're post-economic or you're a board rich guy or whatever. I'm like, [01:35:56]
Mark Pincus: well, I haven't done my thing yet. Like, I like to, like, what is, what does our soul need to do [01:36:03]
Mark Pincus: before we die? Or at least to be in integrity with it, what do I need to be working on and know that [01:36:10]
Mark Pincus: I gave everything I had against it. And it's to build an internet treasure, which is a service [01:36:16]
Mark Pincus: we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that [01:36:21]
Mark Pincus: that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend [01:36:27]
Mark Pincus: Bing Gordon says, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And I think he's right. [01:36:34]
Mark Pincus: And, you know, I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era is to build these digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. [01:36:41]
Mark Pincus: And so that's my ambition and why I'm still like rubbing sticks together. [01:36:56]
Mark Pincus: And writing books. [01:37:01]
Lenny Rachitsky: Speaking of that, to help people build their own Internet treasure, your book is coming out very soon. [01:37:05]
Lenny Rachitsky: I think around the time this episode comes out. [01:37:10]
Lenny Rachitsky: Tell people where to find it. [01:37:12]
Lenny Rachitsky: Anything else you want to share about the book? [01:37:13]
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, you have a copy. [01:37:16]
Lenny Rachitsky: I just got a copy. [01:37:19]
Lenny Rachitsky: Two copies somehow. [01:37:20]
Lenny Rachitsky: Two, because you're important. [01:37:22]
Mark Pincus: We hope you read it twice. [01:37:25]
Mark Pincus: Give it out to a friend. [01:37:27]
Mark Pincus: I'll just say that Life at the Speed of Play is my, [01:37:30]
Mark Pincus: I'm trying to share my playbook and philosophies [01:37:35]
Mark Pincus: and I'm hopeful that somebody will steal from my ideas [01:37:39]
Mark Pincus: and take it further. [01:37:47]
Mark Pincus: And we're all kind of in a conversation [01:37:50]
Mark Pincus: and I love this podcast and you hosting this cocktail party. [01:37:52]
Mark Pincus: And we're all trying to move the philosophies [01:37:57]
Mark Pincus: and the craft of product making ahead [01:38:02]
Mark Pincus: and we're all learning as we go. [01:38:05]
Mark Pincus: and I hope that my book can be something referenceable [01:38:08]
Mark Pincus: and I hope it's easy and fun to read [01:38:13]
Mark Pincus: because I have pain reading a lot of books. [01:38:16]
Lenny Rachitsky: It is actually very easy to read. [01:38:19]
Lenny Rachitsky: It's like very not that long and it's very bite-sized. [01:38:21]
Lenny Rachitsky: So great job with that. [01:38:24]
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, good. [01:38:26]
Lenny Rachitsky: Mark, thank you so much for being here. [01:38:28]
Lenny Rachitsky: Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us. [01:38:30]
Lenny Rachitsky: Thanks, this is fun. [01:38:32]
Lenny Rachitsky: This is actually, I've done some podcasts about the book [01:38:33]
Lenny Rachitsky: and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book [01:38:36]
Mark Pincus: on most of the podcasts and on this one I did. [01:38:40]
Mark Pincus: And I'm trying to only go into places [01:38:43]
Mark Pincus: that I want to talk about, [01:38:47]
Mark Pincus: which I tried to do in the book too. [01:38:50]
Mark Pincus: There we go. [01:38:52]
Lenny Rachitsky: Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product. [01:38:53]
Lenny Rachitsky: My pleasure. [01:38:56]
Lenny Rachitsky: Thanks, Mark. [01:38:57]
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye, everyone. [01:38:58]
Lenny Rachitsky: Thank you so much for listening. [01:38:59]
Lenny Rachitsky: If you found this valuable, [01:39:01]
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Lenny Rachitsky: listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show [01:39:12]
Lenny Rachitsky: at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode. [01:39:16]