Mark Pincus on "Proven, Better, New": Why Great Products Start with Copying and Humility
Lenny's Podcast
Mark Pincus founded Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, Words With Friends, and Zynga Poker, and started several companies before it. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, he lays out the product philosophy he has spent five years turning into a book, Life at the Speed of Play. His central claim is that product builders usually fail for the wrong reasons. They innovate where they should copy, aim too big too early, and hold on to mediocre ideas out of hope. His alternative is a framework he calls "Proven, Better, New," supported by a set of beliefs about ambition, testing, retention, and management.
Instincts versus ideas
The framework became what Pincus calls "a religion" at Zynga and the core of how the company did product management. For three of the four years he spent writing, the book's working title was Proven Better New. He changed it because the name felt too dry and because "life at the speed of play" captured the broader idea of the book.
The philosophy starts with a split between instincts and ideas. People have gut-level human instincts about what they want to build, and Pincus believes those are almost always right. The problem is the specific ideas they layer on top of those instincts. His rule of thumb is that "your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75%," or at best right 25% of the time. Proven, Better, New is meant to isolate the "innovation zone" around the instinct, test many ideas inside it, and make sure that when an idea fails, it fails for the right reason.
His cautionary example is Sid Meier, whom he calls the godfather of game design. When Meier released a social version of Civilization on Facebook, Zynga's team first thought the ultimate game designer had arrived. Ten minutes after launch, Zynga's product managers were emailing around an analysis that said the game was dead on arrival. The first-time user experience took so many clicks that nobody would ever see the design underneath. Zynga's most junior PMs understood the best-of-breed onboarding approach on Facebook. Because Meier didn't copy that proven piece, Pincus says, his innovation never got seen.
The three parts of the framework
Proven means taking everything you are not innovating on off the table and copying the best existing version of it, legally and ideally with taste. Pincus uses the many AI camera apps he sees as an example. If you're building one, the basic workings of a camera aren't your innovation, so study where the best version already exists, whether at Apple, Snapchat, or Instagram, and copy it. You should get a "PhD in proven" first. In his words, you haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until you're the world's leading expert on the best mobile cameras that already exist.
Better is narrower than people assume. It's usually small, incremental, and often about polish that intense or power users notice most. His test is strict: a change is "better" only if 10 out of 10 existing users of that kind of product would say "f*** yes." The judge isn't the builder. "What we think is better is new." Examples of real "better" include a product becoming free or needing no download, improvements that can be shown statistically and that every user would accept.
New is the novel "back of the box" idea that gets people to download and try the product. Pincus says it is probably going to fail. Teams are usually too ambitious here. He recommends accepting that the first new idea is likely wrong and having four others ready to test.
Words With Friends shows all three. It was Scrabble, which is proven. It was polished for mobile, which was the better. Its new idea was social: it attached to the Facebook graph, so your friends were already there to play with you. Pincus notes that even that idea might not have gotten 10 out of 10 people saying yes, which is why it belonged under "new." The game reached 14 million daily active users while Scrabble itself hadn't become that kind of hit, and he attributes the difference to getting better and new right on top of proven.
He describes the framework as a kind of time machine. If he could talk to himself in 2003 or 2004, he would say his instincts were more right than he knew. One of them, he says without naming the company, pointed to something that became a $1.6 trillion company, and he was a year ahead of it. His idea at Tribe (Tribe.net) turned out to be Reddit, and there was also a listings business in it. At Tribe he knew the metrics weren't working. Thirty-day retention was terrible, and he calls the company "a sinking speedboat." If he had been testing many more ideas and looking around for proven "heat" in the market, he believes he would have greatly improved his odds.
The TED touchscreen, misuse of "proven," and Slack
Lenny pointed out that the iPod and iPhone fit this pattern: existing product categories made better, with something new added. Pincus added a memory. At a TED conference he watched an MIT team demo a touchscreen on a giant whiteboard and a table, and Steve Jobs spent the whole time with them, obsessed with it. Pincus says he doesn't know if that was the first time Jobs saw it, but on his reading, touch was the iPhone's one new idea.
He warns that founders often misuse "proven" to justify a wrong idea, for example by pointing to a game that was popular in the 1990s. Proven has to be exact, down to "the pixel level of this experience": proven on this platform, for this audience, for this experience. Older successes can inspire new ideas, but if they aren't on your platform, they don't count as proven.
Masters of the craft do this so gracefully that nobody notices what the product is derivative of. Pincus thinks Slack may have been only proven and better, with nothing new, and says that's even better if you can pull it off, because "people don't like change." Taking a behavior people already like and making it more accessible or more fun can win them over more than novelty would.
The "moral arbitrage" of copying
Asked why the idea of copying bothers people, Pincus calls it, "in the Peter Thiel sense," a moral arbitrage. Founders became founders to be innovators, schools taught that copying is cheating, and so starting from other people's work feels like a beatdown. That resistance creates an opening for people with less ego involved.
His line to Zynga's product makers was: "If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume." If you define ambition by your consumer rather than your peers, you aren't chasing awards. You're trying to win the hearts and minds of, in FarmVille's case, "nurses in Indiana." Innovation then becomes whatever gives her an experience she loves more. Pure copying gives her no reason to switch, but taking something she already loves and making it "one inch better" might beat showing her something she's never seen and didn't know she wanted. He adds that consumer taste also resists obvious copies, the way movies or books that feel too derivative can turn audiences off, so the art is doing this without the user noticing.
His model of a world-class product maker is Craig Newmark. Newmark lived in Pincus's neighborhood and, Pincus jokes, was better friends with his dog, Zynga, than with him. Newmark once told him he had spent two years adding photos to Craigslist listings, because he wanted to make sure people liked it and that the photos appeared the right way. Pincus admits he still doesn't fully understand what took two years. But he took the lesson that people feel ownership of products they rely on and get angry when those products change, even for the better, because they move through life on pattern recognition. He imagines, as a hypothetical, that adding photos might have pushed the text below the fold, when what users valued most was scanning text quickly to compare prices.
Finding proven inside someone else's product
Lenny observed that most products he could think of, from the iPhone to his water bottle to Chrome, are improved versions of earlier things, and that product teams already study competitors' flows. Pincus added that gold often lies in a proven feature buried in someone else's product that its owners haven't recognized. He cites Nikita Bier's TBH, which Bier found as a near-perfect product inside an Arabic-only version of an existing app. His own first company, Freeloader, came from the same pattern. Netscape and Internet Explorer had offline browsing buried as a power-user feature. Because bandwidth was so slow at the time, Pincus saw that an entire product could be built around that one feature.
He doesn't claim every product comes from Proven, Better, New. His question is which path a founder wants to take. On the blank-whiteboard path he points to Rovio, which as far as he could tell made 45 totally different games without learning much from previous failures or the market, and hit on the 45th with Angry Birds. He calls that "wildcat drilling." The contrasting story is OMGPop. After an entirely original product failed completely, the company was down to its last dollar and needed a hit. It then took a proven game, studied everything already working and viral on mobile, and copied the turn-based system from Words With Friends. The result, Draw Something, was the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 days in 2012, and Zynga bought the company.
Be less ambitious
Pincus says he is relearning this lesson right now. If founders start out too ambitious and visionary, they usually miss product-market fit, because the right starting point is often "embarrassingly small." He notes that Facebook began as an app for checking out people at Harvard.
His own career has come in waves. Freeloader and Support.com both started from humble premises and became bigger successes than he expected. Afterward he felt he could do anything. He treats Elon Musk as the exception, partly because Musk can raise seemingly unlimited capital, but says most founders feel the urge to go bigger after a win. At Tribe he saw how large social networking could be and tried to do everything instead of picking one use case, even though several inside it worked, including the "urban tribes" people loved. The company failed. He then went through what he calls an abyss. By the time he started Zynga at 41, as a multi-time successful founder, he made a poker game on Facebook. People told him he had "no dignity" and could do so much more. He says his ambition had come down to a thousand-foot altitude instead of 100,000 feet, and that was the key.
He believes this gives first-time founders an edge over repeat founders, who have "too much rope to hang ourselves." It's too easy for them to raise money and hire against a big vision before finding fit. "The world doesn't care about your resume," he says, so everyone has the same chance. His paradox: the more ambitious you are, the humbler you should be and the smaller the place you should be willing to start. Lenny added that startups can chase ideas too small for a company like Meta to care about, and Pincus agreed that following flaky threads before they look like businesses is where many successful companies began.
As an example he admires Bolt.new. He liked it so much he cold-emailed the founder. As Pincus tells it, the team worked in obscurity on something they were passionate about, open-sourced it, and could barely keep commercial development going. Then they realized that adding their in-browser virtual machine and web stack to an AI coding copilot gave them something better than what anyone else had. He also points to Stewart Butterfield. Butterfield set out to build an ambitious mass-market MMO, was humbled, and noticed a small tool the engineers used internally. Building a product around it became Slack. Pincus says calling that shift takes an attuned, curious, humble founder.
Confidence, honesty, and the "third grade soccer" critique
Changing direction is hard when investors and a team are all moving one way and founders are expected to project confidence. Pincus says he errs toward transparency "to a fault" and has burned people out doing it, at Zynga and since. He repeats the criticism he's heard: working for Mark is "like third grade soccer," with a new exciting idea every Monday. He says the critics aren't wrong. What he'd like to get better at is building a culture where the team agrees up front that it won't hold on to a B+, even one that has traction or could be funded, and won't stop until it finds fit against its north star. People who would rather join a company already taking off can make that choice. To him, the real "founder mode" is having the courage to tell your team and investors that this isn't it.
Kill hope before hope kills you
Pincus says he didn't coin the phrase, but he loves it. He separates belief from hope. Hope is "confidence without basis," a prayer not grounded in your experience with your product, with users, or with the data. Too many teams keep going on the hope that the next release will do something magical. The best product makers, he argues, are "collecting winnings" rather than placing bets. He says Brian Chesky, for example, already knows a launch is a hit before it ships.
This leads to his contrast between a minimum viable product and a "maximum launchable product." In his view, "viable" is the word to kill along with hope, because viability is where hope comes from. Putting something out to learn is different from launching something you believe will be a hit, and founders need to be clear about which they're doing.
He considers AI dangerous right now because it's so powerful. It lets teams reach a viable product in maybe three months instead of three years. He expected people to use AI to build "failure machines" that test "more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year," a hundred ideas a day instead of one every three months. What he sees instead is AI used to build one idea in three months. His advice is to "build it wrong before you know it's right." If you believe today's product is probably wrong, you'll spend a day or a week on it instead of three months, and you'll ask only whether it's good enough to produce signal.
One cheap test teams often skip is the ad. Pincus was repeatedly surprised at Zynga by teams that hadn't tested ads before launch. When Zynga prepared FarmVille's first expansion pack (he recalls it as an English countryside theme), the team planned a $10 million ad budget for "coming soon" ads elsewhere. Pincus pointed out that 25 to 30 million people were already in the game every day. Instead, the team placed locked versions of the new art on the game board, tested different looks and messages by counting clicks, and let players sign up for early access. Almost everyone clicked, since it was a change on their board. The test showed which marketing and product variant worked best. Unexpectedly, Zynga also started selling early-access keys for a player and a friend, and sold $19 million worth. Something planned as advertising turned into product signal, scarcity, and revenue.
Why Zynga's games worked, and it wasn't virality
Lenny noted that FarmVille and CityVille put some product people off, while Poker, Words With Friends, and Mafia Wars are admired. Pincus replied that FarmVille and CityVille were Zynga's biggest hits by installs, engagement, retention, and revenue. Words With Friends and Poker lasted longer because they made the move to mobile and the others didn't. He grants that Zynga became "a victim of its own success": its games took over Facebook feeds enough to annoy non-players.
His main point is that Zynga's eight hits out of ten major game launches didn't come from being good at virality. The company had many competitors copying it and kept winning, so in his view it couldn't have been just spamminess. He credits two things.
The first was the mission of connecting the world through games. He and Bing Gordon kept returning to what he calls a "bold beat": adding a whole new dimension to something that has become boring or rote. Adding social features and real identities let people meet others or improve relationships inside a game. He says many players, especially middle-aged women, loved FarmVille because they had a hobby they weren't doing alone. The most successful features were co-op play and gifting. Zynga described its games as "invest, express, and connect." One of his lines: "people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative." He says Midjourney does that for him today.
The second was that the core metric was retention, not virality. Pincus believes Zynga was the only consumer company in the world tracking day-365 retention and doubts anyone tracks it now. He says the most valuable companies have the highest day-365 retention and calls that statistically true. You can't wait a year to see it, but early indicators correlate. Low day-1 and day-30 retention predict poor day-365 retention. The reverse doesn't hold: most products have strong day-30 numbers and near-zero day-365 numbers. Users themselves ask whether something is worth investing in because they'll still use it in a year. He calls virality-driven companies (he mentions BeReal) "sinking speedboats," trying to drive faster than they sink rather than plugging the hole or building a better boat.
He also shares what he calls an Easter egg: a metric named ASN, "active social network," which counted round trips with other players. You take a turn and they take one back, or you send a gift and they send one back. According to Pincus, going from zero to one round trip meant an 80% chance Zynga saw the player again in the next month. At four, there was an 80% chance they'd return on 22 of the next 30 days. Teams could innovate directly against that number, and he connects it to the dopamine of positive feedback loops like likes and comments.
Latent demand and the future of social
On why so few durable consumer social apps appear today, Pincus says people have given up for good reason, since nothing proven is working. He looks for latent demand instead. In 2007, video games were a $23 billion business, yet he had stopped playing and didn't know anyone who played. Getting people to play with him felt like "crawling across broken glass." He once set up two machines for his gamer nephews and two for himself, with video chat running and a game server for Rise of Nations. It was fun, but they did it only once. His premise for Zynga was that adults wanted permission to play if it became extremely accessible: free rather than a $60 purchase, a game they already knew, "three clicks and you're in," five to fifteen minutes of their time, stumbled upon like comics in a newspaper rather than a trip to the comic book store. Gaming is now, by his figure, a $280 billion industry. He still doesn't play and knows no adults who do, so he thinks another large wave of growth is waiting.
Social, he argues, is beyond latent demand, since people already use Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. The problem is that it has "lost the adrenaline." It feels like eating potato chips. He says his team looked at net promoter scores and found that people who quit Facebook or Instagram went from +35 to -35, like people who just quit smoking. People are proud to say they're not on Instagram because they don't feel they're missing a party. He calls this the biggest unexplored opportunity on the internet and is confident someone will reinvent social for the agentic AI age. His guess is that it will bring back productivity. Facebook let people stay in the loop with hundreds of friends and LinkedIn delivered real productivity, but in his view platforms drifted toward time-wasting engagement, with Instagram developing "TikTok envy."
His guiding image is the cocktail party. People know a great one when they feel it: obligation turns into eagerness because of who you're meeting. Great parties produce leads. For Pincus it started with Napster, where the lead was a music file, then continued with Friendster, Facebook, and LinkedIn, which delivered far better lead generation than Google or Craigslist. He once had a good date through Friendster. Zynga's strategy was to drop games into the party already happening on social networks. "Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party," he says. It's quiet and lonely, like the web before social networking, and his challenge to listeners is to "figure out how to make it rowdy."
How to know you have a B+
Returning to how you know an idea is only a B+, Pincus uses a dating analogy. With the right person you don't ask whether they're the one; you just know. With a B+ partner you keep asking. He cites Osho: if you're torn between two paths, both are wrong. "If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A." A B+ can sometimes become an A, but intellectual honesty comes first. With real signal, "everything works": you're addicted to the product, friends love it, and the metrics confirm it. Nobody had to ask whether ChatGPT was "it." After admitting it's a B+, the questions are whether to kill it, learn from it, or look for proven or nearly proven things nearby.
He applied this to himself two weeks before the interview, when he shut down his "Earth" project for about the fourth time. For 20 years he has pursued his own version of the metaverse, the vision that led him to Zynga. He credits Reid Hoffman with the definition he uses: blurring the lines between the virtual and the real, which he thinks life is heading toward anyway with AI. He says he "went native, not in the good way," building a browser-based game engine to prove he could, chasing a big idea instead of a small one. After four years and $25 million on this version, he stopped. He says he has felt more inspired about ideas in the two weeks since than in the previous four years.
Distribution when AI isn't yet a platform
On distribution, Pincus limits himself to consumer, which he knows best. He argues AI isn't yet a platform. Past platforms were hardware, interfaces like Windows, browsers, or open social networks, or in mobile's case both hardware and interface. Chat apps are a new portal, but not yet a platform for other developers' apps. He believes one will come but doesn't know how. Meanwhile we're still in the mobile and web era.
Platform shifts unlock discovery, and discovery has stalled. He says average app installs per user per month are zero, and that of roughly 40,000 games launched in the App Store last year, none became a top-10 hit or held a top-25 or top-50 spot. That, he says, makes consumer social and games nearly uninvestable right now, while prosumer and enterprise companies are growing revenue quickly. He still thinks it's a great time to work on consumer ideas. Distribution has to be built into the product and strategy from the start, not left to "hope strategy." He argues experimenting now is cheap, since in a year it may cost a hundred times more amid a hundred times more noise and a flood of competitors. Many successful companies, he observes, start by reaching power users and "whales" who care enough to find and pay for a product.
He shares an idea from Garry Tan: design consumer services as though tokens were effectively free, since today's token spend may cost almost nothing in a year or two. Pincus admits it sounds like a dot-com business plan and remembers ordering discounted pig ears for his dog while wanting to thank the VCs subsidizing them. The difference, he says, is that pig ears and delivery weren't going to get cheaper, and tokens will. Premium games and apps already hit token limits today, so working around that could open up interesting innovation.
He also sketches an agent that brokers social relationships, which he calls a "social membrane" of trust. It would know both people's context, share less than it knows, and adjust how much attention it asks for, like a great chief of staff. His example is two people in the Bay Area who both say they want to hang out, with unequal enthusiasm on a given weekend. The agents would find a way to meet without hurting feelings or booking Saturday when one person wants time with their kids. Lenny added that nobody wants a shared calendar to show they have nothing going on.
Asked whether a new distribution platform is coming, Pincus says he is "somewhere between belief and hope." The major labs are currently racing on coding, but he expects them to turn toward consumers and developers, and thinks it would serve OpenAI, Anthropic, or Grok to foster consumer-facing agentic apps built on their models. His favorite example is an agentic travel agent: free, available 24/7, aware of your context, able to book and, most valuably, to rebook when plans fall apart mid-trip. He says travel agents vanished because they couldn't earn enough commission and people wouldn't pay enough. A service like that, built into a chat product, would give users a clear reason to prefer one assistant. Today he often can't remember whether he's asking Claude or GPT. Lenny wondered whether the labs would simply build everything themselves. Pincus pointed to history: Microsoft was a brutal platform that absorbed everything around it, and Facebook absorbed nearly everything except music, because of rights issues, and games, because it didn't want to hire artists.
Management: CEOs, the metal, and micromanagement
Pincus says he doesn't like managing people and arrived at all his management principles "through desperation." Product-minded founders can't hand the CEO role to someone else without priorities breaking down, so the question is how to maximize time on what they love. He concluded that all of management comes down to getting people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. His answer was to "make everyone a CEO": give someone a hill to take, real operating control, a plan and a budget, and freedom inside that. He found this was very motivating and that those people rarely needed managing. He jokes that he is "a team player as long as I'm running the team," and says the best candidates are "frustrated expert witnesses," slightly know-it-all people eager to prove they were right. He ties this to current Silicon Valley talk about removing middle management and mentions Brian Armstrong's push for everyone to be an individual contributor.
"Expert witness syndrome" describes early-career people who are closest to the data and often to the right answer, but furthest from the decision. They're called to testify, dismissed, and left to "disagree and commit" and clean up afterward. Pincus says that's why many become founders. Once they're in charge, the risk is losing touch with the metal. He believes the best product CEOs live in the details. He mentions the story of Steve Jobs choosing conference room carpet. The Discord founders told him they realized they were delegating the most important UX decisions to their least experienced people, so they flipped the pyramid and made themselves the "first and last mile" for the product. He also cites Brian Chesky doing things unscalably by hand, and stories of Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg working deeply with teams a couple of days a week on what mattered most. If you're the best product maker in the company, "we want to put you on the ice."
He calls micromanagement "beautiful" and says to do it as long as you can. Up to about 50 employees, Zynga held two-hour standups where he went through a spreadsheet name by name, checking yesterday's commitments and setting today's. He says the company was far more effective for it, and that this was less accepted 20 years ago than it is now. His first principle is to be in the room as much as possible, assuming you're the best player. Only then do other strategies take over. One is the "teaching hospital," where as many people as possible attend product meetings to absorb the founder's approach. Another is the technical assistant: someone from the ranks, much like the founder in their twenties, who follows you for six to twelve months and takes on test projects. He calls it passing on "the vampire blood." He says that at Amazon under Andy Jassy, everyone on the senior team had once been a technical assistant to Bezos.
He also borrows from Bezos the idea that a CEO's number one job is to be right. He'd take the right product and strategy over excellent execution, because "being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat." When hiring, he looks for evidence that someone was right about something. "I'll take misfits who are right."
Parenting for an AI era
Pincus has five children, including a son with fairly extreme special needs, a one-year-old with a gene mutation who may also turn out to be very neurodivergent, and 15-year-old twin girls who are very different from each other. He says he's "growing my best friends." His first principle is to meet each child where they are, human to human, without talking down to them or treating them as adults. From there they can go surprisingly far. During the pandemic, seeing that the twins' school couldn't handle remote learning, he taught them and their friends "daddy math," aiming to build curiosity rather than follow grade levels. They were in fifth grade, and he later learned he had taught them through eighth-grade math.
He believes a hundred-year cycle of mass-produced education, built for factory and then knowledge work, is ending as knowledge work changes, and he feels uneasy that his kids are still being prepared for it. He tells them he doesn't care whether they go to college, which he admits is hard on kids who are achievers. What he cares about is critical thinking and being useful to people. His daughter Carmen, who has ADHD and dyslexia, created a sweatshirt brand called Comfy Fancy and a group for neurodivergent middle schoolers called Neurosparkly, which he describes as turning a supposed deficit into a way to connect with and help others. He encourages his kids to ask what's behind an adult's or teacher's point of view, including their agenda and lived experience, and to ask better questions rather than know more answers. Online, he pushes them to be generative rather than consumptive. He admits it works only sometimes. He tried to hold off on smartphones until 16 and made it to 14. The twins had flip phones until internships at Niantic, where they built a first-time user experience for Pokémon Go, required smartphones.
He also keeps a running Google Doc of life philosophies for his older daughters, written up with stories, and knows they read it because they repeat some. One entry is that nothing is personal: assume that and you'll be right 19 times out of 20, and you'll probably handle the 20th time well because of it. Another is not to be a victim, since the world is happening around you, not to you, and people are defined by how they react. He jokes that he once wanted to write a parenting book saying everything he knows he learned from his dog Zynga: clear boundaries, freedom, and love in between.
The "why": building an internet treasure
Pincus says it took him until age 41, when he started Zynga, to articulate his why. When people ask why a wealthy founder would keep working hard, he says he hasn't done his thing yet. That thing is to build an "internet treasure," defined as "a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without." He calls this the greatest ambition available to product makers. His friend Bing Gordon says such treasures will one day be in the Smithsonian, and Pincus agrees. He thinks this era's opportunity is to build "digital skyscrapers" that the next generation can't believe anyone lived without, and it's why he is still, in his words, "rubbing sticks together" and writing books.
He describes Life at the Speed of Play as his playbook and says he hopes someone steals its ideas and takes them further. He sees the book as part of an ongoing conversation among product makers who are all still learning.
If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.
You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products.
Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea.
How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following?
If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works.
Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying.
It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for FarmVille. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer.
Building a consumer social app, very few people have successfully done it and built something durable.
We have beyond a latent demand for social. It's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy.
Today my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen both within Zynga and before Zynga. And over the past 5 years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this. And after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more.
In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. Why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids. He's got five. And so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company.
Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysprod.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Mark Pincus.
Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
I've been a big listener.
Oh, wow.
And I'm excited to finally be on. So,
I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed called proven better new, and the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea, such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas.
Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book we called it Proven Better New, but then I was like, oh, that's too dry a name, and I love this concept of life at the speed of play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt to the book. So, but proven better new is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts like in our gut, these human-level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75%, or at best right 25% of the time.
The framework of proven better new takes that philosophy and says, okay, what do we do with that? Okay, let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut and let's just test many, many ideas around that, and let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason. It might be, I mean, at Zynga we'd see new game launches. Sid Meier, like the, you know, godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer, he came out, I think, with a social Civilization on Facebook, and we thought, "Oh god, here comes like the ultimate game designer." And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said, "It's dead on arrival because his FTUE, his first-time user experience, was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design." Even Sid Meier tripped over what was understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga as the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first-time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody.
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And so the point of proven better new is to say let's take all the proven off the table. If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. You're the icon. Maybe just the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally and with hopefully some taste. We can get into like great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist.
And then better is usually, we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say f*ck yeah. 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new, right? What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new. And so better could be it's now free. There's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, you know, is better, and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polish and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most.
And in our game, Words With Friends, you know, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must have been something, you know, better and novel about it. But it had such a polish for mobile, was the better. And the new: what's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? And in the case of Words With Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just, it's attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. You know, even that, which you'd think of course I want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes. And we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail.
And if we do proven better new right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. And I like to think if you do proven better new right, it's like a time machine, because what if I could go back to Mark, you know, 2003 and 2004 and say, "Dude, you don't even realize how right you are." Like, one of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. That's, you know, I'm not going to tell you which. I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's another answer in this that you could pursue that would be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, by the way, your Tribe idea, that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company, industry, you know, listings.
So, there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were a sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me, like if you're doing proven better, you're also looking around you for where you're finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test, and you know, I would have massively changed my odds of success.
Okay, there's so much here. So just to summarize how I think about this framework, which is so good, like if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this, whether they are conscious of it or not, it's wild. So kind of the steps that I hear: so, proven better new. Proven is make a list of the things that are proven to be working already in the market, things people love about this sort of space. Better is make something that is not just better, but that 10 out of 10 people will say f yeah, I would switch, this is better. And then add something new that nobody's tried before that adds a little wrinkle. And I think a little bit like, you have a bunch of examples in the book, Slack and threads. There's also, like if you think about the iPhone and the iPod, like you don't think about them that way, but basically the iPod, there was a music player, they made it better and they added some new stuff and it
Yeah, in the world. 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. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it. Like, okay, there's his new idea, is a touchscreen. It's the only new idea.
And I want to say proven gets so misused, and what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use proven better new to justify a wrong idea, and they're like, "Look, Mark, I'm doing proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the 90s. Proven is..." and they pick something that, and it's to their own detriment. They're not using proven. We have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience. Proven is on this platform, for this audience, for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas, but if it's not on this platform, you know, it doesn't count as proven.
And yet the masters at this product craft do proven better new whether they call it that or not, and they do it at such a beautiful level that nobody even thinks, no one realizes what it's derivative of. And Slack was a great example, because I think Slack might have just been proven and better and no new, and that's even better if you can have a successful product. And I don't want to sound anti-innovation, but you know, people don't like change. So if you take a behavior they like but you make it much more accessible, or something much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack, people love that even more.
There's this thread of copying that comes through this framework that will turn a lot of people off. Talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over that hump of like, this is actually the right approach in most cases.
In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage, because there's something in our gut as a product, you became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we were taught in school copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways, you know, more available for people who have less ego involved. 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. You're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for FarmVille. You're going to define innovation differently, and you're not going to worry about whether you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more.
And so, if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And I think that the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it, because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that if movies, TV shows, you know, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against, you know, our consumer taste.
But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark on Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And I was like, and he lived in my neighborhood, and he was friends with my dog, Zinga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially, and he connected more with the dog. And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. And so he
would sit and talk to me and he was working on... I was like, "What are you working on?" And he said, "I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings." I'm like, "What do you mean two years?" He's like, "Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways." I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years, but if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why wouldn't you want to? Why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new. And I'm like, that's a world-class product maker, because what he gets is that 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 angry, because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition. And we don't want to think about these things. And what if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was? And what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold? And a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick, and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew. I don't know.
Yeah. As you're talking, I'm just thinking, what are all the best products, and are they all just copies and evolutions of existing products, or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around, like the iPhone. There were phones before, and they kind of took the elements of what was great and made them awesome. My Owala water bottle: there were water bottles that worked, and then they added things to make it better. Chrome. I'm just looking around, and it's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens, most products are better versions of things that existed before. And then I'm thinking about, as a product team, what do you often do? You go look at the competitors, look at all their flows: here's what they're doing, here's what's working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think it's easy to get turned off to this idea of the word copy. But as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway.
Well, there's so much on this that we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with, too, or do a whole episode just on this, because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on, and I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment, because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, "Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature." Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic-only version of his product, and he said, "Oh my god, they nailed it." So I think when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product, but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold.
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. But the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard, don't look at any other products, that is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different, not, as far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures or the market, and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds, and it was a hit, and it was innovative. But the odds... that's wildcat drilling. And do you want to have those odds?
Or do you want to do what OMGPop did, which is a very similar story but opposite path? OMGPop created the hit game Draw Something, and Zynga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 days in 2012. But OMGPop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative. No one had ever seen or tried it before. It failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. And now they did Proven Better New. 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, and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words With Friends, and they made a massive hit.
I love this idea of moral arbitrage. That's such a [laughter] way of thinking about this.
Peter Thiel, you know. Very. Yeah. So, there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this, and you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products.
I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this. And one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious at the outset, and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit, because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place. Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard, right?
And the irony for me is 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 any product market fit," had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with a very, very small, humble premise, and then afterwards I felt like now I can do anything. And I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical, unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, and he does not start in humble places at all. 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. That's human instinct, and we want to be more ambitious.
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. It was really ambitious, and I didn't pick one use case, and there were multiple inside Tribe that worked. The idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it. But I was too ambitious, and so we failed. And then I was so humbled, and I was in this abyss we could talk about for so long, and I was so desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be a 41-year-old, multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world, and what did I do? I made a Facebook app. Like a poker game. Not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. People thought I had no dignity. People were like, "Mark, there's so much you could do in the world."
But I'd say my ambition came down to like a thousand-foot altitude, not 100,000-foot. And that was the key to that being successful. And I see this... it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders, and it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder, because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit. But the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. Everyone has the same chance. And in a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. 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.
One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup, to be less ambitious, because a Zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. Anything they take on needs to be a many-billion-dollar business opportunity, and as a startup you don't need to do that, and this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end.
Yeah. Being willing to pursue these little threads when they're flaky, when they're not a business, when they're so much earlier. And so many of the successful companies today started there.
Yeah. Is there an example that comes to mind? What's a company or two that started very unambitious?
I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much I cold emailed the founder because I was just so impressed with... And they toiled in obscurity on something that they were into, and then they open sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development, 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, but we actually add that to an AI coding co-pilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has. And I think that was just a great story, that they were passionate about one thing and they stuck with it.
Yeah, Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that.
Oh, he was so impressive. In a lot of ways Slack also was humbled. Stewart keeps trying to start game companies, and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does next. He now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time.
But I think to your point, he might try again to un-humbly go big.
Yeah. But each time, right? So he started a big idea for like the mass-market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, "Okay, wait. There's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that." And it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. 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, and we have to express confidence as founders whether or not we have actual confidence inside. That's part of, I think, the dissonance of this. How do you express confidence? How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team?
And I'm still learning. I err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault, and I burn out people in that process. I did at Zynga, and I have since, because people will say the negative critique of working with me is, "Oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer, and every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea." And they're not wrong. 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. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold on to a B+. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a north star, and we are not going to stop until we find product market fit against our north star. And this isn't it. And it's going to take courage on our part. And hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship?" Which is a fair career choice for you to make. But I think that, to me, the real founder mode is: can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?
That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give, which is kill hope before hope kills you. Talk about just what that is, because so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly. So just kind of talk about that, and then I'm really curious to know what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, okay, this is a B+, let's move on?
I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that's your lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product, and the data. And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say, are collecting winnings. They're not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it.
And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP. Minimum viable. The viable is the word we've got to kill along with hope, because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right? 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. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction.
And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took, maybe 3 months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug, because 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, as I like to say, more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing a hundred ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred 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. And if you could build it right, great. But don't be slowed down by that. Because if we start off, if we say, okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product. What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. So often it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put it in the market. It's an afterthought, and it was so often at Zynga it blew my mind. I
I mean, give one story from Zynga when we were launching our first expansion pack for FarmVille, which became massive business drivers for us. It was, I think it was FarmVille English Countryside or something. 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." 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? You have these people engaged."
What if you just put something on the game board? And what if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat. 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, and you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. And at the same time, when people click on it, it says coming soon. Click here to be a pre-user. You know, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else.
And it turned out everybody clicked on it, right? Because it's a change on your game board. And it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product. But the unintended consequences was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend, and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to, you know, the new expansion pack. 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 on the product and revenues.
And so often, you know, you can have, you know, this is an existing product, but you could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and, you know, heat-driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, Claude Code, but build the, you know, the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on.
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, you know. 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?
Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that, when you say that the products turn people off, it's funny you say that because FarmVille and CityVille were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Now, Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. That's a whole other story.
But I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success, that 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. And that's fair.
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, we had a very high hit rate, it wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. And we had lots of competitors, lots of copying, and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality.
First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games. And Bing Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love, and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more dimensionality. I love this idea of, it's what I call a bold beat. It's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and rote, poker or whatever, how do I add a whole new dimension to it? And by adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game.
Well, the reason why people, so many, especially middle-aged women, love FarmVille and these games was because they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. And they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of, you know, value for your friends. And so we called the games invest, express, and connect. You could do something where you were being seen as creative. I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Midjourney does for me today. And then, so you were expressing yourself, and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing.
And then, if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew. We outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about it in the book. I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically this is true, they have the highest day 365 retention.
You know, can you build against day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have, you know, high day 365. So those track, you know, those are correlated. But you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and a zero day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera, it's, am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this, or, you know, should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever? And I think there's a mentality to that.
And I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, you know, BeReal, right, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right? They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, you know, which is try to get people back, or plug the hole in the boat, or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But yeah, so we were tracking both in our games and in our network what was the retention, and we were really constantly thinking about that.
And I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success, in my opinion, that I hold, is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. And we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. We built a metric called ASN, and it stood for, what we measured, what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player, meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually, you know, build and innovate against that metric. 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.
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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. Like, it works for a little bit and then dies. And you maybe built more social consumer products than anyone. Like, there's like a dozen that have worked. AI obviously changes the game in theory. What do you think needs to be true for something to work again in today's world?
It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often. And they've given up for good reason, because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there latent demand? Just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite.
And in 2007 when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business. But I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me. And it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. Literally, I got my nephews, who are intense gamers, to play Rise of Nations with me, and we set up two machines for them and two for me, and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game, and we were on a game server. And we did that one time and I was like, that is a lot of effort. And it was fun, but we did it once.
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. 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, I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you, you know, to do this, and you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like I say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them. So I believed there was a latent demand.
And in fact, today, you know, gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games, because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it, or they must be some, it's very big, but none I know.
So, okay, so social and consumer. I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social. We are being social, right, online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok, but I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram, or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram, right? They're not missing the party. They're like, "Whoa, I got off that."
So I think all that to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age. But how are they going to do it? You know, I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again. Part of what we got, people forget, Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or a thousand friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity. They still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time, because they wanted to engage more and have more ads, and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely, you know, Instagram had TikTok envy. So, you know, they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience, that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about, but not wasting our time as much.
And I'll also say this, there's a side of this, I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay, that's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think, where is that happening, or where does it want to happen, and how do we add things to the [ __ ]. We'd love to host the cocktail party, and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You know it. You feel it. You're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." And it moves from like obligatory, I'm at this party, it's the birthday party, to almost like greed, like, I love this party, I love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at a great cocktail party? You often get great leads.
And so that cocktail party, for me it started with Napster, when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. But then Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist. And it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, "Oh my god, I could get on Friendster and find a date." And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Friendster.
So what I would say to people is, look, if you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail party is, or one you could host, and then think about how lead generation is happening. It might sound weird when I say lead gen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn started with lead gen. All the productivity, the value started in the utility in being in this cocktail party today. And by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games, because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them
more to do. Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So, my Easter egg to people is it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive and you will probably, you know, find gold there.
I want to come back to your thread on — your question was how do you know when an idea is a B+, right?
Yeah.
Okay. I love the question on, well, how do you know if it's a B+? And what I would say to you is how do you know if you're with the right person? 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, [ __ ] yeah. I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that.
When you're with the A minus person, you're with the B+, you're asking, could this be the one? And you know, Osho said if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, 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 chance to turn that into an A, but the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not.
And then, well, how are you getting validation that it's not? You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. Anecdotally, you love your product. You're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? Did we say, "Oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure." You know, we're like, "No, I'm [ __ ] living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do." Right?
So, I'd say the hard part about this is, you know, what do you do with a B+? First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B+? And then what do we do with a B+? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B+. That's the first point: 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? When we realize it's not it, we look for more things to do. And it's such a hard lesson.
Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my Earth project for like the fourth time. Okay, I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zynga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. 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 metaversian. It's not being in this other escape to an immersive world. It's that the virtual and the real completely blur together.
But I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. You know, I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this web browser-based game engine. And I was not getting product-market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small idea. I was going for a really big idea. And it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it after four years in and $25 million in just this one version of it. And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more, you know, on a D.
There's a whole discussion I want to have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book, of how that's such a source of good ideas. But I want to touch on distribution just as we're on this thread. Something that's come up a lot on this podcast is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff, one of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. Always been a challenge, always been hard, harder than ever because there's so much happening in the market constantly. There's so much trying to get your attention. All the channels are full, paid and SEO. What's your advice to founders? What do you think needs to be true for a startup to break out because it's so hard now?
Let's start with talking about consumer distribution, which
I understand better.
Yes.
There's one question we've got to back up and really explore, which is: is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever AI chat we use. But it's not in my mind a platform.
A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. 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. And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how. I have ideas, but we're not there yet.
And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And we're kind of like halfway to a platform.
We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. You know, the average app installs per user per month is zero. So, it's really important to think about that, that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. You know, there were something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the App Store and zero, you know, became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So, your odds are bad.
Okay. So it's not an ideal, you know, moment to be — you can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. And it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. It's much easier, you know, to be prosumer or enterprise now. But for good reason, because we're seeing those companies scale revenue, ARRs, very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas, and you asked about distribution.
Distribution is just so crucial and core to any business idea, but any consumer idea. And it can't be an afterthought. It's not "I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come." Distribution has to be part of your product and baked into the strategy deeply and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, you know, that's hope strategy, not a belief strategy.
And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting. And now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because there'll be 100 times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. And I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach, that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business, you know, long before we can get out to consumer.
And there is a great idea that Garry Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week: if we get in the mindset of basically intelligence on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today will basically be free in a year or two, that the token supply is going to go up so much — our demand will too — but if today we start building, re-imagining consumer services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone.
And it could sound like a dot-com business plan. And I remember ordering pig ears for my dog Zinga and wanting to send thank-you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco, right? That's not a good business plan. So, you know, giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be a phenomenal business, 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.
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, premium games and premium apps that have to go and hit the AI — even if you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits, right? So getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation.
And also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle and brokering our social relationships. And getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, you know, general listings. 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 dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us, like a great chief of staff.
And it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, "Lenny, let's hang out." You're like, "Mark, I'd love that." So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend in hanging out. And how do we broker that without hurting, you know, one of our feelings? 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. 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.
I love all these ideas you're sharing. 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. And the issue there is you don't want to look like you've got nothing going on and you're the most boring person. You don't want the other person to know.
It's totally open, available to you.
Yeah. [laughter] Exactly.
And even worse, you don't want it to schedule you for a meeting, you know, that was not
Yeah, that's right. Just to close the loop on the distribution part, what I'm hearing is we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you. It's not there yet.
I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it, and it's a little more likely to me than just hope. I think right now there's an obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. I think they're going to get back to consumer and prosumer and developers' hearts and minds. And I think they are interested in developers' hearts and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. 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.
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 — I doubt they're going to get it buried in the mobile app store. 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. And the more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition.
One example, my number one Easter egg on this, is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. 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. 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 trip, be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of, you know, your travel logistics as they're happening and often failing.
And I think that's valuable to all of us, but not available to all of us because travel agents couldn't make a living. They weren't getting enough commissions and we weren't ready to pay enough. The internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think the next area of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services, and that's my prime example.
But if someone built the best travel agent today, you know, 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 — you know, there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating, and I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT. And that's why they're differentiating themselves right now on coding, and there's real value and that's an amazing business, but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.
Yeah. To me the question is, are they just going to do it, or why do they need anyone to do it if they are building this AGI? They could just do all the things. So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they just want to eat the entire market of everything or they play nice with other startups.
Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. You know, Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. You know, they ate everything around them. And then, you know, with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas that they just didn't care about going into were music, because it was really painful with IP rights, and games, because they didn't want to hire artists. But everything else they did absorb.
I want to go in a different direction and touch on — you have all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling a company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. I want to just kind of touch on a bunch of these. One is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. Talk about that lesson.
All my management principles I got to through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. And it's a necessary evil for us as product
makers because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO because all of a sudden the priorities get messed up and, you know, teams don't have to listen to us and we're now feedback, not direction. So that's a failing path. So we have to be a CEO. But then the question is how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love and the least time doing what we don't?
The bigger principle to me that I started to get to was that, oh, all of management is just how do we get people 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, and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO, I mean, they have operating control, degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want, and they can give me a plan, a budget, and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. So they're not coming back to me with questions. And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO.
What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. You know, I always say I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. So can I hire other people like that? And I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. And those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're kind of a little bit of a know-it-all. They think they have the right answers and we're gonna find out if they do, and so we let them actually be a CEO and they have all this pent-up demand to actually go and prove that they were right, and that's a beautiful thing.
So yeah, I love this principle of make everyone a CEO, and we're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. You know, Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. 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.
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.
They go together. We start our careers, you know, 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, and the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. And that's what I call the expert witness syndrome, because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer, and then you're excused, and then they make a decision, and then you have to deal with the consequences and, you know, disagree and commit. What if I'm disagreeing because I'm [ __ ] right, and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong? And that's why many of us become founders, 'cause we just are sick of being in that position.
You're also closer to the metal. And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the paradox of it that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutiae of the details. You know, all the stories about Steve Jobs. I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms, you know, and I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel-level details that matter.
And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord, and they came to this conclusion too, that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, "We realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX, to our least experienced people, and they're doing this every day. And we decided to turn that upside down and say, 'We as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product.' And we have to be the ones who bless... our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience." And so to me that's being close to the metal.
Brian Chesky believes in, you know, doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. You know, there's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck, of the thing that mattered most, they would go and work, you know, two days a week deeply with the team on it. And it makes sense. If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field, you know, we want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.
Yeah. Elon's famous for this too. You have this line in the book along these lines: micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can.
I believe that, and I did that building Zynga to a fault. I mean, we got to a point that, all the way to 50 employees, we had a standup call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today, and I'd go through name by name and say, "Okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today?" And I completely micromanaged, but we were much more effective. And then, you know, I kept micromanaging things, as I'm like, if you can be in the room, be in the room, assuming that you are the best player.
So yeah, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. But when I was building Zynga, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or, you know, expecting massive results from our teams, and I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as more... it's closer to best practices today, I think.
But my point about, like, that management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room: the first principle is be in the room if you can be, as much as you can be, and then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. 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.
And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistants and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? Like, you have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread it in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. 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, you know, spread to all of them too, and that worked.
And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. 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, and start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, absorb everything you do, and give them projects to test them, and then hopefully you've created a mini me that you can now put in a much bigger role somewhere else. And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C-staff used to be someone who had been the tech assistant to Bezos. So that idea actually scales, and you kind of get it for free.
I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. Oh man. Maybe one last nugget from the book along these lines is you have this line of just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that.
Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy, than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing, because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a great boat in, you know, a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere.
And so I look for that in people, like, are they right? Like, that's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something, and I look for that in the team, and it's less do I like your style or approach or your, you know, personality fit. I'm like, I'll take misfits who are right. I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest, and, you know, the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net.
I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people that know you well in preparation for this conversation, and every single person commented on just how wonderful a dad you are and how much time you put into that part of your life. And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents, and great parents, in this AI era, and there's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here, is just: what's something that you are teaching them or helping them to develop that you think is going to be important to them in this crazy world we're entering of AI?
Thank you for asking about this. I think my greatest role and job and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. So I really, really put a lot into it and take it seriously, and I get so much out of it. I like to say I'm growing my best friends. And so far it's true.
So there's a couple principles that have come in, philosophies that have been important to me as a parent, that I've just seen. I do them naturally and I see that they work over time. The first one for me is I have five kids. Every one of them is just such a different version of a human. And I have a special needs son who's fairly extreme special needs. Our new one-year-old baby has a gene mutation, and she actually may also end up being very neurodivergent. So you have this wide range, and my 15-year-old girls, they're twins, and they're completely divergent from each other.
This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are. With kids, I find we can kind of talk down to them, we could talk to them as kids, or we can kind of treat them like adults, and neither of those are right. It's like we've got to find, engage with them at the altitude that they're at, but as human to human, and find the way to do that. And then once we do that and meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that may be way beyond where they're supposed to be, you know, in that moment.
Like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really, really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught daddy math, because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So I taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain. And I didn't know where they were supposed to be. They were in fifth grade, but I just started, for them and their friends, just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. And then we found out later I taught them all the way through eighth grade math. And I didn't know it and they didn't know it, and that was cool.
And I'd say, how does this apply in the age of AI and where we are? I feel like we're at the end of this hundred-year cycle of mass-produced education, which was get the most knowledge in, get everyone's averages up to the best place, we can educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number, but it was factory produced, and it was for a certain kind of work: first factories, then knowledge workers. You know, knowledge working is going away. It's changing, but we're still teaching knowledge education. And I feel badly about it with my kids.
And what I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than... and I say, "I don't care if you go to college," which is a little hard for them because they're kind of achievers. And like, I don't care if you go to college. What I care about is that you develop critical thinking and you find a way to be useful to people in the world.
And my one daughter, Carmen, she's also neurodivergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia, and she's created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy. And she also has created a gathering, a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called Neurosparkley, and it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit, and it's making it a way that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. So I'm proud to see that.
The dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent is that my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker, and I know that game is over. So what do I want my kids doing? I try to teach them to look at the deeper, the meta of what's going on. When an adult is trying to convince you of something, when a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree with, try to understand why. What's their agenda? Where are they coming from? What's their lived experience? And how has that impacted it? So I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not know more answers.
And I'd say, in terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, I try to promote: how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive? So what can you do online or offline that is generative, that is actually putting something new out in the world, because that's how you're going to get something back, and not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences? And sometimes it works. I see them doing that, and then sometimes it doesn't. But, you know, that's how I'm trying to navigate this.
I also tried to make it till they were 16 with no phones, no smartphones, and I got to 14. And I got them flip phones, and they had internships at Niantic working on Pokémon Go. They built a first-time user experience. It's really good with that. They were, I think, used, but they had to get smartphones for that, and they still have them. So even, you know, I tried to make it and I didn't.
Oh man, that's hilarious.
Oh, and I'll tell you one more thing. For my older girls, I keep a running Google Doc of life philosophies, and anything I say to them as like a quote I say over and over, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to actually write that up with stories," and I keep it in this document for them. And who knows if they'll use it, but they do start to repeat some of them, so I know they read it.
You know, one is nothing's personal. Don't ever take anything personal. And if you assume nothing's personal, you're probably right 19 out of 20 times. And the 20th time, you probably handled it right because of that. So that's one. And don't be a victim. You know, the world doesn't happen to you, it's happening around you. And, you know, we're defined by how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us.
So I'm trying to, you know, give them these, and they're teenagers, the older two, and, you know, I'm in it and learning, and I've got two littles, a one-year-old and a four-year-old, who sleep with me every night and
Oh, man, you're busy. I feel like it's
Clearly what your next book is going to be is these life philosophies. I feel like these are useful for people, for adults, I mean.
Yeah. I wanted to write a book on parenting saying everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zynga, because I had her before I had kids and she was like a person. And, you know, I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between, and she believed that she was a person. So,
Is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up?
The thing that I've gotten that's resonated most in writing in my book, of life for the last 30 years, it took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zynga at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. And I think for all of us, it's so important to get there, and we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why.
But I figured out that mine was, I talk about in the book, is I want to create an internet treasure. Like, you know, when people say, "Mark, how do I know that you're going to work hard on this next thing?" or "You're post-economic," or "You're a bored rich guy," or whatever. I'm like, well, I haven't done my thing yet. I like to, like, what does our soul need to do before we die, or at least to be in integrity with it? What do I need to be working on and know that I gave everything I had against it?
And it's to build an internet treasure, which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend Bing Gordon says, you know, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And I think he's right.
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. And so that's my ambition and why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and
And writing books.
Speaking of that, to help people build their own internet treasure, your book is coming out very soon. I think around the time this episode comes out. Tell people where to find it. Anything else you want to share about the book?
It's right here.
Well, you have a copy. I just got a copy.
Two copies somehow.
Two because you're important. We hope you read it twice. Give it out to a friend. So, I would just say that Life at the Speed of Play is my, I'm trying to share my playbook and philosophies, and I'm hopeful that somebody will steal from my ideas and take it further.
And we're all kind of in a conversation, and I love this podcast and you hosting this cocktail party, and we're all trying to move the philosophies and the craft of product making ahead, and we're all learning as we go. And I hope that my book can be something referenceable, and I hope it's easy and fun to read, because I have pain reading a lot of books.
It is actually very easy to read. It's very not that long and it's very bite-sized. So, great job with that.
Oh, good.
Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us.
Thanks. This is fun. I've done some podcasts about the book, and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book on most of the podcasts, and on this one I did. And I'm trying to only go into places, you know, that I want to talk about, which I try to do in the book, too. So,
There we go.
Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product.
My pleasure. Thanks, Mark. Bye, everyone.
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