The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2ead255c0e6b670a

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 ninety-five percent of the time, your ideas are wrong seventy-five percent 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 it, 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 Zinga.
Who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history.
Over a dozen, both within Zinga and before Zinga.
And over the past five 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 kill 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 linny'sproductpass.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.
Mm.

Mark, thank you so much.
For being here and welcome to the podcast.
I've
been a big
Listener excited to
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 uh so much here I want to talk about.
I wanna start with this framework that you developed.
Uh 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.
Yeah, it is such a clever idea, such a simple idea with so much depth. Um I wanna
Spent a bunch of time on this.
Um
So first of all, just give us kind of the the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it.
In coming up with ideas.
Sure.
A framework that we got to early on at Zinga.
And it became like a religion.
And the fundamental
The core
Principle's and engine
Behind
how we did product management.
It's in a
And it's
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 in the
And I
I love this concept of life at the speed of play, which we can talk about, but
is the bigger gestalt of the book. So
But
Proven better new is this core
Um
philosophy that I've had around
Products.
Since I started Zinga.
Which is that we have these
The 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 instinct that are
usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is
Your instincts are right ninety five percent of the time, your ideas are wrong seventy five percent, or at best right.
Twenty five percent of the time.
The framework of Proven Better New
Takes that
Philosophy.
And says,
Okay, what do we do with that? Okay, let's
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 it's Zinga.
We'd see new game launches.
Sid Myers, like the
You know, Godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer.
He came out with I think a a social civilization.
On Facebook.
And we thought, Oh God, here comes like
The
Ultimate game designer.
And
Ten minutes after the game came out.
The Zinga PMs
emailed around their analysis and they said it's dead on arrival because
is fatui.
His first time user experience.
With so many clicks and so bad.
That no one was ever gonna see his great game design.
Even St Myers tripped over
What
Understood by the most
Junior product managers.
At Zinga was
Um
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 c the point of proven better new is to say
Let's take
All the proven off the table.
Yeah.
You wanna 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.
Yeah.
The icon.
Um
The 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.
Yeah.
Copy those legally.
And
With
Hopefully some taste we can get into like
Great copies and bad copies.
But
But be a master of the proven first.
Get your PhD improved.
First.
We
We don't
We haven't earned the right.
to innovate on the camera until
We are the world's leading
PhD on the best mobile cameras.
They'd already
Exist.
And then better is
Usually we can't
Find better. Better is
Usually very small increments in innovations, and better is something that ten out of ten of your existing
the existing users of that product
would say fuck yeah.
Ten out of ten, 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
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
And usually it's
It's very small and it's polish and it's it's things that
Intense uzers, power users.
Will notice
The most important thing.
In our game words with friends.
You know, it was scrabble.
But if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit?
with fourteen million DAUs.
And scrabble itself.
wasn't, right? There must have been something
you know, better and novel about it.
But it 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.
is attached to the Facebook
graph and your friends are just already there.
Which
with a new idea
You know
Even that which you think of course I want.
you might not get ten out of ten people saying yes.
And we have to
Except that that new idea
Is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it.
For people
But it's probably gonna fail. And if we do
Proven better new right.
The product
has much better odds.
Of succeeding in the market.
Not feeling 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 we just prosecuted.
In it.
And and we
Really it's I like to think
You do proven better new, right?
It's it's like a time machine.
Because
What if
I could go back to Mark
You know
Two thousand
Three and four and say, dude.
You
They don't even realise how right you are. Like
One of your
Instincts is going to be a one point six trillion dollar company once
And you
Or a year ahead of them.
Right. You're a year ahead of a one point six trillion dollar company.
That's
You know I'm not gonna tell.
Totally cheap, but I'm just gonna tell you there's something
There's another answer in this.
That you could pursue
That'd be worth one point six trillion.
Oh, and by the way, your tribe's idea.
That's Reddit. That becomes a whole
company industry

So
There's a point in trial where
I knew my metrics weren't working, our D thirty retention was terrible.
We were sinking speedboat.
And
If I had
Had this
Attitude of
I'm going to try a lot more ideas. I'm a look around me. Like
If you're doing proven better knee, you're also looking around you for what's
What are you finding he to proven the market?
That you can
Also go test.
And
You know, I would have massively
Change 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're conscious or not, it
It's wild.
So kind of the steps that I hear is
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 ten out of ten 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
You don't think about them that way, but basically the I thought there was a music player, they made it better and they added some new stuff. And it Yeah.

I was there at the tech conference when this team from MIT was demoing
Their touch screen.
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.

obsessing over their 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
Is a touch screen.
It's only new idea.
Um and I wanna say
Proven get so misused.
And that 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 nineties.
proven is
And they
They pick something
That
And it's
To their own.
Detriment.
There's
They're not using proven
You 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
But it's not
If it's not on this platform, it's
Yeah, it doesn't count as
And
And yeah.
Yeah.
The masters at
This product craft.
do proven better new whether they call it that or not.
And they do it.
It's such
Uh
A beautiful level that nobody even thinks
No one
realizes what its derivative of. And 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 get a if you can have a successful product
And I 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 may get
much more accessible or something much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack.
Um
People love that even more.
There's a this thread of uh of copying that comes through this framework that
Will turn a lot of people off.
Uh
Talk about w 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 maker, you
You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go
Be an innovator.
And so
It can feel like a beat down.
That
Your path to innovation.
starts with copying other people's work, and we were taught in school copying is cheating.
So
There's
There's a lot of good
uh reasons why we've built this kind of moral
Resistance.
Two.
Copying.
But
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 Zinga.
If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.
If you 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
You're not going to worry about
Whether you're gonna take the best ideas wherever you can find them.
If they are in service of giving her
of an experience that she loves more. And so
If
Yeah,
So
And if you 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 and I think that the
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 consumer if
movies, T V shows, you know, books, if if they feel
Two derivative.
And they're not adding something important and new.
Um
Then it
It
could go against, you know, our consumer taste.
But the best product makers
And I
Love referencing someone like
Craig Newmark and Craigslist we
took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. I was like and he lived in my neighborhood.
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 try to be friends with them 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? 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 don't 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 wanna why isn't that better?
In his mind it was new.
They're like that's
A world class product maker because he what he gets is that
His
Th there's
We feel the sense of ownership.
of products that we rely on every day. And
We're angry when they change, even if they change for the better.
We're like
Angry because
We go through life faster because of pattern recognition.
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.
Yeah, 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 that I don't know.
Yeah, I'm thinking like as you're talking, I'm just thinking, uh what are all the best products and are they all just kind of
Uh
One word to
Are they copies and evolutions of existing products, or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around like
The iPhone that was, you know, there's phones before they kind of took the elements of what was great, made'em awesome.
uh my Awala, I don't know, uh water bottle. Like there was
Water bottles that work and then they added
Things to make it better.
uh chrome. I don't know. I'm just like looking around. Like 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 what do you often do? 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 there's like it's easy to get turned off to this idea of like
The word copy
But I like 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
We could literally spend the whole podcast on it. Which
I'd be fine with two, or do a whole episode just on this.
'Cause it so much comes up for me. On the one hand I think about
Nikita, who I think you've had on.
And
I love it
His story on TBH.
It's a perfect
Example of
Mm.
Found proven
In someone else's product, I that was my first company free loader.
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 it 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 right of his product.
And he said
My God, they they nailed it. So
I think
the when we can see something that is proven already
In someone else's product.
But they have
you know, the wrong
Idea.
Around it.
That's gold.
You know, that's
That's one and then

Is every product
Derivative is every product
From proven better data.
My answer's no.
And I and I talked 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 Roveo getting to angry birds.
They made forty five games. Every single game was totally different.
Not
As far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures.
Or the market.
And their forty fifth 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

Very similar story, but opposite path, which was
O M G pop.
Created
uh the hit game draw something and Zinga bought them. They were the number one
game and app in the app store for
Sixty days in
You know, two thousand
twelve.
But OMG pop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative.
No one ever seen her tried it before. It failed completely.
And now they were ruthlessly
Desperately in need.
Of a hit.
And now they did proven better new.
Perfectly they said.
We're going to take
This
proven game and do every

In
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.
Yeah.
Uh yeah.
I I love this idea of moral arbitrage that's such a Peter Tillion, you know.
Um
Yeah. So there's there's so many fun threads that kind of connect all this. One is and you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build.
Amazing product. 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'd say
Th there's there's so many paradoxes.
In this and
And one that I've had to learn over and over again is
Yeah.
If if we're
If we're too ambitious.
And we're 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

It's it might
Usually that
The starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many
A these
Massive hit.
Products or you know, franchises.
started with such humble
Um you know
non ambitious places and you know the Facebook
Was just
An app to
Check out
girls and guys, you know, at Harvard, right?
And
The irony for me is that
I I've
I've found that my career has gone in these waves and and maybe
Some of your other
Founders have had this experience too.
Yeah, I've
Started in a very
Humble.
Place of
I just want to get to
Any
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
Very very
Small, humble premise.
And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know
Elon has is the exception to the rule.
Part of it is
I think he can raise the three.
magical unlimited amounts of capital which helps. But
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.
be 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 try but 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 was multiple inside tribe.
That worked.
The tribes the the idea of these urban
Tribes.
Work. People loved it.
Para ahí
It's too ambitious.
And so we failed.
And then
I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about.
For so long.
And I was so
Just
Desperate to get out of that abyss.
By the time I got to Zinga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean
To be forty one.
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. It was
People thought I had no dignity. I mean, people were like Mark
There's so much you could do in the world.
But
I
Was
I'd say
My my
Ambition
Came down to like
Uh
A thousand.
foot altitude, you know, not a hundred thousand foot. And and that was
The key to that being successful and
And I see this with
It's just so hard. I see it with so many
product founders and
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.
Yeah.
That's the good news for everyone watching. Like everyone
has the same
Chance and in a lot of ways.
If you're in a more humble place, you have you have a better opportunity. So
I
The paradox is
The more ambitious you are.
Yeah.
the the more humble you should be and the the smaller place you should be willing to start.
One of your uh insights along these lines is that
This is your advantage as a startup.
is to be less ambitious because Azok.
needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. Anything they take on needs to be
many billion dollar business opportunity.
And as a startup, you don't need to do that. And
And this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end. Yeah. Yeah. Being willing to pursue these little threads.
When they're flaky, when they're
They're not a business when there's so much earlier and and so many of
The successful
companies today, you know, started there. Yeah, is there an example that comes to mind when'cause
Yeah, what's like an what's a what's a company or two that started very unambitious.
I love the story of Bolt dot new.
That really blew up last year.
I loved it so much I cold mailed the founder because I was just so impressed with
Yeah.
And
You know, they
They twiled in obscurity.
on something that they were into and then they
Open sourced it.
I think they
We're barely able to keep going with commercial development.
And then they had this realization one day of wait a second, if we take these
Uh web stacks.
virtual machine that we've
In making
work on the web, but we actually
Add that to
And AI coding
Co pilot.
We now have something
That's better than what anybody else has.
And
And I
I think that was just
A great story that
He
They were passionate about one thing and you know, and they stuck with it. Yeah. Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that.
Oh he was?
So impressed.
Um in a lot of ways
Slack also, you know
Was
Humbled
Stuart.
keeps trying to start game companies.
And
Those turn into
Unexpected bigger
Hit companies.
Um we'll see what he does next. He now has probably so much capital he could
Just keep
doing a game company this time.
Try again to unhumble.
Go big. Yeah.
But each time, right? So he started a
Mm.
Big.
Uh
you know, idea for like the the mass market MO, which I've also loved, but really difficult.
And they were
humbled in that enough to say
Okay, well wait, there's this little teeny
thing that our engineers use.
Let's build a product around that. And
It takes
Mm.
It really takes
A
A really attuned
Curious humble.
Founder
to to call the ball on that. I mean
It's I can't imagine I mean I 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 you have to we have to express confidence as founders.
Whether or not we have
Actual confidence inside.
We 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?
А до вистати.
And transparent.
And not
rattle our team.
You know, how do you
And I've
I'm still learning. I had
I had people
I
er on the side of transparency
And honesty and
Yeah, I
Being authentic.

And I burn out people in that process and I
I did it Zinga and I have
Since
Because

You know, people will say
The the negative critique I'm working on me is
Oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in
Excited about a different idea.
And and they're not wrong.
But
Where I can get better at this, maybe.
Is
You know
If if we can
If we can build
Uh
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 plus, even if we could get funding, even if it has
Some traction.
We we have a North Star.
That we are
going not going to stop until we find
product market fit against our North Star.
And this isn't it.
And it and it's gonna take courage on our part and hey
Let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this?
Where do you want to
Peel off and go.
join someone else who's already
A rocket ship.
Which
I
That's a fair career.
But
But
I think that that's to me the real founder mode.
Is
Can you have the courage
to
Two.
To tell your team and your investors that
This isn't it.
That's uh that's exactly where I wanted to go. Uh which is this other piece of advice you give, which is kill hope before hope kill you.
Talk about just
what that is,'cause uh so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly.
So just kinda talk about that and then uh I'm really curious to know when you kind of what it takes to realize an idea is back. When do you decide, okay, this would be plus, let's move on.
I don't know if I get credit for, you know
Making up that quote.
But I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you.
It's
There's a difference between
Belief and hope.
Help.
Is
Confidence without
Basis.
Hope is
Just
You know, it's
It's a prayer.
But it's
But it's it's not
It's not founded in
Anything that your your lived experience
It's not founded in your experience with
your product, your experience with people
Experiencing your product and the data and
And
And I think that

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 they're collecting winnings.
They're not making bets.
They already know.
You know.
If 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
If we're going off hope.
We're getting to this MVP.
minimum viable.
That the viable is
the the word we gotta
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 you're putting a product out.
that you're gonna learn from
And you're putting a product out.
that you're gonna launch that you think
You believe not hope is going to be a hit.
It's really important.
To be crisp.
And to make that distinction.
And and AI is
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.
Then it took maybe three months instead of three years.
And that's a dangerous drug because
It means
That
Yeah.
What I thought
would happen where we be today is that people would be using AI to build these like
Incredible testing machines.
failure machines that are testing
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.
You know
In a day.
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 what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product.
What are you gonna do differently because you believe it's the wrong product?
You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product.
Oh, 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. It's so often it could be an ad.
I cannot believe
How many times a team
Hasn't even tested ads.
for their product before they
go and put in the market's an afterthought.
And it was so often at Zinga, it blew my mind.
I mean
Give you one story from Zinga.
When we were launching
our first expansion pack for Farmville, which became a mass these became massive business drivers for us.
Um
It was
I think it was Farmville.
Um
English countryside or something.
The team.

Okay, we have
a ten million dollar ad budget.
And we're gonna start running
Ads before the launch.
Like wait.
You have
twenty five, thirty 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 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
a pre user. You'll click here to get access.
Two weeks before anybody else.
And
It turned out.
Everybody
clicked on it, right?'Cause 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 nineteen million dollars worth of keys.
to get early access to
You know, the new expansion pact.
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 and so often
You know, you
You can have
You know, this is an existing product, but you can
turn something 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 or something else that matters.
So
The way we should be using AI.
is as a testing machine, a failure machine.
In a way to
Vib code, clod code.
But
But build.

Yeah.
You know the the
lowest possible
cycled version of your product that you can get.
Signal back on.
Awesome.
I wanna 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 zinga, they're not like
This is the product I wanna build.
Yeah, and there's a spectrum.
Of all of products you guys have built. There's like
Uh
Far Farmville and Cityville and all these things that I think P
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 just speak to that?
Sure. I I think if I'm unpacking that
When you say
Yeah.
That the pribes turn people off.
It's it's funny you say that because
Farmville and Cityville.
were
Our biggest hits.
In terms of
Installs, engagement, retention, revenues.
Um
No.
Words of Friends and poker were more enduring because they
made the transition to mobile.
And the other games.
Didn't
It's a whole other story.
But
But I think the part you're getting to is that
Zinga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success that
It was
Our games were
so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that
The
Your friend who was playing it
started to bug you.
as a person not playing it.
And
And
That's
That's fair.
What I would say I think what's misunderstood about
Zinga from the beginning and
why we succeeded and we created
Uh
Eight.
massive hits out of ten mass large game launches. We had a very high
hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality.
It was that
We we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. And we had lots of competitors
Lots and copying and
We still managed to keep winning.
And

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 and I want
Your founders
Product makers.
Watching this to
to join me in thinking about which is
How can we add more dimensionality?
I love this idea of
It's it's what I call a bulbeat. It's
It's
How do I take this thing that's kinda gotten boring and wrote?
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.
What
The reason why
People
So many, especially middle aged women.
Love
Farmville and these games was because
They 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 there are things that
Let you
Do gifting and do things.
Of
you know, value to your
For your friends.
And so
We called the games.
Invest, Express, and Connect. You could
Do something that was
You are being seen as creative.
People don't wanna be creative, they wanna feel creative. So we're letting you
Feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Mid Journey does for me today.
And then we were letting you
So so you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting
with people around it.
So that was the first thing and then at
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 to track day three sixty five retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today.
I talk about 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 three sixty five retention.
No.
Can you build against day three sixty five retention? Yes.
You we can't wait till day three sixty five.
We can find early indicators.
Of a positive day three hundred sixty five and a negative day three hundred sixty five retention.
If you have
Low D one, low D thirty, you will
Probably not have
in Ohio day three sixty five. So those
Track.
You know, those are correlated.
But you can have the opposite. You could have very high
Day thirty and a zero day three sixty five, which is most products and if you don't
Think about
why someone would use in a year
If you don't have that mentality
It turns out.
When someone tries our product, they
Think that way too.
they kinda think is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera
It's
Am I gonna use this in a year? Should I
Tell my friends about this or
You know, is this
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 there's been many
You know
Be real. There's right, we've seen these.
They're sinking speed boats.
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.
Yeah, we just try to

Or plug the hole in the boat.
And
You know, or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But
But yeah, so we
we were tracking both in our games in our network what what was the retention and we were
We were really constantly thinking
About
Yeah.
About
That and
And I think
The two things to take away from
Zinke success.
In my opinion that I hold
Is
is to have a strong innovation vision that
translates to what your teams are doing every week.
Yeah.
And we even built
A metric.
That's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if anyone if this doesn't get cut and anyone
Still listening.
We built a metric called ASN.
And it stood for
What what we measure 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's an eighty percent chance we saw you again in the next month.
And if we got you to a four.
There's an eighty percent chance.
We'd see twenty two out of the next thirty days.
And so
We could actually
you know, build and innovate against
that metric. Because
If you saw
Positive loops. It's like
Someone likes your photos, comments, you know, that.
That's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.
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Let's talk about building a consumer social app.
Very
Very few people.
I've successfully done it and built something durable.
Uh 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've you maybe built m more social consumer products than anyone. Like there's like a dozen that have worked.
Uh A AI obviously changes the game.
In in theory.
What do you think needs to be true for someone for something to work again in today's world?
It's probably
Equally surprising to you
how little we're seeing
In social
And
And and consumer in general.
It seems like people have
kind of given up on
The idea that 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, nothing's working.
So I I like to
Think first, is there latent demand?
If if
Just because a category doesn't exist today.
It doesn't mean that we don't want as consumers, in fact.
The best opportunities are usually the opposite. And
In two thousand seven when I started Zinga.
Video gaming was a twenty three billion dollar business.
But I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top ten activity on the web.
And
I thought
There's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing my family.
But I can't get people to play games with me.
And it's
too much investment. It's too hard. It it was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. You literally
I I
Got my nephews.
Who are
Intense gamers
Two.
Play
Rise of Nations with me.
And we set up
Two machines for them and two for me, and we had
Face time going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server.
And we did that one time.
I was like, that is a lot of effort.
And
It was fun, but we did it once.
And I said,
My premis 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 gotta make it
So accessible.
So
Cheap in terms of what it asked for them free.
Not just free even.
Which it wasn't. It was sixty dollars 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 gonna ask.
five to fifteen minutes of you.
You know, to to do this.
And and you're gonna trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not gonna
Like say you
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 two hundred and eighty billion dollar 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'cause they're this big and it's this boring.
And adults ha aren't doing it.
Or they must be some, it's very big, but
None I know.
So
So okay, so social.
Um 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
And TikTok.
But I believe it's 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
Or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips?
Like are these
Positive calories or negative calories?
Um or empty calories in the middle.
And I think
One interesting thing
I we looked at
NPS, net promoter scores.
And we saw
Dead.
when people quit Facebook and quit інstagram
They went from a plus thirty five
to a negative thirty five.
There's
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 it.
So
I think
So I think
All that's to say
I think
It's the biggest unexplored opportunity.
there is on the Internet. I mean I think
I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent
This social experience.
for the agentic AI
Age.
But how are they gonna do it?
You know, I would guess
That they're going to give us
Productivity again.
That they're going
Part of what we got, people forget.
Facebook gave us massive social productivity.
We were able to stay in the loop.
with
Three hundred or a thousand friends.
LinkedIn gave us massive productivity and they still do.
But
They started to
move away from that productivity into a realm of
Wasting time.
'Cause they want it to engage more and have more ads and and less LinkedIn, but
They might have ads now, but
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

In that experience that
Our agents are
Letting us
stay even more in the loop with the people we care about or you know, but not wasting our time as much.
So
And I'll also say this.
There's a side of this
I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay, that's
That's the big
uh instinct vein for me.
And
I think about that cocktail party.
And I think where is that happening or where does it wanna happen?
And how
How do we add things to the cocktail 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's
moves from like obligatory
I'm at this party, it's the birthday party.
To
Almost like greed.
Like
I love this party. I'm
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 that
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 the 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 I had a good date on Friendstart.
Um
So
What I would say to people is like
Look.
If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is or you could host.
And then think about
How is lead generation happening? It might sound weird when I say lead gen, but
What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn star with Lee Gen.
All the productivity, the value started
In
the a utility in being in this cocktail party.
Today
And by the way.
With Zinga I said, I'm gonna go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks.
I'm gonna drop games in the middle.
And give them a new dimension.
to network in the games'cause they wanna be on Facebook. I wanna give them more to do.
Today.
We're all hanging out.
On

On our
GPT
But there's no cocktail party.
So
My my Easter egg to people is
It is it's a
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 your question was
How do you
How do you know when an idea is a B plus?
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
I love the question on
Well how do you know if it's a B plus?
And what I would say to you is
How do you know if you're with
the right person.
Like you're dating what was your experience dating?
And
My experience
has been
That
When I'm with
The right person
I know it.
I'm not asking
Is this the right person? I'm like
Fuck yeah. I
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 plus.
You're asking, could this be the one
You're like you're
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 you're full of hope.
You hope it's an A.
It doesn't mean it's not a
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 do you know
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.
Everything works.
It's
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.
Mm.
Did we have to ask if GPT was
Yeah.
Do we say oh
Is GPT? I'm not sure.
You know.
We're like
No, I'm fucking
living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do.
Right.
So
I'd say
Yeah.
The hard part about this is
You know?
What do you
What do you do with a B plus? First can we
be intellectually honest that it is a B plus.
And then
What do we do with a B plus?
Do we just kill it?
And start all over again.
Do we use it to learn?
The power is knowing it's a B plus.
That that's the first point.
Is
Okay.
This is not it.
Now what do I do with that?
Is it a way to learn to
Do I can I
Do I see examples that are near this that are it?
Can I find anything proven or near proven?
When
When we realize it's not
Yeah.
We we look for more things to do and
It's such a hard lesson.
Two weeks ago I pulled the plug.
on my dot earth project.
For like the fourth time.
Okay.
I've been building my version of the metaverse.
For twenty years.
It's what led me to Zinga.
I call the metaverse that I want life of 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 Reed Hoffman credit for this definition as
Blurring the lines between the virtual and the real.
And that is where our lives are going anyway.
So we're getting more and more metaverse in.
It's not being in this other escape to immersive
World.
It's
It's it the virtual and the real
completely blur.
Together.
And
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 game engine.
Web browser based game engine.
And
I was not getting a product market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not.
Going for a small, small idea is going for a really big idea.
And it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it.
After
Four years
in and twenty five million dollars 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 plus and even more, you know, on a D.
There's a whole uh discussion I want to have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book about how that's such a source of good ideas, but
I wanna 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 S
What's your just like advice to founders? What do you think needs to be
true for a comp for a startup to break out'cause it's so hard now.
Let's start with
Talking about
Consumer distribution, which
Yeah. I understand better.
Yes. Um
There's a
One question we gotta 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 chat we use, AI chat.
It's not in my mind a platform.
A platform in the traditional
Sense of it was
A hardware platform.
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
A an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network.
That opened up.
And
And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface.
We
We're not at that point.
Yet.
I believe we will get there. I don't know how.
I've
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
Uh 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
That
We're kinda like halfway to a platform.
I we are in a point of discovery.
New technologies that break through at the consumer level.
Unlock discovery.
That's really important.
Discovery means
We 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.
Not only are we not in discovery
But
Even when we are
We don't it doesn't stick. You know, there were something like forty thousand new games launched
last year in the app store.
And zero
You know, became
Top ten hits and zero even sustained top twenty five or fifty.
So
Your odds are bad.
Okay.
So
It's not
It's
It's not an ideal
you know, moment.
To be
You know, you you can't launch
Consumer.
right now with 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.
Uh it's much easier, you know, to be pro Sumer or Enterprise now. Um, but for good reason because
We're seeing those companies.
scale revenue ARRs.
Um 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 consumer any business idea, but any consumer idea.
And
It it can't be an afterthought.
It's not I'm gonna build the best mouse trap and they're gonna come.
distribution has to be part of
your product and part of
baked into the strategy deeply.
And
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.
You know
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'cause it'll there'll be
a hundred times more noise and once
There is distribution, there'll be
A flood of competition, but
But
When distribution is this broken
It is even more core to your product.
And your strategy.
And I
I think we're seeing many more
successful companies
that find a pro Sumer approach, that find they go after their power users, their whales.
The people who care enough to find it.
Care enough to spend money on it up front.
To sustain a business.
You know
Long before
We can
get out to consumer
Mm.
There there is a great
Idea that
Um
I got to
That Gary Tan had that
I'll repeat here'cause I loved it so much this week.
Yeah.
If we get in the mindset
Of
Basically
Uh intelligence on tap.
Free tokens.
And if we think that
The the amount of tokens
We're buying today.
You know that
Will basically be free.
In a year or two.


Token.
You know, 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 when
I remember ordering pig ears for my dog Zinga.
And and wanting to send thank you notes to the V Cs 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 in a phenomenal business.
Because
What the dot com thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't gonna come down or delivery wasn't gonna come down.
But the price of tokens will be.
I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight.
That
I'm intrigued by
And I think
I think
Founders are going to do something really interesting with it that
Because games.
Don't work freemium games and freemium apps.
that have to go and hit
The AI the
Even if
you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits, right?
So
Getting around that today.
Might unlock.
Really interesting
Innovation.
Another Easter egg thought on
The social cocktail party.
I love the idea.
Of
The agent
being in the middle of and brokering our social relationships and getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs.
Yeah.
General listings.
But I love the idea that the agent
has our context and knows my context and your context.
Yeah.
This membrane, I call it the social membrane, this intelligent membrane of trust.
And it
It gets smarter and smarter at knowing when
to
Change dynamically change that trust.
Or change that attention level that it's gonna take from us.
Like a
Great chief of staff.
And
And it could
share less information with both of us than it knows.
It could be
You're a Marin and
I'm like, Lenny, let's hang out. You're like, Mark, I 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 and hanging out.
And how do we
Broker that without hurting
Yeah, one of our
Feelings or you know going into
There's some really interesting spaces that the
That the
AI and the agent
Can
broker between us.
In
in ways that start to
Give us both
Productivity. They they find ways for us to get together without
Going without
Getting in

You know.
You see me on your calendar for Saturday and you wanted to be with your kids.
I love all these ideas you're sharing.
Like what I'm hearing there, there's this always this idea of why can't we just here's my calendar, here's your calendar, let's just find time.
And like the issue there is you don't want to ever feel like
You don't want to look like you're you got nothing going on and you're like the most boring person. Like you don't want the the other person to know. Yeah, exactly.
Um and and even worse, you don't want it to to you don't want it to
Schedule you for a meeting, you know, that
Just to close the loop on the distribution part.
What I'm hearing is like
we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you.
Uh it's not there yet.
I I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this'cause I don't have enough evidence to believe it.
And I'm it's a little more likely to me than just hope.
I think right now there's a
obvious race and competition around coding between the major
L
I think they're gonna get back to consumer
M pro Sumer
And developers' hearts and minds.
And I think they are interested in developers' hopes 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
They're
There will be some kind of
There will be some kind of consumer facing platform.
For
For AI apps and agents.
I I can see so many
I can see so many consumer facing agency services.
That
Make so much.
Sense to me
That I think consumers will want.
But
They're not gonna get it because it's
If it's just buried in I doubt they're gonna get it buried in the mobile app store. And I think it's going to be in open AI's interest.
Claude.
Grock.
Um
to
To see these apps.
consumer facing agency service apps.
happen and see them be successful.
With
their LM baked in and the more it's uniquely instantiated to open AI,
The more it
Drives
their consumer value proposition. One example that
My my
Number one is my Easter egg on this is
I
Think there should be
An agentic
Travel agent.
So
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'cause we won't
Pay enough for it.
Is a travel agent.
I believe if I offered you
A free
twenty four seven travel agent.
That
was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you.
And we'll actually
Book not just book travel.
But I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of the travel
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 they weren't getting enough
Commissions and we weren't ready to pay the enough. So
They
We're
The Internet has grown through us getting a better deal.
But I think
the the next area of growth
probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services.
And 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 it's a it's a tough road. But if
If there was
specifically baked into
Open AI
Or Claude.
And
was a
Gave me a
A real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond.
Yeah, there's there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that
I'm having
More and more trouble.
Differentiating.
And it's just
I don't even know anymore if I'm
Asking a question to Claude or or to GPT.
So they
At some point
And that's why they
They're differentiating themselves right now.
On coding.
And there's real value and the
That's an amazing
Business.
But
But they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.
Yeah. To me like the question is are they each just gonna do it or why do they need anyone to do it if they
or building this A GI that can just do all the things.
So I think it's gonna be interesting to see if they just wanna eat the entire market of everything where they
Play nice with other startups.
Yeah, that that is going to be interesting. And and look, we there's
We can see past examples with Microsoft
you know, Microsoft was a brutal
Monopoly. They were a brutal platform.
You know they
They ate everything around them.
And
And then you know with
Us you know, we saw it on Facebook, you know, they
The two areas that they just didn't care about.
going into was music,'cause it was
really painful with IP rights and games.
Because they didn't want to like
higher artists.
Uh but everything else they did absorb.
I'm gonna go in a different direction and touch on all these really
Amazing nuggets of advice.
For scaling company
Managing people, hiring people, working with people. I want to just kinda touch on a bunch of these.
Um
One is this idea of making everybody a CEO.
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 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 feeling path.
So we've 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 the bigger principle to me
That
I started to get to was
that oh, I'm like all of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing we're not when we're not in the room.
So I was like okay, if if I give them a hill to take
And if I make
Them a CEO.
Make them a real CEO. I mean they
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.
S
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
Uh
I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team.
Um
So
Can I hire other people like that? And and I
I like to say
I was
a frustrated expert witness when I work 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 they're 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
And that's a beautiful thing. So
So yeah this
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's
Saying everyone should be an individual contributor.
Everyone should be managing

That's really
kinda 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 uh nugget of uh 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 twenties.
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
What if
I'm disagreeing because I'm fucking 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
The paradox of it that 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 minutia 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 and the
Conferences, you know when
Mm.
I tried to have that same mentality.
Oh.
Micromanaging
The really small pixel level details that matter and
I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord.
And they
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
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
Ar 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

in doing things in non scalable ways and doing it
himself with the team by hand.
Yeah.
There's so many stories about Jeff.
Bezos and Zach 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.
You were the best.
product maker in the company, we want you on the field.
You know, we 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, uh Elon famous for this too.
You have this uh
line in the book along these lines. Micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can.
I
believe that and and I I did that building Zinga to a fault. I mean we we got to a point that
I had all the way to fifty employees.
We had a stand up call that would go on for two hours.
And I
I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're gonna do today.
And I 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 gonna do today?
And
I completely micromanaged.
But we were
Much more effective.
And then I I
Yeah, I kept micromanaging things as 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 I
I I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was twenty years ago, but
Like
When I was building Zinga we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or
You know, expecting
Uh
you know, massive
results from our teams.
And and I think
I'm happy to see that that's becoming
Kind of.
accepted as
more it's closer to best practices today, I think.
But
Um
But my point about like
Okay.
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
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
Your skill
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 assistance.
And 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 in the organization. The first thing is put them in the room with you.
Like
So the idea of this teaching hospital was
Okay, I'm just gonna put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings.
And
Have them.
My
Passion and ideas and approach.
You know, spread to all of them too.
And
And that worked. And then
Grab someone from the ranks.
Make them your tech assistant.
Have them just
Follow you around for six months or twelve months.
Make
Make it the mini me. The person who is you in your twenties
Who was
The expert witness, a little bit of a know it all.
Um
And
And start
Having them follow you around to pick up
Learn absorb everything you do.
and give them projects to test them.
And
And then
Hopefully.
you've created a mini me that you can now put in at in a much bigger role.
Somewhere else and
In fact.
Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff.
used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant.

It actu that idea actually scales and you kinda get it for free.
I love this phrase of transference your vampire play.
Oh man.
Um, maybe one last uh 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.
Um
But
If if I gotta pick one if I get to pick one thing
That you do as CEO, I'm gonna pick
That you're right.
So
Even if
You don't
You know
Even if you don't
operate the ship or the factory that well.
I'd rather that you picked
the right product, the right strategy
Then
You were phenomenal execution or
inspiring people or managing because
You know.
Being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
And I
A great boat in, you know.
I
Dead late bed, you know, isn't going anywhere.
Yeah.
So
Uh.
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
And I look for that.
In the team and
Less
Do I like your style or approach or
Yeah.
You're
Yeah.
Personality fit. I'm like
I'll take
I'll take misfits who are right.
I'm like I want I want those
really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest and
And
You know, the more
people you have around you who
You know, that's
Yeah.
Putting balls in the net.
I wanna 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
You that part of your life?
And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are are parents and great parents
In this AI era.
And there's a lot of stuff I wanna ask about, but let me start here it's just
What's something that you are
Teaching them or helping them develop that you think is gonna be important to them in this
Crazy world we're we're entering of of AI.
Thank you for asking about this. I
It's I think my greatest
role and job and
And service to the world is
Trying to grow.
Good humans.
It's like really, really put a lot into it and take it seriously and I get so much
out of it. I I like to say I'm growing my best friends.
Um
And so far it's true.
So there's a couple of principles that

Philosophies that have
Uh
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 the first one for me is
I have five kids. They're
Every one of them is just
Such
A different
version of a human and
I have
A special needs son
Uh who's fairly extreme special needs.
Um
our new one year old baby
uh has a gene mutation, and she actually may also end up
being very neurodivergent.
Um
So
You have this wide range. My my fifteen year old girls are
They're twins and they're completely divergent from each other.
This first principle that
I've found is
Meeting them where they are.
And and
And it's
We kids I find
We can
kind of talk down to them. We could talk to them as kids.
Um
And it' or we can kind of
treat them like adults and neither of those are right. It's like we gotta like find
Engage with them at the altitude that they're
Uh
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 what 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 home schooling so I taught them and their friends daddy math.
And I just try to teach them a math brain.
I and I didn't
know where they were supposed to be. They were in fifth grade.
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 I found out I
We found out later I taught them all the way through eighth grade math.
Um
I didn't know it, they didn't know it, and that was cool.
And then I'd say in the
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 twenty million graduates a year or whatever number
But it was factory produced.
It was and it was four
A certain kind of
Work.
First factories, then knowledge workers.
You know.
Knowledge working.
Is going away. It's changing.
But we're still cheating.
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
Have critical thinking.
More than
And and I say I don't care if you go to college.
Which is a little hard for them'cause 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.
Uh she's also neurodivergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia.
And she created
She created a brand of
Sweatshirts.
Called Comfy Fancy.
Um
And she also has created
Uh
A gathering, a grouping a group for
Um
neurodivergent middle school kids.
called Neurosparkly.
And
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.
I I've also
What I'm
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.
And I know
So so what do I want my kids doing?
I w I try to teach them
Two
When
When in a
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? What's their lived experience and how has that
impacted it.
So
I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not no more answers.
And and I think that's you know in
And and I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online
use and what I try to promote and discourage.
It's
I try
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.
'Cause that's how you're gonna get something back.
And not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences and
And
Sometimes it works, and I see them doing that and then sometimes it doesn't, but
Yeah, that's that's how I'm trying to
Navigate this. I also
tried to make it till they were sixteen with no phones, no smartphones.
And I got to fourteen, I got them flip phones.
And
They had
internships at Nyantic working on Pokemon Go. They built a first time user experience.
It's really good.
What that they were they I think used.
But they had to get smartphones for that and they still have them and so
So eve you know, I tried to make it and I didn't.
No man.
That's hilarious.
Oh, and and I also I'll say one more thing.
For my older girls.
I keep a running
Uh
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 gonna actually like write that up with stories.
And I keep it in this document for them and who knows
If they'll use it.
They they do
start to repeat some of them. So I know they read it.
Um you know.
One is
Nothing's personal.
Don't
Don't ever take anything personal.
And if
You assume nothing's personal.
You're probably right.
nineteen out of twenty times and the twentieth time you probably handled it right because of that.
So
That's one, you know, and
Don't be a victim.
You know, the the world doesn't happen to you, it's happening around you. And
Yeah, you're we're defined how we react to the world, not by
the events that happen to us.
So
I'm trying to
You know
Give them these

You know and
And it's
And um
And they're teenagers with the older two and
You know, and I'm
in it and learning and
And I've got two littles that
Yeah, a one year old and a four year old who
Sleep with me every night and
Oh man.
Yeah.
You're busy.
Uh
I feel like it's clearly what your next book is gonna be is these life philosophies. I I I feel like these are useful for people, for human for adults, I mean. Yeah, I wanted to write a book on parenting.
Saying everything
Everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zinga.
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
You know, she
Uh.
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
It's resonated most in
Writing in my book of life.
For the last
Thirty years.
It took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zinget forty one 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 they 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 know, you're post economic or
You're a bored rich guy, or whatever.
I'm like, Well
I haven't done my thing yet. Like
I like to
Like what is
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
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 those digital skyscrapers.
that the next generation
Can't believe anyone ever lived
Without
And
So that's
That's my ambition and why mm why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and
Yeah.
Uh
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.
Uh tell people where to find it.
Uh anything else you want to share about the book?
Well
You have a copy. I just got a copy.
So somehow.
So
'Cause you're important.
Uh.
We hope you read it twice.
Um
Give it out to a friend.

Uh I would just say that
Life and speed of play is
My
It's
I'm trying to share my my playbook and philosophies.
And
I
I'm hopeful that somebody
Uh
Will steal some of my ideas.
And
And take it further and and
We're all
kind of in a conversation and I love this podcast and and you hosting this cocktail party.
And
We're we're all trying to move
Good.
The philosophies and the craft of product making.
ahead and and we're we're all learning
As we go.
And
And I hope that my book
uh can be something referenceable.
And I hope it's
Easy and fun to read because
I have pain reading a lot of books.
Mm. It is actually very easy to read. It's like very not that long and it's very
uh bite sized. So great job with that.
Oh good. Um
Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us.
Thanks this is
This is fun. This is actually
I've 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.
I'm trying to
I'm trying to only go into places, you know, that
That I wanna talk about.
You know.
Which I tried to do in the book.
So there we go. Thank you for
Inspiring me to want to talk about product.
Yeah.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Mark. Bye everyone.
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