Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f494de84a9026d3a

You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI.
Out loud, let's go through this framework.
I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards.
Awesome, great. This is like showing us nudes for for my first million. This is like exactly what we like. I feel like I could rule the world of nowhere.
But I want to
So all right, you've done everything. You built uh a ten billion dollar company, you're I I think a seed investor in Facebook or early investor in Facebook.
One thing you haven't done
is sitting still. I'm looking at your biography and your timeline. It seems like you start a company, it either sells or fails, and six months later,
You have a new company. And you've done that like eight times, it feels like. Do you ever sit still?
I'm working on sitting still.
My partner Hillary
We said she's like a tree and I'm like a hummingbird and so I'm I'm trying to be more like
Like a redwood tree.
Wha wh why is that? Why not just embrace your nature of just being this extremely generative creative guy? Well who who cares? Why why be the tree? Be the bird.
Well, I think it's good to have a balance. I'm trying to
I'm not trying to sit still from a
Creative
business work perspective. But
In
Home life. I think it's more
It's good balance.
You know, I've added like morning practice with breathing and meditation. So I definitely have extreme A D D and so
But I but I do better when I focus.
But they both work really well together. You know, my daughter Carmen
Has dyslexia and A D D.
And we tried
Adderall and some of those things.
And she liked it first, and then I was like, Wait.
Your brain is beautiful the way it is.
I don't want to sh normalize your brain and standardized it.
Let's
Figure out what
Works best for your brain, you know?
So it's a I'm a little bit
Like that with myself was just saying
The way I work, the r I call my investment and incubator
Um workplay ventures because
I love this.
Kind of
triangulation between workplay and usefulness to the world.

took so long and was difficult because
It took me a long time to find.
The
The function.
kind of narrative and voice for the book.
One of the cool parts is that you uh you're very transparent about money.
And
That was pretty cool. I think you were in your late twenties or so when you sold Freeloader. I think you said you made like two or three million dollars. You sold it for eight thirty eight
Million.
You walked away, I think, with three or five, you can correct me if I'm wrong.
Five after taxes.
Five after taxes and I had to pay short term gains'cause it was so fast.
It was like a ten month or something like that. Yeah. Which is crazy.
And then you wrote
A thirty eight thousand dollar check.
to Facebook. I think you said that that would be worth six billion dollars now.
How often are you doing the math as to how much that would be worth had you not sold it. Is that part of your morning meditation you calculate what nine million shared of Facebook is?
I
It's amazing. I
I say in the book that
It is so true in this life, like some of the patterns that I recognize is if you pick the right body of water
It you don't have to pick the right boat.
Both.
Pick the wrong body of water, the best boat isn't gonna help you.
And
It's just been so true and
The Internet obviously

It's like
the whole thing. Um you can't even call it a body of water. And you know, AI is like that now.
And
There's so many instances where I sold something
That I was early and it became
It would have become worth a lot. I mean, but even in selling
My first company free loader.
You know
We said no to Yahoo.
They had I think thirty five employees, they've been public like six weeks.
They're worth eight hundred million.
We would have had
five percent of the company, I would have had one and a half percent. I remember all these numbers for sure.
But
I I wrote on the back of an envelope.
Like if I got fired in year one.
Which deal would be better if I got fired from year two. I knew I'd get fired.
And so I just was trying to figure out.
Well what point
How long would I have to make it before the Yahoo deal is better?
You know, and I thought I'd have to make it at least like
Two to three years and that seemed
Unlikely.
So
But I was wrong, even one year
Would have been
Amazing and that check.
Was that ten so that was ten percent of your net worth you put into Facebook's seed round. Is that right? Is that math right? No, no, no, no. Thirty eight thousand. I Oh, thirty eight thousand, sorry, I was like five hundred thousand.
No, I
Th there's nothing brilliant about my Facebook
investment and
I get
Kind of bugged when I see people

But that they were.
You know, a seed in or early in there were only three seed investors in Facebook. It was me
Read and
Peter Teel.
But
You would have anyone listening to this would have made the same investment.
that I did if they could have.
You know, it's
Find more impressive.
That I was in a place that
you know, Zuckerberg and Sean Parker walked into my office then
That I
you know, decided to invest.
So so tell tell the story of how that happened because I feel like the P Peter Thiel gets a lot of uh recognition for that. And even Reed kind of I think introduced or facilitated the meeting. I feel like you're not l put included in that story as much. So as a historian of Silicon Valley, I want to know what what was going on then. So can you take us back?
How did that investment happen? What was the what was going on? I think Sean Parker was your intern at one point and he was a
Sean.
has this amazing nose for viral consumer
Heads and
And he found free loader really early.
And wrote me this whole long
Email and
S
He was a Unix programmer and he'd come work for free for the summer. He I think he was sixteen.
And I said sure and he came
And he was awesome. I don't know if he actually knew
How to program Unix or not?
I still haven't actually ever
But

Yeah, he was
a force even then
And and then he started Napster with the other Sean Fanning.
And
emailed me about Napster and just said
We turn on these couple servers, this music
Sharing and it's
Every server is full, we need more money.
And we need a hundred thousand dollars and I just mailed them a check for a hundred thousand'cause again, that was just
A no brainer. You always send that check.
But
Yeah, and Napster.
could have been gigantic. And I think that was the beginning of the whole social media
you know, wave and revolution, but just
A bunch of years, a few years earlier.
And then
Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes. The team at HubSpot went through.
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Back to the show.
And read and I
Had
Met while he was at PayPal.
Around politics and then
We both
kind of came back to
consumer internet in oh two thousand two. There's a small number of people
We both

The first checks into Friendster, which we just thought was like a useful experiment.
And then
Uh, it started to blow up in February of O three, like a month after it launched.
And I guess it was
In O four
That Sean walked
Zuckerberg into my office at Tribe.
And said
You gotta side s.
I just joined this company and
And I'd heard about the Facebook, you know, I'd heard they were in
А капло скол.
He said we have a wait list for all the rest of the schools or that wanna be want us to launch and
You know but we launch a school
It sounded just like Napsterby's like we launch a school
We get eighty percent the first week.
The next week we get the other twenty percent. Um
Zuckerberg was just sitting here, this he really looked like he was like fifteen or sixteen. I think he was nineteen.
And
He was in like
basketball shorts, you know, Hawaiian flip flops, had his feet up on my table and
Gave me a car that said, You know, I'm CEO bitch.
And
And it just gets a little bit more.
from another world, he was just so unapologetic and
It just didn't matter because
His metrics were amazing. Like
between sixty and eighty percent of his users logged on every day or just stayed logged on.
He had nailed trust.
Yeah, every single

Cell phone and
at the time it connected to their computer.
They had this product called Wirehog, I think, that
Would was like Napster that would
upload every file and music and things from your computer and
And I was
I was failing so miserably with tribe.
Yeah.
Well tr tribe was also a social network.
Before Facebook it was
It was one of the first three social networks.
And
And I like to say that
But
Part of
the the deep painful scars and learning that
went into Zinga and went into this book and I'm hoping to save other founders
From doing
'Cause it's it really is like
a friend who's just in a bad relationship and you're like he's just not that into you like
Stop it.
Have some dignity. Like you could go back and shake me when I was doing Tribe and say, Mark
You're
There's so much like in this.
Stop just
sticking heroically to this one idea
That's
Too complicated.
got trust wrong and it and it's not working and
There were probably ten social networks that launched in that era.
And eight.
were successful like you know
Bibo was around that time, you know, Michael Birch.
He was he sold for a lot of money to AOL, as you know.
Um tag.
Later my space.
And I managed to fail with Tribe, like
'Cause I just stuck to
one idea when when everything was working. And so by the time Zuckerberg and Sean walked to my office
I knew enough to invest.
I should have
Copy them.
I mean I should have
Said okay, they've nailed trust.
I don't necessarily have to do the dot EDU, although it was brilliant and I could have done it, but
I think like so many founders I was stuck in this pride.
And and
And didn't do you know, Peter Till would call that a moral arbitrage.
Right.
We don't feel good about that.
Right.
But
Someone's gonna copy it.
And and
Did and will and and now that's
You know.
Unapologetically part of
Zuckerberg's playbook and we see them coming out with their own Calci or
You know, and that's
It it's just the efficiency of the market and the internet that

Yeah.
going to do it and it's actually how we get more innovation because
If they just
Exactly copied it.
it will probably fail. But if they
Did proven better new, like I write about
In the book.
They might
get to something that that's an innovation.
Hey, when he uh

Does what he did, you know, he's got that audacious business card, he's got his feet on your desk or whatever.
Are you turned off by that? You're like this cocky, arrogant prick, or are you like, I love this Hutzpa, this is awesome.
You're both. You're everything at once. And you have some deep self loathing too.

Ah.
You know, remember like
I was
Not a first time
Founder at this point.
I had some
swagger, like I'd my first two companies were very big successes and now I was on my third one and
It seems ordained, you know.
And
Social network's working
And it's not mine isn't working. It it was. It was like a sinking speed boat. Like we had huge virality, no retention, or
Very, very limited retention.
And
You're like he
He's got he's holding you know, if you're playing poker, he's holding the nuts like
He's got the cards.
So he can be arrogant, you know, in your front of brain, hopefully your executive function is working enough to overcome your ego and emotions and say
Dude.
You you have to invest in this if you can because
Y he's got the winning hand, and you you've been playing this game, you know.
enough to know this is the winning hand.
What was the moment that you thought, Oh, this guy's gonna be like generational. This isn't like a oh uh a short term viral app. This is g this guy could be one of the greats.
That that came later.
As he went it it went from
Just
This fun kinda he had lightning in a bottle, this rocket ship.
Um
He was having fun hiring all his friends and all living in a house together.
I remember
Was that like the D conference, um Kara Swishers conference?

The first time he was speaking, I I can't remember.
I don't know if it was the time they kind of famously
I think it was later too. Yeah, I don't this I don't think this is the sweat con.
Um
Like
I
I went up to his room with him for some reason.
I was always trying to
Like
have impromptu product meetings with them.
So he's in his room.
I think he was gonna speak
He he had forgotten, I think, that I had invested or that was part of it.
And said
Oh right.
You on stocks.
What'd you put in? And he did the math and I think maybe I own like
half a percent of the company
And he was like, Wow.
He's like
That's amazing.
That's gonna be
Huge or something. You know. It was almost like in the third person not saying it as
Zuck the founder, the CEO, but he was just like
Almost like a a friend and peer
And then it
K
morph like by the month and he had such a sense
But this was destined
To be
This
generational
company and
I I found he had that
Pretty maybe it was around the time that he brought Cheryl in. Um
But
I think anytime
That
We had issues, like we were getting in their way, like
By tw twenty ten.
When
They were trying to roll out credits and and Zinga was starting to be
A very big part of their platform. We were
We were like
Eighty percent or
of the ecosist app ecosystem
We were like this really overgrown.
Teenager.
And
You know, they were trying to explain why we needed to voluntarily sign up for their credits because everyone would follow
And it was like
He wasn't explaining it in just business terms, he was explaining it more in a way that like
No, not even.
There's a little mafia and w you know, they said they said you're not leaning in
You know, and
I started they they had language that everyone repeat in the company
And
Yeah, I started to kind of
Here lean in
You know, at the time as as
So they wanted Zinga to voluntarily lean in
For credits, even though credits
It w it wasn't just a
thirty percent tax on our revenues. It was it was so
primitive the way they built it, that we were losing fifty percent of transactions. And it
It would have been kind of a
Elective surgery to like chop off our legs if
None of the other developers in the ecosystem were doing it.
But they said you know
He said
Uh
Cheryl worked in the Treasury Department and she can explain to you why
This makes so much sense economically for our ecosystem.
But it was
My point is the way that he was talking about things were like
Don't you get that this is like
In the way of the destiny and the fate of this company.
So
You can't
Stand in the way because
This is fate. You're in the way of fate.
It sounds like a like have you ever read about like
Some of the conquerors. Like have you ever read like about Napoleon?
Um, or any of these folks like Napoleon has this quote where I'm p I'm paraphrasing where he was like
Someone was like, What's your uh what's your heritage? They want to know like where he came from. He's like, Oh, I come from the people who conquer worlds.
Like most people say Irish or whatever. And he was like I c I I I c I I I come from the winner side. Yeah, like what you're describing is very similar.
Where it was like a sense of destiny. And that's that's very rare and intoxicating.
It's an interesting question that's not related only to Zuck, right? Like I think one of the cool things that you've been in the game for so long and you've been
early into a bunch of the right uh what'd you call it the right oceans or whatever the right bodies of water. But I I I wonder
Do you
Yeah.
Can you pattern match now when somebody is
sort of has has that that extra gear or that X factor or whatever it is, or do you think it was a lot more of luck and there was a thousand other people just like them?
That just didn't happen to catch a winning winning train ride.
What's your conclusion?
I I talk about this
In the book.
Th there is pattern matching around lightning and bottle and it's
Every metric and anecdote comes back to this.
The reason why
We don't
pattern match that is because we usually haven't seen it.
And
And this is where B plus the enemy of an A, if if you have to ask somebody
Do you think this is lightning in a bottle?
It ain't lightning in a bottle.
You know, when you've got it.
You don't have to ask anybody. It it's like true love. I mean it's like I hope you guys
you know, have experienced that kind of love that you didn't have to ask anybody else
If they thought this was the one.
And
There's so many things. I mean
Napster

And it's
Friends was like
I thought it was the most unlikely thing when we funded it.
But then I was sitting at a blackjack table at the hard rock.
hotel in Vegas.
And there were these two girls from
They're like
Kinda maybe post college from Ohio.
And
Sitting next to me as one finds themselves in Vegas.
And one turned to the other and said, Oh, can you
I think she said, Can you friendster me?
Or this is a month after it launched and she said
You know, can you it was invite only and she said can you
Invite me to Friendster.
And my head like spun around. I was like, What did you just say? Friendster?
And
And that's
These kind of shocking
moments. And so it can be a one anecdote like that.
It could be
I mean
The first time I played Restaurant City
Uh which was for our competitor Playfish.
I was like holy f
I was so addicted to that game.
Like
I just tweeted back and forth with a guy who was the product manager on it.
Just huge respect. I mean I was so
Addicted to the game.
I just think
There are patterns that you can just see there are metrics. Like
Every time you see sixty percent DAU to MAU
Just invest.
That was
Facebook.
That was
Friendster.
When when sixty percent of the people who
Yeah.
Try this.
Come back every day.
When you get that kind of engagement, that's just
Lightning bottle. What about for personalities?
I can't say that there is
One
Pattern but
There are a lot of
Similarities.
There's there is a certain swagger.
that I see. It's it's not even a personality, it's more of an energy that they have when
When someone's got the nuts, like when they
Have it.
There's a way that they don't give any f
If you care.
Yeah.
is deeply authentic. Now you can fake it like we saw in
The show Silicon Valley.
People can try to be
A derivative fake of that and that might work for a little while. But
There's things like
Uh, I've invested in the last few rounds in this private
um company that has an online the biggest online bank in Europe called Revolute.
Okay.
I've never met the founder.
I'm
Deeply.
In admiration of him.
But
I started admiring him from afar just because
I saw every six months they do another round and beat the projections they'd given us six months earlier.
That's what we were doing at Zynga.
And when you see that, you also
Just invest without
That's
This is not
Investment advice. I'm sorry, this is
What I've done, you know, when
When I see a company
That's just beating its own numbers. And
Yes, in the public markets there used to be Cisco trying to
Manage us with
They very carefully manage, you know, beat and rays.
That
We've started a pattern recognize is not real.
But when it's real
And you're like, they give you numbers that sound
Like
hockey stick and then they beat those
Just
Invest.
Who else have you seen that with? It it's pretty cool to hear that. So Revolu which
We don't we don't use it's it's European. Obviously now anthropic. Yes, they've got that right now. Anthropic. I I did the same
I stupidly skipped.
the first two rounds.
You know
I skipped the five billion valuation and the eighteen.
And
It was because at the time nobody believed there was gonna be room for a second LM and
I worried they wouldn't be able to raise enough capital to compete.
then Amazon led that
Third round.
At like twenty billion.
And then it changed everything.
'cause they had clear access to capital.
Then
The next round that I saw, I think was a hundred and eighty billion.
And I just
Invested.
Okay.
I was wrong.
I'm just gonna invest. I don't
Not gonna worry about the fact that
I could have invested like ten X ago.
And how how do you how how do you think about upside here? Like I invested what it was at eight hundred billion or something crazy. And I'm almost laughing at myself, like, Oh, yeah, let me just
Yeah, eight hundred billion. There's clear upside from here.
But then you sort of have to break your brain and be like I th if if these
Work, how big are these gonna be? How do you think about
The case for how big
These big AI companies are gonna be.
Of
gigantic platform shifts on the internet is that
Whatever we

Underestimate
How big
And profound and impactful. It's gonna be
I don't think anyone even believed really ten years ago that we would have multi-trillion dollar companies say, I remember when all these companies were three hundred billion.
And that seemed like the cap.
Microsoft
Facebook or Meta.
Ten cent and the company Alibaba.
And
I would have theoretically believed they could ten X, but I wouldn't have
I wouldn't have believed I wouldn't have bet my money on it.
Yeah, do you still struggle with that?
Like just under like
We all know this pattern. We all know this pattern like
For example, I like track and field and I always think, Oh, this record is unbreakable and obviously every record every record gets broken, or there's always a new freak.
Same with companies. There's always a new freak. So even though I know that, it's still shocking when you see it. And it's still like I can't believe that.
You just have to get comfortable with this
This kind of
emotional, intellectual
dissonance and separation and
Yeah, it's
It's just
It is hard to grasp.
Like on the one hand.
But then
You know
Yeah if
If basically this
AI, kind of centralized computing.

Part of the stack of
The way
Everything gets done.
It it just
It makes sense that it'll
So I
I
Believe
These companies
We'll get to
At least ten trillion and that means they'll probably get to like
twenty or thirty trillion.
And
So
And it I'm not to I'm not saying they won't
crash before then and there won't be despair, you know?
Who knows with
In Q a lot of people are
Betting that in Q one of next year.
You know, this these infrastructure bets.

But that's what they bet this year and that's why you know
The memory stocks have been on this wild ride and
It's exciting.
Do you play the stock market? Do you do you just like kind of
the game of investing, whether it's Angel, it's stock market, are you pretty active everywhere with your portfolio or like it.
And I I am like more active probably than
I should be.
Can you give us uh an understanding of what your portfolio looks like as a pie?
Sure.
Um
It's well I'd say
I'd say fifty percent
is probably in
Privates of some kind.
Does that include the m is that the markup?
That's probably with
I mean some markup.
And then
Fifty is liquid and
I've been managing my liquid portfolio for about eight years. I I got out of all the hedge funds and
different kinds of funds and I I just decided that they were protecting me from some amount of volatility.
And that
If I could withstand the volatility
I
Rather have control and

It wasn't obvious.
I actually I mean I looked in the previous ten years
I had average two point two percent.
Annual returns on my whole liquid portfolio.
Um, with wealth managers and funds and everything.
But
massively underperformed the market. Thanks experts. Yeah. Oh thanks experts for keeping me safe. Safe and low. You know, it was a very consistent two point two though. They nailed that two point two every year.
No volatility.
And I just I stopped any fixed income.
I just
I just believe that the governments the world have no choice but to print money and so
I I I really like Macro.
Like I've connected with Peter Thiel on macro investing for like
twenty five or thirty years and
So he's
Better than me, but similar, you know.
Can you explain what what does that mean? I I I don't know I don't
I I only buy index ones. I don't know anything.
Well it's sort of like you know, Peter Deal has his talk on YouTube when I don't know it's like
twenty years ago and he's basically describing Bitcoin before Bitcoin.
He's describing like the macro plot problem of
fiat currencies and printing and all this stuff. It's like if you understood that, then it's no surprise when something like Bitcoin shows up.
Give us an example of some of your ideas. What were the big ideas that you got excited about. Whether they're right or wrong. Last year
I found myself in late February.
Like almost fully invested
in equities in my liquid portfolio
Was very bullish. I was very bullish on
What?
Trump would be for tech in the economy.
And then
I started looking at
But
How
bad the dislocations were gonna be from the tariffs and I was like, Okay
My read on Trump is
He's somewhere between he's a good poker player and he's gonna bluff.
He's gonna have some cards, but bluff.
But he's gonna have to keep making his hands stronger.
So we can't
If people don't come to the table, Ray Ray's gonna have to like
Show them some show them some cards and do some
Damage.
So I was like this is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.
And the markets are gonna overreact.
So I
Put most of my portfolio in gold.
And then around April
When these deals started coming in, these tariff deals.
The market wasn't
g coming back and giving much credit
I was like, Okay.
Trump is gonna like
land this plane before the end of the year. And so then I moved
Hugely back into the market.
And
The most volatility and change.
Yeah, I've ever and
This is
Not meant to be a brag'cause I've had bad years, but
But
I was up.
Like
Thirty five percent
on my whole liquid portfolio last year
because of these trades, because of gold and because of
going in and out of the market.
This year not nearly as good. I've gotten
I I'm a huge long term believer in Snapchat and I've been crushed.
So this year I've been crushed in Snapchat, crushed in Bitcoin.
Trading is stressful. Why are you even trading in the first place? Is it just s just because you love it? That's why I said I shouldn't be. I mean
I should be in some place where I'm kinda set it and forget it.
Um
I enjoy it.
And and sometimes it feels like
Because there is no fund manager, there's some things I need to do just to be responsible. For instance
This AI infrastructure trade.
I don't it's a belief trade right now.
Like
I don't know whether or not all these hyper scalers are gonna re up
In Q one of next year.
Or
Or take a pause.
Ан ай лов
These companies and I love the trade almost too much because
It looks generational that you could buy these companies at peg ratios that are like point three or point two five, where
In very uh
Micron, so many of these companies are trading
their trade their PE rate is a fraction of their growth rate.
So
On the one hand, that looks
generational, but it's because
Every the market is worried that
The buying
The capex rate isn't gonna keep
Up at this and so I collared all of it.
Just'cause I don't want to worry about it.
But that made me be like a day trader'cause I had to put
All these collars
On like
ten or fifteen different

But now I can set it and forget it because they're like
Down fifteen, up fifty.
Oh for the next year.
Okay, I
I don't have to worry about it.
One thing I really like just listening to you is that
I like that you are kind of unabashedly
Willing to just have fun and, like you said, blur the lines between work and play. I actually want to read you this. I think you'll you'll appreciate this. I I screenshotted this.
From Blake Mykowski, who started Tom Shoes. He put this on the wall of every office he's had. He said, A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.
He simply per pursues his vision of excellence.
through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing.
To him, he always appears to be doing both.
I yeah, I love that.
I really do believe that
There's like a singularity of ideation and building
Which is that we all will
Feel on the
You know that we're all I
Kinda that's why I started the book saying
The we're so close to this future point where we'll all live like Elon and we'll just
Put our intention in the world.
And
won't need to go through all of the painful steps of
raising venture capital and hiring lawyers and
All of the beat down of life.
And we'll just turn our idea into something
In days that other people
And
We're
In some ways we're there already
But I think at a
business creation level, I think
I think that's the very near future.
And and and it's awesome.
You have this cowboy gunslinger.
Attitude that I love. I admire it.
I would not say that's how I roll.
Um and I'm and but I'm and I'm envious of you.
Like when I see a guy with great style and fashion. It's like I appreciate it.
Couldn't be more different. But I've never seen it. The way that you inter the way that you view life, it's it's not exactly how I do things and I'm envious of you for it.
Are there downsides to this sort of like like you have this very stereotypical Silicon Valley energy that I love.
Do you think that you feel stress the same as the normal person?
I don't think there is like
A constant state of mark.
You know, like
I'm not like
I love what's the name of the guy.
Um
The music guy who wrote the creation the
Create creativity book from Hollywood.
Rick Rubin? Rick Rubin. Like
I wish I was like more like
I admire Rick Rubin, right? He's so zen
I'm not
I'm not
Uh
Not that level.
Um
And
The here's what's so weird.
Sam.
Maybe you guys can relate to this and
And I guess
It is funny to hear that I'm kinda stereotypical Silicon Valley because I
I've
I spent so much of my career feeling like such an outsider to Silicon Valley culture.
And like okay, I don't know what that means now to be in the middle of
the whole thing. I'll have to think about that.
But
This whole idea of work life balance relates to this because
I find
That
When people say like
How are you doing? Are you are you stressed or relaxed? I say, I'm not stressed enough.
I
Miss
the level of intensity that I was the storm I was in the middle of at Zinga.
And because it was such
It was such a high to be in this creative loop.
That I could be
working with amazing
Product teams.
And and making these huge leaps every week and come up with ideas
Get them out.
See users love it, see metrics move.
See our financials move weekly.
That's a high that I miss. And when I'm in like the abyss, which is what I call any time in between those
I have a different kind of stress and anxiety. It's
It's not
Like my aura ring.
Is happy.
And now
The most stress it shows is is around my family and my five kids. And I'm like
I wanna
I want my work stress in some way to to trump.
my family stress and it's not it's too
It's too calm.
And
I wanna crowd out the time.
for investing or anything else.
I wanna be in the middle of this like
Just
Creative.
Storm.
You know, um
And I'm not. And so that's where I feel kind of antsy.
It's like
I think it's like the cavemen, like we were designed to get
restless and that makes us go out and hunt, you know.
I I definitely resonate with that. And and you when you had the Zinga
Thriller.
You you know, in some ways you can always be chasing that feeling again, right? Because it's it's such a entrepreneurial thrill ride that you caught
You caught one of those waves and you were surfing it. And you may you may be out there paddling in the ocean.
For for another decade. You may never get another wave like that, but you you want it and you you found yourself right in the bad addiction. I
In some ways my life would be so much easier if I didn't have that addiction because I could just go be
A venture capitalist full time or I don't know.
A professor or something?
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I I wanna ask you a different question. Uh I kinda wanna brainstorm with you actually. You're a creative guy.
And
You talked about being in the right body of water. Right now AI might be the right body of water. Maybe you have a different definition.
Where do you see the opportunities? Where do you get excited? Where do you brainstorm with a with an entrepreneur right now of what sort of
Products to build.
What sort of experiences to build?
What sort of problems to go try to solve? Where do you what do you think the n the moment is now for?
I did a podcast with Gary Tan.
And we started brainstorming like this.
About
Can we close our eyes?
And imagine
Two years from now.
Where
The tokens that
We use today.
Are free.
We there might be an overall spend on tokens that's higher.
But the per token spend
per kind of unit of intelligence
is going to
What we
Look at today.
will probably be close to free. It'll be like water.
And then
I think we already passed the singularity and
You know, I or I'm not sure.
But
I don't know if I can say the singularity, but I'd say we already passed AGI.
But the way it was defined.
And so
If you could have a a human
On the
That was available twenty four seven live.
For anything you wanted.
I think most of the time we would take that
If
If they were available and knew the context
And so
So I get back to like
You know
That's why I kind of
Showed my
the front of my iPhone and the book.
I don't know if you can see it there.
This is what makes me so optimistic about the consumer future because
Well, your nanit a uh your nanit one was missing there. In the book you had nanit. Oh yeah, well I now my
My you know, she's eighteen months, I don't need the net Well now they all sleep with me, so I
I don't even need the uh the camera, but
But what I'd say is
Like
Half of that screen is empty.
And the other half of it is generic apps.
And maybe we won't even have the screen, right? So maybe I'm even dating myself with that.
Uh this will this may not age well.
But
Either way.
We will still do the that digital life stack of those functions. We'll still want to know about the weather
We're still gonna wanna look up your podcast.
Calendar.
Photos, whatever.
And
If there was
Alive human
Agent.
That was
Managing all that all the time twenty four seven.
I think we would use it if it was free.
And I think Freemium will come back'cause I think
We would use it free.
I do believe
I'm a I'm an AI optimist.
I also believe
the jobs are gonna skyrocket not be not go away and
I think
That
We're going to be pulled into these services, and then we're gonna want
To get to a human sometimes, like take travel.
I think we could have an amazing travel agent.
But
When your flight was canceled.
You're trying to get home, you know, from
London
And it's July Fourth.
And you're racing to like
Rebook the next flight.
I think in that moment you'd probably pay fifty or a hundred dollars to have a human
Jump on.
Book it, get it right.
Trusted.
Those are the zones.
that on some level kind of turn me on. And then the biggest thing I talk about in the book
Is this social cocktail party?
I
Reed said he's about people, people and people, and I'm with him.
I think what we care about most
Across all these services is the social
And I think we're moving from
Consumptive.
to generative.
I think that what the dopamine hit that we're gonna get and we get already from being generative
Is so many times bigger.
Then the dopamine we get from consumptive
Entertainment.
We feel bad about ourselves. I got off Instagram. It was like a bad drug.
It was giving me
Very little value.
Now X is my thing and I I love X.
But now these reels sometimes
They do such a good job of looping into others.
And my daughter'll come in and be like, W dad, what are you doing? I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just
I don't know, I'm I'm watching Matthew McConaughey
And he's awesome talking about July fourth. So how can I not watch this and
Then they're stringing me into somebody else.
But
It wasn't a good use of my time and I I don't feel good.
I think that with AI
We are going to literally make music. You know, I think that we are going to
Look at mid journey.
The magic of mid journey.
I I could make
You guys believe I'm a good
Like home designer or logo designer.
Just you using mid journey.
It makes me more creative than I really am.
So
The I like the the proven better new bit from the book. I mean that's the one that's like one of the biggest pieces of the book.
Can you kinda like close your eyes and put yourself
in the position of like a twenty five or thirty year old a young person, you know, just like Mark was when he started Free Loader.
Mm-hmm. You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI.
Out loud, let's go through this framework.
of what you're gonna do to figure out what you're gonna work on in the next couple of weeks.
I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards.
Awesome. Great.
Great, great, great. This is fantastic.
Okay.
This is like showing us nudes for for my first million. This is like exactly what we like. Okay.
Whiteboard number one.
Is
What are we passionate about?
Doesn't matter. Do not worry. Give zero f
About business or anything, just
I mean I'm past not surfing
Being a dad.
Um
I am passionate about like
cocktail parties.
Connecting people.
Uh we call this swerging people together. Like
merging people
I love
connecting disparate people and they form like interesting
I I introduced two friends and they made the movie The Dissident.
Like
That turns me on. I I just
Love do that.
Here's your passing board.
So then
Then we wanna write like
What is a real business.
Let's not forget about real businesses.
What
What is
on the internet or what are industries they might be mature that are that are making a lot of money like
You know, like
That guy uh
Who started the peptide company? Okay.
Peptides.
They're making a lot of money.
Um but then you could put like
You know
Online dating, you know, jobs.
Um
Video games, like
It doesn't matter.
What are just things?
that are addressable, that are real.
Businesses, okay.
And then
I'm
Your third board.
You kind of Frankenstein these things it and you say
Well
Okay.
If I connected these boards
Um
Okay.
Uh
You know
I don't know.
Being a dad plus
Jobs or dating.
You're looking for the intersection of proven business then with
Things you give a shit about. We're not at even the proven better new part yet, which is
You you come up with
Any mashup idea, okay.
that kinda turns you on. And it could be like you're into agents.
Or you're into claw bot or
What
You know, I I'll give you like an example.
Here's here's a real life example for me, okay?
I invested in Ria.
And I found them'cause I was single.
They were sixty percent DAUs to MAUs.
And Raya is uh a dating it's like Tinder but for high profile people.
It's
It's human
curated online dating. Okay, so
You have to apply it's like
The really high end
social club that has
facilities and Soho House. Like Soho House, thanks.
So it's like Sewhouse.
In a way.
So it's curated.
Um you have to have an Instagram account and they have committees in each market.
And just famous hot, rich, cool people only.
That's the reputation, okay. Okay. It has grown beyond that.
What it really is is
I like to say that that online dating
feels like a one out of ten experience and Raya feels like a three out of ten. Like it's
It's still
Not
Great.
I I don't wanna diss it'cause I
I'm an investor. I I think we're
One of the biggest
uh equity investors. And I think Rye is amazing.
But the difference from the one to the three is that
I found with
Just using these online dating apps.
There was the same odds of second date if I went on the date or didn't go on the date. So it was like
Zero percent.
So I was like, why don't I just not go?'Cause I'm saving myself so much time and agony.
And with Raya
It was not a waste of time. I had second dates and things
And
It just wasn't curate enough. Okay.
So the point is the insight from that.

Is
Human curation.
So then
The mashup is
Can we apply that same thing?
And it's a lead business.
You're paying for lead generation.
Well
Could we apply that?

Um
Could we apply that to
I had an idea to create like a lux B and B like
Could we
Do human curated
Listings or
What about human curated Uber? Like
Could we have a high end Uber?
Where
Yeah.
The black cars actually are black. They're not just colored black. But that's actually Sean what you were talking about the other day with Jack Steiner.
Yeah. I I don't know if you Mark have you ever heard of Jack's dining room?
He's this he's this Instagram kid who
goes around the world, he's like, I'm at this pl place in Italy with the best gelato and there's like a you know a gr amazing visual hook for Instagram where there's like this craato thing that he's about to try. He tries it
And he just he's trying to find the best foods of different genres in the best places around the world.
And when I met him, I told him, I said, Look, you're trying to cut these brand deals, like why don't
Like
You should create the new yet because
Yelp is this completely generic platform with everything.
But if I trust you and I have trust as a service or curation as a service human curation as a service.
I would just if I go to New York and I want the best ramen, I would trust Jack over you.
Let's freeze frame on that, okay?
And now
Like Professor Pincus.
I did I created a class at Stanford around this, two classes.
And the students still didn't do that great, so it tells me
Either my framework's not
perfect or I'm not the best teacher, but let's let's freeze frame on that, okay?
So let's do proven better new.
And yep.
So we say okay
Well
Proven.
Is
Let's not
With
Anything about
The way that Yelp displays listings, rates listings.
But
Let's do a legal copy of Yelp.
It's we're not gonna change it. We're gonna freeze and isolate and assume
That Yelp has taken the time over the years

To make that
What the world wants most, okay?
So we copy that pixel for pixel.
I mean we copy their onboarding of a new user.
Everything we copy it.
Then we say
Do we have anything that's better? Meaning ten out of ten users would say
Yes, that's what I want.
Not yelp.
We probably don't have that, okay?
Better is actually really hard to get to.
What we think is better is new. So
We probably are just proven and then some new ideas.
I think our new idea here is
human curated
And
Probably
Can we human curate it first?
And get to
Can we can we take
Some slice, some verdict some blade in a city so we take
You know, Florence
barbershops or you know, Florence
Maybe better is like f coffee shops in Florence.
We're gonna go do that ourselves.
And then
Put it side by side and test in some way and see whether people
like ours better or not. Like there used to be tablet hotels which was like
A better version.
Cooler design hotels.
Um
Is that better or not? This is kind of the Brian Chesky way, do it by hand first.
If people don't like it better
You do not pass go. There's no reason.
to even
Try to build this in software.
If they do
Then we can start to use AI and say is there a way to use
AI agents to automate this.
But that's a very, very secondary. The first is can we
Can we get to a clearly better?
product experience. That's the hard part. That's the lightning in the bottle.
Not the AI.
And and then
What I would tell you
Mark at
twenty three or twenty five to do is
Just
Force yourself to do everything in AI right now. Like
Force yourself to code this.

You know, I've tried vibe coding. I've personally find
Co work.
plus cloud code easier for or I get to more
real things for myself, but
But force yourself to use it.
And see how far you can go.
creating agents as employees and other things.
And then
And then do some like
Hire some
In addition, hire some really cheap people.
Who can just do some of this stuff by hand.
You know, I would avoid
founding a company around it, I would avoid
hiring expensive engineers or people
Before I've connected all the dots.
Hey, you have this interesting kind of dichotomy about you, which is
You seem like you're all about like going big and building these huge viral things that get big fast. But at the same time in your book, I think you said I think one of the titles is like
Big or something like that. Scale.
And it's like that you're like, it doesn't matter how many people you're gonna get, you have to nail the product. And that's sort of what you're talking about right now.
But also I know that you're big on goal setting. You have this I forget what you call this. Do you call it written down here? Book of life. Book of life. Yeah, which I want you you have to explain it. That's pretty cool. But you have this like cool thing of like
Goal setting.
So when you're ideating new companies
One of the things that kills ideas.
A monks.
Successful entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs is asking like, Well, how big can this really get? And like
And like that's always the challenge. People always ask that question. And like you said earlier, and we all know this to be true, you never really know, and whatever things can get big oftentimes shock you. No one really knows entirely.
So
Do you set goals early on and how do you deal with that thing in your head or with uh entrepreneurs you work with of like this constant like question of well, how big can this get? Yeah. Yeah.
It's so hard and
And
And s part of this book a life practice and part of
This painful journey is
Killing our ego.
And and our ego
Wanting
Our our ego is where the hope comes from that
We we fall in love with the idea, we fall in love with the
potential of it.
And that
Works against us
Because
Do we we've gotta
get to a very, very small, small
Use case.
That really works.
Before we can do anything else.
And I'm guilty of this too, and we tend to skip it.
And
And we get so excited about the bigger
Macro, the bigger idea, the bigger
Body of water.
And we get so committed to this.
And it's part of the danger of AI and vibe coding that
We can build something in three months instead of a year or two.
And so we do
And we skip testing it and we don't set
real objectives for ourselves.
Like absolute objectives and goals.
That we hold ourselves accountable to.
And the next thing you know, you're just kinda in this B plus relationship.
And
And you don't love it.
And
All these things are paradoxes. On the one hand
I
Start the book talking about this book of life practice of
I've been doing since nineteen ninety four of
Really trying to have a conversation with yourself.
Over time and
Writing in this book.
for one period of time every year about the same things.
So that you can go back and
See, I'm not going to be able
Did you what were your hopes and dreams and
Have you done anything about them and
And the real point that's come to me over all these years is not
Do you achieve these goals, but are you
attuning to these goals and are you in alignment
Are you living in alignment with your goals?
That
I've found
is more important to my
well being and happiness then
Achieving so
If my goal for twenty years has been to launch dot earth and create my version of the metaverse
Which is different than Zuck's version.
Okay, cool. I it's okay that I haven't done it.
But have I gone for it?
Or have I just talked about it?
And that's I say these these
IDAs and things haunt us.
And
Over time weigh on us'cause like I've had this idea, but
Well, I haven't ever done or I've always wished I could do this.
And the point of
The book of life is Let's Stop Time.
Let's stop time right.
Now.
And let's
go to an absolute place and have a real
Honest conversation with ourselves.
And say
You know.
Sam, are you
Are you serious about this desire or you just
Yeah.
And if you're serious about it.
Well, what's wrong with you? Like
You're
You're capable, you're
A free human and
Why in the last year have you
Let's be honest, you've you haven't done shit about
Mark.
Every year you say you want to learn guitar.
You know you could do it.
But you don't. So
Why don't we just stop putting that down as a goal because you're not serious about it?
That's
I'm not gonna like
Beat myself up, or I'm not gonna beat
You know.
Mark.
twenty twenty five up.
And Mark twenty twenty five.
did go for it and launch dot earth and the version I launched
Wasn't right and I pulled the plug on it.
I'm good with that.
You know, like it doesn't have to
When
For me
To feel like
I'm living a full life.
I have to at least know.
I went for it. And that's that's the point of the book of life. When when did you start doing it? I started doing it in nineteen ninety four and
I start the book off talking about this that
I had made a series of
Terrible career decisions.
And I was being pushed out of this
kind of fledgling venture capital firm.
And
There was nowhere to go to
Like.
It wasn't like a next
job and so I'd kind of
kind of
Messed up my resume.
I had nothing to lose when I started
a year later started my first company, but in nineteen ninety four
I went to temple. I hadn't been to temple for the h
Jewish high holidays, Jewish New Year's for
Since I was a kid.
Someone invited me, I was in D C
And I sat there
Didn't understand what
anyone was saying or doing and I just wrote in a notebook about
How shitty my life was.
And all the hopes and dreams that I hadn't
Pursued
And the thing that I
Came back to I hated most about myself.
That represented
Just
how little control I had over my life was that I smoked cigarettes.
And I was
Part of my book of life practices, what can we do this year that would make this a seminal year in our life? Like
What could the three of us do?
That
You would remember this year for the rest of your life, and thank you, because so many of our years, I can tell you at age sixty.
That there are years.
I can't write anything down for her.
Most years are like that, I feel.
It's sad to not have something seminal, not one thing
That's memorable about that year. And so I was like, Okay
At least if I quit smoking, if I do a lifetime quit.
I'll remember this year and I think I'll be happy later that I did it.
So I'm partnering with my future self.
It's important enough.
But it's it's easy and in my control.
And for me
That was that was my path to
Changing my life.
Hey are are you still doing like
You know, I you you you said it's sad that
You don't have like a seminal year or you don't have this thing and like
Uh you know, Sean and I both have young kids. You have young kids too. I don't know how old your oldest is, but you have at least one young kid.
I'm in the phase now of my life where I feel like
A little bit treading water.
And that's okay.
Like I'm like I don't think that's sad. Like
You know, a kid being born is seminal, but I didn't
Yeah. Achiev anything. It's not like I did that. No, it can't. But I'm enjoying it. Are you still d achieving great stuff? And are you still a dog?
Even after you've had kids.
Yes, but but you also have to be realistic because now
You've
You've committed
To be
In service of raising these
Is great.
humans and that's
And that feels great too. And
I think the best thing I've ever done in life is be a dad. And I think
The greatest achievement my life is my five kids. So
Every year that I've
Had a kid, that's been the seminal
And to your first question.
Yes, you can still
Achieve it's just different than some of your friends that
made different decisions and you gotta stop comparing
But you can
I built Zinga.
While raising
You know?
Carmen, Georgia, Wyatt, my third kid.
Hey, what was your schedule then to accommodate them? Taking a comedy public while still trying to be d it sounds like
You've mentioned being a father many times. It sounds like that's super important to you. How did you balance the schedule?
You if you treat
The things in your life like
These are non movable rocks. Everything else becomes
the river that moves around it and
And it turns out that
It's great.
modelling for your company
To show that you
Are prioritizing your family and like
If
Do you ever walked into Zinga? You saw kids and dogs everywhere. And so
People loved it. We we worked really hard and we played hard.
And we family hard.
And
And we integrated our kids and our pets, you know, we brought them
to work, or we brought work to home.
So
The way I did is
My my friend and coach Bing
Gordon he said
The most important thing is they are there for the first and last fifteen minutes of their day and they're always gonna remember that
And I
I made that like my religion. I was like I'm never gonna miss the first or last fifteen minutes of their day.
I'm never gonna miss breakfast with them.
Hopefully not dinner, but I'll always do bedtime, bath and bedtime.
And
And I did.
It's so funny. So many of the things you say
uh are echoed by other guests, but they came up with on their own in their own way, with their own words. But it's just you know, we'd have to be dummies at this point, either listening to this podcast or d doing this podcast to not pick up on some of these
Yeah, Ryan Smith who who did Qualtrics and he owns the jazz now.
When I we I went out and visited him for the podcast and hung out at his house and stuff and
He goes, Hey, let me just he's like, I just gotta do one thing. It's gonna take me three minutes. And I was like, That's a weird number
Uh I've never heard anyone say like, you know, you're going to he's not going to the bathroom. He's got a task to do that's gonna take three minutes. What's
And he basically said
I have these three three minute interval like three minute moments. I just make sure I'm fully present with my kids.
And it's
Basically right before I drop you know, dropping them off at school. Like I you know, I'm not like half here, half in my mind somewhere else. Like I'm fully there.
Three minutes right when they get home and three minutes right before bed, he goes, This is the most important nine minutes of the day. Because you could be a busy guy, but you always got nine minutes. And if you could be fully fully present.
Um he's like it's not like he's only doing nine minutes, but he's just make sure that's sacred. Like my kids know, like my fifteen year olds know
I will always answer when they call. Like I'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and I might be like guys
I gotta take this.
So they just know they can always reach dad and there's there's like a
a priority that they get, you know, they they feel that
And some of this stuff carries over, I think, to like management principles, like
I my policy at Zinga was
I will always read and respond to your email.
to everyone in the company. We got to
I don't know.
thirty five hundred four thousand employees globally.
And it was a lot, but I said.
I'm always gonna read and respond.
To your email.
And and now I kinda try to
I come close to pretty much do that on on X that
Anyone listening if they go to
My ex at Mark Pink.
I'll I'll pretty much reply to everybody. I I probably don't hit it a hundred percent of the time, but I'm probably like
Ninety five percent of the time.
And so there's there's an availability
That we can
Prioritize.
That's
Important in life. So
Yeah.
I'm I'm I'm on that.
Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. So I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.
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Can I ask you a question? You know, I I'm a framework guy, so when you whenever you have these frameworks, I love it.
At the same time
Some of my friends who are much better entrepreneurs than me don't use any of these frameworks. They just sort of operate on pure law instinct and sort of following their nose.
Did you start
Z Zinga by doing all the stuff, mapping out your passions and then cross-referencing it with proven models or, you know, existing business models, or did you just
Now you think about it this way, or did you
Create your biggest hits doing this.
Like most people.
This was all going on, but it wasn't written down.
So
I didn't just set out
to s show that I could make
A poker app.
on the Facebook. Like I was forty one
You know
I think
My friends, peers thought I had no dignity then. It was
This was not like impressive. I mean I did it because I had
I my ego had been so beaten down at tribe that I had to do something small that worked. I just like I need to do something that worked.
But I wasn't gonna just
make like at the time the obvious apps to make were these wall apps and these throw a drink, these pokes.
I wasn't gonna do that.
I wasn't gonna that's what was working, okay?
Poker was not working. Games were not working.
Um
The Facebook ecosystem.
I did it because
I I saw this ocean. I saw two oceans, you know, two bodies of water, social networking.
And video games.
So
I was thinking
Okay.
If this works.
It it opens a little crack.
into
mass market casual gaming.
А найдес болів.
One of the things I talk about in the book that I just
And I and I will encourage your listeners to consider
This is available to all of us.
All the time.
Find a mature market.
That's over, that's done, that's dead, that's been played out.
Online dating, you know, eBay with listings or
Analog businesses
that are not attractive, they're almost not investable. Like VCs won't like them. They're
They're red oceans, they're not growth markets.
Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it.
And it has a proven behavior in it, and that's video gaming. By the way.
Here's a gift, here's the Easter egg, take video gaming.
In two thousand seven
It was a twenty three billion dollar industry.
It was barely growing. There was no
It wasn't a top ten behavior on the consumer web.
And it was stupid to go into.
People no but it was not fundable, okay.
Here we are.
Nineteen years later.
It's a two hundred and eighty three billion dollar industry that's not fundable.
Okay.
It's not growing, it's mature.
You'd have a really tough time getting a V C to fund it.
Perfect place.
to try to do something innovative because
If you can find a new dimension to this.
де спар
You don't have to prove
that anyone's gonna do it or wants it or is gonna spend money on it. It's unlimited, right?
And that was search when Google showed up. So
I do love that and I was think like that when I started Zinga because
The year two before I was trying to buy C net.
They're a public company.
And I said
I need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming.
I need to
Self distribution.
Consumer was not investable because of distribution. Today
Consumer is not investable because of distribution.
It's a perfect parallel.
The new thing then was social networking.
The new thing today is AI and agents.
This is like a mirror, you know, in time.
So
We are living today in two thousand seven.
Go for it. Consumers not investable.
Do consumer.
You you you've made these bold claims multiple times, and I love that.
You've like you did it with investing. You said like I believe this.
You have a point of view, which I like.
And I think people who have points of view
Where they're confident.
They're either stupid or they're like well read and educated, and that has shaped it.
uh their point of view and that's why they're confident. You seem in that category.
Do you have any good like honey pots of information that you consume on a regular basis that aren't well known that you could fill us in on? Like people you follow on
Twitter, people you follow on Substack, books, newspapers, anything that shapes how you think.
Yeah.
Um
Yeah, there's
There they're really wide ranging
And and disparate
I am grav I gravitate towards people that have
you know, non mainstream
More contrarian views.
I love everything Peter Thiel says, like it's like catnip for me.
I just heard him talk and
H
He's saying that we've
Lived in this
Fifty years of stagnation, even though
The economy, Gdp, stock markets up so much.
When we think about
How POLIV.
And how our parents the gap and how our parents live versus their parents.
We didn't see that gap again.
From our parents to us, and now
the next generation, like the the
The kids of the nineties and the early two thousands
They don't look at their life and opportunity.
You know, if if our parents were in the nineteen or my parents, you know, in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
their parents were in the nineteen thirties and forties, and you think about that difference
And it's just it was the middle class was formed and so much and so
Peter's kinda coming at this

The same problem, but the opposite side of like
The democratic socialists and the far left.
Progressive democrats and he's saying
The only solution
is growth we've got to grow the economy and grow
The
Opportunity base
For
the middle class and for people
In order to save capitalism and democracy.
Um
I thought.
I hadn't thought about it in that way because I think of the last fifty years is unbelievable
growth and in in
the worldwide standards of living and in
Technology and
You know, stock markets and all these things, but
But I thought that was
Really brilliant insight.
That's got me thinking.
I I'd say that who I follow I I love Pirate Wires
The Mike Solano.
And
Th there's there's so many insights that they've had early that were not mainstream.
You know, that have
Changed my thinking.
Do you read a lot of books?
What what genre of books do you like? I I have a lot of trouble reading books. I do books on tape. I

I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm walking or driving
But
I I get a lot and
I I connect with a lot of friends around social political issues first, where we have
you know, non mainstream views. I mean like I came out for Trump, you know, a few days before the election
That was not a
mainstream or popular thing in my community to do.
But I guess I I pay a lot of attention to people
That
break through in any way in consumer.
That's probably something that
I pay more attention to and
I I think it was announced like
Two weeks ago or something, I invest in this company, FOMO.
That's
Yeah, yeah.
The resume for me and consumer is traction.
I have no idea who or why. I mean
But when
I
I cold milled
Um, Shane at Polymarket on Twitter when they broke through
So
You know, like
I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer
Біка
It's so broken and it's so rare. So
You know, th I think those are good leads.
Um
And I and I do.
I get a lot of
Macro and stock.
Investment ideas on X.
Have you outperformed the index over the last ten years, do you think?
Last year I I definitely did, but
But
No, I I can't say
I don't I gotta look at the last ten years.
I don't know if I've outperformed the index. I probably I haven't this year. I'm like
We've had more fun and memories and that's what counts.
You be you probably beat the two you you beat two percent, maybe.
I'm I'm way behind. I I think this year
I'm up like
Four and a half percent.
Not incl I was it I
I got a big distribution of SpaceX. I don't include that in my returns'cause
That was a private investment, you know, so
Not including SpaceX, I think.
Not like
foreign change and I think that the market's up probably like
I don't know, three tim two or three times that. So
I'm not.
You don't wanna follow me this year.
One thing I really like about you is um
You're very so you're insightful. That's great.
Uh, the second thing is I like some of the kind of life wisdom, like the book of life practice and having an honest conversation with yourself. I think ultimately that's actually the most useful thing.
That any of us could go do.
And then the other thing I like is that you are
You're not one of these people who makes everyone feel bad because you're so disciplined. I like that you're a little not disciplined and you do some stuff you shouldn't do, or you're doing things for other reasons than just like what's purely utilitarian and optimal.
And um and I like that'cause a lot of times people come on this podcast and I'm like
I should be doing this should be we should all over ourselves. I don't I don't like this.
Punk rock.
Consumer.
Good dad. Like there's it's a very rare you have this very weird uh That's why I was like so misunderstood by the media
You know when
When Reed Hoffman said to me
Mark, what's your narrative? What
What's your three bullets? And I'm like, I don't know, I don't have one.
Dice well
Either you make that up or they're gonna for you.
And I think you said before we started that
That when you
when Zinga was big, you you saw me as this villain
I think that I'm
Authentic and nuanced.
And people will
Meet me in person or hear me talk to the say
Wow, I
Really connected with you, I really like you. I'm like
Thank you, but it feels like this backhand compliment'cause they they really mean like Oh I hate you. Yeah, what I Googled about you was so bad.
When I first started dating my partner Hillary, I said
Just do both of us a favor, just don't Google me'cause you're not gonna like
Anything you read'cause it was trying to understand why people hated you. I'm trying to like you, but by Village. But like did you wear a lot of black? I don't know. Like what is the villain? I found my black T shirt. Yeah. And I
No, I it's
I I was telling this before that
All I cared about was
winning. All I cared about and winning was in the eyes of
Like a teenage girl or a middle aged woman
You know?
who wanted to play one of our games and
They weren't gonna read this
They're not reading the Wall Street Journal.
I hired a PR firm to keep us out of the press, and when we were in the press.

To dampen down the story.
'Cause I just
We
had figured something out with user pay and I didn't wanna like go announce it to the world.
And we are just trying to
win as many sprints as we could before
inviting a lot of competition and venture and ever we're buying a company every month
You know.
Lot of the companies, you know, no one else was bidding on them. You bought the company that became Farmville, right? Well not really. I
The real story
Is that
I couldn't get anyone in Zinga to build Farmville because they thought it wasn't cool.
They wanted to build like Coasterville.
Cafe world.
And
Nobody.
in video gaming wanted to make
a farm simulation game that was not
There's nothing less cool.
Why why did you want to make it?
I wasn't from video gaming. I wanted I had a farm fantasy. I wanted to create Pincus Valley Ranch and
You know, have our vegetables.

So I had that fantasy.
And
I have four sisters and I feel like I really connect with middle aged women. I'm like
I don't want
Twitch.
you know, fast moving games. I want something I don't have to pay any attention to.
I don't have to pay any attention to a farm, you know.
I just
I wanted that.
game and I thought that would be the game
that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play.
Bing won't admit it, but he tried to convince me not to build it, even from a business standpoint. He's like
Farm simulations never do well, Mark.
And
And I I finally bought this little failed
Flash gaming company.
because they had four flash engineers.
And then I put them and
Like
Four or five other people in an alcove outside my office.
And checked in with them every day and we built Farmville
Together in six weeks.
Did it come out the gate hot?
What was day one, day two?
You know, we were gonna buy this
company that made Farm Town and the guy was
To me, I was kind of a jerk and he had the right to be a jerk. He was
He was winning.
I think he doubled the price he wanted from like forty million to eighty million.
And he had the right.
But we are building
our own version.
And we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game. So ours was not
Proven better new is proven better less.
So
Our crops were better than his, our art and math were better.
And we
We have more polish.
But
That was it.
And we took out
The stranger danger part.
other community members and we just thought our users didn't want that.
So we turned it on I said
On a Friday
I had a s tough call with him. I said, you know.
I don't think this is gonna work.
We're not gonna buy you.
And in our game, our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go.
And so then on Sunday we turned on Farmville.
And it was one of those lightning in a bottle things that
For some reason so many things with Zinga just worked.
And
Which isn't great to hear.
How do you repeat that?
We turned on Farmville and I think it did like
A hundred and seventy one thousand installs the first day with no marketing.
It was just viral. It just
It was viral.
And
And we were doing like a million installs a day by the end of the first week.
With no marketing.
And
You know, we passed farm town.
within like three or four weeks they were at like four million DAUs.
What what was the peak, the absolute peak of Farmville? What was it doing?
I think it peaked
Uh like
thirty or thirty two million DAUs and at its peak
I think like
fifteen or twenty percent of people on
Facebook were using it or had used it.
And what did it make in terms of revenue at that game?
Farmville two

lessons in mechanics and made more revenues
You know
I know Farmville
Two
Did over a billion in revenues.
I mean no one at that time thought
A video game.
You know, definitely not a casual video game could do
Over a billion in revenues and
I remember trying to explain that to Fidelity, I'm like, That's gonna be a normal thing, like
Three million a day, baby. That's gonna be the new
Benchmark for a good game.
But
You had a question I really liked that was like the beginning of this whole thread.
So
I hired this PR firm because I said I don't want to have my fur coat moment. I don't want to be on the cover of Fortune.
And the fur coat moment came from that movie American Gangster. Yeah. When he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur coat, he's on the front page of the New York Times.
And it's
Everything goes downhill from there.
Like I don't want to be on the front page of anything. And the police are like this young black guy wearing a fur coat in the front row, this he must be something. I was the equivalent of that.
This forty one year old retired guy that's not supposed to be
doing anything important.
That's when people write articles saying
Can you back a founder under you know, over thirty?
And consumer and
So
I just didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual
And
Consumer wasn't supposed to be working.
And so
Our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors.
I said
You I'm gonna tell you a price.
You decide if you want to invest.
Afterwards I'll show you our financials.
And if you don't like it, you can get out.
But if if they're not better than you think.
Which obviously made people
Even one invest more.
Wait, what was your what was your first five years revenue and profit?
I mean
We went public. We forced to go public after four years.
I mean
We had over a billion in cash on our balance sheet when we went public.
We had never spent a dollar that we raised.
In capital.
From
I didn't know we wouldn't spend it, but
And and I think that
The year before we went public, I think we did like
Four hundred and fifty million in free cash flow.
Oh my gosh. So in year three you're doing four hundred fifty million in free free cash flow. Is that what you just said? That might have been year four, yeah.
I mean
We started in mid July of oh seven, so oh seven wasn't like a full year. You know, we did like
Maybe a million and a half in oh seven.
Of cash flow or revenue.
Revenue, revenue.
I mean we were cash.
Flowing. Maybe I did more than that revenue,'cause by
October, November we were making like two hundred thousand a month in cash flow.
We
In oh eight.
We did like
Thirty eight million in revenues.
And we probably made like
I don't know.
twelve or fifteen million in cash flow.
But but we were
We are
putting all that money.
We're
Putting it into
Big data and then data centers.
And then we're raising more and more money'cause
I didn't want to
Ever slow down.
But but my point is I let our story be told by our competitors.
And by press I didn't talk to
And I'm kinda nuanced and Zinga was nuanced.
And so it I let the story go out that we're making all money from advertising, but it was really user pay.
And I was fine with that. I didn't want to
Say no, you're wrong.
And then Michael Arrington wrote for Tech Crunch.
А хол сірі с кол Скам.
They said they must be making all their money from these really scammy
Ads that are showing
And they were no different than the ads on Google, but
We also were not.
All of our money was user pay.
And I didn't want to come out and say, No, you idiot, we're making money from our whales
You know.
And and then but Errington, who I'm friends with, I'm an investor in his fund now.
He used Cityville.
He played Cityville.
He spent five hundred fifty dollars in the game.
And then
І се амсо сорі, авоз врон.
I get it why adults would spend money in your games now.
Because remember
There was no in up purchase yet, and so all of the adults were like
There's no way adults are paying money for art.
But we had
You know, a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in Farmville.
And this was her hobby. And
Maybe her husband was spending more than that.
you know, to go fishing and skiing and hunting
This was her hobby, and so we reframe this as
We are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has
And this is a small amount to spend on a hobby.
Whereas, you know
For a video game it was a lot. Right. And I did not
Do myself any favors. I did not go on press tours.
I didn't talk to investors.
А сем'я би сер.
And our employees I'm not gonna talk to anybody else ever.
My kids
Like players
My employees and so my
Everyone else told the story and it was
And a and we fired a lot of people, and they were out telling our story.

I had a meritocracy, a force curve.
We forced you to
Rate ten percent of your team.
As a low performer every quarter.
And if you were two quarters in a row, you're fired.
Without question or exception.
Wow, that's uh you also have I I have one other theory for that, which is you have the nickelback problem. Like if you ever heard of like a Veblen good, it's like a good where the demand goes up the more the price goes up.
Uh, there's like a the Nickelback problem is basically um everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's like an easy it's a easy thing to look down on. You look cool for looking down on it, but yet somehow they'll sell
Millions of records. Nobody knows them, but somehow they're selling millions and millions of records. Like it was never cool to say
I love Farmville. Uh yeah, I play I love to play Farmville and but but somehow everybody's playing, but nobody wanted to say it was cool. So you you had a little bit of a problem.
Video game industry
hated me. I was like the Darth Vader. So it didn't help either. Exactly. They said you're not real games.
We're never gonna give you an award or invite you to GDC.
I was like, that's cool. They none of my users go to G D C
There's this uh article, I'm looking at old articles of you. There's one from uh two thousand eleven.
And it says Old Mark Pink has had a farm and it's a picture of you. You look like a motorcycle uh guy, like with your boots up, like overlooking the city. Like you're
You had you had that.
swag that you talked about with Zuck. I mean you had swag and you looked pretty cool and you kinda had like a
you I'm gonna win like
smile on your face and I think that's kinda cool, but also that will be that will rub some people the wrong way.
Yeah, and th there's a great
Uh
Tweet that I love by this guy yesterday.
Tiny
Co or something. Yeah, Andrew Wilkinson. That's our that's our good friend.
I loved his tweet and he referenced the courage to be disliked and he said
Said it was a huge turning point for him when he stopped.
trying to be liked and he stopped trying to be like Warren Buffett and worry about his reputation, basically his resume.
I'm like, yes, that's
That's my career and that's what I advise people. I'm like burn your resume.
Don't look for respect from your peers.
I say if you're truly ambitious
Do not
look for respect from the people around you'cause you will not get it.
If you're
doing things differently than them because they don't like that.
I mean you're supposed to like
Stick to this one
Mold and
And if you do something different, like just like you were saying, Sam, and it works.
It makes them question themselves.
So they don't they kinda don't want to see you
Succeed, do it.
It's like
It's like
But I paid all these dues and I don't want you to make it without paying the same dues'cause I'm in a job I hate.
You're supposed to be in a job you hate, or else
I didn't have to do this.
A lot of people made fun of Mark Andreessen because he had that thing where he says like
No one's successful is introspective, which I thought was I disagree with him. I think that's kind of silly. Uh that was a very introspective thing of him to say. But you are you are an example of someone who uh I think you live life fairly intentional and fairly
Introspective and trying to like live like a full good life while also you have this like swag about you, but also bow in the china shop, like this like really cool dichotomy that I think is like very admirable and really exciting.
Yeah,
You got like the California woo woo and then Zinga and your stuff is so was so metrics driven. You were like the most metrics driven company
Of anyone. I if I ever wanted to hire somebody who I knew would be like supermetrics driven on the product side, Zinga was the the perfect pool to go hire from because you guys had like a navy SEAL training for for PMs. It was unbelievable.
I do want to th say it was just what you're saying, Sam, that
It felt
A little like
funny and bad to come out with my book.
Like pretty much the same week that Andreessen and the all in guys, they all started saying
How it's a waste of time.
to be introspective and
Hey, shout out your book, man. Uh can you show it? Show your show your book and shout it out. Okay.
I ha I do have one copy.
Uh
Life at the speed of Life at the speed of play.
Th there was something on the all in where they're talking about how
I forget the word they they say contemplation is
is a total waste of time.
This is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things. That's just a really stupid thing. Or it's right for them. I mean it's I don't think there is that's not what they do. I just saw a thing about Chamat say talk ref being retroactive looking at his time doing spacks.
Oh yes, yes. Well
Chemoth is is a lot of things, but he has no problem whatsoever contradicting himself.
I mean I heard them
All talk about how AI was gonna put everyone out of work.
And now they're
Proudly saying like I think just yesterday I saw something from them.
Saying
That's bullshit.
But
The facts don't support it. AI's not putting anyone out of work. I'm like, but you guys were the ones saying it.
And I kinda love

They don't care. They'll just
contradict themselves, you know, a few months later and they don't they're not self referential. So in that sense

I'm not tired to what I said three months ago. I'm
I'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view and unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip. Yeah. Yeah. So
Yeah, I
I I I do
Think there's
A mix of all of it. I I think
Holding yourself accountable to real things in the world.
Is useful.
Tool used in the right way.
Um, and sometimes you should just f and go do stuff.
Alright, well we should leave it at that.
You're awesome, man.
You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it. I really like talking to you guys. We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I could rule the world of nowhere.
But I want to
I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Cause if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story.
If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing QA sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.