How do you build a billion-dollar startup? Ask Mark Pincus.
The founder of Zynga and creator of FarmVille, Mark turned a $350,000 personal investment into one of the most successful gaming companies in history — eventually selling to Take-Two Interactive for over $12 billion. Along the way, he invested early in Facebook, launched one of the first social networks, and learned more from his failures than his wins.
In his new book, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!, Mark shares the product philosophy and founder mindset behind his biggest successes and his biggest swings. In this episode, Mark sits down with Oz to talk about why control is the secret to creativity and what it really takes to spot an opportunity before it's obvious to build something the world didn't know it needed.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm os Vloschin. Today we're joined
by Mark Pinkus. He got his start in tech during
the dot com era and has gone on to found
multiple companies, including Zinger, producer of.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hit game Farm Film.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Mark found a Zinger in two thousand and seven, and
the company was acquired by Take two Interactive in twenty
twenty two.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
For over twelve billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
He's also invested in startups like Facebook, which changed the
Internet as we know today. Mark's new book, Life at
the Speed of Play Launch Products People Love is pop memoir,
pop playbook for running a successful business when everything around
you is in flux.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Mark pink is welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
What does it mean to live your life at the
Speed of Play?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Well, there's so many dimensions that that line has meant
to me that I wrote a whole book.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I was like, that's got to be the title.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
So on the one hand, I think I think culturally,
I think we're on the precipice of being able to
feel like we're living our just our normal lives more
at the speed of play.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Speed in a good way.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I know there's speed that also is hectic, but the
ideas that life can feel like a beat down, especially
when we want to do something creative or launch a
product or a company.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
And in games we get to skip all that.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
We just get to the good stuff and there's really
no consequence, especially in you know, simulation games, there's almost
no consequence. Just someone else wins more than you. And
I think that when we lower the barriers to being
generitive and creative, we also unlock a lightness of being
(02:02):
a playfulness because we can try and experiment and a
lot of things and afford to be wrong, as opposed
to putting all your wood behind one arrow and saying, Okay,
this has to work and this If this doesn't, my
company is going out of business or losing my house.
It's not like that, and it's getting less and less.
(02:23):
And now in the age of AI, you don't need
to quit your job. You can even simulate and see
whether this idea might work before you even bother to
try it. So I think life the speed of play
speaks to all of that. And then it's also this
whole kind of product manager bible and playbook that we
developed at Zinga that I tried to lay out the
(02:46):
case for it in the book.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, I'm curious.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I mean, obviously you're most famous for Zinga, which is
a game company, and the title of the book is
life that the speed of play and playing games are
kind of two sides of the same coin, right, So
I mean, I guess what is it you in games?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Well? I never thought that I'd be able to work
entrepreneur in games. It seemed like such a such a
closed off, different kind of industry, and it always was
and kind of is. But for me, I thought, okay,
(03:22):
there's a chance, a very decent chance, that games have
missed their real opportunity, and that in two thousand and seven,
you know, it was a twenty three billion dollar, fairly
mature industry.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
This was mainly like traditional video games.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Console video games was kind of flatlining, and the computer
gaming business was in constant slow growth.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
But it was not a top ten activity on the web.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Definitely not mass market, I mean in the sense of
that we think about it. It was a very very big,
niche business, but it was the size of the movie industry.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Now it's a lot bigger.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
So my hypothesis was, I love the idea that there
can be a mature industry that has lots of revenues
has a existing behavior that hasn't even started its real
growth yet, and that was searched before Google. It was
fairly mature, and a lot of times those industries get
mature and they lack real innovation. That was the defense industry,
(04:21):
you know, it was the rocket industry. And it's such
a terrific place to go because you don't have to
prove people want to play games. In this case, you
just had to make it much more accessible to people
and ask less of them, you know, drop it where
they are and ask them to play, you know, for
fifteen minutes and not have to learn anything.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I want to come back to Zinga and games, but
before we get that, I want to talk a bit
more about your family life. You don't talk too much
about like individual scenes I mentioned as pot memoir, but
you're not kind of you know, telling this happened, then,
that happened type of story. But your dad is this
kind of Homeston presence and touchstone, and I was quite
(05:03):
struck by the lesson he really seemed to impart on.
You is controlled, Oh yeah, yes, where to control and
play fit together as concepts.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
I actually think it sounds paradoxical. But they actually do
come together. They are necessary. If you think about when
we were kids, we could play when we felt the
most freedom, and in a sense, in order for you
(05:34):
to have freedom, you need control. If someone else, if
our parents were controlling our time and behaviors in those moments,
we wouldn't have felt the freedom to really let loosen play.
And similarly, for us as creators and founders, we start
to learn the hard way what happens when we don't
(05:56):
have control.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
It's not fun, it's not playful, and we don't.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Get to to really explore our full expression and creativity.
And so if you have control, then you're guaranteeing yourself
the open canvas or open highway for you to go
for it and try whatever it is that you believe in.
(06:21):
And in a lot of ways, I think that the
more control founders get, the more room there is to
see people do really risky, audacious things. Because investors don't
like risk, you know, they they want certainty. They like upside,
but they like certainty even more than upside. I mean
(06:44):
they say they want upside, but they'll take a guaranteed
three X. You know, most of them over you know,
a very small potential of one hundred x. Some may
argue with me, some might be right, but but you know,
and as you get to be more and more capital
you might say that there's seed investors that are fine
with that, but they also have a model that assumes
(07:06):
a huge loss rate. By the time you get to
growth investors, public market investors, you're looking at almost a
zero tolerance for a loss rate.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
So control gives you confidence. Confidence allows you to play.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
The confidence is a part of it, but it also
gives you degrees of freedom, and it's not very fun.
It's not a lot of fun to play if you're
told you can do anything you want between this one
foot wide expanse. You know, if it's like infinite do
whatever you can imagine, that's a lot more creatively, you know,
(07:41):
exciting and has more potential, and you need as a
foundered you need the freedom to make very very hard
decisions and bet the company decisions. And you feel that
you have less and less of that freedom as you
have more and more constituents, more employees, more investors, higher
(08:03):
stakes in this more you know, people have more to lose.
You're carrying a bigger responsibility, and you're kind of going
to war to be your best. You can't worry about
you can't be sitting there on the front lines worrying
about the people that aren't going to like this decision
if you believe this is the best decision.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Your dad gave you this advice about control long before
you were a founder. What did it mean to him?
And what did you What did this word to control, like,
how did you internalize? How did you explain the importance
of it to you?
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Well, it had a It was a double edged sword
for me with my dad and control, because I saw
him in building his business. He had a nationwide financial
pr firm, investor relations, and he had complete control of
his firm, and that made it very fun for him.
I think it made it somewhat less fun for other people, and.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I either the people who work for him.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Yeah, and he had very you know, he also had
complete control and you know, running our family, and sometimes
that made that a lot less fun for us.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
But I did.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
I did get from him this idea that I talk
about of a democratic dictatorship, and there was room. There
was always room for us to express an opinion or
a preference, but then he was going to make the decision,
and that was very clear and there is a value
in that certainty. I think that having uncertainty around decision
(09:37):
making and letting people think a lot of the problems
we got into a Silicon Valley companies was a false
sense of democracy and employees starting to think that it
was democracy and being led to believe that somewhat because
they're being given more and more agency, and then this
rude awakening when they found out it wasn't the democracy. People, Oh,
(10:00):
this is a business, and I run it, you don't.
I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
You're known as the technologist today, but your early career.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Had quite a lot of intersection with media. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
There are two funny scenes in the book which involve
you as a young man telling, in one case, the
most successful media company in American history and the other
case the most successful media entrepreneur in American history, Disney
and John Malone, that they were wrong and you were right.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It can happen.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
So but talk about both those stories.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I mean, you were a job interview for Disney and
they were saying, what would strategy look like if we
opened a park in every city?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And you just said that's a dumb idea, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I said, gatting more questions Yeah, Well, I'm not good
at interviewing. So I have one, you know, one mode,
and that's authentic and that's what I aspired to and
I don't really inspired anything else. And corporations want people
(11:04):
who are going to be team players. And I've always said,
I don't know if I put this in the book,
that I'm a great team player as long as I'm
running the team like your dad.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, just like my dad. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
What I liked about I mean, you've obviously had an
amazingly successful career, but you're very open in this book
about the dark moments, something you call the abyss, and
not just you don't just describe the abyss, but you
talk about how the abyss is almost a necessary precondition
of the most successful periods of your life.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Can you explain that.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Because
then you're like, oh, I'm in a dark period. It
means the darkest for the dawn. It means I'm about
to have great stuff happen. So that's an optimistic view, Yeah,
not always true, not always true. Or how long that
abyss is going to go on?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
For it?
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You know, it could be six months, it could be.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
But in your case, you hate the abyss, and therefore
it gives you the motivation to do whatever you want to.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Get out of the abyss.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yes, but you got to be really careful that you
don't have such a strong desire to get out of
the abyss that you pursue a B plus idea or something.
So it's the longer you've been in the abyss, the
more desperate you are to not be in the abyss,
the more dangerous you are to yourself in terms that
you have to really have the discipline still. And that's
(12:22):
why I think I try to talk about pathways out
of the abyss. Are lots of little steps like engage
but realize that what you're engaging in may not meet
your ambitions, and that's powerful knowledge for you to have.
I would say one thing I've realized in talking about
this since writing the book is when I look at
(12:42):
the pattern of my career, it seems to have gone
in waves of success and failure. And it seems to
be that I had a lot of success early on
with Freeloader, with support dot Com going public my second
company right after that in like four years, and then
I had a long payeroerod of failure the whole two
(13:03):
thousand and one all the way, I mean through tribe
dot net all the way.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Tribet was your social network, which you found it at
the same time as basically read Holfum was founding LinkedIn
buk Zuckerberg was founding.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Just before Facebook. Yeah, I still managed to fail. And
that's when I remind people there were a lot of
social networks that succeeded. We just don't know them because
they didn't win ultimately. But tagged bibo, you know, there
was a whole bunch. There was like seven or eight,
so lots of social networks worked. You know, people were
into it. I was one of the only ones to fail.
(13:42):
So this wasn't like there was one that made out
of one hundred. You know, there might have been like
seven or eight that made it out of I don't know,
twelve or ten, you know, so I was in a minority.
Like it was like an active will to do it
in a feeling way, and it was so humbling that
(14:03):
I think it prepared me well for Zinga and being
ready to do something, start something very small and really
get to product market fit first and then ambition after.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And you saw it with your own money, right, You
can't take any excellent on funding. You got it to
be cash for positive before you started talking to investors.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Yeah, I mean, I mean it was actually cash flow
positive a month after we launched poker the first game.
So yeah, I put up three hundred and fifty thousand
to start the company. We were cash flow positive and
we actually never needed any of the money that we
raised all the way up to going public. But I
didn't know that, and we kept spent doubling down and
(14:47):
spending more and more. But then our revenues and profits
kept growing ahead of that. And I will say a
lesson I've got an investing that comes from Zinga is
when you see these companies that are growing like that
and they're beating their own numbers, you just invest at
(15:08):
any price they asked for, like the.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Other type of company. So you's always invested in. When
you've got a call saying we don't have enough computer, right,
yeah we just need more service. Yeah, just send them
a check.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
But I don't want to come back to zincer.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
But starting in the beginning, as a quote in your book,
at twenty eight, I found myself washed up and living
in a junior one bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. I'd
been the only kid in my hav A business school
section to graduate without a job. Over the years, my
classmates have become partners at Goldman or McKinsey, started hedge funds,
while I managed to get fired from every place I
worked or.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Standing in your way? And how did you change that
with freeloader?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
If I didn't change it, what was standing my way
was self realization that I'm not employable. Right, So once
once I accepted that, and I was probably undermining myself.
I mean, I know I was undermining myself in all
these jobs because I know at Columbia Capital there was
a path I could have gone down to fit in
(16:08):
to their culture. We see that, right, We're like, Okay,
it's not me, but I could adapt me. You know,
I could dress more like they didn't have a dress code,
but they all dressed like in khakis and stuff, you know,
And I was just in like beat up jeans and
now it's normal the way I just but it was
(16:28):
not then. But I was I think on some subconscious level,
I was my father's son and I just was never
going to.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
You're forcing yourself to fail in some way.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So you could do your own thing or inviting failure
without even being fully aware of it.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
I think I just was never cut out to.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Fit into some corporate culture, and I tried to All
that shaped the way I created companies because I wanted
cultures to not be so oppressive, and I wanted I
wanted to invite divergence, and I wanted to invite in
weird different kinds of people and mindsets and not have
(17:13):
people say this is and it happens the at Zinga
people would say this isn't the way we do it,
and I would fight that.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
It was like fuck that if? What if the way
we do it is stupid?
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Like we need some maybe the people who are going
to say, well, your way of doing it is dumb,
and like bring that the fuck on?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
After the break?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Why online poker became Zinga's first success story, stay with us.
There's a concept in your book which is right, instinct,
wrong idea. I guess with Tribe don't Net that was
a classic example, right, Yeah, you're correct that social media
(17:56):
was going to become basically the whole Internet. Yeah, but
you're actually was the wrong one. The company before that,
which was called Freeloader You essentially had the idea that
you were going to sort of push information from the
open Internet onto people's screen savers, and I slowly downloaded
(18:16):
overnight because that was the speed of the interests. That was,
in a sense, the wrong instinct but the right idea,
right because you managed to sell that company for thirty
eight million dollars, whereas in fact the Internet was kind
of moving on just as you were selling it, right,
or how how do you characterize them right now?
Speaker 4 (18:31):
It's a really interesting way of framing it. I haven't
thought about it that way. I think that it was
the right instinct in that moment. It was the right
instincts that I think I did tap into that the
Internet was too hard for most people and not accessible,
and it was too slow. Those are my two big instincts.
It's like, it's too hard and it's too slow for
(18:53):
normal people. I mean, you could also say it was
wrong instinct about the Internet being slow, because bandwidth came
eventually got faster. But in that moment it was right,
and I think the idea was I think it was
the right idea, and I think our execution was like
a B minus. I mean, it was a pretty janky product,
(19:14):
but it was. But it was so interesting that you
can bring out kind of a really bad product that
really has an idea that resonates for people, and it
can do well despite that. You know, it could work
twenty percent of the time and that's enough for people.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
And in the beginning, when something's emergent.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
It's also I mean, so you sold that company within
less than a year of building it, yeah, for thirty
eight million dollars, which is exactly the same price your
father sold his company for. That's weird, Which is weird?
What's the conversation like?
Speaker 4 (19:48):
It was a real kind of wake up moment for
my dad because he had built his company over thirty
eight years and sold it for thirty eight million dollars
and it was a huge success and his company produced
very lo large income for him and his partners. You know,
he is an agency and agencies at agencies and pr
firms don't have a lot of assets they build up,
(20:09):
you know, it's just the people and the brand. So
that was a huge success at his time. But then
this was on a different order magnitude because the Internet
is a marketplace of everybody, so it was just such
a different scale and my dad shifted the relationship, and
all of a sudden he was like, okay, you you
(20:34):
get something that I don't get, and you're like surpassing me,
you know, and men are very thinking a lot about,
you know, money and achievement, and my dad was very
achievement oriented. And so it did change the relationship in
good ways. I mean we we since I was eighteen,
(20:58):
we had had more of a p your relationship when
he wasn't supporting me financially, and then this really changed it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So then you sort of you took the money and
then you started thinking about basically this was was this
nineteen ninety five?
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Was it nineteen ninety six, nine ninety six?
Speaker 2 (21:16):
And then you made support dot com.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
You took it public, another big success, and then the
kind of dot com boom outside the dot com bust
happened and you had time on your hands, as did
a lot of other interesting people like bread Hoffmann, and
you started thinking about what you referred to as like
the social cocktail party on the internet. And you made
tribe dot net. What why do you think tribe dot
(21:42):
net failed where LinkedIn and Facebook succeeded.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Well, I saw the potential to acquire a big audience
through the virality of social networking, and that worked, and
Tribe was very viral and got a big audience quickly,
much bigger than LinkedIn. But what I didn't see was
(22:06):
how important trust was for mainstream Internet users. And they
were just putting themselves on the Internet and they didn't
like the idea of strangers seeing them and contacting them.
But my business model, which was to be like Craigslist
meets Friendster, the business model of Craigslist, was at odds
with that because to be a Craigslist a listing, everyone
(22:29):
needed to be able to contact everybody. So what really
worked on Tribe, and this is still an opportunity that's
not explored that someone should go steal and use, is
the value of the loose ties of these urban tribes,
these psychographic in some cases demographic, but interest based groups
(22:49):
that you have affinity groups. And that's what Tribes was
that it was based on Ethan Waters, I think that's
his name, essay on urban tribes, and that really worked.
I mean people loved it. They would be in the
Mission something tribe or they had their burning Man camps.
And so now you have these people, you have enough
(23:10):
of them affinity to and you can that was enough
to go to Brazil and somebody who knows someone from
my burning Man camp or from my Mission Freaks or whatever,
you know, weird group had enough of an affinity for
that social filter and lens to create a likeness and
(23:31):
a connection for me with someone in Brazil they've never met.
And so in a way it was like LinkedIn's two
or three degrees away and that worked. The two problems
with that one I ignored it. So that's a problem
in the Paul Graham sense. I should have just focused
on that one part and said, Okay, that's working. How
(23:54):
do I be that right? And in some ways that's reddit.
But and then the other problem though with that is
that that for that loose ties concept to work, you
still need people to be able to see and connect
with people that they are not that are not in
their networks, and so that's violating that trust thing. So
(24:16):
there's still going to have the membrane of trust being
very difficult to get right. So you know, it ends
up being a lot of mainstream women getting you know,
undesirable interest you know from a lot of men, so
you know, which comes off in the form of dick pics.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, So anyway, that was Yeah, that was a big
miss with.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Tribe, but it was the right instinct.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
It was like three killer instincts and one losing idea,
and it put.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
You in put you in the right stream both meeting
a young monk Zuckerberg and being one of the very
first investors in Facebook. I think you invested like was
it fifty dollars thirty eight act number? Yeah, thirty eight again, Yeah,
you're right, and that if you kept it with worth
six billion dollars today. Yeah, yeah, you didn't keep all
of it, have done some of it.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
The only like sliver I kept was what I put
in my kids accounts eventually, so they.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Got to thank you Dad.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
And also, I mean, what would you so take a
step back, what is Zinger And would you have been
able to come up with it if you hadn't done Tribe?
Speaker 4 (25:24):
I guess I know I wouldn't have gotten to Zinga
if I hadn't done Tribe first. And because when we
were doing Tribe, we were thinking there's going to be
this massive competition on plugins. We call it plugins but APIs.
We thought there's going to be these video services and
games and all these other things. We were right to
some degree. We said, we'll never be able to keep
(25:47):
up with the other social networks. So the only way
is going to be having a plug in architecture.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
So we have this captive audience, will allow the people
to access it and will charge them some.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
Yeah, and then that didn't happen until eventually it did,
and later than I thought. So I thought this happened
in you know, two thousand and four, two thousand and five,
you know, it didn't happen until two thousand and seven.
I'm still always thinking about this. But I was like, Okay,
it's so annoying to have to go get distribution. It's
so annoying to have to raise venture capital line to
(26:18):
build all of this infrastructure of accounts and password reset,
like all that stuff that now we take for granted.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
You had to build yourself then.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
And but then at the same time, Facebook announced they're
opening up their API access, and I said, great, I
don't have to build any of this infrastructure. I can
just be on someone else's network. A lot of what
I think about in social networks and games is dimensionality,
and I like the idea of there's a richness of
being able to do something that opens this other dimension
(26:50):
that wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay, So it creates a new paradigm of interaction. You're
on Facebook and then you get to go into poker.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Actually on the whole web, it's a quiet experience. It's
like you're in a library. You are just looking at
your browser that hasn't changed since nineteen ninety four. It's
the same browser. It's the same type in you know,
URL window, and it's still links and pages, right, And
I thought, when's it going to get rowdy? And so
(27:17):
what I want to do with poker? I was like,
I want to make it kind of loud and rowdy.
I want to be like, turn the lights up a
little bit. And on Facebook, nobody could talk to each other,
you know, live or anything. And now all of a
sudden they could drop in here and meet the other
people and often their friends.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
And they're not playing for money those it's it's no,
it's spoke of additional chips. Yes, And nonetheless it was cuptivating.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
Yeah, people are afraid of losing even a dollar, so
people don't want to be the sucker. So there's a
mentality that people would rather practice their poker without having
to spend money. But an insight that I had was
that they wanted more chips, first of all, because they
(28:01):
always do, but second because they wanted to play against
better players.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
But they would play real money. They would pay real
money to get more chips. They will later and back
into money. But so Poka takes off, then Foamville you
become most famous for right Yeah, And all this time,
basically all of your business is coming through Facebook, and
Mark is your friend and you're one of the first
invests in his business. And then all of a sudden
they turn around to you and say, if you don't
(28:27):
play by all of our rules and effectually become a subsidiary,
we're going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
How did that feel? Well?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
I didn't take any of it personally, because it's the
only reason that we were able to scale so quickly
was because we were, you know, an app apps riding
on top of Facebook. So at one moment you're on
strategy for them, and another moment you're not on strategy,
(28:54):
and that's life and it's there.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
You know, that's their right to do that.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
I didn't like the way they went about it, you know,
kind of taking us in a dark alley and beating
us up and In fact, the only reason that in
the end they came back to the negotiating table with
us is because at some point we realized that we
didn't have any NDA signed between the two companies, so
we I don't know if we threaten this, but we
(29:22):
heavily implied that there was nothing stopping us from taking
their agreement they asked us for to sign and publishing
it on the internet, which would not have helped their reputation.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And because they would have been seen to be bullying.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
It's not going to help you being an app developer
platform when your lead app developer was just given like
put the barrel. Yeah, a contract you know that says
you're going to be captive to our company and and
nothing that you launch on Facebook can go anywhere else
on the internet. You know, like that might dry up,
you know, interest in your platform pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So you, with John Doo's support, turned around and said
we're going to fight this and rather go down than
except becoming your subsidiary.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Yeah. It was a very heroic, romantic moment for our
company and scary, but I knew it wasn't going to matter.
That Zuck and I were friends and at this point
I'd been to his wedding. You know, we were legitimately friends,
but he had such a sense of fate and destiny
that nothing was going to get in the way of that.
(30:22):
And so if if there was something about Zinga that
was in the way, it didn't.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Matter if we had a friendship. I said.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
It was more like he wouldn't take pleasure as he
like pushed the sword into my neck.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
So look how much to ask you.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I mean, it's it's the sort of fomo era all
over again, right like, I mean there it's a space
x ipo anthropic ipo, and I mean that's just that's
just money, but everything that goes around it is I mean,
this is the moment where everybody in Selicon Value is
feeling that the future is being built in real time. Yes,
your friend riad Hoffmann wrote the wrote the forward to
(30:57):
your book, and he I thought it was very very
interesting essay actually, but I.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Think what he wrote was so good that it I
was like, oh shit, I got to make the book better.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
That's a funny a funny way around, but I mean
he he Basically I always ask people two questions, what
game are you playing?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And what's your theory? Of the game.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
So I guess I want to ask that question to you,
and in particular to ask you know, as you think
about this moment, everything you've done so far, you know,
what's the game you're playing, what's your theory of it,
and what comes next?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
For Mark Pinkers in the Age of AI.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
I asked myself that all the time. Luckily I have
some answers, and I talked in the book about that.
I realized in the midst of building Zinga, what my
why was that I want to build one of these
Internet treasures, these services. We can't remember life before or
(31:49):
imagine life without. And that's my why. And what I
also realized in this kind of came through my book
of Life Practice just.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
For the audience, that this is basically an annual review
cycle you give to.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
Yeah, yeah, and the first part of it is read
it or throughout it, I'm reading everything I've written before,
and it's a conversation and a dialogue with yourself over time.
And the painful weight of time and weight of pages
is how many years you talk about doing the same
things and you don't do it right And we all
(32:22):
feel that, but there's nothing like reading it in your
like shit, five years ago, ten years ago, I was
trying to do the same thing. I was still talking
about launching dot earth next year, and I still haven't
fucking done it right, And it's like, what am I
going to do differently this year? How am I going
to stop time and make a difference? And so it's
it's been a powerful practice for me. It hasn't always worked, obviously,
(32:47):
because I kept talking about launching dot earth and I
didn't do it. But what I have learned is this
that there's It's the most important thing over time is
not It's not whether or not you achieve it the goal.
It's not whether or not I build that internet treasure
that I dream of, It's did I go after it?
(33:10):
Am I in integrity with that goal or out of integrity?
Because if I went for it last year, which I
did and it didn't work, which it didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
I don't feel bad about last year.
Speaker 4 (33:23):
I can check that off and say, Okay, I tried
that approach, it didn't work. I'm not going to do
that again. What did I learn from that that I
can do definitely this year if I didn't do it
last year, and it's just another broken promise to myself.
The deeper thing is I'm out of integrity with myself.
It means in some level, I can't trust myself. So
(33:45):
you're kind of full of shit. You're writing this down
here as you did last year, but I.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Don't what's the point.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
I don't believe you because you're going to get distracted
and you don't really mean it. So when are you
going to be honest with yourself that you don't really
have this goal? So you know, I'm being very Northern
California about this, but you know it's it's true. And
so for me, what is the game? The game is
(34:12):
I enjoyed building innovative, emergent products, trying to connect the
dots before they're obvious, trying to bring that to the
mass market, make these things accessible to them in ways
that they don't feel stupid. And the game is I wanted.
(34:32):
I want to be prosecuting that with great teams, and
I hope to get back to the high that I
had with Zinga of just this loop of every week
coming up with ideas and working with great teams and
then seeing them go out, learn and do, rinse, and
do it again.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
The book is life at the speed of Play. Not thinkers.
Thank you, thanks for tech stuff. I'mos Vloscian.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
Executive produced by me Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katria Novel for iHeart podcasts. Our engineer today
was Bahid Fraser. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle
Murdoch wrote our theme song
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm os Vloschin. Today we're joined
by Mark Pinkus. He got his start in tech during
the dot com era and has gone on to found
multiple companies, including Zinger, producer of.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hit game Farm Film.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Mark found a Zinger in two thousand and seven, and
the company was acquired by Take two Interactive in twenty
twenty two.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
For over twelve billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
He's also invested in startups like Facebook, which changed the
Internet as we know today. Mark's new book, Life at
the Speed of Play Launch Products People Love is pop memoir,
pop playbook for running a successful business when everything around
you is in flux.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Mark pink is welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
What does it mean to live your life at the
Speed of Play?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Well, there's so many dimensions that that line has meant
to me that I wrote a whole book.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I was like, that's got to be the title.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
So on the one hand, I think I think culturally,
I think we're on the precipice of being able to
feel like we're living our just our normal lives more
at the speed of play.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Speed in a good way.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I know there's speed that also is hectic, but the
ideas that life can feel like a beat down, especially
when we want to do something creative or launch a
product or a company.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
And in games we get to skip all that.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
We just get to the good stuff and there's really
no consequence, especially in you know, simulation games, there's almost
no consequence. Just someone else wins more than you. And
I think that when we lower the barriers to being
generitive and creative, we also unlock a lightness of being
(02:02):
a playfulness because we can try and experiment and a
lot of things and afford to be wrong, as opposed
to putting all your wood behind one arrow and saying, Okay,
this has to work and this If this doesn't, my
company is going out of business or losing my house.
It's not like that, and it's getting less and less.
(02:23):
And now in the age of AI, you don't need
to quit your job. You can even simulate and see
whether this idea might work before you even bother to
try it. So I think life the speed of play
speaks to all of that. And then it's also this
whole kind of product manager bible and playbook that we
developed at Zinga that I tried to lay out the
(02:46):
case for it in the book.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, I'm curious.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I mean, obviously you're most famous for Zinga, which is
a game company, and the title of the book is
life that the speed of play and playing games are
kind of two sides of the same coin, right, So
I mean, I guess what is it you in games?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Well? I never thought that I'd be able to work
entrepreneur in games. It seemed like such a such a
closed off, different kind of industry, and it always was
and kind of is. But for me, I thought, okay,
(03:22):
there's a chance, a very decent chance, that games have
missed their real opportunity, and that in two thousand and seven,
you know, it was a twenty three billion dollar, fairly
mature industry.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
This was mainly like traditional video games.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Console video games was kind of flatlining, and the computer
gaming business was in constant slow growth.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
But it was not a top ten activity on the web.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Definitely not mass market, I mean in the sense of
that we think about it. It was a very very big,
niche business, but it was the size of the movie industry.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Now it's a lot bigger.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
So my hypothesis was, I love the idea that there
can be a mature industry that has lots of revenues
has a existing behavior that hasn't even started its real
growth yet, and that was searched before Google. It was
fairly mature, and a lot of times those industries get
mature and they lack real innovation. That was the defense industry,
(04:21):
you know, it was the rocket industry. And it's such
a terrific place to go because you don't have to
prove people want to play games. In this case, you
just had to make it much more accessible to people
and ask less of them, you know, drop it where
they are and ask them to play, you know, for
fifteen minutes and not have to learn anything.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I want to come back to Zinga and games, but
before we get that, I want to talk a bit
more about your family life. You don't talk too much
about like individual scenes I mentioned as pot memoir, but
you're not kind of you know, telling this happened, then,
that happened type of story. But your dad is this
kind of Homeston presence and touchstone, and I was quite
(05:03):
struck by the lesson he really seemed to impart on.
You is controlled, Oh yeah, yes, where to control and
play fit together as concepts.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
I actually think it sounds paradoxical. But they actually do
come together. They are necessary. If you think about when
we were kids, we could play when we felt the
most freedom, and in a sense, in order for you
(05:34):
to have freedom, you need control. If someone else, if
our parents were controlling our time and behaviors in those moments,
we wouldn't have felt the freedom to really let loosen play.
And similarly, for us as creators and founders, we start
to learn the hard way what happens when we don't
(05:56):
have control.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
It's not fun, it's not playful, and we don't.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Get to to really explore our full expression and creativity.
And so if you have control, then you're guaranteeing yourself
the open canvas or open highway for you to go
for it and try whatever it is that you believe in.
(06:21):
And in a lot of ways, I think that the
more control founders get, the more room there is to
see people do really risky, audacious things. Because investors don't
like risk, you know, they they want certainty. They like upside,
but they like certainty even more than upside. I mean
(06:44):
they say they want upside, but they'll take a guaranteed
three X. You know, most of them over you know,
a very small potential of one hundred x. Some may
argue with me, some might be right, but but you know,
and as you get to be more and more capital
you might say that there's seed investors that are fine
with that, but they also have a model that assumes
(07:06):
a huge loss rate. By the time you get to
growth investors, public market investors, you're looking at almost a
zero tolerance for a loss rate.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
So control gives you confidence. Confidence allows you to play.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
The confidence is a part of it, but it also
gives you degrees of freedom, and it's not very fun.
It's not a lot of fun to play if you're
told you can do anything you want between this one
foot wide expanse. You know, if it's like infinite do
whatever you can imagine, that's a lot more creatively, you know,
(07:41):
exciting and has more potential, and you need as a
foundered you need the freedom to make very very hard
decisions and bet the company decisions. And you feel that
you have less and less of that freedom as you
have more and more constituents, more employees, more investors, higher
(08:03):
stakes in this more you know, people have more to lose.
You're carrying a bigger responsibility, and you're kind of going
to war to be your best. You can't worry about
you can't be sitting there on the front lines worrying
about the people that aren't going to like this decision
if you believe this is the best decision.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Your dad gave you this advice about control long before
you were a founder. What did it mean to him?
And what did you What did this word to control, like,
how did you internalize? How did you explain the importance
of it to you?
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Well, it had a It was a double edged sword
for me with my dad and control, because I saw
him in building his business. He had a nationwide financial
pr firm, investor relations, and he had complete control of
his firm, and that made it very fun for him.
I think it made it somewhat less fun for other people, and.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I either the people who work for him.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Yeah, and he had very you know, he also had
complete control and you know, running our family, and sometimes
that made that a lot less fun for us.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
But I did.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
I did get from him this idea that I talk
about of a democratic dictatorship, and there was room. There
was always room for us to express an opinion or
a preference, but then he was going to make the decision,
and that was very clear and there is a value
in that certainty. I think that having uncertainty around decision
(09:37):
making and letting people think a lot of the problems
we got into a Silicon Valley companies was a false
sense of democracy and employees starting to think that it
was democracy and being led to believe that somewhat because
they're being given more and more agency, and then this
rude awakening when they found out it wasn't the democracy. People, Oh,
(10:00):
this is a business, and I run it, you don't.
I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
You're known as the technologist today, but your early career.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Had quite a lot of intersection with media. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
There are two funny scenes in the book which involve
you as a young man telling, in one case, the
most successful media company in American history and the other
case the most successful media entrepreneur in American history, Disney
and John Malone, that they were wrong and you were right.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It can happen.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
So but talk about both those stories.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I mean, you were a job interview for Disney and
they were saying, what would strategy look like if we
opened a park in every city?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And you just said that's a dumb idea, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I said, gatting more questions Yeah, Well, I'm not good
at interviewing. So I have one, you know, one mode,
and that's authentic and that's what I aspired to and
I don't really inspired anything else. And corporations want people
(11:04):
who are going to be team players. And I've always said,
I don't know if I put this in the book,
that I'm a great team player as long as I'm
running the team like your dad.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, just like my dad. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
What I liked about I mean, you've obviously had an
amazingly successful career, but you're very open in this book
about the dark moments, something you call the abyss, and
not just you don't just describe the abyss, but you
talk about how the abyss is almost a necessary precondition
of the most successful periods of your life.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Can you explain that.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Because
then you're like, oh, I'm in a dark period. It
means the darkest for the dawn. It means I'm about
to have great stuff happen. So that's an optimistic view, Yeah,
not always true, not always true. Or how long that
abyss is going to go on?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
For it?
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You know, it could be six months, it could be.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
But in your case, you hate the abyss, and therefore
it gives you the motivation to do whatever you want to.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Get out of the abyss.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yes, but you got to be really careful that you
don't have such a strong desire to get out of
the abyss that you pursue a B plus idea or something.
So it's the longer you've been in the abyss, the
more desperate you are to not be in the abyss,
the more dangerous you are to yourself in terms that
you have to really have the discipline still. And that's
(12:22):
why I think I try to talk about pathways out
of the abyss. Are lots of little steps like engage
but realize that what you're engaging in may not meet
your ambitions, and that's powerful knowledge for you to have.
I would say one thing I've realized in talking about
this since writing the book is when I look at
(12:42):
the pattern of my career, it seems to have gone
in waves of success and failure. And it seems to
be that I had a lot of success early on
with Freeloader, with support dot Com going public my second
company right after that in like four years, and then
I had a long payeroerod of failure the whole two
(13:03):
thousand and one all the way, I mean through tribe
dot net all the way.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Tribet was your social network, which you found it at
the same time as basically read Holfum was founding LinkedIn
buk Zuckerberg was founding.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Just before Facebook. Yeah, I still managed to fail. And
that's when I remind people there were a lot of
social networks that succeeded. We just don't know them because
they didn't win ultimately. But tagged bibo, you know, there
was a whole bunch. There was like seven or eight,
so lots of social networks worked. You know, people were
into it. I was one of the only ones to fail.
(13:42):
So this wasn't like there was one that made out
of one hundred. You know, there might have been like
seven or eight that made it out of I don't know,
twelve or ten, you know, so I was in a minority.
Like it was like an active will to do it
in a feeling way, and it was so humbling that
(14:03):
I think it prepared me well for Zinga and being
ready to do something, start something very small and really
get to product market fit first and then ambition after.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And you saw it with your own money, right, You
can't take any excellent on funding. You got it to
be cash for positive before you started talking to investors.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Yeah, I mean, I mean it was actually cash flow
positive a month after we launched poker the first game.
So yeah, I put up three hundred and fifty thousand
to start the company. We were cash flow positive and
we actually never needed any of the money that we
raised all the way up to going public. But I
didn't know that, and we kept spent doubling down and
(14:47):
spending more and more. But then our revenues and profits
kept growing ahead of that. And I will say a
lesson I've got an investing that comes from Zinga is
when you see these companies that are growing like that
and they're beating their own numbers, you just invest at
(15:08):
any price they asked for, like the.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Other type of company. So you's always invested in. When
you've got a call saying we don't have enough computer, right,
yeah we just need more service. Yeah, just send them
a check.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
But I don't want to come back to zincer.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
But starting in the beginning, as a quote in your book,
at twenty eight, I found myself washed up and living
in a junior one bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. I'd
been the only kid in my hav A business school
section to graduate without a job. Over the years, my
classmates have become partners at Goldman or McKinsey, started hedge funds,
while I managed to get fired from every place I
worked or.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Standing in your way? And how did you change that
with freeloader?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
If I didn't change it, what was standing my way
was self realization that I'm not employable. Right, So once
once I accepted that, and I was probably undermining myself.
I mean, I know I was undermining myself in all
these jobs because I know at Columbia Capital there was
a path I could have gone down to fit in
(16:08):
to their culture. We see that, right, We're like, Okay,
it's not me, but I could adapt me. You know,
I could dress more like they didn't have a dress code,
but they all dressed like in khakis and stuff, you know,
And I was just in like beat up jeans and
now it's normal the way I just but it was
(16:28):
not then. But I was I think on some subconscious level,
I was my father's son and I just was never
going to.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
You're forcing yourself to fail in some way.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So you could do your own thing or inviting failure
without even being fully aware of it.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
I think I just was never cut out to.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Fit into some corporate culture, and I tried to All
that shaped the way I created companies because I wanted
cultures to not be so oppressive, and I wanted I
wanted to invite divergence, and I wanted to invite in
weird different kinds of people and mindsets and not have
(17:13):
people say this is and it happens the at Zinga
people would say this isn't the way we do it,
and I would fight that.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
It was like fuck that if? What if the way
we do it is stupid?
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Like we need some maybe the people who are going
to say, well, your way of doing it is dumb,
and like bring that the fuck on?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
After the break?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Why online poker became Zinga's first success story, stay with us.
There's a concept in your book which is right, instinct,
wrong idea. I guess with Tribe don't Net that was
a classic example, right, Yeah, you're correct that social media
(17:56):
was going to become basically the whole Internet. Yeah, but
you're actually was the wrong one. The company before that,
which was called Freeloader You essentially had the idea that
you were going to sort of push information from the
open Internet onto people's screen savers, and I slowly downloaded
(18:16):
overnight because that was the speed of the interests. That was,
in a sense, the wrong instinct but the right idea,
right because you managed to sell that company for thirty
eight million dollars, whereas in fact the Internet was kind
of moving on just as you were selling it, right,
or how how do you characterize them right now?
Speaker 4 (18:31):
It's a really interesting way of framing it. I haven't
thought about it that way. I think that it was
the right instinct in that moment. It was the right
instincts that I think I did tap into that the
Internet was too hard for most people and not accessible,
and it was too slow. Those are my two big instincts.
It's like, it's too hard and it's too slow for
(18:53):
normal people. I mean, you could also say it was
wrong instinct about the Internet being slow, because bandwidth came
eventually got faster. But in that moment it was right,
and I think the idea was I think it was
the right idea, and I think our execution was like
a B minus. I mean, it was a pretty janky product,
(19:14):
but it was. But it was so interesting that you
can bring out kind of a really bad product that
really has an idea that resonates for people, and it
can do well despite that. You know, it could work
twenty percent of the time and that's enough for people.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
And in the beginning, when something's emergent.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
It's also I mean, so you sold that company within
less than a year of building it, yeah, for thirty
eight million dollars, which is exactly the same price your
father sold his company for. That's weird, Which is weird?
What's the conversation like?
Speaker 4 (19:48):
It was a real kind of wake up moment for
my dad because he had built his company over thirty
eight years and sold it for thirty eight million dollars
and it was a huge success and his company produced
very lo large income for him and his partners. You know,
he is an agency and agencies at agencies and pr
firms don't have a lot of assets they build up,
(20:09):
you know, it's just the people and the brand. So
that was a huge success at his time. But then
this was on a different order magnitude because the Internet
is a marketplace of everybody, so it was just such
a different scale and my dad shifted the relationship, and
all of a sudden he was like, okay, you you
(20:34):
get something that I don't get, and you're like surpassing me,
you know, and men are very thinking a lot about,
you know, money and achievement, and my dad was very
achievement oriented. And so it did change the relationship in
good ways. I mean we we since I was eighteen,
(20:58):
we had had more of a p your relationship when
he wasn't supporting me financially, and then this really changed it.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So then you sort of you took the money and
then you started thinking about basically this was was this
nineteen ninety five?
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Was it nineteen ninety six, nine ninety six?
Speaker 2 (21:16):
And then you made support dot com.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
You took it public, another big success, and then the
kind of dot com boom outside the dot com bust
happened and you had time on your hands, as did
a lot of other interesting people like bread Hoffmann, and
you started thinking about what you referred to as like
the social cocktail party on the internet. And you made
tribe dot net. What why do you think tribe dot
(21:42):
net failed where LinkedIn and Facebook succeeded.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Well, I saw the potential to acquire a big audience
through the virality of social networking, and that worked, and
Tribe was very viral and got a big audience quickly,
much bigger than LinkedIn. But what I didn't see was
(22:06):
how important trust was for mainstream Internet users. And they
were just putting themselves on the Internet and they didn't
like the idea of strangers seeing them and contacting them.
But my business model, which was to be like Craigslist
meets Friendster, the business model of Craigslist, was at odds
with that because to be a Craigslist a listing, everyone
(22:29):
needed to be able to contact everybody. So what really
worked on Tribe, and this is still an opportunity that's
not explored that someone should go steal and use, is
the value of the loose ties of these urban tribes,
these psychographic in some cases demographic, but interest based groups
(22:49):
that you have affinity groups. And that's what Tribes was
that it was based on Ethan Waters, I think that's
his name, essay on urban tribes, and that really worked.
I mean people loved it. They would be in the
Mission something tribe or they had their burning Man camps.
And so now you have these people, you have enough
(23:10):
of them affinity to and you can that was enough
to go to Brazil and somebody who knows someone from
my burning Man camp or from my Mission Freaks or whatever,
you know, weird group had enough of an affinity for
that social filter and lens to create a likeness and
(23:31):
a connection for me with someone in Brazil they've never met.
And so in a way it was like LinkedIn's two
or three degrees away and that worked. The two problems
with that one I ignored it. So that's a problem
in the Paul Graham sense. I should have just focused
on that one part and said, Okay, that's working. How
(23:54):
do I be that right? And in some ways that's reddit.
But and then the other problem though with that is
that that for that loose ties concept to work, you
still need people to be able to see and connect
with people that they are not that are not in
their networks, and so that's violating that trust thing. So
(24:16):
there's still going to have the membrane of trust being
very difficult to get right. So you know, it ends
up being a lot of mainstream women getting you know,
undesirable interest you know from a lot of men, so
you know, which comes off in the form of dick pics.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, So anyway, that was Yeah, that was a big
miss with.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Tribe, but it was the right instinct.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
It was like three killer instincts and one losing idea,
and it put.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
You in put you in the right stream both meeting
a young monk Zuckerberg and being one of the very
first investors in Facebook. I think you invested like was
it fifty dollars thirty eight act number? Yeah, thirty eight again, Yeah,
you're right, and that if you kept it with worth
six billion dollars today. Yeah, yeah, you didn't keep all
of it, have done some of it.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
The only like sliver I kept was what I put
in my kids accounts eventually, so they.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Got to thank you Dad.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
And also, I mean, what would you so take a
step back, what is Zinger And would you have been
able to come up with it if you hadn't done Tribe?
Speaker 4 (25:24):
I guess I know I wouldn't have gotten to Zinga
if I hadn't done Tribe first. And because when we
were doing Tribe, we were thinking there's going to be
this massive competition on plugins. We call it plugins but APIs.
We thought there's going to be these video services and
games and all these other things. We were right to
some degree. We said, we'll never be able to keep
(25:47):
up with the other social networks. So the only way
is going to be having a plug in architecture.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
So we have this captive audience, will allow the people
to access it and will charge them some.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
Yeah, and then that didn't happen until eventually it did,
and later than I thought. So I thought this happened
in you know, two thousand and four, two thousand and five,
you know, it didn't happen until two thousand and seven.
I'm still always thinking about this. But I was like, Okay,
it's so annoying to have to go get distribution. It's
so annoying to have to raise venture capital line to
(26:18):
build all of this infrastructure of accounts and password reset,
like all that stuff that now we take for granted.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
You had to build yourself then.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
And but then at the same time, Facebook announced they're
opening up their API access, and I said, great, I
don't have to build any of this infrastructure. I can
just be on someone else's network. A lot of what
I think about in social networks and games is dimensionality,
and I like the idea of there's a richness of
being able to do something that opens this other dimension
(26:50):
that wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay, So it creates a new paradigm of interaction. You're
on Facebook and then you get to go into poker.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Actually on the whole web, it's a quiet experience. It's
like you're in a library. You are just looking at
your browser that hasn't changed since nineteen ninety four. It's
the same browser. It's the same type in you know,
URL window, and it's still links and pages, right, And
I thought, when's it going to get rowdy? And so
(27:17):
what I want to do with poker? I was like,
I want to make it kind of loud and rowdy.
I want to be like, turn the lights up a
little bit. And on Facebook, nobody could talk to each other,
you know, live or anything. And now all of a
sudden they could drop in here and meet the other
people and often their friends.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
And they're not playing for money those it's it's no,
it's spoke of additional chips. Yes, And nonetheless it was cuptivating.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
Yeah, people are afraid of losing even a dollar, so
people don't want to be the sucker. So there's a
mentality that people would rather practice their poker without having
to spend money. But an insight that I had was
that they wanted more chips, first of all, because they
(28:01):
always do, but second because they wanted to play against
better players.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
But they would play real money. They would pay real
money to get more chips. They will later and back
into money. But so Poka takes off, then Foamville you
become most famous for right Yeah, And all this time,
basically all of your business is coming through Facebook, and
Mark is your friend and you're one of the first
invests in his business. And then all of a sudden
they turn around to you and say, if you don't
(28:27):
play by all of our rules and effectually become a subsidiary,
we're going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
How did that feel? Well?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
I didn't take any of it personally, because it's the
only reason that we were able to scale so quickly
was because we were, you know, an app apps riding
on top of Facebook. So at one moment you're on
strategy for them, and another moment you're not on strategy,
(28:54):
and that's life and it's there.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
You know, that's their right to do that.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
I didn't like the way they went about it, you know,
kind of taking us in a dark alley and beating
us up and In fact, the only reason that in
the end they came back to the negotiating table with
us is because at some point we realized that we
didn't have any NDA signed between the two companies, so
we I don't know if we threaten this, but we
(29:22):
heavily implied that there was nothing stopping us from taking
their agreement they asked us for to sign and publishing
it on the internet, which would not have helped their reputation.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And because they would have been seen to be bullying.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
It's not going to help you being an app developer
platform when your lead app developer was just given like
put the barrel. Yeah, a contract you know that says
you're going to be captive to our company and and
nothing that you launch on Facebook can go anywhere else
on the internet. You know, like that might dry up,
you know, interest in your platform pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So you, with John Doo's support, turned around and said
we're going to fight this and rather go down than
except becoming your subsidiary.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Yeah. It was a very heroic, romantic moment for our
company and scary, but I knew it wasn't going to matter.
That Zuck and I were friends and at this point
I'd been to his wedding. You know, we were legitimately friends,
but he had such a sense of fate and destiny
that nothing was going to get in the way of that.
(30:22):
And so if if there was something about Zinga that
was in the way, it didn't.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Matter if we had a friendship. I said.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
It was more like he wouldn't take pleasure as he
like pushed the sword into my neck.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
So look how much to ask you.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I mean, it's it's the sort of fomo era all
over again, right like, I mean there it's a space
x ipo anthropic ipo, and I mean that's just that's
just money, but everything that goes around it is I mean,
this is the moment where everybody in Selicon Value is
feeling that the future is being built in real time. Yes,
your friend riad Hoffmann wrote the wrote the forward to
(30:57):
your book, and he I thought it was very very
interesting essay actually, but I.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Think what he wrote was so good that it I
was like, oh shit, I got to make the book better.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
That's a funny a funny way around, but I mean
he he Basically I always ask people two questions, what
game are you playing?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And what's your theory? Of the game.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
So I guess I want to ask that question to you,
and in particular to ask you know, as you think
about this moment, everything you've done so far, you know,
what's the game you're playing, what's your theory of it,
and what comes next?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
For Mark Pinkers in the Age of AI.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
I asked myself that all the time. Luckily I have
some answers, and I talked in the book about that.
I realized in the midst of building Zinga, what my
why was that I want to build one of these
Internet treasures, these services. We can't remember life before or
(31:49):
imagine life without. And that's my why. And what I
also realized in this kind of came through my book
of Life Practice just.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
For the audience, that this is basically an annual review
cycle you give to.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
Yeah, yeah, and the first part of it is read
it or throughout it, I'm reading everything I've written before,
and it's a conversation and a dialogue with yourself over time.
And the painful weight of time and weight of pages
is how many years you talk about doing the same
things and you don't do it right And we all
(32:22):
feel that, but there's nothing like reading it in your
like shit, five years ago, ten years ago, I was
trying to do the same thing. I was still talking
about launching dot earth next year, and I still haven't
fucking done it right, And it's like, what am I
going to do differently this year? How am I going
to stop time and make a difference? And so it's
it's been a powerful practice for me. It hasn't always worked, obviously,
(32:47):
because I kept talking about launching dot earth and I
didn't do it. But what I have learned is this
that there's It's the most important thing over time is
not It's not whether or not you achieve it the goal.
It's not whether or not I build that internet treasure
that I dream of, It's did I go after it?
(33:10):
Am I in integrity with that goal or out of integrity?
Because if I went for it last year, which I
did and it didn't work, which it didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
I don't feel bad about last year.
Speaker 4 (33:23):
I can check that off and say, Okay, I tried
that approach, it didn't work. I'm not going to do
that again. What did I learn from that that I
can do definitely this year if I didn't do it
last year, and it's just another broken promise to myself.
The deeper thing is I'm out of integrity with myself.
It means in some level, I can't trust myself. So
(33:45):
you're kind of full of shit. You're writing this down
here as you did last year, but I.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Don't what's the point.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
I don't believe you because you're going to get distracted
and you don't really mean it. So when are you
going to be honest with yourself that you don't really
have this goal? So you know, I'm being very Northern
California about this, but you know it's it's true. And
so for me, what is the game? The game is
(34:12):
I enjoyed building innovative, emergent products, trying to connect the
dots before they're obvious, trying to bring that to the
mass market, make these things accessible to them in ways
that they don't feel stupid. And the game is I wanted.
(34:32):
I want to be prosecuting that with great teams, and
I hope to get back to the high that I
had with Zinga of just this loop of every week
coming up with ideas and working with great teams and
then seeing them go out, learn and do, rinse, and
do it again.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
The book is life at the speed of Play. Not thinkers.
Thank you, thanks for tech stuff. I'mos Vloscian.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
Executive produced by me Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katria Novel for iHeart podcasts. Our engineer today
was Bahid Fraser. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle
Murdoch wrote our theme song
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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