--:-- Host: You might recognize the name Mark Pincus, but I can almost guarantee you recognize the game Farmville. Mark Pincus is, of course, the founder and longtime CEO of Zynga, known for its massive global franchise of games, including those household names like Farmville and Words with Friends. Zynga was also at the forefront of the transition to mobile, and the use of large platforms like Facebook for distribution. And if you need any reminder of how big Zynga got, it was sold in 2022 to game publisher Take-Two for a whopping $12.7 billion.
--:-- Mark, of course, has also founded several other companies, including Support.com and Tribe Networks. And today he sits down with Josh Lu, partner on the A16Z Games team who's previously worked at Zynga and Meta, about how to prepare for major tech waves and specifically what, quote, true signal to pay attention to. Mark also candidly covers so many other topics, including how to give yourself permission to be too early, whether he thinks we're still getting the metaverse, broken resumes, and his take on a Silicon Valley standard, minimum viable products, or MVPs.
--:-- This is a really fun conversation for people both inside and outside the games industry, and it comes directly from our A16Z Games Accelerator, Speedrun, which is going through its second cohort right now, and we'll have more details about how you can potentially attend our demo day on March 18th. All right, enjoy.
--:-- Oh, and by the way, this was one of many more sessions recorded during our exclusive multi-week Games Fund Accelerator, which we call Speedrun. And the good news, in fact, the great news is that we just announced Speedrun 3.0, which is coming to Los Angeles. So if you're a founder or have thought about founding a company, or quite frankly, just know someone that should found a company at the intersection of games and technology, make sure to tell them about Speedrun 3.0. You can learn more at A16Z.com slash Speedrun 3. Or you can find the link in our show notes.
--:-- As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures.
--:-- [The conversation begins]
--:-- Josh Lu: Zynga is best known for Facebook and eventually mobile, but actually it started well before that. So maybe talk to us a little bit about that.
--:-- Mark Pincus: Sure. I'm not well known, probably for good reason, for starting one of the first three social networks called tribe.net, which failed. Which is kind of an amazing feat to actually fail as one of the first social networks when everything worked. But that did ultimately lead to Zynga.
--:-- I'd say that where Zynga came from was after Tribe, in these times like right now, and this time when there was amazing growth around Web 2.0 and social networking, you start to feel this kind of weird FOMO because you're like, why haven't I figured it out? So I went into what I call this abyss where you're just kind of like, I know I want to do something, I want to be innovating on new consumer product ideas, but there's no obvious place.
--:-- I actually spent a long time trying to buy CNET because I thought if I own CNET, I have this captive audience. I spent all this time with bankers and private equity people. Their jobs are so boring. So while that was happening, Facebook was opening their API. And I said, oh, that's free. I don't even have to buy. Anyway, they have this captive audience. They had 70 million DAUs. And I had this instinct from Tribe that what people really wanted to do at this social cocktail party was play games together.
--:-- I thought games was this amazing business, which you may not even be aware of today. But in 2007, when I started, games was a mature and even declining business. The whole game industry was $20 billion. It was mainly console gaming. There was maybe like a billion dollars of PC gaming and zero web. It wasn't in a top 10 activity, but it was big. So I thought it was kind of like search before Google. Search was a big but mature business and then Google reimagined it.
--:-- One thing you're probably all aware of so much today is that distribution is kind of the hardest part of the equation in gaming. There was no distribution, there was no way to market games to a mass market audience. All games were made for a very hardcore audience. Then with Facebook, there was finally a distribution channel. So that's how I got to do it.
--:-- Josh Lu: So one of the really interesting things you said is suddenly this opportunity came along and it worked. So maybe a compound question: one, how do you as a founder prepare for these big waves? And second, how do you sort of know when something's working?
--:-- Mark Pincus: Well, I surf badly, but I surf for so long that it actually is a perfect analog. I said this last year, but when you're surfing, all you can do is try to be where you think there will be waves. Surfing is almost this chess game where you're trying to figure out the tides, the weather, the swell. What are other surfers thinking? It is this kind of interesting 3D chess game. Everyone's looking at Surfline. They have the same data you have. So you're trying to figure out, is this the day that I'm going to go to Ocean Beach and it won't drown me and no other surfers will be there and I'll have this epic day?
--:-- There's a lot of that around startups. There's a lot of hurry up and wait. There's a lot of being too early and wrong and then trying to decide, should I stay here and see if there's a wave or not?
--:-- One thing that my friend Reid Hoffman said to me a couple months ago, and I think he's one of the smartest thinkers and earliest thinkers around AI, is he said, you need to focus on the easiest unsolved problem that will have the biggest impact. Which is really hard. How do you come up with an easy problem that no one else has solved that has a big impact?
--:-- What I keep thinking is that what we're all trying to do is get to what I call true signal. Not what's getting a lot of VC funding or what everyone else is doing or what's popular right now. If it's a consumer focused opportunity, you're like, how do I know that this is something that a lot of consumers and people would like if they just had it in front of them? It's hard because you've got to learn over time and calibrate which data you should listen to that has true signal in it and which has false signal. I could talk for a long, long time. I think it's probably a science to pursue by itself.
--:-- Josh Lu: This is one of the hardest things, I think, for the games industry. Founders are making oftentimes experiences and they sometimes present as either working or not working. But really, there's so much more under the surface.
--:-- Mark Pincus: Yeah, I mean, I have so much to unpack there. The core for me, when you think about this true signal concept, is that I like to say that we have these winning instincts. And you all probably being here today can probably already trust the instincts that you have being right. But then we put these losing ideas on top of our winning instincts.
--:-- I had this instinct in 2003 for a bunch of things, but one was that we should be able to order a taxi through our phone. So I registered smstaxi.com, and I did a whole business plan around it, and I thought, this is an awful plan. I'm going to have to work with the taxi companies. I could get a million rides a month at a dollar a ride. That's a lot of work to get to a $12 million business and dealing with these awful taxi companies. So I had this instinct, but my idea was completely wrong. It never occurred to me that years later Uber would figure out to let anyone be a driver and do this magical app that we all take for granted now.
--:-- In the games industry, it happens all the time, or even right now with AI. I see something that's true signal right now with my friends and family, the way that they're using ChatGPT, the way that I have to literally stop my daughter from doing her homework on it because she's not going to learn it. She might learn the new skills she needs, but she won't learn the skills she's supposed to be doing in school right now. Even watching my partner, she's on Midjourney for hours doing room designs and imagining. To me, that's true signal. I look at it like, okay, there's something for sure that's happening that if that were easier and more available, I think everyone would be using this all the time. So I'm like, okay, that's true signal. I don't know the right ideas to put on top of that, but that feels like a wave to me.
--:-- I'll say where I have gotten true signal wrong is when I was talking a year ago about blockchain gaming. I think so many people took the wrong signals in that. We have to be careful when we say true signal of what. What we didn't see in blockchain gaming or blockchain was true signal of consumer adoption. What we saw was day trading and gambling. That's a real thing that people were into, but the adoption didn't happen. A lot of the game companies were thinking, well, everyone's going to want to own assets. They were half right. I think what we kind of know now is we saw a true signal in blockchain gaming around monetization. I do believe that people see more value in owning the money they spend in a game, having the potential that they could trade and sell that to somebody later. Bing Gordon always said, if you have a marketplace in a game, you double the value of the assets that people buy. So that's real. I think we should hang on to that true signal for monetization, but not adoption. Eventually, I think all these things get put together and we have a new reason that people want to play games that they find really fun and emergent and new, and then there's blockchain assets and you monetize. You have all kinds of new whales. Does that make sense?
--:-- Josh Lu: Makes sense. So you talked some about lessons from the Web3 wave. Obviously, we're big believers that generative AI is this new oncoming wave. You talked about some things that you've seen, some signal that you've seen. If you're a founder today and you see this wave coming, what would you do about it?
--:-- Mark Pincus: The coaching I've been giving myself for the last 18 months, and it's a reminder of so many hard lessons that we got at Zynga, is give yourself permission to be too early. I feel like that's what we all need to write down and say to ourselves right now. What I mean by that is it's okay to be too early, and you're going to be too early.
--:-- It's tough. When Zynga went into mobile, our biggest problem was we're way too early and too aggressive. That was a problem Zynga had everywhere. But we went big into mobile. We said this is going to be our way off of Facebook and monetization. Every reason in the world to love mobile. We had an 800 person division, but we were turning dollars into pennies. We got to a point that an ambitious person like Josh is, okay, do I want to work on the next mobile game that might get to 50,000 a day, or I can work on this web game that's not that interesting, but it's going to do 500,000 a day? We got all of our best people dove into mobile, and then they all left mobile early. We couldn't get really good teams to keep working on mobile.
--:-- Today, with AI, I just think we've got to keep trying things. It's moving so fast. Realize that what you're doing today might be obsolete in three months or six months. There might be a new release. But hopefully you're learning, building skills, building team, and you're in the right place. There might be little waves coming that are crashing over you on the head and you're like, shit, I'm in the wrong place. You're still in the right place. I would have the kind of staying power and fortitude to think about the macro and accept that at least everything I've done in the last 18 months or three years has been wrong. It's been the wrong ideas. I'm okay about it because I feel so strongly that this macro...
--:-- By the way, I still believe that what we're going to end up getting is going to somehow be the metaverse. That's a really unpopular thing to say today. Even Zuckerberg doesn't really talk about metaverse, and maybe he'll change the name back from Meta to something else. If you think about the definition of metaverse as being blurring the lines between analog and digital, I like to say that we're headed towards life at the speed of play.
--:-- To me, the North Star that I think about, that I think all this comes together around, is imagine we can type a tweet too quickly and easily. We're happy that there's an hour to edit it or delete it. I am at least, because Dan Guerin who works with me and now Kevin will say, that's awful, take that down. It's misspelled, it's embarrassing. But I can put up a tweet and it actually has real world impact. So I think of the metaverse as making the virtual real. We started that with Farmville in a little way and that really had adrenaline. I think that's an important part of gaming, but an important part of just what we're doing digital. You could put up a tweet and something real comes out of that. To me, that's powerful. That's why I think Elon's so into Twitter as the biggest, it's his metaverse. It's this big game that has real world impact.
--:-- I think that's the beginning of this thread that we're on with AI. I think that we're going to get to a place where you're going to type in something and it's going to turn into a whole business or store, or maybe a lot of people are going to come to you with services and an hour later, that's something real. To me, that's life at the speed of play and that's the metaverse. That's this bigger thing that I keep thinking we're headed towards.
--:-- Josh Lu: All right, we could spend a lot of time in the metaverse. Instead, I'm going to pivot just a little bit. You've now gotten to sort of see the evolution of consumer tech in lots of ways. You've also gotten to work with lots of amazing founders. What are the through lines on what makes for a successful founder? Given that everything else changes, nothing is static, how do founders prepare themselves and what are the attributes of really great founders?
--:-- Mark Pincus: I keep thinking of founders from a consumer standpoint, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But I spent a bunch of time with Brian Chesky and he's kind of molded in the Paul Graham school of first start with something that you could use. He gets to his own true signal and he does such a good job of building things in a non-scalable way. Even now, I'm so impressed with his commitment to getting to an A, not a B plus. I say, don't let a B plus be the enemy of an A. So I see him say, it's not ready, it's not good enough, and build things by hand.
--:-- You may not even have noticed, but Airbnb has something I think called experiences. I got involved and I renamed it Trips. It's done really well but it took him years and years to make this experience product because he would set up by hand a dinner that Michael Mina would prepare for you and the most interesting person would come as a guest. You'd be like, I'm not that excited about it. Personally, Michael Mina seems great but I don't want him to come to my house and cook dinner because it feels like an obligation. I have to fawn all over it and be impressed. I just want good food fast. I'll go to his restaurant if I want his food. So I wouldn't have gotten Trips experiences either. But I was like, Brian, what I would like is when I rent a surf house in Maui, I'd like some wax surfboards already there. I'd like a local to paddle out with me so I don't get angry stink eyes from the other locals. I'm like, that's cool. So rethink this in terms of that experience. He's done the best job of that.
--:-- I think Reid Hoffman, I work on a lot of things with. So many lessons I get from Reid as a founder. He's so strategic. What I've gotten as a lesson that's a hard one I'm trying to learn now from Reid is Reid doesn't pursue something until he has a CEO for it. Actually, this is how I did it at Zynga. I couldn't do it all, so I had to get a CEO, someone to be a GM and owner of something before I could fund it. I have too much of a tendency as a founder to just want to be the CEO of it myself, but then it doesn't move without me. I think there is this lesson that once you're trying to get a lot done, it's about being really good at turning people around you into CEOs, letting them be CEOs, getting out of their way.
--:-- Josh Lu: Maybe as a follow-up on that, a lot of the founders here, they've got other co-founders that are going to be hiring their first teams here shortly. Any advice for the founders here on how to find amazing people to work with? Because Zynga had a really good track record of being a collection of amazing talent.
--:-- Mark Pincus: Yeah, I think these are some pretty different ideas or principles that I've used around people that may or may not resonate with you guys right now. I think you have to be realistic about where you are and who you can get. I was a multi-time successful founder. I couldn't even get A investors or any investors to start with. What I was doing just sounded so flaky. Just Facebook apps. Do you have any respect for yourself? Is that really what you're doing?
--:-- I like to start rubbing sticks together. I don't start with a big amount of money. I don't build that. It's, hey, do you want to come work for Mark on this project? He's funded this with 350k and this little office he owns. No A people want to do that. There's no job security. We're doing this little Facebook app. Everything I've done started off feeling flaky. No matter what my track record is, even now I'm trying to recruit people. I get what I can get and I'm just realistic about it.
--:-- When I started my first company, you know what? You can find these diamonds in the rough. There's this kid, JW, Justin Waldron. I found him by fishing through failed Facebook apps with 10 users. I would send messages out being, I love your app. Can we talk? I was the only message he got that month. He emailed right back. I hired him for 50, 60 bucks an hour. He was living on his mom's couch in Connecticut. He was 18, self-taught. It was six months before I even met him in person. This was not someone who a lot of people were after, but he was passionate about games and he became super successful in his own right today as a co-founder.
--:-- You can get these broken resumes, non-resumes. I would say don't over-optimize in the beginning on people. I don't know if this is good to tweet, but this is not what you probably hear. I wouldn't waste a lot of time. Get the best you can and move the fuck on.
--:-- I'm also not good at interviewing. My interview process was hiring. I would just hire everyone who was willing and keep the good ones. That's what I did. I was just trying to move. PHP, cool, you're hired. That's all of our apps from PHP, apparently. I don't know shit about coding. So for me to hire coders, all I knew was which code worked. I'm like, this one seems like a great engineer because their app works. But I moved fast, and I actually was shocked. I didn't know who would be great. I found really great people that way.
--:-- Then we were a lot more successful. Then Josh came a lot later. So Josh was obviously an A player I got later. But once we got traction and we were more successful, I started being able to get better and better people. I eventually did get these amazing CTOs and great people. Anyway, it's always hard to get great people. I would tune more to who's excited about what you're doing and willing to dive in. And then if they're no good, don't keep them.
--:-- Josh Lu: Amazing. One other thing that I want to touch on from my time at Zynga is you did this great job. We have this company value: everyone is a CEO. Be your own CEO. That is not easy to do at a small company and at a big company. How did you come up with that and how did it go?
--:-- Mark Pincus: I've always felt that way because I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one way or another every job I ever had because I'm not a good employee. I've learned I'm only a good team player if I'm running the team. That's probably a lot of you.
--:-- I was what I call the expert witness. Every job I was in, I was closest to the answer and the data, and I was furthest from the decision. The adults would make the decisions and then tell me it and then I had to make it work. I was super frustrated and half engaged, disengaged. I said, I want to find people like me who feel this frustration and then I want to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Some will hang themselves, but others won't. What I learned was I got so much more done and so much better things done by turning people into CEOs.
--:-- It only works if you hire people who want to be a CEO. It doesn't work to take people who are passive and not interested in being a CEO and be like, you're a CEO, and they just sit there and do nothing. What I started to learn over time is that people who are really ambitious aren't actually focused right now on the pay and the equity and the money and stuff. That of course matters. But they actually are really focused on being in a position of much greater responsibility than anyone else will give them. You can hire people and give them a lot of responsibility, so much that it scares them in a way. Like, I can't believe that they just asked me to do this. And you get more out of them.
--:-- It's a really good management hack because I am not good at managing people. I'm too impatient to learn how to be a good manager. I don't do one-on-ones. But if you get people that can be CEOs, you don't theoretically have to spend the time managing them. But you can't be a fake CEO. You can't say you're a CEO and they're not really. They have to have a real hill they're taking, some real responsibility, real degrees of freedom.
--:-- Josh Lu: Okay, one last follow-up for me, and then I think we'll try to open it up. Something that we think is really important and that you sort of pushed really hard on is when you're trying to ride a wave, you just got to move fast. You got to iterate. You're not going to know all the things, so you might as well fuck up a few times, learn from it, and if you can do that faster than everyone else, you win. So maybe talk a little bit about that because we think we're at the onset of lots of interesting opportunities. How would you sort of approach that?
--:-- Mark Pincus: I'll be in my book when it comes out someday. My core philosophy that made up product management at Zynga, and it took me so many years of being so inefficient and stubborn before I got to Zynga. Let's assume at the outset that your idea is just wrong. It's like a time machine. What if you could come back from two years in the future, or on a shorter time frame here maybe it's six months or one year, and say, oh, the thing you're working on was the right wave, but your idea just was wrong. It just wasn't quite right. What would you do with that information today? Would you just heroically still go with this one idea because you're committed and you've got funding and I'm doing a B2B game tool? What if from the future you came back and said, you know what, that thing you were building actually was the shit. But the time it was going to take you to sell that into some game companies, they're too dumb to know it's ever useful. You never got there. But the thing you were building, if you just unleashed that to consumers, they were going to just go bananas and love it. Would you do something differently?
--:-- I know everyone talks about pivots. Pivots are too slow, take too long. People talk about MVP, building the minimum viable product. I don't really even believe in minimum viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time. You do not have the time to build your product and fail and do it again. You may be out of money and time by then. How can you move faster than that? That's too slow for what we need today in a world of AI. We need to get to minimum viable idea state. You need to separate what that idea is from the underlying instincts that you're pursuing. Even before you start that one idea, you and your team need to come up with your 10 other variants of that idea. What's everyone else in your space doing? Are you spending as much time looking at their ideas that relate to your instincts as your own? You probably should be spending brain cycles 50 to 60% of your time looking at what everyone else around you is doing and trying to see why they're wrong or why they are kind of almost right. And then half the time on your own.
--:-- When you're on your own, can you come up with a faster process? When I started with Zynga, it was kind of shooting fish in a barrel because we were competing against the EAs, these game companies who spent two years putting out a game to learn from. We said, we want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year. That was our mantra. How do we learn as many shots on that goal in one week as the industry in a year? Now with hyper-casual, they move faster than that even.
--:-- I loved your idea. Is it Rishi? In his zone where he's trying to build a whole new way to leverage AI for game companies to build out 3D assets and animations, right? On stable diffusion. God help you because so much of the first part of what you're doing is already proven and done by other people. The hard part for him is how does he build the proven pieces that everyone else is already doing also? How do you do that quickly and cheaply and not waste any time on that because it's already done? You need to legally copy everything. You say who's done it best, figure out how to copy what they've done so you can get to the edge. The edge is what's better and what's new.
--:-- Better is not what you think is better. That's the first place we get it wrong. What you think is better is actually new. Better is nine or 10 out of 10 of your target customers say fuck yeah. Better is half the price. Better is everyone says better. When we put Zynga Poker, it was proven and better and a little new. The better was there was no download. It was a poker game that had no software download. 10 out of 10 people would say yes to no download. And they did because one thing you learn in consumer is every time there's a click, you lose half your audience. Two clicks and you've lost 75% of people. So we had no download. That was better. The only new thing we had was you could see your real friends at the table. But we also had to build a poker game that everyone else in the world had built. So we said, how do we move quickly and just copy the best version of that we can and make that not be a thing that we waste time and money on?
--:-- You have to move fast and learn and fail fast on that idea state. What we're all after with true signal is conviction. The other thing you learn from a Brian Chesky is the best product makers are not making bets. That is bullshit. This whole MVP, this whole lean startup thing that we've learned about or pursued for 20 years, there's something in that that is selling us a false prophecy. Steve Jobs didn't put out the iPhone to see if anyone liked it. He already fucking knew. If you were on his team, you were smiling like a Cheshire cat. You fucking knew this was going to be the shit. You weren't going to see how the iPhone did. That was not an MVP product. When Brian Chesky puts out new versions of Airbnb's products, he already knows that it's going to do well.
--:-- What I would encourage you guys to try to get to is conviction that your idea state is right. Enough that you believe in it. If you really believe in it, then Josh is going to believe too. Not hope that it's right. That's different. That's false conviction. But real conviction because you found a way to prove to yourself that this idea state is right. It's just as powerful to know that your idea is not right. You don't have conviction. The real question, if you don't have conviction, is how ambitious are you? I ask founders all the time, are you really ambitious?
--:-- Mark Pincus: Because I consider myself really ambitious. And so I'm willing to be in this abyss for years. And I've had tons of products that were B pluses that I could have put out. And I have not released a single product because I haven't gotten conviction on anything yet.
--:-- Josh Lu: Amazing. Okay. Should we take some questions from the audience?
--:-- Audience Member: Hi. What's the best game ever?
--:-- Mark Pincus: The best game ever? Well, good question. Obviously, that's the question is for who? I've taken shit over the years for this. I am not a committed hardcore gamer. There's very few games that hold my attention. And what I'll say is the only game that I play right now every day and that's on the front of my iPhone is chess.com. And it's not that I'm great at chess either, but it kind of has value in the real world to me because I run into sometimes embarrassing moments like this weekend. My godson, I think he might be like eight now or nine, and he now beats me in chess, and it's really humbling. And I'll be like, oh, I've been studying this opening the Queen's Gambit. It's not just a show. And I start doing it, and he's like, oh, you're going to do the Queen's Gambit. Okay, no, that's probably not the right first move.
--:-- But anyway, chess.com is the only one I'm addicted to now. When I think of what's the best game, I think it's games that can get to this Shakespearean level, that they can transcend just the kind of core addiction loop. I guess I would have to say the game that I admire most and wish that I had built is Minecraft for, I guess, obvious reasons. But it's amazing that what Notch built, the core of it is still kind of relevant today. And it's still something that my kids want to come back to. And it's still probably kind of one of the most referenced games. So I'd have to say Minecraft.
--:-- Audience Member: Thank you. You mentioned the intellectual order to get in towards conviction. You also mentioned that someone else's finance and division. What tends to be the first true signal that it's time to probably be done? Re-evaluate what you're doing?
--:-- Mark Pincus: Oh, good question. I'd encourage you guys to at least do this exercise. Try to write down, here's what we think today. This is actually really powerful for intellectual honesty because I don't know about you, but I get in arguments with my team all the time about what we agreed or believed or assumed even three months ago. But I would encourage you, write down what is the instinct that you're following? What are the signs that instinct is right or will be right? And then separate what is the idea variant that you are doing.
--:-- So Rishi has an instinct that I agree with that there will be this generative AI moment around 3D objects for games and other things. I share that instinct. I don't know that I have great signal yet around it other than it seems cool to me. So when do you reevaluate? I think that your ideas and execution you're pursuing can change a lot, maybe monthly, maybe every sprint. Your strategy probably shouldn't change more than quarterly unless you're like really running out of time. And hopefully your vision and the instinct you're following doesn't change. But you're saying what would shake that? Hopefully that there's such a big kind of landmass that you're headed for that you feel a personal conviction about.
--:-- Josh Lu: For what it's worth, Mark, in all my years of working with you, I've never seen you change your fundamental instinct. When you have an instinct, it stays. And then it's just about, do you believe that you can execute on that exact instinct at that moment? And sometimes it's micro forces and sometimes they're macro forces that you can't control. And that's kind of the decision that you've made?
--:-- Mark Pincus: Yeah, I think patting myself here on the back and also accepting that it can be humbling too. You got to calibrate yourself and say, how good have my instincts been over time? And I have found that anytime I've gotten a deep instinct in my whole career, it's always been right. And maybe it's self-serving and you kind of read if your instincts is broad enough, it could be right. Every time I've had these deep instincts, they've been right. And usually what I've been wrong is they've been just much bigger than what I imagined. And maybe they showed up in a different form. And so part of it is you gotta figure out like how good you are at your instincts.
--:-- Audience Member: So yeah, I consider a recurring topic being talking about theory you think it a way of potentially tsunami but from the applications you mentioned creation tools you want to be smart creators businesses. So while AI is going to be very fascinating, so right, how do you think it matches with speed to play? Where do you think the adoption for consumers and casual?
--:-- Mark Pincus: So first, consumer adoption. I think that we're in this moment now that I call prosumers. I don't know that I've coined that. I Googled it and saw that Marc Andreessen said this a bunch of years ago, so I'll give him credit. But I think we're in this interesting prosumer moment where it's like people are using this in this hobbyist way. They're kind of industry people are interested. I'm seeing people around me that I wasn't expecting become kind of power users.
--:-- I mean, like I said, my partner or this other woman who's a friend of ours, who's not that technical, she figured out she could do her whole job on ChatGPT. And she moved to Aspen. She's doing her job in half hour a day at most. Then she had ChatGPT write a proposal for her company about how they could use ChatGPT to do their jobs. But what I'm not seeing that much of right now is where it's really fundamental to what people are doing, where it's really interesting and fun. And I've heard there was an Atlantic article actually that said it's a toy and they need their Farmville moment, which I found so many ironies in that. Like their non-toy was a game.
--:-- But I'm curious where this adoption is going to happen. I guess the thread that I'm following, the true signal for me, is the magic in this generative experience. And I think what we have to isolate is what is it that makes it so magical? This weekend watched my daughters and my partner use it to think about redesigning rooms. Using a combination of Mid Journey and Dolly. They were annoyed because they're like, well there's only one time that it looked like my room and then the rest the dimensions are off and it made the ceilings high. So there was something magical but it also was something missing. And what I'm interested in is how do we capture the magic, isolate the magic of this generative thing, and then stick that into things that are proven.
--:-- I like to call it frankensteining. Just mash the shit up. Just put on one whiteboard, here are the most addictive game mechanics that are out there today. Match three used to be Bejeweled Blitz. And then put on another thing, what is the most magical thing about generative AI? On another board, what is it that I can isolate that people get most blown away and turned on by? And then on another board, what are the best social mechanics? What is it that works today and worked in the past that is the most proven for social? And then come up with a lot of ideas, like how do I mash this all up together? So what does it look like to have match three mechanic plus generative AI plus social? And keep doing that and then don't build it. Then use some generative AI product to build what I call a rip-o-matic.
--:-- A rip-o-matic is what we used to do at Zynga, which is how do I get to that experience so that I can put it in front of the audience and they understand enough that they get what the experience is without building it. So we would do it in PowerPoints. Now you can do it better. Screen captures and stuff. But create a rip-o-matic and first say to yourself, like, is there something there that's interesting? And then you start showing it to other people.
--:-- I think that's what we're going to get to. I think that the breakthrough moment is going to be, for me, it's less the co-pilots. It's less that the AI could create the art for you or the code for you. And it's more, how do we add a new dimension to this consumer experience that people say, Bing would say, OMFG. I can't believe that I just did that in a game. But the game is probably a game they've already played. It's poker. It's match three. Probably not a game or game mechanic the world's never seen before.
--:-- And I also don't know, as much as I wish it were true, my friends and family aren't dreaming of being game makers or creators. We have to be careful that we don't just drink that Kool-Aid and say, oh my God, what if there was a Roblox that everybody could make games? I'm just not sure that I don't see true signal that they all want to make games. But I do see true signal about something really magical in the generative experience. But it's a lot less than making a game.
--:-- Josh Lu: Yeah, well, the interesting thing is that game is now a very loaded concept. But remember, the first social games came out, there was a game technically, but actually the real game was in the community where all the AdMe threads were going on or the guilds where there were lots of chatter. And so that ended up being where the engagement was. And so maybe it's not that everyone wants to be an advanced game maker, but certainly I think people like creating cocktail parties and cocktail parties have a little bit of structure and this has been a thesis of yours for a very long time.
--:-- Mark Pincus: Yeah, I would say on the social side, there's two threads in social that I have built deep instincts on that I would just tell you could trust as North Stars. One is really simple and stupid that I reminded game teams of at Zynga all the time, but for some reason, everyone shits on it and they're not that interested in it. It's community. Since the beginning of the web, there's a lot of lonely people looking for community and they find it there. And community is trying to find a home always. And nobody, there's Reddit, but for the most part, nobody really aspires to create a home for community. And if you give a single chance in anything you build for community to happen, it will just happen. It just captures there. It's like rain capture. If you have a little bit of a place for a pool, it happens.
--:-- And one thing we found at Zynga was community always over-delivered. Like in Mafia Wars, there was a hit list, and people would pay more and more money to put themselves at the top of the hit list, put a bounty on their own head, because they thought it was cool and they'd be popular. And so they were trying to find this community.
--:-- The other thread that's been true since I put up the original money for Napster, if any of you have heard of Napster, and I put up the original money for Friendster and Facebook, one of those is a humble brag, and the other two are not. And this thread of the cocktail party is also a North Star. It's still out there. People want the perfect cocktail party on the web and they don't have it. And it happens for a while. Recently, it was Instagram for a long run, like the last eight or 10 years. I believe that the Instagram cocktail party is almost over. I mean, it just doesn't feel like it anymore to me. And I think Snapchat still is the cocktail party for younger people. But I think for the mass market, I think that cocktail party doesn't exist in an obvious place anymore.
--:-- And I think that you could try to build the next Instagram. It's probably going to look a lot different, but you also could build that in a game and create that. And I encourage you, if you go that route, to try to deconstruct what makes the best cocktail party. Like, what is it for you? Try to throw great cocktail parties. I try to. But yeah, it sounds dumb and obvious, but I do think that the cocktail party is still just available.
--:-- Audience Member: I'd love to hear your thoughts on the UGC gaming space. So for example, just Roblox or the PortBot platform, which is supposed to be able to use the relevant games very quickly within libraries.
--:-- Mark Pincus: Sure. When we say UGC and games, I think that the whole games industry is on this kind of slow, bumpy path towards UGC. And I do think that people love the opportunities for UGC. I'm, I guess I'm, I think that Roblox will keep, Roblox will do their own generative stuff in it and Fortnite will. I do think, and I can't say I have great true signal for this, that this is just a deep instinct of mine. I do believe that we're going to get to something different eventually.
--:-- I don't think I'm saying anything contrarian really here, but I think we're going to look back on the Fortnights and the Roblox's as the AOLs of our time, as the walled gardens. I think we're going to look back on the iPhone app store as the walled garden. I mean, it obviously is, they like it that way. But I do think that we're going to get to a new version of the web. And that's why I called .earth.earth, because I thought eventually we'll just have these TLDs and the consumers will know to type in this one and that they'll get a full-dimensional interactive experience. And I think it'll be generative and it'll be extensible and it'll be interoperable.
--:-- And my vision is it'll be like HTML. And you'll see an experience you'll like. You'll right-click on it. You'll drag and drop it into something else. I can't separate how much is I want the world to be like that versus that I have a deep instinct. I just can't say that it's coming from a true signal that everyone's asking for this and wants this today. We weren't asking for the iPhone either. So the whole phone experience, nobody was like, oh, I wish I could just have this touch screen, which we didn't know about, or download apps and things. I mean, I know it's obvious today, but so I do believe that we're going to get to a totally new paradigm for computing.
--:-- I don't know that it'll happen specifically from a UGC point, the way we think about it today. I don't know that it's kind of, I know people are like, oh, imagine if it was like TikTok and anybody could just make games. That doesn't resonate for me and for my kids who are real gamers. They're not wishing for that. But I have this feeling that if this all existed and they could drag and drop things and just make a store and all of a sudden that store could be real and sell real shit that they would do it without thinking about it. And I think I don't think it's going to happen inside of Roblox and inside the iPhone. It's probably going to happen first on PC and web in some way and have some breakthrough moments and then have to make it to mobile, maybe to Android first. And I wish I had a better sense in my head about what that's going to look like, because I've been trying to build this for, I don't know, 15 years and getting nowhere. So if you guys have a better idea than me, I want to hear it.
--:-- Josh Lu: All right. On that note, Mark, thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you for all of your wisdom and advice.
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