Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework.

**Mark Pincus** (0:05)
I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards.

**Sam Parr** (0:07)
Awesome, great.

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
This is like showing us nudes for My First Million. This is like exactly what we like.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
So, all right, you've done everything. You built a $10 billion company. You're, I think, a seed investor in Facebook or early investor in Facebook.
One thing you haven't done is sitting still. I'm looking at your biography and your timeline. It seems like you start a company, it either sells or fails, and six months later, you have a new company. You've done that eight times, it feels like. Do you ever sit still?

**Mark Pincus** (0:44)
I'm working on sitting still. My partner, Hillary, we said she's like a tree, and I'm like a hummingbird. So, I'm trying to be more like a redwood tree.

**Shaan Puri** (0:54)
Why is that? Why not just embrace your nature of just being this extremely generative, creative guy? Who cares? Why be the tree? Be the bird.

**Mark Pincus** (1:01)
Well, I think it's good to have a balance.
I'm not trying to sit still from a creative business work perspective, but in home life, I think it's good balance. I've added like morning practice with breathing and meditation. So, I definitely have extreme ADD, but I do better when I focus. But they both work really well together. My daughter Carmen has dyslexia and ADD, and we tried Adderall and some of those things, and she liked it first. Then I was like, wait, your brain is beautiful the way it is. I don't want to normalize your brain and standardize it. Let's figure out what works best for your brain.
I'm a little bit like that with myself, with just saying the way I work, I call my investment and incubator work-play ventures because I love this kind of triangulation between work-play and usefulness to the world. And that's why this book took so long and was difficult because it took me a long time to find the fun kind of narrative and voice for the book.

**Sam Parr** (2:15)
One of the cool parts is that you're very transparent money and that was pretty cool. I think you were in your late 20s or so when you sold Freeloader, I think you said you made like two or three million dollars, you sold it for 38 million. You walked away, I think with three or five, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

**Mark Pincus** (2:33)
Five after taxes.

**Sam Parr** (2:35)
Five after taxes.

**Mark Pincus** (2:36)
I had to pay short-term gains because it was so fast.

**Sam Parr** (2:38)
It was like a 10-month or something like that acquisition, which is crazy. And then you wrote a $38,000 check to Facebook. I think you said that that would be worth $6 billion now.
How often are you doing the math as to how much that would be worth had you not sold?

**Shaan Puri** (2:55)
Is that part of your morning meditation? You calculate what nine million shares of Facebook is worth today?

**Mark Pincus** (3:03)
It's amazing. I say in the book that it is so true in this life. Some of the patterns that I recognize is if you pick the right body of water, you don't have to pick the right boat. But if you pick the wrong body of water, the best boat isn't going to help you.
It's just been so true and the Internet obviously was the right body of water. Now, it's like the whole thing. You can't even call it a body of water, and AI is like that now.
There's so many instances where I sold something that I was early and it became, it would have become worth a lot. But even in selling my first company, Freeloader, we said no to Yahoo. They had, I think, 35 employees. They've been public like six weeks. They're worth 800 million. We would have had 5 percent of the company. I would have had one and a half percent. I remember all these numbers for sure. But I wrote on the back of an envelope, like if I got fired in year one, which deal would be better if I got fired in year two? I knew I'd get fired. So I just was trying to figure out, well, at what point, how long would I have to make it before the Yahoo! deal is better, you know? And I thought I'd have to make it at least like two to three years. And that seemed unlikely. So, but I was wrong. Even one year would have been amazing.