Ep 92 - Mark Pincus on Zynga, Media, Tech, and Democracy

**Sriram Krishnan** (0:00)
We are so excited to have you. I think I followed your work for over 14, 15 years. I've been a fan. We have met many times. Both Aarthi and I have spent countless hours consuming your products, maybe way more than that is healthy. You and I have met many times over the years. You've been very helpful to me. And I would say, in the pantheon of people at Silicon Valley, you're really up there as somebody who has built one of the most iconic companies and franchises, and one of the deepest thinkers I know. So it's an honor. Thank you for coming on the show.

**Mark Pincus** (0:32)
Thank you.

**Sriram Krishnan** (0:34)
Now, we're going to get a lot. Yeah, we're going to get a lot about product making and games and your history. But we are recording this about, I would say, roughly 36 hours after the elections. And so I can't like not ask you about how you feel about the elections and the state of the United States.

**Mark Pincus** (0:59)
Wow. Let's start broad. I had this kind of liberating experience in an odd way last April. And I've worked closely with this guy, Dan Gearan, I think, who started out as my tech assistant at Zynga and Gruent, a really talented product maker. And then he was my chief of staff and then became co-founder and collaborator in efforts I was doing. Also, though, we hit a point in April after nine years, we realized, okay, he needed, it's time for him to go off and be his own CEO and founder. But the interesting thing out of that was, Dan was always this voice of reason who was stopping me from putting out my own wild tweets and stuff. I think I have a little, you've probably seen some of my tweets since April, but I have a tendency to get heated on something and really speak my mind in a very immediate and honest way. That's, I think, what's beautiful and dangerous about Twitter or X. And when Dan and I stopped working closely together in April, there was nobody, there's no guardrails anymore, and there was nobody to stop Mark from being Mark for better and worse. And I've seen better and worse. And I just said, I'm just going to, there wasn't anyone to say, Mark, you need to take that tweet down, like that's not okay, or that's too much. And the other thing, you start off saying, should we really talk about politics? This is about products in Silicon Valley. One thing that this election liberated is all of us, just to be able to have a voice. It was so oppressive for so many years, hearing, stay in your lane. And when I started, so I, Dan would say, Mark, nobody wants to hear what you think about San Francisco politics or world politics. They are only following you because they want to hear your thoughts on products and founding and stuff, which might have been true, but it also gets dry, and it's not all of what I'm thinking in the moment. And anyway, we all were hearing that in Silicon Valley, and people like Kara Swisher, we know, are the loudest voices saying, no one wants to hear from you, rich, white, tech bro, blah, blah, blah. And that voice around us is so loud in our bubble that it was liberating. And I started just saying, I don't care, I'm just going to start speaking my mind way beyond products. And I got some negatives, and Carrie also very recently said really angry things towards me, which is her prerogative. But something else happened, and a lot of people connected with me in tech and outside of tech, and really far outside of Silicon Valley. And it was really terrific. And for me, Twitter, I keep calling Twitter this very confusing, there's X and X dot AI. But Twitter became my social network. And one thing we'll get into in product making is I try to be a student of myself, which could sound very self-involved. It may be, but it also makes me a better product maker. So I watch in a third-person way, what am I drawn to? And I never forced myself to use anything. I was out in Clubhouse for five minutes during the pandemic, and I was like, you know what?
I don't want to hear in like single duplex or non-duplex people talking. Like it was interesting, you guys and Mark Andreessen.

**Sriram Krishnan** (4:36)
Thank you. Thank you. I was going to say, of course, you'll never hear the guys, but everybody else.

**Mark Pincus** (4:39)
And it gave you lots of that. And there was a minute when we're all trapped in our houses and we have the time. But then we move on with our lives and we don't. But the bigger point to me is, oh, we actually, there's a world outside of our bubble of Silicon Valley and a bubble in the opposite way that the Kara Swishers mean it. We've been trapped in our bubble in a negative way. Once we get out of this world and people, this echo chamber of bad echoes, a black mirror and people shouting us down or this negative voice, the rest of the world is actually interested and sometimes not. My family and friends in Chicago, they love the All In Podcast. My friend's wife, nothing to attack, she loves it. Anyway, I started just tweeting about anything I wanted, and I connected with this broad group of people. I got way more engagement than my founder tweets or my product tweets were getting. I got into real conversations with people, and it was really fun and sometimes not, but mostly fun. I connected with this whole group of techno optimists, EAC, and they started calling me a few times based, and I didn't know what that meant. I thought they were saying biased. I googled it and I was like, oh, base is a good thing. I was like, oh, cool. I connected with Beth Jesus, who is like the spiritual leader of all them, and he's awesome, because now we know he is still. But anyway, it's hard to give a short answer on this on election, but I've gone down this path of realizing that just as, yeah, my voice was magnified because I've been a large donor to the Democratic Party in the last four election cycles, including this past one. I literally sat down and had lunch with Biden in December and gave just under a million dollars because I was still in my perspective, I was still in this mindset that many people are on, of thinking this could be the last election, existential threat to democracy, all this stuff. Anyway, I went through this different awakening this year, where I started looking at things differently and questioning my own assumptions and say, I needed to go back to primary data and listen to what the actual people are saying, listen to whole conversations from Trump, from Kamala where I could. I co-wrote this post on the Free Press with Barry Weiss in July when I couldn't take it anymore. I said, Biden is even riskier than Trump.