Founder of Zynga Mark Pincus Talks Outlook on AI

**Carol Massar** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:07)
We're going to stay on technology and how it continues to transform amid the AI backdrop, and it takes us to someone who's been innovating and disrupting as well, and remembers all too well the boom and bust and changing landscape of the.com era. He's best known as the founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company that IPO'd in 2011, but he's built and invested in so much more, and through every iteration of the internet, the 90s boom and bust, the social media boom of Web 2 and now the AI era. Carol, he's also a prolific investor.

**Carol Massar** (0:35)
He is indeed. He's invested. You'll know these names, folks. Napster, SpaceX, and had he held on to his shares, his $38,000 seed investment in Facebook, now Meta, for about half a percentage of the company would be worth many, many billions of dollars right now. Smart investment, I would say.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:50)
We're talking about Mark Pincus. He's got a new book out, and we know all this thanks to the new book. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. Mark Pincus joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Welcome, welcome. How are you? Congrats on the book.

**Mark Pincus** (1:04)
Thanks, thanks. By the way, I really am happy about the Memory Stocks.

**Carol Massar** (1:08)
Okay, well why? Why?

**Mark Pincus** (1:11)
Well, for diving right into the AI trade.

**Carol Massar** (1:14)
We are.

**Mark Pincus** (1:15)
Let's not mess around.
I'd say that it's a pretty simple trade at this point. It's a belief, and either you believe that the AI infrastructure, investment is going to pay off and keep playing out, in which case all of these companies are generationally undervalued, and it's a generational buying opportunity if you're getting a PEG ratio of.3 or less, or you think that it's not gonna play out and then you should stay away from all of it. So I'm a believer.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:52)
You are. It's funny, because we just spoke with Ted Oakley. He manages money for Oxbow Advisors. And he sent us a bunch of stocks, and missing from there were tech names and memory names. He does own some tech, but he said, the memory got too expensive. And he said, I've been doing this for decades, many decades. I remember the 1990s, we sold Intel, and I watched Intel stock go up for the next 12 months before then it went down. So he understands these cycles. Are we in one of those cyclical moments right now?

**Mark Pincus** (2:19)
Well, we'll know in the future, but it'll be, it's only cyclical if this, if these AI growth rates and numbers don't play out. If they play out, I think he would even agree that they're still undervalued.

**Carol Massar** (2:36)
You know, Mark, one of the things that we're thinking, and we want to get into the book and talk about, you know, life at the speed of play and what it all means, but we are curious, you have been in Silicon Valley for all of the iterations of the internet.

**Mark Pincus** (2:48)
I'm that old.

**Carol Massar** (2:48)
No, no, seasons, like a great wine. Like that's how I think it. Love talking with people who have seen cycles, right? And can sometimes figure out the silly from the stuff that really matters. How do you, like, how do we make sense? Like we see the money going in. We see the circular financing that makes us a little uncomfortable.
We see the narrative around AI changing. I get it, disruption. This is what happens, but help us understand like, is this a boom cycle with no bust or is there going to be a a breaking point at some point or for only maybe for some?

**Mark Pincus** (3:24)
If I had the perfect answer, I would have held my meta stock too.

**Carol Massar** (3:32)
You did okay. You did okay. How do you think about how you've seen some of this?

**Mark Pincus** (3:39)
I built a boring enterprise software company in the middle of the.com boom. It was called support.com, but it was actually an early SaaS company. We went public on the last day of the IPO window.
I'd say that then versus now, my peers and I thought it didn't make any sense during the.com bubble.
We thought it was crazy what we saw going on around us. And now my peers, my smartest friends think this makes a lot of sense. I mean, it was dark fiber then, and now it's like hot GPUs. I mean, it's actually being used. It was betting on a whole consumer that didn't show up or didn't show up yet. And now the investment, the infrastructure is going to enterprises who are bottom line oriented. And then it was eyeballs, and now it's ARR, it's actual revenue. So it's definitely not the same. I think what we do have is extreme volatility. And I think that the volatility comes from, it's hard to remember this level of growth market. And when there's this level of growth, like we've seen just this week and today, when there is a negative data point or even absence of more positives, it starts to be run for the hills and doom and bubble. And then when we see like Micron's numbers and guidance, all of a sudden, everyone's bullish again. And we're going to keep seeing that. That's my take.