How to build breakout products, with Mark Pincus & Reid Hoffman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. The speaker line up for Masters of Scale Summit 2026 is coming together. And I'm thrilled to share some of the absolutely iconic speakers. We're going to have the incredible Kara Swisher, Danny Meyer, Anjali Sood from Tubi, Cloudflare's Matthew Prince, Adam Grant, our very own Reid Hoffman, and some folks you might be less familiar with, but who, well, they're going to blow your minds. It's this October 20th to 22nd in San Francisco. Our theme, our agency now could not be more timely. Applications are open, but spots are limited. Apply at mastersofscale.com/apply25.
That's mastersofscale.com/apply25.

**Mark Pincus** (1:50)
It does feel very analogous to Internet Nuclear Winter, we called it. In 2002 to 2003, right when you started LinkedIn, and I started Tribe.
This feels very like a similar moment, that it's not figured out, but you know it's going to be.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:12)
This is Masters of Scale. This week on the show, Reid Hoffman sits down with Mark Pincus.
You should know Mark, but if you don't, he's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Zynga. Thanks to games like Farmville, Zynga blitz scaled to 300 million monthly active users on Facebook at its peak. They were also huge on MySpace, but we don't remember MySpace so much these days. Now Mark has a new book out, Life at the Speed of Play. The godfather of mobile gaming talks with Reid about how to build products people love, how to learn fast from your mistakes, and much, much more.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:53)
Mark, it's always an honor and a pleasure. Welcome back to Masters of Scale.

**Mark Pincus** (2:58)
Happy to be invited back.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:59)
Part of the reason why we decided to do this, you have a new book coming up.
I wrote the foreword to the book. I'm a huge fan of the book. But okay, internet boy, why did you write a book? What led you to writing a book? Very old school media.

**Mark Pincus** (3:15)
Well, coming from someone who's been prolific with his books, internet boy, I would say after writing the book, I think everyone should write a book once. I think it's one of those things that's such a labor of love. But I wanted to capture a few things in the book. It's like one part book of life motivation, one part stories, one part product management Bible. And we'll see if they all work. Originally, you may remember the first few years I was writing this book, I called it Proven Better New, because I was like, that's the core value, that's the core value.
But I started to realize that that's in service of something much bigger. And to me, Life at the Speed of Play, it has meaning on a bunch of levels. One is it's the vibe, it's the way that I think we should approach making products. I think it should be fun and playful and light.
Someone asked me at a party, they're like, is this book also targeted children? And I said, no, actually, they already know how to play. And so I think remembering the kind of level of fun and imagination that we have in play as kids, giving ourselves permission to play is important. I also think that in this AI era, which you told me about years before we got to it, I wish I had listened harder.
In this AI era, we are just hurtling towards living our lives at the speed of play. And I think that that's more and more accessible to all of us. That this idea that you don't have to quit your job to try out, build an idea that you've been thinking about. You don't have to go and mortgage your house, raise a lot of venture capital, do all these things before you can experiment. That wasn't true when you and I were starting out. And even a couple years ago, that wasn't true. And now we're at this place that we have the one person founder team. So that's the other part of it is like, it's the era that we're also entering.