Mark Pincus - Product Instincts: “Proven, Better, New”

**Auren Hoffman** (0:02)
Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DaaS. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data, and more at worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdaas.com. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Mark Pincus. Mark is the founder and former CEO of Zynga, which pioneered social gaming and developed some of the most popular mobile games of all time, like Farmville and Words With Friends. The company went public in 2011 and was acquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2022 for $13 billion or so. And prior to Zynga, Mark founded a number of internet companies, including tribe.com, one of the earliest social networks. He was also an early investor in Facebook. And today he runs Reinvent Capital, which teaches product management and teaches product management at Stanford. Mark, welcome to World of DaaS.

**Mark Pincus** (0:57)
Thanks.

**Auren Hoffman** (0:58)
Now you have this cool framework that I love that says, proven better new, which is the simplest formula I've ever seen for success. Can you walk us through it a little bit?

**Mark Pincus** (1:09)
The basis of my whole product management course, I created nine years ago at Stanford, and I'm writing a book on this now called Life of the Speed of Play, is there's two fundamental philosophies that make up my approach. And in one way or another, most, at least consumer, but even B2B product makers approach to inventing products. One is, I have this core belief that I've found to be true, that we have these winning instincts at some human level of your experience, and we put on top of those usually losing ideas. And the key is we need to isolate our winning instincts from our usually losing ideas. And so the point is that you might have, quote unquote, an idea for some new product, and maybe you never pursue it, maybe you pursue it and it's a B+, and it never makes it. Somebody else seems to pursue the same idea and theirs makes it. So what happened? My analysis of that is that someone like me, you, Auren, we have ideas all the time. I had an idea to order a taxi through my phone in 2003, so it was early, and I registered smstaxi.com, and I did the analysis and I said, maybe I could get a million riders a month and I could get paid a dollar per ride from the taxi company. So I thought the best instantiation of that might be $12 million a year and working with terrible taxi companies and I scrapped the idea. Travis went and did my idea.
No, he did my instinct. And a lot of other things clicked into place to enable that to have a moment that weren't there in 2003, like the iPhone and GPS, but he had a much better idea to let anybody become a driver and just sidestep the taxi companies altogether. So the first concept is really try to isolate your instinct in its rawest form from the idea variant that you're putting on top of it and be dispassionate about your ideas. You and I have known so many entrepreneurs over the years, Auren, who we see valiantly, stoically going down with the ship. They have this B plus business. And year after year, you see them pursuing it. You're like, why are you still doing it? It's like a friend in a bad relationship. You're like, just end it already. So that's one point I try to get across to people.

**Auren Hoffman** (3:39)
And that's part of the proven is just trying to figure out what's the proven piece of the proven better new.

**Mark Pincus** (3:44)
Yeah, all right, you move me along. So once you buy into this instincts versus ideas, it opens up a new world of product management. And what you can then do is apply this framework that I call proven better new, which is think of it as your job is to be a scientist in a white lab code. You're dispassionately trying to isolate this winning variant of your instinct and your idea. And the reason you do proven better new is what you do with it is you say, okay, if I wanted to compete with Uber today, I would start with everything that's proven that you shouldn't fuck with. And Steve Jobs famously, when he came back to Apple, his biggest complaint about the company under its horrible management for the previous eight years was that they come out with a new computer and they try to make every feature 10% better and the whole computer was 50% worse.