Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas

**Siqi Chen** (0:00)
And they said, well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse the lack of revenue for success either. And then they got kind of upset.

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
Dude, this meeting goes in the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame. What's up?

**Shaan Puri** (0:23)
We got our friend Siqi here, founder of Runway, back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga, built another company, sold it to Postmates, has gone viral many times. There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who, it's like a film director. It's like, oh, they're working on a new project. You really want to know what they're doing. That's you because you do things with taste. So excited to have you here. Do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga? Because you sold a company to Zynga. Back when Zynga was the shit. Did you work with Mark Pinkus? What's he like? Give me a good Zynga story.

**Siqi Chen** (0:55)
Okay. I have a great story actually. How I came to report to Mark Pinkus is actually a great story. I have so many good Mark Pinkus stories.
Zynga bought my first company, and I joined his director project on her studio.

**Sam Parr** (1:07)
Wait, can you give the background of Mark? So he marks like a Silicon Valley OG. Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground? Was that his first big hit?

**Siqi Chen** (1:13)
He did. So he and Reid Hoffman co-owned, bought the Six Degrees of Separation Patent from a company called Six Degrees. And he angel invested in Facebook, but also licensed a patent, I believe, for more stock into Facebook.

**Shaan Puri** (1:28)
That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right? Like how we're connected, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other. And I think Reid, there's some story where Reid and him realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company, that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup by holding this patent over their head. So they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided we're not going to use it to stop anybody. And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook, which is amazing.

**Siqi Chen** (2:01)
I think that's what happened, yeah. So when I joined, I was director of products, and my girlfriend and my wife, who I recently met, moved to China for some job work thing. And I was like three months into Zynga, and I was like, I'm not really feeling it, it's not that fun. So I told them I was going to resign and move to China. And they said, hey, why don't we just give you this new job?
You can report to Eric Scheinmeier, one of the co-founders, and basically be head of product for the company. I said, that sounds fun, that sounds great. So I did that. So I reported to Eric Scheinmeier, he was the co-founder of Zynga. And what happened is a month into the job, Eric Scheinmeier stopped showing up to work. Like, wouldn't start on emails, wouldn't go to work. And I was like, what? And basically that's when I reported to Mark and I was the head of products. And later, the punchline of the story is, the reason why he stopped showing up to work is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.

**Sam Parr** (3:03)
Pretty good reason.

**Shaan Puri** (3:04)
That's not what I thought was coming.

**Siqi Chen** (3:07)
He literally, he was like, he wanted to start a ninja dojo and he wanted to undergo ninja training.

**Shaan Puri** (3:14)
What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story?

**Sam Parr** (3:17)
How's his ninja career now?

**Siqi Chen** (3:20)
He started another social games company.

**Sam Parr** (3:27)
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**Shaan Puri** (3:55)
So give us at the time, what was Zynga like? Was it like on top? Was it king of the world at the time? Or was it on the downstream?

**Siqi Chen** (4:02)
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting on Zynga is they hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers to be product managers there, because it was just all about the numbers going up. It was highly analytical. So I went in and just the amount of knowledge I had about growth. One of the things that really blew my mind, I think about a lot, is when I first had a commerceman, Mark Pinkus, early on, I think maybe during the acquisition, I asked him, hey, what do you think about this industry? It just seems really low moat. It's hard to have a competitive moat here because it's just so easy to enter, or you build a new game and for it to expand. How defensible is it? I think about his answer quite a bit because his is like, no, this is great. I wonder to be more new entrants into the space because it's free R&D for me. I just like, okay, that blows my mind. That is next level because he was just so confident in his ability to execute, that anyone who is going to come in with some new idea, they can just fast-follow it and do a much better job of growing it, which is like what they did, right? Farmville was in the first Farn game, Poker was the first Poker game, and they worked really, really well, at least during the Facebook era.