The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga)

**Mark Pincus** (0:00)
If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:02)
You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products.

**Mark Pincus** (0:06)
Your instincts are right 95% of the time, your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:15)
How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following?

**Mark Pincus** (0:17)
If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying.

**Mark Pincus** (0:31)
It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder and entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for FarmVille. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:50)
Building a consumer social app. Very few people have successfully done it and built something durable.

**Mark Pincus** (0:55)
We have beyond a latent demand for social. It's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. Today, we're all hanging out on our clod, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:23)
Today, my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen, both within Zynga and before Zynga. And over the past five years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today, the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this. And after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. Why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong.
Also, what he's learned about raising kids, he's got five and so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Mark Pincus.
Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Mark Pincus** (2:55)
I've been a big listener.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:57)
Oh, wow. Thank you.

**Mark Pincus** (2:58)
I'm excited to finally be on.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:02)
I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed, called Proven Better New.
And the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea. It's such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this.
So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas. Sure.

**Mark Pincus** (3:44)
Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga.
And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book, we called it Proven Better New. But then I was like, that's too dry a name. And I love this concept of Life at the Speed of Play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt of the book. But Proven Better New is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is, your instincts are right 95 percent of the time, your ideas are wrong 75 percent, or at best right 25 percent of the time.