Zynga Founder Mark Pincus: Why All New Fails + How to Copy to Millions

**James Altucher** (0:00)
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**Mark Pincus** (0:05)
Morning coffee run with an old friend, earn cash back.

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**James Altucher** (0:10)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Today on The James Altucher Show.

**Mark Pincus** (0:20)
You know, everyone's so jaded that you're trying to find like an OMFG moment, like trying to find a vein, and you just put crazier and crazier shit until somebody starts clicking on it, and then it's like a perfect trade win.
One of my mantras that's still repeated in the hallways at Zynga is all new fails, and that might sound like a beat down. If you start with that mantra, you won't be disappointed, because there's lots and lots of statistical proof that all new fails, like the App Store last year, a hundred percent of new apps failed, right? If you can perfectly copy a proven successful app and no one thinks it's a copy, that is the fucking magic trick.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

**James Altucher** (1:25)
This guy is one of the true OGs of the internet, Mark Pincus. You probably know him as the founder of Zynga. He brought us FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words With Friends, and basically turned casual social gaming into a multi... I mean, he sold Zynga for $12 billion to Take-Two Interactive. Before that, he started what I think was one of the first social networks, Tribe. This was pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook. He basically coined the term social media. He's spent the last 25 plus years building, failing, studying what actually gets millions of people to click, play, share, come back.
And I love how he describes it in his book. But basically, this book has inspired me to start... Even during the podcast, I was coming up with new ideas for businesses. And what I really love is he teaches how to copy like a master without looking like a copycat. For instance, he has a framework, proven, better, new. If you have a business idea, if the idea has already been proven, which implies maybe you're copying it, if it's better than the previous version, if it's new, if there's something new, this is the single best way I've ever heard to create products people actually want. And you can look at Google, Facebook, so many businesses and see that they actually were built on this concept of proven, better, new. Plus, he's got stories from the early days of Facebook, MySpace, the whole gaming industry, and how to create businesses now using AI. And it's just fascinating stuff. I love talking to Mark. You're going to learn a lot from this. I am still inspired from this conversation. And literally, I'm building businesses based on what I learned in this next hour. He talks about all this and a lot more in his incredible new book called Life at the Speed of Play.
We talked about the book, we talked about the ideas in it, but I have a lot of questions. I want to do the deep dive. And literally, I am creating businesses now based on what we spoke about in this next hour.
Great book, by the way.

**Mark Pincus** (3:35)
Thank you.

**James Altucher** (3:36)
I want to just get right to the two pages that I find the most fascinating, and they're facing each other. One says, build failure machines. The other says, don't even start with an idea. And I love these two concepts a lot. Like, I love the concept of building a failure machine.

**Mark Pincus** (3:51)
Yeah, me too.
It's easier said than done, you know? I think, I would have thought by now with AI that everyone would do that, and I can't say that I've even seen one good example yet. So I think that's still a hill to take.

**James Altucher** (4:10)
Why don't you give us, give us a good example?

**Mark Pincus** (4:13)
I think our best innovations come out of dire need and, you know, ruthless need to survive necessity. And in the very beginning of Zynga, you know, we were living day to day and week to week. And literally, you know, if something changed on the Facebook platform or MySpace, we would have like been wiped out of existence and somewhere. I mean, Christmas Vacation killed the number one game, I think it had been the number one game on Facebook. It was called Jetpack Joyride. And people didn't feel the joy when they came back from Christmas. It was just gone.