Zynga's Founder on Failure, Founder Mode, and What AI Still Can't Do | Mark Pincus (Zynga)

Mark Pincus (0:00)

My lived experience of my whole career is that your instincts are probably right more than you know, and your ideas are usually wrong more often than you like. And we lost a third of our traffic in like, I think, a day. So we missed our guidance, you know, it was a public company, and we'd been crushing it, and then all of a sudden, and I went from being named founder of the year in the end of 2011 to being named one of the five worst CEOs in America, in 2012

Ben Casnocha (0:38)

So good evening, everybody. I'm Ben Casnocha from Village Global. For those I haven't met, we're really excited to have you here. Another Village Global Luminary Gathering with the one and only Mark Pincus. Mark was actually here seven years ago, this very same room with a bunch of villagers. So welcome back. It's great to have you here.

And he's, many of you know Mark is one of the great entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, also an incredible investor on the side and full of ideas, just a relentless idea machine. They're not always the bright ideas. Thanks.

Mark Pincus (1:10)

I like the honesty.

Ben Casnocha (1:11)

A lot of incredible ideas. And we're going to today get into some of the themes of his book, which of course you all have a copy of and he'll sign afterwards if you want it. But we're going to talk about entrepreneurship and startups. We'll talk about the journey of being a leader and CEO and some of the ups and downs you faced, some of the lessons learned as well as talk about AI and the new opportunity landscape. Let's start Mark by just covering the high level in the book. What do you want people to take away from the book?

Mark Pincus (1:33)

Well, first of all, I have so much trouble reading business books that I, I tried to write the book for people who have like a very low tolerance. So I told Ben I deleted 80 percent of what I wrote and I tried to just make it very fast and readable. So hopefully, it's a good drug delivery. I tried to put enough stories to keep you going, but put valuable content in it.

Ben Casnocha (2:03)

The story is always helpful when you start sentences like when Zuckerberg and I were getting monthly lunch, when I was demoing to Steve Jobs, when I was meeting with Jeff.

Mark Pincus (2:09)

You could have a lot of name drops.

Ben Casnocha (2:10)

There's a lot of good bold names in the stories.

Mark Pincus (2:13)

Well, the core points of the book, I created a class at Stanford that's still taught at Stanford Business School on product management. There was just two core points that are, I think, if you don't bother reading the book. By the way, one thing you can do if you don't bother reading the book is, you can actually, if you have a digital copy, you can upload it to GPT or Claude and it works really well. It's like you hired me as your product manager. Or even just the Proven Better New chapter worked amazing. But the two most core points, I guess, are that my lived experience of my whole career is that your instincts are probably right more than you know, and your ideas are usually wrong more often than you like. So it's like, okay, what do you do with that? If your instincts, this gut feeling that we have around something is right, even beyond what we think.

But the idea that we put on top of that is wrong. And to get a little Northern California, part of what we have to go through is this death of our ego and we end up killing hope. But because it's our ego that wants to believe that the first idea we have is right or that it's beautiful when it's not quite there. So that's this core point I'd love to convince you of today if you're not already convinced.

And I go into a lot of depth on the book. And then this framework that I didn't create until Zynga, but I had been dancing around it before of Proven Better New, this idea that it's how do you get in the right innovation zone and how do we change your odds of success? And I've said, if you use the book the right way, it's like a cheat code because at the very least, I think if especially if you're doing something consumer, if anything that needs a product market fit, you are probably doing too much new and you're probably ignoring too much proven.