CEOInterviews.AIZynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It

M

Mark Pincus0:00

Even though consumer is arguably not investable right now, the opportunity has never been greater to offer people a new internet treasure, reinvent some service that we thought was over or just generic, but it's enabled now because of AI and agents. I think that that is highly likely and that makes me want to keep building consumer product.

I

Interviewer0:31

Today I'm sitting down with Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, a relentless idea machine and one of the sharpest product minds in tech. Mark has a new book out, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love. And we're going to dig into the playbook behind it. AI optimism, The Failure Machine, Proven Better New, Founder Mode, and a lot more. Mark, it's great to have you.

M

Mark Pincus0:54

Thanks. I love being here in San Francisco, the motor city of the internet.

I

Interviewer1:00

I love the title. I mean, here at YC, we give people the t-shirt that says, 'Make something people want.' And so, 'Make something people love' is like another level, really.

M

Mark Pincus1:09

Yeah. And make something you love to start with.

I

Interviewer1:11

That's right. Maybe we start there. Why'd you write the book? What's the core motivation? You've made so many products that people love in the past. What does this book mean to you?

M

Mark Pincus1:22

In building five companies, but especially Zynga, I over time built this playbook, literally a playbook of my approach to product management, my approach to being a founder, to building companies, and this holistic realization that you can't just focus on any one piece of this. If you want to build great products, you can't avoid management. You can't avoid having a board or investors. So you just got to dive into the whole enchilada. And you should think kind of full stack from first principles of customers and products and coding all the way to long-term sustainable strategy. Some of the things we were just talking about that you said Eric Ries was talking about: how do I structurally set up a company in a way that I can play the long game and align everyone's interest. So I finally sat down. It took four years. I think everyone should write a book one time, but I really just wanted to get this in one place to be helpful, of service to everyone from a stay-at-home mom who has an idea and wants to think about if she could actually go build it, to my peers, to you, and just be in conversation.

I

Interviewer2:48

One of the things that really jumps out at me as I've gotten to know you is that you've been through and a leader through a lot of the ages of computing itself.

M

Mark Pincus2:59

Yeah. What that means is you have this sort of first principles wisdom from these different moments. You were mentioning the five companies and two of them went public, but some of the earlier ones were literally at the dawn of a brand new thing with social networking, which some of the people watching probably can't even imagine. Social networks are water now. You couldn't imagine a world before that, and yet the same thing is happening again. We're right now at this moment going from a moment where we didn't have AI and intelligence on tap to now AI everywhere. So you're uniquely blessed to be able to both tell us what the first principles are, but also what's going to rhyme.

It feels like the third time that we're about to enter a new era. When I started my first company, Freeloader, in 1995, it was just the web and trying to convince people they might want to use this online network. And with Tribe, Zynga, it was social and mobile, and now with AI. So it's really exciting.

I

Interviewer4:13

What are some of the things from that first wave? Were there parts of social networking that you thought it was going to be X and then it became Y?

M

Mark Pincus4:22

Well, the first thing I'd say is I trace the beginning of social networking to Napster, which Sean Parker started. He worked for me as an intern when he was 16. You remember that first moment that you loaded Napster and it said 4.5 million machines are connected to you right now.

I

Interviewer4:38

That's wild.

M

Mark Pincus4:39

And this song file, there's 15,000 copies of it available on the network. That's the first time to me that I felt like we looked through the network at each other. We connected to each other. We didn't just connect up to some corporation or database. It was truly a decentralized peer-to-peer. And it always was that. But this is the first time that we're able to actually experience it and visualize it and even feel a little bit rowdy. Napster to me was a little bit rowdy in a great way. And to me that was the beginning of this people web, even though it was a bunch of years before we got to Friendster and Facebook and LinkedIn. My failed company Tribe. I find so often as a founder that we're too close to something to even see how big it's going to be. I was working on the beginning of social networking and I met Zuckerberg when he first started. He came in my office. The thing I got wrong with Tribe was trust. I built a social network before Facebook and I managed to fail, and I just got the trust component wrong. For people to put themselves on the web, they first had to feel this good container of trust, and that's the thing that they got right with .edu from the beginning. I don't think Reed or I ever imagined, I know none of us ever imagined how big this got. Peter Thiel, all of us, we all sold our stock in Facebook, so we voted with our shares. None of us could have ever described how big this all got.

I

Interviewer6:19

What are some things when you reflect on that, and then you see we're a few years off of the ChatGPT moment, but now I would say that we're in the Opus 4.5 and later moment. I would trace it to that model was the thing that changed everything for me. The things before that were usable but like toys. There was something magical that happened, and now I can sort of treat the agent as a peer.

M

Mark Pincus6:50

Yeah.

I

Interviewer6:50

I can trust it with things, not everything, and it still hallucinates and it's not quite right, but it actually is smart enough.

M

Mark Pincus6:56

Yeah. And if you surround it with the right harness and the right context, it can actually do relatively magical things. My main use case now since the latest release is that I walk around talking to it.

I

Interviewer7:14

Yeah.

M

Mark Pincus7:14

And I'm just in conversation with it a lot. I've been frustrated. I know Granola is really successful. I'm surprised that the product hasn't evolved faster because what I want is to just have my AI listening in on this conversation now with us and just have it be a smart other person at the table. Any moment we can turn to the AI and ask it for its point of view. Maybe sometimes it'll interject it. I find I'll be walking and talking and then I said, 'Let's see what the AI says,' and I turn and I say it into it.

I

Interviewer7:53

Totally.

M

Mark Pincus7:54

And then it gives me a response.

I

Interviewer7:55

I mean this is a great example of consumer AI that is almost certainly going to be a 10 or hundred billion dollar company that no one's built yet. I did exactly the same thing today with my therapist. It's kind of funny. I like Granola in that it has the real time transcript.

M

Mark Pincus8:13

Yeah.

I

Interviewer8:14

And then I took the transcript and I pasted it to my OpenClaw.

M

Mark Pincus8:18

Yeah. And I was like, 'Hey, this is how my therapy session is going right now. Is there anything from the last week that I should have brought up that I haven't brought up yet?'

I

Interviewer8:27

Wow.

M

Mark Pincus8:28

And because it has total context and awareness of all my emails and my texts and everything, and I talk to it all the time about what I'm thinking about, it was really useful. So, yeah, basically it could be sitting here right now in our interview. I don't know. It's very weird.

I

Interviewer8:44

The tech is all there. I'm actually going to open source my Gemini Live voice plugin on GBrain shortly. So, I mean, it's not hard. And the weird thing is once I get it going, I sometimes talk to this open source thing that's just built on Gemini Live and it's better than Siri, and I'm like, why is Siri so bad?

M

Mark Pincus9:04

Siri so bad.

I

Interviewer9:05

Even just the voice input on it is so bad.

M

Mark Pincus9:07

And then at Amazon, it's just unbelievable, right? You have an entire Alexa team. I heard there's like 10,000 people on that team.

I

Interviewer9:15

No.

M

Mark Pincus9:16

I was like, what is happening? If there's no LLM, it's been years and there's no real LLM that you could feel. It's just like what is going on with these organizations at this point?

I

Interviewer9:27

I'll often not even use Granola. I just turn on voice memo for important meetings like a doctor for my kid, and then just copy the transcript and then have my own prompts, and I find I get something way better and more sharable. Someone could do Proven Better New on it.

M

Mark Pincus9:46

That's right. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we should use that right now. Is that like a good example? How would you do Proven Better New for this idea of just always-on AI intelligence that we just talked about? We hacked it together with whatever we got.

I

Interviewer9:58

This framework Proven Better New would start with an instinct that we have that something's missing.

M

Mark Pincus10:07

In this case, we have it. Yeah.

I

Interviewer10:08

Okay. Here's our instinct, which is also kind of our innovation zone that we want to test. But then isolate that and make sure we're testing just that instinct and not the things we don't want to test. So we would look at Granola, let's say, is probably the most successful AI note-taking product.

M

Mark Pincus10:30

Totally.

I

Interviewer10:30

And we deconstruct it and we would say everything that they're doing that we're not innovating on, we're going to legally copy. We're just going to not even question it. We don't have time.

M

Mark Pincus10:44

It's proven.

I

Interviewer10:44

It's proven.

M

Mark Pincus10:45

Yeah. Why would we?

I

Interviewer10:46

And we don't have time to make it better because that's where we're in the wheel here.

M

Mark Pincus10:51

Yeah. And better would be something that 10 out of 10 existing users would say better. So that would be like now it's free. It's half price. It's faster. It's less friction. I mean in this case it feels like the friction part is the biggest problem because it's like you and I, but that's a hypothesis. So that would be new.

I

Interviewer11:12

You and I say, 'Okay, the friction's the problem or the fact that it's not listening is the problem. Maybe we're right. We're probably wrong.' And so that's the part we want to test. So we do all the proven mechanics of it. And then the only new thing is that it's always on listening, but we start off with the proposition that that idea is probably wrong. And so we don't get attached to it. And we test a lot of other ideas around it.

M

Mark Pincus11:43

Proven Better New sounds like a perfect thing to do right now because there's basically all the things. I made a GPT and a Claude skill to upload my book and do Proven Better New, and part of what it did was amazing. So, the proven part I would give it like an A minus. It was faster and better than most.

I

Interviewer12:06

It knows what has been done. Yeah, it's brilliant at proving.

M

Mark Pincus12:10

Yeah, it's in distribution, it's literally in the model sometimes, right? The better part I'd give it like a B minus because it was not always getting better, the concept of better, right? And then for new I'd give it a D.

I

Interviewer12:23

Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean that's what the human's for.

M

Mark Pincus12:29

We're still useful for something, and making new things is probably one of the most fun things you could do. Going back to consumer, earlier we were talking about I had just done office hours this afternoon with someone who has some of the best consumer metrics I'd ever seen in years, and then the other investors who had invested in it are telling them like you need to pivot to enterprise, and I was like no, this is amazing.

I

Interviewer12:59

And why did they want them to pivot to enterprise just because that's more fundable right now? That's what investors want to invest in.

M

Mark Pincus13:05

So, you know, what's your sense?

I

Interviewer13:07

I was on the opposite end of that during in like 1999. I was building an enterprise software company called Support.com, which went public, and no one had any interest in us because everything was about consumer.com until all of that failed and we were one of like only two companies that could go public.

M

Mark Pincus13:26

Do you find that odd? The investors, they're sometimes exactly 180 degrees off.

I

Interviewer13:33

They're not thinking about first principles at all.

M

Mark Pincus13:35

It sounds like they don't think about the new part enough. And then maybe these days they're over-relying on ChatGPT and Claude, right?

I

Interviewer13:42

And so, you know, they like the GPT doesn't like consumer. Maybe if you had an idea and said, 'Where should I go to get funding?' It would probably tell you enterprise.

M

Mark Pincus13:51

Yeah, that's exactly the deal. And then the thing is, you have to work on the new stuff. And the new stuff is out of distribution.

I

Interviewer13:58

If you and I were just starting today, would we go do consumer when there's no distribution, no proven distribution?

M

Mark Pincus14:07

By hook or by crook, I'd try and figure out how to get distribution. I mean, ideally, there's some viral hook inside of it. Can I get people to email their friends?

I

Interviewer14:17

Well, what about when those things fail? From a standpoint of proven, there is no proven path for distribution right now in consumer.

M

Mark Pincus14:27

Which is why it's so hard.

I

Interviewer14:28

Yeah. You probably don't have a whole lot of consumer companies coming through right now.

M

Mark Pincus14:33

Yeah, that's right. What's interesting is we have things that kind of resembled consumer. They're dev tools.

I

Interviewer14:40

So there's like prosumer.

M

Mark Pincus14:42

Yeah. There's definitely prosumer. And if you talk to AI investors, that's actually one of the key markets that they like to go after right now. The prosumer thing is that there might be like 20 million developers, for instance, and you can basically use consumer style tactics. I don't know, consumer is hard because you just don't have that many hours in the day.

I

Interviewer15:05

Right. Right. We're booked.

M

Mark Pincus15:06

Even this voice idea that we were just talking, we should start this idea. We should start this.

I

Interviewer15:11

Yeah, we should. Can you code it tonight?

M

Mark Pincus15:14

Yeah, I can. Yeah, I'll use GStack.

I

Interviewer15:16

Supposedly, Thinking Machines, their big innovation is close to zero latency on AI response times.

M

Mark Pincus15:25

That goes in the new category. It sounds like we got to test it out.

I

Interviewer15:28

It's a tough one. Is that better or new? Because zero latency, less latency, everyone's gonna say yes to it.

M

Mark Pincus15:35

That's true. So, that's better. But the feature we want to do with it is probably new. Yeah. They have the AI listening and responding to our conversation.

I

Interviewer15:44

So once I know Proven, Better, New, it's like, proven gives me a base and then better gives me a direction and then new is sort of like all the spikes that go out and some of these things are going to catch.

M

Mark Pincus15:55

Probably none of them will catch, to be fair. Yeah. I mean, be prepared for none of them to catch.

I

Interviewer16:00

Assume. Yeah, assume none. I mean, new is like the novel idea that will get someone interested in your product. If we just did proven and we're like, 'Hey, we have a copy of Granola. Do you want it?' No one's going to be very impressed.

M

Mark Pincus16:13

Yeah, I'm already using Granola. It's cool.

I

Interviewer16:14

So, but if we're like, 'Oh, this is like Granola, but it's always listening. It's always on.' It might get someone to try our product, but that feature might die. The feature might actually get trial. It's like they call it the back of the box, like what got you to buy the new cereal, but it's probably not what you came back for. You come back for the Granola.

M

Mark Pincus16:36

This is actually a really important part of the process. I feel like it's understanding that new will not work and then not getting demoralized. How do you do it? You've worked with so many product teams and designers and they think they're convinced the new is going to work and then it doesn't, and then what do you say to them? It really gets into this death of the ego. How do we stay passionate about the instinct we're pursuing, the vision, but dispassionate about this particular product variant and idea? That's really difficult. And what do you say to your team when they're taking this hill and everyone's working day and night? One of the worst things we can feel as a founder is to come in on Monday or Sunday, I lay in bed and think, I don't think this product's exactly right.

I

Interviewer17:31

Yeah.

M

Mark Pincus17:32

But what do I do? I've got investors convinced and I have people killing themselves to build this. Do I come in Monday and say, 'Guys, I'm not feeling it.' Or do I just kind of suck it up and then slowly try to move them? It's kind of like being a parent. How do you manage things with your kids? And it gets to one question which is alignment and style. Have we given ourselves permission as founders to pivot a lot, or are we trapped in this one product path? There's a funny thing about what I call true signal or heat. When you have the right product, the lightning in the bottle moment, when you have it you know it, and when you don't you don't know. What I mean is you don't know positively when you achieve it. Everything works, every feedback loop is a yes. But when it's not quite right, then it's debatable and you're looking for lots of different data and trying to test one more thing. When you've got that heat, that true signal, you don't have to tell anyone to work harder or faster, everyone sees it. I call it the fish are running. When the fish are running, you're up all night throwing nets and it's great. It's a high. I think you have to go slow to go fast. Get to real conviction and then everyone is going to move fast against it.

I

Interviewer19:04

How many times in your life have you felt like the fish are running?

M

Mark Pincus19:07

Only a couple times. With Freeloader, my first company, we were in the right place at the right time and we got 2 million downloads of our free app in the first month. And then a lot of times at Zynga, I felt it. There were so many game launch moments.

I

Interviewer19:27

You had so many hits.

M

Mark Pincus19:28

Yeah, we had a lot of hits and so many even big feature releases. I like to say great product makers are collecting winnings, not making bets. So long before you launch, you know it's a hit or that your users are going to love this. You don't look to see if they like it.

I

Interviewer19:47

So what are some other things other than Proven Better New that you would suggest to founders? They want to invoke fish are running when things are going right. And you have a bunch of companies now that have things going right, hitting big ARRs, and then they hit a question of scaling. Scaling and management are like these black boxes. People are like, what do I do? Do I hire someone who knows scale? Do I bring in an investor who knows it? I try to coach founders in the class I create at Stanford. I just said, 'You don't need to go get an MBA. You don't need to learn management.' The only point of all of these management tools is to get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. That's it. The first lesson is be in the room.

M

Mark Pincus20:38

It's like be in the room as much as you can if you are the best player in that position, and then replace yourself with people and processes that you can feel confident are going to do the right thing when you're not in the room. There isn't any one playbook. There's lots of ways, but that's what this all boils down to. There's a lot of things in my book about how do you get alignment with people? How do you hire the right people who are going to be in that culture and style that you're creating? And talk about making people CEOs. There's a bunch of different things you can do. I've tried and others, but the whole point of it is just so they do the right thing when you're not there.

I

Interviewer21:23

Basically, what you're mentioning there sounds a lot like Brian Chesky's founder mode in a way.

M

Mark Pincus21:29

I can always hear him saying, 'Leadership is presence, not absence,' right? And that's like the first part of what you're saying. I love that movie. I think it's called Master and Commander. Do you know what I'm talking about? And he goes down and grabs an oar and he's rowing and he's like, 'Come on, man. Freedom. We got to make it to freedom.' But I definitely think that that is a part of founder mode, whether it's Elon sleeping on the factory floor, but your team seeing you get into the details and know the details and pay attention to the details as much as them. I don't trust the CEO of a consumer company that doesn't love their product and doesn't know their product better than anybody else. I know there are some really successful, but I don't understand how they can be. I love founder mode. When I first heard Brian talk about it, it spoke to me. Because to me founder mode is so much of it is about giving ourselves permission to be ourselves. I love the way that he talked about it and I love the debate that came out after founder mode where on Twitter or X a lot of VCs were saying founder mode is only good for the very small percentage of founders that deserve it, like Jeff Bezos, right? And I'm like, founder mode is for every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors. It's just funny that founder mode is for when no one else believes in you, right? When no one wants to let you. What you're doing is so unpopular, but you're the only one who believes in it. I like to say that we all start as expert witnesses early in our careers, that we're closest to the answer and furthest from the decision. And founder mode was made for you because you're but don't be an expert witness in your own company, and we do that to ourselves.

I

Interviewer23:27

Oh, that's so interesting that that's what happens. We make so many compromises as we're building our company to hire that CTO or get that major investor that we contort ourselves and we end up not building a house we want to live in. And then one day we're like, well, I guess it's not really the company for me or I'm not for it. We're like, no, you're the star player.

M

Mark Pincus23:52

Yeah, you're the owner and you're the star player. I have a feeling the company's worth more with you there. So, what did we do? You create an environment you're not even welcome at or you don't belong in. I've started to interpret founder mode is it's not just at the governance or the board level, there's a question of how do we as founders live in founder mode on a weekly basis. I think it's you have these instincts that got us here, got Airbnb to where they are, and so much of it is Brian having the confidence but also creating the context with everyone around him that if he comes in on Monday and doesn't like that product, is he able to tell the team that or does he have to manage them or couch it? People have said working for Mark can feel like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in and falls in love with a different idea. And sometimes they're right. But if they're saying that, I'm also not doing a good job of managing them and creating the context for me to change every Monday. That's one thing I've learned. But first of all, founder mode is like being ready to tune into your own instincts and follow them and not ignore them because you're a people pleaser. But the other part of founder mode that we start to learn is create the context that your team is okay with that, that you say, you know what, we're going for that continent over there. That's our mission. It hasn't changed, but I'm going to talk at a lot of different altitudes now. That's 100,000 ft. Today, we're at 5,000 ft. This tack is not heading towards that continent. We got to go that way. And where everyone comes in where we're trying to be intellectually honest and there's a culture of that, so that people come in on a Monday like, what did you learn the last week? Well, I saw this other product that I think is doing what we're talking about better. Tell me more about it. Are we humble and curious and intellectually honest, and is that our culture, or are we an execution machine and there's no room for anybody to raise their hand and say I don't get it?

I

Interviewer26:04

Yeah, I think that's so hard because every company is in different modes. Sometimes you're in the new product mode and you're trying to do something that's never happened before, and then sometimes it's like, hey, this thing's great. We just got to keep squeezing the lemon here. I'm curious what's your point of view on are there massive trillion dollar consumer services and companies that are yet to be invented that we haven't seen yet?

M

Mark Pincus26:37

I mean I think almost certainly. How could there not be, right? Intelligence is on tap though. People are starting to get a little demoralized about it interestingly. Even on the enterprise side, there was a stat yesterday that I saw something like 90% of enterprises that have invested in AI haven't received any benefit yet.

I

Interviewer26:58

I've seen that too.

M

Mark Pincus26:58

Yeah, isn't that weird?

I

Interviewer27:00

But it's also so early and I think there are just so many things arrayed against adoption.

M

Mark Pincus27:05

You think that includes all of these companies that are spending a million dollars a year on tokens? Probably. But, you know, I guess it just depends on what people are doing. If you just spend the tokens and don't do anything different about how you make products or it doesn't touch a user, I could see how that's just spending more money and not having any effect. So, for now, I still think if it's 2026 and people are still figuring it out, I assume it's a skill issue.

I

Interviewer27:33

If that number continues to be true in like three or four years, I might get a little worried. But you think we have three or four years before it has to deliver?

M

Mark Pincus27:43

There's just so many weird confounding effects. One of the things I'd be not too surprised is happening is actually this token maxing thing. So many of our friends are spending, I'm spending a million dollars a year on tokens. Peter Steinberger apparently is spending a million or $1.1 million a month. That is sort of the frontier of what you can do with this stuff. You can literally do the work of a thousand people right now, but you have to pay for it and very few.

I

Interviewer28:12

If you're doing the work of a thousand people but you're not getting the output of a thousand people, then something's not adding up yet.

M

Mark Pincus28:20

I would say I feel like I'm getting that. My open source projects seem to be quite usable and useful, and the better version is actually OpenClaw. The entire reason why I think Peter Steinberger was able to make that was he was already wealthy and he was messing around. I heard he got sick of Aiza and he just said, you know what, it's way more, he just loves coding and why not just spend a million dollars a year on tokens to make the world's best open-source platform that gives this gift to everyone. That's how the OpenClaw phenomenon happened. But embedded in that is actually an interesting lesson. How many of those 90% are spending a million dollars a year on tokens, but it's in one or two people, and how much of it is divided out by a thousand people and everyone basically is using GPT-3.5 on Copilot? They're using sort of models from a year ago, really worried about cost, and they're just not using it correctly. I got in a lot of trouble on the internet for talking about lines of code. I realized they were actually right because I wrote half a million lines of Rails code when I first started coding again.

I

Interviewer29:37

Mhm.

M

Mark Pincus29:38

And that was the wrong thing to do because I was writing a lot of code that then would call the LLMs.

I

Interviewer29:44

Oh.

M

Mark Pincus29:44

And that's the old way to do it. The new way to do it is actually have the LLMs just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more customizable. It does more and is more awesome. Between token maxing and even, don't write code that calls LLMs. Write markdown that teaches LLMs to write code. They're just a few big shifts in how to think about building software that nobody knows yet. But I also like the concept that the R&D now is about going and squandering tokens.

I

Interviewer30:20

I know, right? I don't think it always is a squander of tokens, but maybe that's what we should be doing right now.

M

Mark Pincus30:26

Yeah.

I

Interviewer30:26

I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good. I think that in 2 years that'll be 100,000 and down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen. I heard you say that, but I also wonder if you're just going to squander that much more. You might still be spending a million dollars. It's just that now you're getting the work of a million people instead of a thousand people.

M

Mark Pincus30:53

I guess we're going to find out what the limit of pure software is.

I

Interviewer31:00

A pessimistic view would say we're already there. You don't need a million people coding anything actually. There are only 20 million coders in the whole world apparently.

M

Mark Pincus31:10

Well now there's probably a lot more. Depending on how you define a coder.

I

Interviewer31:13

Yeah. That's right.

M

Mark Pincus31:14

The one thing I'd say back on the question of are the big consumer services is that ground taken and is that over?

I

Interviewer31:23

I'd be curious. What do you think?

M

Mark Pincus31:24

I look at my phone. That's my home screen. It's half empty, and the half that is full is of generic apps for the most part. It's clock, notes, photos, camera, weather. But I think that these what I call these internet treasures, these services we can't remember life before or imagine life without like a Google or a GPT. I think that there are so few that have been invented that's in our digital life stack. So I think that even though consumer is arguably not investable right now, I do think that oddly the opportunity has never been greater to offer people a new internet treasure and reinvent some service that we thought was over or just generic, whether it's the camera or an Uber and Airbnb, a service that we didn't yet really imagine, but it's enabled now because of AI and agents. I think that that is highly likely and that makes me want to keep building consumer products.

I

Interviewer32:38

Yeah. I mean, I would argue, if the Opus 4.5 moment was just in December, you have to pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to get real work done with those things. It means that the ideal consumer moment is still like three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029.

M

Mark Pincus33:01

That sounds right. I mean, that makes sense to me. I guess you think about the beginning of the internet and there was huge investment in telecom and infrastructure just kind of an analog to today, but it was mostly dark fiber. So, we know that was different. And then there was huge investor interest in the consumer internet. And then that crashed and we saw eBay take off early, but it wasn't until late in 2002 that I started to see Amazon's numbers start to really consistently climb quarter on quarter. They were kind of doing their thing, but it was starting in the fall of 2002, they announced a big quarter and it was kind of shocking because the internet was supposed to be over, and that's when I was like, 'Oh, this is finally happening.' So to your point, that was a good six years in before we got to it.

I

Interviewer33:51

How do you think about timing for all this stuff? That's a great example. These things seem to take a long time and then you have to be wrong for almost a decade and then suddenly everyone's like, 'Oh, you were so right.' And then finally,

M

Mark Pincus34:06

Right? Then everyone feels late. Yeah.

I

Interviewer34:08

Then they are late because you had to have started something right now that took over in three or four years from now. Do you have any advice for people who are like, I don't even know what I'm going to eat for lunch tomorrow. How did you find your staying power?

M

Mark Pincus34:23

I've always had a love for building consumer products and I've found over time that I seem to be like 18 months ahead of the early mass market majority. I think about it that way in terms of myself as a user. It is interesting that half my phone is empty other than GPT and Claude. There aren't consumer apps that are grabbing my attention right now. Definitely not games. So it is hard to have the staying power, but it depends on how you think about it. It's hard to just keep building things when there's nothing that you're falling in love with. We need to go out and fall in love with things to get our inspiration. These zones we get in, I call the abyss. The abyss is this place in between passionately pursuing products that we find ourselves in where we're not sure if we'll ever find something we're passionate about again.

I

Interviewer35:23

Yeah.

M

Mark Pincus35:23

And we don't know if we'll ever come out. Then it's like, well, what do you do in the abyss? But I think that during this time in the abyss is when you actually can expand your taste zones and potentially find things that are part of your way out. You just don't know it at the time.

I

Interviewer35:40

Well, we're in this weird moment where, the more I think about it, I feel like it is a cost problem. The really magical things you have to pay a lot of money.

M

Mark Pincus35:49

We got to get to that Jevons paradox point, right? Where you can squander it. And it's definitely a problem in games.

I

Interviewer35:54

Yeah. Especially with a premium product in most consumer and games, every cent counts. How do you make it work? You can't do that kind of compute and processing. That's why when Elon says games are just going to be created pixel by pixel by the AI while you're looking around, I'm like that's going to be very expensive.

M

Mark Pincus36:17

Until we build enough GPUs, my friend. Suddosi was just mentioning one thing that we could probably count on is like a 10,000x increase in inference from a Jeff Dean. So there's a breakdown of how all this stuff is going to go down. You can't bet against Elon. Elon is probably right at a different point in time that maybe is coming faster than we realize. He sees a point that you have that many GPUs and the cost of any one cycle or token is so cheap that we can squander it everywhere in games.

I

Interviewer36:55

This moment is coming. For people who are watching to the end and they're like, well what is the story about consumer? That might be the story.

M

Mark Pincus37:04

Might be. And that might be the time machine moment is to come back to today and say, remember when we didn't understand that this was intelligence on tap like water, right? And we're not there yet. But if you can get your head in that space, it's probably the right way to think about consumer. If you think how will all of these services be when that compute is basically free? How would I use it if I could just use unlimited amounts for everything all the time? We'd have our app that would be listening.

I

Interviewer37:36

Yeah, because you can have that app now. It'll just cost $1,000 a month and so you could afford it and I could afford it and a bunch of our friends could afford it, but that's not consumer. That's basically enterprise.

M

Mark Pincus37:48

Right. Right.

I

Interviewer37:48

And so it's just a matter of time. Actually, earlier I was making a joke about neither of us are time travelers, but actually we are time travelers right now. Most of the people who can't spend that much money can't get it yet.

M

Mark Pincus38:01

That pains me honestly.

I

Interviewer38:03

Or you could be inspired to say everyone eventually will have this soon. So we have to figure out the primitives right now. You could start building now and working backward. That's an incredible head start. That's one of the classic ways to come up with startup ideas. You take any log graph of a cost curve or some capability curve. You could have guessed the moment that the iPhone could have been possible because memory came down and display cost came down and compute came down to a point where someone could afford an iPhone.

M

Mark Pincus38:36

Yeah.

I

Interviewer38:36

And so you can do this right now with the cost of intelligence. I love the business plan of free. If you want to say what do you always know is better? Free, right? And it's one of the rules of the internet. Anything that can be free will be free.

M

Mark Pincus38:51

And my first company, Freeloader, we had a free interactive screen saver that competed with Berkeley Systems' $35 flying toasters, right? It's a good win, right? It's not even new. It's just better. You want it. But the new was the internet, but the better was just free screen saver. And then with Zynga and social games, again, the game industry was only $23 billion and they had one model which was go to the store and buy a box and it was $60. And we said, can we make decent quality games free? And the free worked again. So I love thinking about what does free mean in the age of AI and compute, and how will we rethink all of these services when it's unlimited and free.

I

Interviewer39:44

I mean what's interesting is it's always darkest before dawn, right? And so maybe that's the moment. That's why we're sitting here lamenting that consumer is not investable, but it will be and we know this now. Yeah, it's a good argument to imagine any one of these franchises or any of these consumer services and think how would it be different if you offered that with free unlimited AI inside of it.

M

Mark Pincus40:14

That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new Snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future. And it's not even a couple years away.

I

Interviewer40:22

Yeah, Mark, this is so amazing. Thank you so much for spending time with us. And for everyone watching, make sure you go out and buy his new book. It's going to be available anywhere books are sold. Thanks for joining us.

Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It

About Mark Pincus