This is Masters of Scale. This week on the show, Reed Hoffman sits down with Mark Pinkis. You should know Mark, but if you don't, he's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Zinga. Thanks to games like Farmville, Zinga Blitzcaled to 300 million monthly active users on Facebook at its peak. They were also huge on MySpace, but we don't remember MySpace so much these days. Now, Mark has a new book out, Life at the Speed of Play. The Godfather of Mobile Gaming talks with Reed about how to build products people love, how to learn fast from your mistakes, and much, much more.
Mark, it's always an honor and a pleasure. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. Part of the reason why we decided to do this, so you have a new book coming up and I wrote the forward to the book. I am a huge fan of the book. Start with a little bit of like, okay, internet boy, why did you write a book? What led you to writing a book?
Very old school media. Well, coming from someone who's been prolific with his books, Internet Boy. Um, I would say that not the playbook you've been on, but after writing the book, I think everyone should write a book once. I think it's one of those things that's such a labor of love, but I wanted to capture a few things in the book. It's like one part book of life motivation, one part stories, one part, you know, product management bible and we'll see if they all work. Originally, you may remember when the first few years I was writing this book, I called it proven better new because I was like, that's the core value. That's the core value.
Um, I would say that not the playbook you've been on, but after writing the book, I think everyone should write a book once. I think it's one of those things that's such a labor of love, but I wanted to capture a few things in the book. It's like one part book of life motivation, one part stories, one part, you know, product management bible and we'll see if they all work. Originally, you may remember when the first few years I was writing this book, I called it proven better new because I was like, that's the core value. That's the core value.
But I started to realize that that's in service of something much bigger. And to me, life at the speed of play represents it. It has meaning on a bunch of levels. One is it's the vibe. It's the way that I think we should approach making products. I think it should be fun and playful and light. I think someone asked me at a party, they're like, is this book also targeted children? And I said, no, actually, they already know how to play. And so I think remembering the kind of level of fun and imagination that we have in play, you know, as kids, giving ourselves permission to play is important. I also think that in this AI era, which you told me about years before we got to it, I wish I'd listened harder. In this AI era, we are just hurtling towards living our lives at the speed of play. And I think that that's more and more accessible to all of us. That this idea that you don't have to quit your job to try out an idea that you've been thinking about. You don't have to go and mortgage your house, raise a lot of venture capital, do all these things before you can experiment. That wasn't true when you and I were starting out. And now we're at this place that we have all the one person founder team. So that's the other part of it.
Proven better new. What's the framework? What's the baseline of understanding again? And we'll do that and then we'll move to also talking about that in the age of AI.
In order to explain proven better new, I got to start a chapter earlier on instincts versus ideas. Literally a chapter earlier, I guess.
The foundational point for me as a product maker is that we have winning instincts. These things in our gut, you just know it. You're tuning into it. You see it. You're like, I know that's right. If you accept this premise that your instincts are right and your ideas are usually wrong, then what do you do with that? What I mean by that is you could say we all had the idea for a dating app or whatever but we didn't, we had the instinct that something was broken there or there was a better way but not that idea. So proven better new is this framework that I got to out of the failure of tribe came the commitment to winning in Zinga and with that this framework. And the idea was to say, okay, we've got to be more scientific about this. And it's really a way to isolate and box in your innovation in one place and to say this is where I'm innovating and this isn't. So if you're Zuck and you're building threads, which is a copy, a fast follow of another very successful product, he did a very good I give him an A minus very good job of proven better new. The things that are proven are things that on that platform for those users works and you're not planning to make better and you should copy those legally. If you do it artfully people don't realize it's a copy but you should not change a single thing.
Stay as close to it as possible without doing anything that's illegal. Yeah, the real art of it is that the end user doesn't feel like copy. That's the real magic trick.
By the way, there are funny things on copies because in 2004 when I went to Shenzhen, there were three copies of LinkedIn. There were such exact copies in Chinese. I could fill out a profile and I don't speak any Chinese. Proven is no. No. We know what the game mechanic is. We know what the product mechanic is. We see the demand. We see the signal for how people use it, why they value it, etc. Stay close to that within what you're doing in your product.
Yeah. And the best product makers, the irony of this, the paradox of this is that the best product makers, the best masters of the craft are the best at copying.
Yes.
And they have the least ego around it.
And the most junior amateur people feel the need to change everything and they're the worst at copying and they fail for the wrong reasons. And that's the thing. If you don't do the proven right, you're going to get usually false negative signal, very rarely false positive signal, but your product will fail for the wrong reasons. Then better is I like to say what you believe is better is called new. What's actually better is what 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, yeah, like and better. So better is usually very simple and basic things like it's now free, no download. Yeah. It's clear something that they really care about is like one inch better where you already have the consumer experience of what this thing is and what would be obvious like would be immediate like yes, this is better.
Yes. Yeah. It's clearly better, but it's clearly better because it's also something I really care about and I care so much about this product that I noticed that you polished it more. Yes.
Okay. And then new is your novel idea that will probably be the reason why people will try this product and it will probably also fail. So we called it the back of the box, but it's the reason it's new and improved. My favorite bad example was the game Risk. You and I love board games. I remember when I said, oh, some MBA at Microsoft decided to change my risk game. What did they do? It was proven worse and bad new. They took the wooden pieces that I loved and made them plastic. They made them Roman numerals. Like I want to show my force. I don't want Roman numerals. That's not better. And then they had another game on the back called Castle Risk, which I never even learned. I'm like, what happened to classic Risk? Right. So that happens too often. People try and make it better. But we have to realize that if we realize our new idea is probably wrong then we can plan ahead for it and say what are four other ones and am I looking around at other products other versions of what I'm doing so I can learn faster. What you try to get to with proven better new is we want to be like scientists with white lab coats and we want to be prosecuting this instinct and saying okay, I'm not attached to this idea and my team isn't and I'm going to give myself and my team permission to change every Monday.
Now take proven better new and use that lens to talk about the age of AI because one of the specific strangenesses is there's very little proven.
So you're suddenly in a proven is okay. ChatGPT is proven in some ways. Claude is proven in some ways, but they're pretty expensive proven. Like whether I can point to something proven and all you need, it used to be 10 billion. Now all you need is a 100 billion for that game and the compute cluster.
People say does proven better new still apply in the AI world when you're going to a new platform. And we can come back to whether this even is a new platform. What do you do when there's no proven?
It's much harder. I tried to deal with it in the book by talking about there's a fuzzy proven you're looking for. Is there something that was proven, an experience was proven somewhere else and now I could try to apply it here. It's a better well to start with. That's a better vein than just I'm going to come up with something the world's never seen before. That's much less likely because you and I know that behavior, the more things change the more they stay the same. And the other hard part of this is when we think, is there a platform here? I'm curious, do you believe that AI is a platform?
Well, there's several senses in which we talk about things as platforms. So there's some senses at least in which it is a platform, but platform...
How about in the consumer sense?
Well, AI certainly has platform technology for consumer applications, although the model underlying what could be a number of different agents. So that model could be the technological platform for this. There's also the question of the front door, right? The fact that people will generally go to one, maybe a couple more, that's the front door for everything. That's why we use Google and search synonymously. So there's the portal.
Right? So there's the portal.
There's a portal. And so there's a platform sense in which I think we'll have people will have an agent, maybe a couple, but certainly an agent that's their general front door, but they don't yet, right?
Well, I think that's one of the benefits where the ChatGPT position is. I think ChatGPT is the closest to that right now.
I would argue it is not yet a platform at a consumer level. There's no...
Despite the fact that it's huge, it's not yet there.
Even as a contrast with Google in the early days was a platform for web distribution because there was SEO and SEM through Google. So that was a platform. I mean, the web obviously and the browser were, but Google was itself a platform enabler magnifier. And we are not yet there. I think we could see it, we hope for it.
By the way, this is funny because your comments are echoing back to our very earliest conversations as friends because both you and I went to the internet winner. The internet was considered to be concluded. It was Yahoo, Amazon, etc. And all of Silicon Valley broke in two directions. It broke to either enterprise or cleantech. And we're like, you guys, the consumer internet just started. You and I were the earliest web two guys. We formed a little group of people who were doing angel investing and started doing companies because we're like, hey, the consumer is coming. So what part of what you're saying is that with AI, people haven't realized the whole consumer revolution that's going to come with AI. I agree with you. As we see it in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking enterprise because that's where the money is. But no no no, consumer is going to be big now.
