Mark Pincus unpacks his "Proven, Better, New" framework (with Reid Hoffman) | Masters of Scale

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes.

And they have the least ego around it.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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?

How about in the consumer sense?

Right? So there's the portal.

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...

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.

Well, okay, enterprise where the money is, that was the same thing back in the internet winter. And like no no no, consumer is going to be big, enterprise will be big too. By the way, they were right. Cleantech generally failed, and enterprise did the cloud revolution, SaaS. So there will be a whole bunch of enterprise stuff. But it's funny how few people are thinking about the consumer thing right now. It's a very good illustration. That was one of the things you and I started having dinners on. The world is here and no one realizes it.

Yes, exactly. And it was later that venture came in because they saw the growth curve beginning to happen. Yeah.

Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

But it does feel very analogous to the internet winter.

Internet winter we called it in 2002 to 2003 when you started LinkedIn and I started tribe. And this feels very much like a similar moment. It's not figured out, but you know it's going to be.

Yeah, I believe that. I even see it with my partner Hillary. She started getting into vibe coding with Claude and got way ahead of me. I was like, wait a second, this is what I do. She made this little mobile app for all of us and our nanny based on location it would recommend activities for each of our five kids by age. I thought, wow, there's a great design aesthetic. The point is we're all going to become product makers because it's democratized and accessible. My daughter Georgia is making a poker app. So I do think that everyone becomes full stack when the stack is automated and just promptable. Then it gets down to taste. Hillary has amazing taste. Which are the key things from the Zinga playbook that you would recommend to AI native companies?

Yes.

All of that is more possible and at your fingertips today than ever before with AI. I like to say, do not build it right. Build a culture of building it wrong.

I'm in the same spirit. But that word viable is actually hurtful because viable also means hope, of viability. What you want is not viable. You want conviction. Viable is a very weak word. Conviction is strong. What I would say from the Zinga playbook that people should ruthlessly copy today that was proven was test more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. Build a testing and failure machine. Usually at the top of the funnel, especially in consumer, is anyone even going to click on this? Don't build the rest, just the landing page, the ad link, nothing else. It's amazing to me even today, we're in this weird paradox with AI. I would have thought by now people would be all over the place with these testing machines, building prototypes in a day and testing, and they're not. You can almost get to that minimum viable product in 3 months instead of 3 years. People want to do that, but then they go native, they get too committed to that product and they can't kill it. Teams often say it's not ready yet. It's so true that if you're not embarrassed, you're not launching early enough. Launch is the wrong word. You should turn it on to the level that you'll learn.

But I go to this question with founders. How ambitious are you? Everyone says a 10. Then when you unpack that 10, no, you're not. If you're really ambitious, you're willing to be wrong for a long time. You can be wrong for three years and then really right, or a little bit right every day. Most people take a little bit right. I also, like you, am an extreme AI optimist. I believe we are on the verge of the greatest gains not just in human productivity but in proliferation of new kinds of services for humans by humans. I don't want to sound tone-deaf, but my belief, just like every other era, the internet, the web, mobile, is that there are so many industries we can't imagine today that are going to pop up.

The irony is that so many of us who are spending our time building apps and working in this industry shield our kids from it, just as any parents could and should. With my twin girls who are 15 now, I made it pretty far. I told them no smartphone until you're 16. They had to convince me to get them a flip phone. I said you're going to be the coolest kid, the only one with a flip phone. They didn't think they were cool. That got me a couple years. When they were 14, they did an internship at Niantic working on Pokémon Go. They built a new first-time user experience. I was proud. They convinced me they needed phones for that. I couldn't take them back, but I said you're permanently on probation. If I see you on your phone at dinner or not paying attention to your little brother or sister, your phone's gone forever. Put the fear of God in them. We enjoy being together, playing games together, having big debates. I try to meet them where they are. They're on their phones way less than other kids. That's healthy. I notice when one of them is on their screen for long periods, they get more isolated, flat, sometimes sad. I take it away and tell them to go outside. It's a parenting issue for all of us. Maybe it sounds self-serving, but I don't blame Facebook. I don't think it's like cigarettes. I don't blame games. It's part of our culture. What are we modeling for them? We're on our phones constantly. It's hypocritical. How did we get addicted? It's a real challenge. It's giving all of us ADD. We have a one-year-old and a four-year-old. My partner is very vigilant about no screens ever. Many new parents are the same. The second I had my twins in 2010, I had two thoughts: how do I implant GPS devices so I never lose them? Classic dad. And could we make an app for parents that would gamify screen time for our kids, limit it and incentivize them? I had one of those job wheels they would spin and enjoy. I don't have magic answers. What I've done is kept them off as long as I could. They went through games. Now Georgia is obsessed with chess on chess.com. That's a more okay addiction. Obsession and commitment can lead to success. The game I'm trying to get them into is coding. It pains me to see high school today. It feels like the end of a 100-year cycle. Kids are stuck. It's not efficient. They go all day and come home with so much homework. We homeschooled for the last semester. They missed the social but had much more time. They learned more. Learning efficiency went up. In an ideal world, they'd do efficient learning and screen time for coding, otherwise outside.

I think the metaverse is starting to happen. It's going to happen and it's going to be as big as Zuck thought, just not inside an immersive game goggle that's painful and hot to wear. Even if the form factor improves, whether we wear devices that listen to us, AR Ray-Bans, or just our phones, everything is going to get more metaverse. The big unlock for games is putting real world, real humans, real social into games. Games should be a good use of your time. They're a big industry but a total waste of time. Imagine if games improved your life skills, did LinkedIn for you, got you a job. How much bigger would it be? I think that's an unlock. All these apps like Duolingo will be more gamified. Winning services will become more fun and rewarding. Once the unlock happens for consumer agentic AI, that's the metaverse. When we have avatars roaming the world while we're not there, networking, finding us dates, jobs, new ways to make money, that's the metaverse. It doesn't have to be immersive 3D. It could happen in your brain getting a text back that says your AI just gave an amazing talk in Bombay.

I had a junior partner at Accel once tell me, when I was trying to raise money for Zinga, that he worried I wasn't coachable. I said, thank you for asking. I have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all of them. I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job. The implied advice was that I should pretend I'm going to learn from the person with money. I've always said no to that.

Yes.

Right, which is usually the best outcomes. Everyone else is looking at patterns, playing the same game. From Settlers of Catan, you have to have a different strategy or you can't expect a different outcome.

It's been 10 years, but worth it to get to this.

Thanks again to Mark Pincus for joining us on Masters of Scale. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play. Launch Products People Love. It's a fantastic read full of actionable insights like the ones he shared in his conversation here with Reed. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you for listening.