Mark Pincus on Combining Markets

Games were not working on the Facebook ecosystem. I did it because I saw this ocean. I saw two oceans, you know, two bodies of water, social networking and video games. So, I was thinking, okay, if this works, it opens a little crack into mass market casual gaming. And I had this belief. One of the things I talk about in the book that I just love and I will encourage your listeners to consider this is available to all of us all the time. Find a mature market that's over, that's done, that's dead, that's been played out. Online dating, you know, eBay with listings or analog businesses that are not attractive. They're almost not investable. Like VCs won't like them. They're red oceans. They're not growth markets. Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it and it has a proven behavior in it. And that's video gaming. By the way, here's a gift. Here's an Easter egg. Take video gaming. In 2007, it was a 23 billion industry. It was barely growing. There was no, it wasn't a top 10 behavior on the consumer web. And it was stupid to go into people. No, it was not fundable. Okay, here we are 19 years later. It's a $283 billion industry. That's not fundable. Okay, it's not growing. It's mature. You'd have a really tough time getting a VC to fund it. Perfect place to try to do something innovative because if you can find a new dimension to this that sparks people, you don't have to prove that anyone's going to do it or wants it or is going to spend money on it. It's unlimited, right? And that was search when Google showed up. So I do love that and I was thinking like that when I started Zynga because the year or two before I was trying to buy CNET, they were a public company, and I said I need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming. I need to solve distribution. Consumer was not investable because of distribution. Today consumer is not investable because of distribution. It's a perfect parallel. The new thing then was social networking. The new thing today is AI and agents. This is like a mirror, you know, in time. So we are living today in 2007. Go for it. Consumer is not investable. Do consumer.

Yeah, there's they're really wide ranging and disparate. I gravitate towards people that have non-mainstream, more contentious views. I love everything Peter Thiel says, it's like catnip for me. I just heard him talk and he's saying that we've lived in this 50 years of stagnation even though the economy GDP stock market's up so much when we think about how people live and how our parents the gap in how our parents live versus their parents. We didn't see that gap again from our parents to us and now the next generation, the kids of the 90s and the early 2000s, they don't look at their life and opportunity. You know, if our parents were in the 19 or my parents, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, their parents were in the 1930s and 40s. And you think about that difference and it's just it was the middle class was formed and so much. And so Peter's kind of coming at this thing from the same problem, but the opposite side of like the Democrat socialists and the far-left progressive Democrats. And he's saying the only solution is growth. We've got to grow the economy and grow the opportunity base for the middle class and for people in order to save capitalism and democracy. And I thought I hadn't thought about it that way because I think of the last 50 years as unbelievable growth and in the worldwide standards of living and in technology and you know stock markets and all these things. But I thought that was really brilliant insight that's got me thinking. But I'd say that who I follow, I love Pirate Wires, you know, Mike Solano and there's so many insights that Dave had early that were not mainstream, you know, that have changed my thinking.

I have a lot of trouble reading books. I do books on tape. I'll tell you that I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm walking or driving, but I get a lot and I connect with a lot of friends around social political issues first where we have non-mainstream views. I mean, like I came out for Trump, you know, a few days before the election. That was not a mainstream or popular thing in my community to do. But I guess I pay a lot of attention to people that break through in any way in consumer. That's probably something that I pay more attention to and I think it was announced like two weeks ago or something. I invest in this company FOMO. That's what I find the resume for me in consumer is traction. I have no idea who or why. I mean but when I cold-messaged Shane at Polymarket on Twitter when they broke through. So, you know, I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer because it's so broken and is so rare. So, you know, I think those are good leads.