The Zynga Founder on Becoming a Builder, Not Just a Consumer

So, I've said that this book I think can be used like a cheat code because I think whatever you're doing, the book can change your odds of success. The real cheat code in the book is proven better new. It's so powerful that it can actually deliver you strong signal and kind of a B+ even when your idea isn't that good. The idea of proven is that there is a body of work out there that relates to whatever you're doing that has been proven. You can find a successful product that both you like so it speaks to you. You think this is a great version of something close to your idea and the metrics show that it's proven.

It's something that's so crucial to that product experience that the users will notice it. Okay. So, in Farmville, we were proven better less. We had no new. All we did really was make the crop art and crop math better. But people who loved farm simulation games noticed it. That's what the game was about was

And then the math having a better dopamine hit. Like this math is more of a puzzle I want to solve. So and our users were middle-aged women who love solving puzzles. So it's really better is in the mindset of your audience who already like this kind of product. Words with friends. People say that was just Scrabble. It must have been more than just Scrabble because we peaked at 14 million DAUs and Scrabble peaked at like years later peaked at like 2 million DAUs. So if it was just Scrabble,

It was so polished and the social just happened without you thinking about it that ours was instantly social, which was a new idea, not better. Not everyone you didn't know up front everyone want social. That was a new idea that worked. The polish was better. So anyone getting on mobile wanting that touch experience and that kind of beautiful feeling that you got appreciated the attention to the polish. So that's better. And new is a novel idea

You probably are using it because you like the proven and the better, but you're trying it because of the new. And there is no formula on what percent is new. In fact, I talk in the book about the more new the platform is, the less new you need to be. Okay.

Right. AI. I want to invent new things.

I'm going to like tell you the weather a week from now or no, I still want just the weather today and tomorrow or whatever I want didn't change. But now AI makes it some reason why I'm now interested in the weather app again. So don't overthink it as I've so often done.

Yes 100%. I say like we have to earn the right to try to improve or make this product new. And if you're not a master of that, a PhD in that product and the history of that experience and product, then you haven't earned the right to do new and you will you're welcome to do new, but you'll most likely fail. And yeah, there is a bit of like a moral arbitrage,

and there's a magic trick. We inherently as consumers, we don't like something that looks like a blatant bad copy. If it just looks like you ripped off somebody else's idea, then you know, you'll get bad app reviews and people won't like it. The magic trick is that it is a copy, but nobody knows it. Fortnite was a beautiful proven better new of PUBG. PUBG had proven out the category of battle royale and was making a lot of money. And then Epic pivoted their Fortnite game. They took all this beautiful art and they came out with a PUBG clone, but the art was so much more consumer friendly and the game was so much more accessible. No one ever accused them of being a copy. That's a master craft, a master class in this and it's a magic trick. And so I'm not telling people just make this look to end users like a copy, but there's mechanics that make up this successful experience that you should be an expert in. And Steve Jobs was famously he loved copying, stealing. He said, you know, he said, 'Great artists copy and the masters steal,'

and you look at Zuckerberg is coming out with his own version of Kelshi you know in betting markets now and has done this you know his threads product was a perfect proven better new on Twitter and where I say it's dangerously powerful is when you get so good at this proven and better new. You can make a product that is 80% proven and better and you could get a false positive signal back on that even though your new isn't good. And so you can get a false signal because you don't do proven better new. I mean a false negative signal because you're failing for the wrong reason. You can get a false positive signal because you're succeeding for the wrong reason. meaning you've got a B+ and you're getting enough signal back because you did such a good job on the proven, but you didn't do enough [snorts] innovation to win. There probably is a science at some point to the ratio of the familiar to the new. There's a wonderful book called um I think it's called Hitmakers, the science of perfection by Derek Thompson in which he talks about like how common it is that people like art that looks familiar that if you show art students the same set of paintings over and over again, the ones that they've seen most frequently, they will say that they like the best. There's all just all this evidence of familiarity being attractive to people, but we like a little bit of novelty. We want to feel at home. We and then we like a little bit of a novel twist. I mean, as you say, there's also this variable of like when you have new ways of technology, there's newness built in. So, you have to be careful, right? Like people there's a limit to how much newness like homo sapiens can handle without feeling nauseous on some level, right? Part of it is because our brains work on pattern recognition and that's how we move quickly through this world. And if the cereal box is always on this shelf in the grocery store and they move it somewhere, you're pissed off. You're just annoyed cuz now you have to like give it more thought and consciousness than you want to. I made up most of our best performing ad links. And I had a lot of fun with the psychology and I do things they're kind of cheesy. I'd put misspellings in it or I really like billboards that don't make any sense because

I don't understand, but this is going very well

I used to at Zingga try to find third graders to test our games because I said if a third grader understands it like makes it through the first time user experience an adult might. But if a third grader can't understand it, an adult won't because third graders are just learning to read. They have a very limited attention span for text. If it doesn't make sense to them right away, in three clicks, they're gone. An adult is giving you so little attention that it is equivalent to a third grader giving full attention.

And I go to Japan and I'm in I'm so inspired by this idea that they're doing quality just for the sake of quality. And I was at this store called Capital and they had these amazing suits and I tried one on. I was like, 'This is amazing. Can I buy it?' And they said, 'No, no, no, no. That's not available till next season.' And I said, 'Well, is it a sample sale?' And they said, 'No, it's just showing what we're going to sell next season.' And I said, 'Well, can I pre-order it?' 'No.' 'Okay, [laughter] might I be able to order it online?' 'No, you'll have to come to this one capital store'

I was like, 'That's really not commercial. I'm not coming back here to buy this suit.' And I had this respect for it, and I was like, 'Wow, they're so committed to this. There's some lessons in that.' But my PM brain wants to take that and now make that into something, you know, commercial.

Yes. I mean, more so now even than when I was writing this book. And I'm so happy that I won the argument in the end with my publisher and editor and agent to name the book Life at the Speed of Play because I really feel we this vibe, this vision of product making that is moving at the speed of play. I feel like we're on the brink of it if not there. You know, people talk about AGI and I think we passed it now. They didn't even talk about AGI. I think we're approaching the singularity for product making where you will be able to prompt and ideate something into existence in some form. And it's great that parts that are still like feet in the mud and annoying are the legal and the business of money raising and stuff. But the amount of money you need now to bring something to reality is so much less. I think everyone has ideas. You know, very few people pursue them and the ones who pursue them have to raise money or quit their job or, you know, historically there was so much friction. I do believe that now we're going to enter this renaissance, this era where it'll just be normal. Everyone around us will be bringing their ideas to life in some way. And I think we're going to move as a culture from being consumptive to generative. I want that. But I also think that that's going to be what the AI era does for us is it's just going to normalize building things and being because it'll be so much more accessible. It'll just be anyone with an idea will have it'll be like a side hustle or gig economy. And I just think that the economic growth we're going to get from all of these ideas coming to the surface so quickly is kind of unimaginable for most people today. And so that's what makes me such an AI optimist.

I encourage people whatever your way of doing this is but I encourage people to just try to mash up your passions like write on one whiteboard or piece of paper all the things that you are most passionate about, most curious about and they don't have to have any business purpose at all. And then write on another piece of paper all the businesses and revenues sources and things that you admire most that are like really existing big bodies of water, big business opportunities. And then on the third one, just let yourself Frankenstein them. Like just keep connecting weird dots between one and the other and see if any weirdness kind of floats up to the surface. And then take that and try to test it like put in a one-liner test it on your friends and go in the world and just like a standup comic testing their material and then try to test things that get heat or emotion. You know, you can test with ad links. There's so many really simple ways that you can try to find signal and heat around whatever it is. That step of testing to confirm appetite is probably the step that you would say that most people don't adequately emphasize, right? Like people tend to just dive headlong into their passions without doing and as you said earlier in our conversation like this is something that with AI should be able to help us do right while we're sleeping go and run surveys do focus groups you know put up buy ad links and here's a couple hundred bucks test my idea before I spend three years of my life pursuing it. Yeah. and you know in trying to I call it crawl across broken glass in trying to be native to this new planet the process of doing that is so valuable. Look at Toby who created Shopify that came out of him trying to create a website I think to sell surfing stuff or something and he's just like wow this is so bad I can't believe it's this hard and bad and then he built Shopify. There's always that kind of easy opportunity where you've connected the dots because you cared enough or you're passionate enough and you either see where it's broken or you now are the expert and yeah and just like have fun with it. We're at a time that you don't have to quit your job. You really can go and build.

and the next big idea is a small business.

Yeah, funny. You know, first of all, let's look at the statistics. You probably heard that nine out of 10 new businesses fail. I have heard that. Yeah. Turns out that's a myth. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, five years in, half of all new businesses are still chugging. Okay, so those are better odds, but I mean still success is not guaranteed. It depends how you define success. I've started four companies and some were more lucrative than others, but I don't count any as failures because I've learned something every time. I've met amazing people, made new friends, and had a blast, honestly. And something we've learned on this show is that even though it may look bleak out there, AI is actually making it possible to take your business idea from cocktail napkin to first sale in record time. I mean, I think of what Peter demand told us the other week.

For sure. And it was a whole debate with our whole book team around the title and why not products at the speed of play or why not just call it speed of play and it was so important to me that it is life at the speed of play because I do think it's a whole approach to life that I do think that we can take a more playful approach and that life like everything we go through can be fun or not fun and we make it fun and especially work, you know, and I would say to these new employees when they came to Zinga, you're making this deep sacrifice taking this job. If you had all the money you wanted, you probably wouldn't be showing up here on Monday. You'd be doing something else. You'd be with your family. You'd be surfing. So, you are making a sacrifice. You might as well do two things. You might as well have fun if you can make it fun. and you might as well make this count and make this a seminal experience in your life. Like you might as well, you're here anyway.

and they miss it because I tried to give people so much responsibility that it scared them and I think that gives us adrenaline and I come back to this adrenaline point. If you're feeling adrenaline in your job, doesn't matter what your job is, that's a good job. Like that's right. You are. Yeah. So I could talk for a long time about that, but that is life at the speed of play. You know, I think Elon's having a lot more fun than the rest of us. Not because he's made so much money or worth so much. I don't think he actually does a whole lot with for personal benefit with the money he's made. He just goes out and manifests more cool [__] in the world and he's having a lot of fun. I think he laughs a lot. [laughter] Yeah, exactly. Fart noises and hey, let's start a boring company. I'm sick of this traffic. Let's create a tunnel company. Why not? And I think he created like a fart perfume and a flamethrower. That is Life at the Speed of Play. And there's an odd way it loops back on itself that those things kind of break through the consciousness and work because they're so silly and non-corporate that they get through to us.

I'll say this, Rufus. I think that Elon has raised the bar on all founders, no matter how successful around the world. And I think by showing everyone what is theoretically possible, I think he single-handedly has made Jeff Bezos go back to work. I think [laughter] don't think Jeff Bezos would admit it to us if we got him on here, but somewhere in his consciousness, I'll bet that he knows that he could have been happy going on his yacht and his whole new life in Miami except for Elon. and that Elon is showing him how much more he could do and he can't ignore it. So, he's back at it, not just with Blue Origin, but his own LLM company. I mean, so I love that. I mean, Elon has had a knock-on effect to make the rest of us kind of strive, you know, much higher, even Jeff Bezos.

Yeah. And the sacrifice. I mean, yeah. It's there's a beauty in the sacrifice because just like it is aligning with your goals. Even if you don't hit them, you know that you gave all you had and that you made this sacrifice. And my point on, you know, asking people how ambitious are you is everyone will say an 11 out of 10, but not if it means enormous sacrifice without a shorty of winning. So, it's like, would you take I call it the steak dinner in the matrix, which is if you could have an 80% chance of a first base hit in a year or two and everyone respects what you did or a 50% chance of the greatest home run of your life beyond your imagination in 10 years after toiling in obscurity. You know, almost no one's going to take the ladder.

Money is such a weird thing. It's not the goal or the objective. And if it is, when you get there, you know, it'll be hollow. It's also not something to completely ignore. I think of money as capital that enables greater degrees of freedom. And yeah, there's freedom in your own personal life. if you don't have to work for someone. But that goes away quickly. That for me when I was 28 and my company got bought, I had that freedom. Um, and that's a huge huge freedom. I don't mean to understate the freedom to not have to work for other people and to be able to entrepreneur for the rest of your life or whatever, but the bigger freedom comes with more capital either that you've accumulated that's captive to you or capital that's willing to follow you. And if you think of Elon, sure, he's now the richest man in the world, but the real story of Elon is his ability to raise outside capital. And he used every dollar he had when he didn't have huge amounts to the point of bankruptcy almost. But when that was successful with Tesla and then SpaceX, he has access to the capital markets like we just saw with the SpaceX IPO. There's a level of faith in him almost at a religious level that means his degrees of freedom. The amount he can dream and build and manifest is on a level we've never seen in humankind. And luckily, he's using it for things that he thinks advances civilization. And he's not retiring. And he's not a Bond villain building an island with a lair, you know, he's [laughter] I think he now owns one house or something, you know, he's putting it all back on the table to go even bigger for humanity. And so anyway, so we all can live like Elon on our own level, which is if you can have financial success, you now have more capital both that you've earned or is captive and you now have reason for more people to give you capital to dream bigger and that's pretty awesome.

the idea of this is that I've been doing since 1994 is that you pick some period of the year and for me it's the Jewish New Year's it's 10 days but it could be you know the first week of January or last week of December, whatever. You write in this book, the same book every year. And it's like a board meeting with yourself. And it's an accounting for not like in a lot of the religious traditions, it's been like atoning for your sins and fire and brimstone. I'm not into that stuff. Maybe I should be, but this is about your hopes and dreams. This is about what have you wanted to achieve in this life and how are you doing against it. It's taking stock. It's kind of your spiritual balance sheet and income statement for this past year and a forward projection of what you hope to do next year. And it's checking in on okay last year I signed up for these things. How did I do? And what you see over time is it tells you a story that you can't ignore. There's things that come out. There's patterns. Like I found every year I try to pick one thing that's 100% in my control. It's like elective surgery. It's something that maybe I wouldn't do this year if I didn't sign up for it. Originally was quitting smoking. And then I picked something that is not completely in my control. So like quitting jobs and things is in your control. achieving things is not in your control. You can have it as a goal, but you're often disappointed with that because you can work against it, but it's not in your control whether it happens. So, picking something that you can do every day or not do like quitting smoking was a daily conscious decision, you know, until it wasn't. But picking something that you're consciously doing or not doing every day reminds you of this bigger commitment that you've made. And then looking for things that you can do every week that operationalize, you know, what was in your book of life gives you a better shot at having a good year. And I like to say, what's one thing you could do that would make this a seminal year in your life? Having a child, you're done. getting your wisdom teeth out. You're done. Yeah. You know. And I like to go back and just from top of mind write every year of my life and what's the one thing I remember? And I had a picture of that in my book. And there's some years I just have nothing. And that's kind of sad, but I'm not going to make something up either. I'm like, sorry. You know, that also tells a story. You know, do I want this year to be one of those forgotten years? And it's something I love is you describe writing in the margins of your book of life notes to your former self which could be like thank you for you know for resolving you you did this you executed on this you know well done gosh we've never executed on this other thing that we said we were going to do here's what I've learned from this maybe this was the right and then also conversations with your future self right is it's I think that exercise is kind of fascinating and I mean it forces accountability to some degree, right?

And I like to go back and just from top of mind write every year of my life and what's the one thing I remember? And I had a picture of that in my book. And there's some years I just have nothing. And that's kind of sad, but I'm not going to make something up either. I'm like, sorry. You know, that also tells a story. You know, do I want this year to be one of those forgotten years? And it's something I love is you describe writing in the margins of your book of life notes to your former self which could be like thank you for you know for resolving you you did this you executed on this you know well done gosh we've never executed on this other thing that we said we were going to do here's what I've learned from this maybe this was the right and then also conversations with your future self right is it's I think that exercise is kind of fascinating and I mean it forces accountability to some degree, right?

Three boys is a lot.

Yes. And I'll give you one cynical one that I think I forgot to put in the book. Um, maybe for good reason because I'm not sure this is a truth, but not all truths are worth sharing or come off well. But one that I've always said is you give them a job or they're going to give you a job. And that's I found completely true with my kids like I can give them a job and they feel my four-year-old I'll say, 'Enzo, I've got a mission for you.' And he feels so important to go on this mission. But if I don't give him something to do, he's like, 'Daddy, entertain me. daddy, you know, right? So, I found similarly with my employees and people I managed. If I gave them a big hill to take, they were off to the races. They didn't need me. If I didn't give them a clear enough big thing, they're coming back like needing direction, needing you having a lot of needs. And I'm like, I can't. And the first time this came up for me and became a management principle was the very beginning of Zinga, I was so overwhelmed. Everything was exploding, mostly in a good way. And I got in this practice on Mondays of just writing on my whiteboard all of the impossible number of things that I was carrying and had to do. And I just brought everyone in my office and I said, 'Okay, I'm going to put someone's name against each of these. I don't care what you do, what your job is. I don't care if you have background in law. I'm going to give you, hey, EA wants to sue us because we're copying Hasbro games. You engineer, that's yours. Figure it out. I'm like, it's better than me spending, you know, 2% of my brain power this week on it. And it gave me real leverage and it reduced my anxiety. Like, okay, there's someone thinking about this more than me. So that kind of became a management principle. I do find like with my older girls who are 15 almost 16 almost 40 right once we were at five I started like oh my god there's not enough time between like 5:00 and 10:00 to connect with all my kids show them all attention do bedtime help with homework. I was like it's not possible. I'm being pulled apart and I'm stressed and I saw my aura ring was showing very little stress during the day and then like 3 hours of stress once I was with my family, right? And I finally got to change this. So I said to my older girls, okay, I need I'm going to integrate. That became our word. I need you to take on jobs with the littles. You know, we call them the littles. and I need you to including Wyatt who's 11 and special needs is a lot like the littles in ways and needs someone to give them attention. So I recruited them to join me and now I was get they were getting attention time while they were doing jobs. So that was a little principle a little hack that helped. But in terms of overall like raising these kids in the middle of this whole world, I've found a few of my hacks are like one actually when they were little is I gave them a job wheel. I gamified it. So nice. Yeah. I would have them spin this wheel and they would land on something and they'd be excited about, you know, go do the dishes or go kiss your mom or [laughter] gamifying it really worked to a fault. So I took my game mechanics home.

Yes. Yes. Your kids really like gambling. Variable rewards. Luck. And I like to say that the rewards should be like the Mormon church. Like, you know, it's good, better, and best. There's no, you know, bad, right? Brilliant marketing. Another hack for me has been really limiting screen time. I found the more screen time any of my kids had, the more isolated and depressed they got. And even though they would fight like hell and make my life miserable when I took away screen time, they it got them out, you know, and then also giving them unstructured time to be bored and we feel this need as parent to like entertain them or give them, oh my god, they have nothing to do and just saying, go outside. I don't have time for you. I know I have a little parent guilt, but I don't have time. and you need to just go outside. You can't come back in. Right. Right.

I mean here's where it's not ironic and this is kind of an Easter egg in the end of this if anyone's listening this far in to part five of our gigantic multi-chapter discussion the Easter egg and irony is that not all engagement is the same on this device. The metrics look the same, but the outcome, the feeling we have and we're left with is different. You feel better about your time on Duolingo than just endless scrolling of TikTok or Instagram. I was like, okay, can we give you more for your time than just entertainment? And that's why we started limiting in our games the amount of session time you could be in the game. We kicked you out and then we saw people the retention went up not down. Revenues went up not down. And so I think that the lesson that's an Easter egg is that I think if someone can crack the code on games and these apps feeling like a good use of your time, I think that they are going to crush it. And that's why Pokémon Go did so well. And I do believe that that is out there for any of us to deliver on. It's being generative, not consumptive. And learning, not just turning your brain off. And so, you know, I think that's out there for all of us. And that's something to aspire to do is to help people feel creative, help people feel useful.

and connected which I think for Zinga like marriages was one of an important KPI. It was we said we wanted to measure our success in hugs and marriages, you know, not clicks and dollars. And yeah, and the beauty is that they went together so well. I mean, the more we helped you in your own socializing, the more there's a positive relationship with engagement, with retention, with revenues. And even when we did social virtual goods, when we launched with zinga.org, this concept of social virtual goods that you could buy sweet seeds for Haiti, all of the money that you spent went to disaster relief in Haiti and Japan. Not only did we raise a huge amount of money, but we converted a lot of people to being buyers in our games who weren't previously. And so there was this virtuous cycle, you know, that played out. And so I don't, you know, I believe that you can do highly capitalist things that are generative for people and are even more successful as a result. You know, that's not extractive.

and have nothing to show for it, right? I mean, it's sad like watching TV is fun, but you have nothing to show for that. And I just think people are happier when they are generative. And I tell parents, hey, you're not going to be able to stop your kids from playing video games. Try to steer them towards Minecraft. Steer them towards a game where you need to be building and generating in the game. And if you really want to get to be a power user, you're a modder. You're hosting servers, you know. But by the way, Hillary, my partner, has forced our family to sit at home and paint. Like, we have a tradition every year. Amazing. Every Thanksgiving, we paint self-portraits. And it is twisting arms and pulling teeth to get everyone to do it. And then we can't get anyone to stop. Once they're into their pictures and their me too, they get so into it and they're so excited about it that they can't stop. And so there's something in that. And I just heard this amazing talk where this guy who's a self-trained artist said, 'You don't need any technique to draw or be an artist. In fact, your imperfection is your style.' And so, yeah, I love that. Whether you want to do music, I've been trying to learn guitar for 25 years. And the lesson for me is I need to just go out and play for people and not be so self-conscious. Beginner's mind. Yeah.

Thank you all this time.