Why the best PMs trust their instincts | Mark Pincus (Farmville, Words with Friends, and more)

If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.

Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea.

If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works.

It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for Farmville. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer.

We have beyond a latent demand for social. It's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel you're like, 'Oh, I'm so glad I'm here.' Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy.

I've been a big listener.

And I'm excited to finally be on.

Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion. The fundamental core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book we called it Proven Better New, but then I was like, 'Oh, that's too dry a name.' And I love this concept of Life at the Speed of Play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt to the book. So Proven Better New is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts in our gut, these human-level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of Proven Better New takes that philosophy and says, 'Okay, what do we do with that? Let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut and let's just test many, many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason.' At Zynga, we'd see new game launches. Sid Meier, the godfather of game design who's the most revered game designer, he came out with a social Civilization on Facebook and we thought, 'Oh god, here comes the ultimate game designer.' And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said, 'It's dead on arrival because his first-time user experience was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design.' Even Sid Meier tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga as the best-of-breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first-time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody.

And so the point of Proven Better New is to say, let's take all the proven off the table. If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. The icon, maybe just the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best-of-breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally and with hopefully some taste. We can get into great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing users of that product would say, 'F yeah.' 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new, right? What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new. Better could be it's now free, there's no download, something that you can both statistically show works and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polish and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. In our game, Words with Friends, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't? There must have been something better and novel about it. But it had such a polish for mobile was the better and the new. What's the novel new idea, the back-of-the-box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? In the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that, which you'd think of course I want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes. And we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do Proven Better New right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. I like to think if you do Proven Better New right, it's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark, you know, 2003 and 2004 and say, 'Dude, you don't even realize how right you are. One of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them. You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company.' That's, you know, I'm not going to tell you which. I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's another answer in this that you could pursue that would be worth $1.6 trillion. Oh, by the way, your Tribes idea that's Reddit that becomes a whole company industry, listings. So there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were a sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. If you're doing Proven Better New, you're also looking around you for what's proven in the market that you can also go test, and I would have massively changed my odds of success.

Yeah, in the world. I was there at the TED conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen and they did it on a gigantic whiteboard and Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it and I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their touch. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it. Like, okay, there's his new idea is a touch screen. It's the only new idea. And I want to say proven gets so misused. What I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use Proven Better New to justify a wrong idea and they're like, 'Look, Mark, I'm doing proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the 90s.' And they pick something that is to their own detriment. They're not using proven. We have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience. Proven is on this platform for this audience for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas, but if it's not on this platform, it doesn't count as proven. And yet the masters at this product craft do Proven Better New whether they call it that or not, and they do it at such a beautiful level that nobody even realizes what it's derivative of. Slack was a great example because I think Slack might have just been proven and better and no new, and that's even better if you can have a successful product. I don't want to sound anti-innovation, but people don't like change. So if you take a behavior they like but you make it much more accessible or much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack, people love that even more.

In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product person. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. We were taught in school copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. You're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana like for Farmville. You're going to define innovation differently and you're not going to worry about whether you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. If all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. The art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it because consumer taste also resists just a copy. If movies, TV shows, books feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark on Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. He lived in my neighborhood, and he was friends with my dog, Zynga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially, and he connected more with the dog. I tried to be friends with him through the dog. He would sit and talk to me and I was like, 'What are you working on?' And he said, 'I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings.' I'm like, 'What do you mean two years?' He's like, 'Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways.' I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years, but if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why wouldn't you want that? Why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new. And I'm like, that's a world-class product maker because he gets that we feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day. And we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition. And we don't want to think about these things. What if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was? And what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold? A junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew.

It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, 'Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature.' Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic-only version of his product and he said, 'Oh my god, they nailed it.' So I think when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold. And then to your question of is every product derivative, is every product from Proven Better New, my answer is no. I talked about this a little bit in the book and in my course. But the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard, don't look at any other products, that is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different, not learning from the previous failures or the market, and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds and it was a hit and it was innovative. But the odds, that's wildcat drilling. Do you want to have those odds or do you want to do what OMG Pop did, which is a very similar story but opposite path? OMG Pop created the hit game Draw Something and Zynga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the app store for 60 days in 2012. But OMG Pop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative, no one had ever seen or tried it before, it failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. And now they did Proven Better New. They said, 'We're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that is as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile.' And they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends and they made a massive hit.

Peter Thiel, you know. Very. Yeah.

I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. There are so many paradoxes in this. One that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious and visionary at the outset about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product-market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place. Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. The irony for me is that my career has gone in these waves. Maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too. I started in a very humble place of just wanting to get to any product-market fit. Had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premises. Afterwards, I felt like now I can do anything. Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, and he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, after success, we tend to feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct. We want to be more ambitious. When I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. There were multiple inside Tribe that worked. The idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it. But I was too ambitious and so we failed. I was so humbled and in this abyss we can talk about for so long. I was so desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. To be a 41-year-old multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world, what did I do? I made a Facebook app, a poker game. Not even a Facebook app, a poker game. People thought I had no dignity. People were like, 'Mark, there's so much you could do in the world.' But my ambition came down to a thousand-foot altitude, not 100,000-foot. That was the key to that being successful. I see this with so many product founders. It almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product-market fit. But the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. Everyone has the same chance. In a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. The paradox is the more ambitious you are, the more humble you should be and the smaller place you should be willing to start.

Yeah. Being willing to pursue these little threads when they're flaky, when they're not a business, when they're so much earlier. So many of the successful companies today started there.

I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much I cold-emailed the founder because I was just so impressed with it. They toiled in obscurity on something that they were into and then they open-sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. Then they had this realization one day: 'Wait a second, if we take this web stack, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding copilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has.' I think that was just a great story. They were passionate about one thing and they stuck with it.

Oh, he was so impressive. In a lot of ways, Slack also was humbled. Stewart keeps trying to start game companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does next. Now he has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time.

Yeah. Each time, right? He started a big idea for a mass-market MMO, which I've also loved but really difficult. They were humbled enough to say, 'Okay, wait. There's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that.' It really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. I can't imagine how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction and you have to express confidence as founders whether or not you have actual confidence inside. That's part of the dissonance of this. How do you express confidence? How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team? I'm still learning. I had people who err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault, and I burn out people in that process. I did at Zynga and I have since. People will say the negative critique of working with me is, 'Oh, working for Mark is like third-grade soccer. Every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea.' They're not wrong. But where I can get better at this maybe is if we can build a culture with our team that says, 'Okay, we are ambitious. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold on to a B+. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a north star that we are not going to stop until we find product-market fit against our north star. And this isn't it. It's going to take courage on our part. Hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship?' That's a fair career choice for you to make. But I think that to me the real founder mode is can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?

I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience, your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. The best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings, not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. If we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP. 'Viable' is the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from. If it's viable, it might make it. There's a difference between getting in the market early to learn and putting a product out that you're going to launch, that you think, you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. It's really important to be crisp and make that distinction. AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took, maybe 3 months instead of 3 years. That's a dangerous drug because what I thought would happen is that people would be using AI to build incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas in a day. What would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. Build it wrong before you know it's right. If you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that. If we start off saying, 'Okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product.' What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. The point of what I'm building is to learn. Is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? We can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. It could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put it in the market. It's an afterthought. At Zynga, it blew my mind. Give one story from Zynga when we were launching our first expansion pack for Farmville, which became massive business drivers for us. It was Farmville English countryside or something. The team came to me and said, 'Okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch.' I'm like, 'Wait, you have 25-30 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads somewhere else for coming soon? You have these people engaged. What if you just put something on the game board? What if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat? What if you start putting different art forms of your English countryside locked on the game board and you just see how many clicks you get? You just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. At the same time, when people click on it, it says coming soon. Click here to be a pre-user, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else.' It turned out everybody clicked on it because it's a change on your game board. It both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product. But the unintended consequence was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend, and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to the new expansion pack. We took something that was going to be afterthought advertising to drum up interest in this product and turned it into something that gave us signal and direction on the product and revenues. So often, you can turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat-driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. The way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, cloud code, but build the lowest possible cycle version of your product that you can get signal back on.

Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that the products turn people off, it's funny you say that because Farmville and Cityville were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. That's a whole other story. But I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success. Our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. That's fair. But what I would say, what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 large game launches, we had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. We had lots of competitors copying us and we still managed to keep winning. So it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games. Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more dimensionality? I love this idea of what I call a bold beat. How do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and rote, poker or whatever, and add a whole new dimension to it? By adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. The reason why so many, especially middle-aged women, loved Farmville and these games was because they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. They were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. In the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of value to your friends. We called the games invest, express, and connect. You could do something that made you seen as creative. I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Midjourney does for me today. You were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. That was the first thing. Then at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew. We outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about it in the book. I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, statistically this is true, have the highest day 365 retention. Can you build against day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high day 365. Those are correlated. But you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and zero day 365, which is most products. If you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, is this worth investing in? Whether it's a game or a camera, am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this? Should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me? I think there's a mentality to that. I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, BeReal, right? We've seen these. They're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking. They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, which is try to get people back, or plug the hole in the boat, or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. We were tracking both in our games and our network what the retention was and we were constantly thinking about that. The two things to take away from Zynga's success in my opinion is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. We even built a metric that's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. We built a metric called ASN, and it stood for what we measured as your active social network. We looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player. Meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gifted you back. We found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. If we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. We could actually build and innovate against that metric. It made sense because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments. That's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.

It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in terms of new consumer social apps that work. The bar is high. People have a lot of options. The key is to find a deep, unmet need and build something that people genuinely love and use daily. AI can help personalize and enhance the experience, but the core has to be a product that people want to come back to. It's about creating a habit and a community. The most successful social apps are those that make people feel connected and give them a sense of belonging. That's the cocktail party we talked about. If you can create that feeling, you have a chance.

And consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often, and they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there latent demand? Just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. In 2007 when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business. But I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me. And it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. Literally, I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me and we set up two machines for them and two for me and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server and we did that one time and I was like that is a lot of effort and it was fun but we did it once and I said my premise was okay.

I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them. Free. Not just free even, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So I made it free and I said, I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you to do this and you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like I say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them. So I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand again. I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be, it's very big but none I know.

So social and consumer. I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social. We are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok, but I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Are you excited to go get on Instagram or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram, right? They're not missing the party. They're like, whoa, I got off that. So I think all that to say I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age. But how are they going to do it? I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again. Part of what we got, people forget Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or a thousand friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity. They still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely, Instagram had TikTok envy. So they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about but not wasting our time as much.

And I'll also say this, there's a side of this I call this social thing the cocktail party. That's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how do we add things to it? We'd love to host the cocktail party and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You know it. You feel it. You're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. And it moves from obligatory, I'm at this party, it's the birthday party, to almost greed, like I love this party, I love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at a great cocktail party? You often get great leads. And that cocktail party for me started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. But then Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist. And it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, oh my god, I could get on Facebook and find a date. And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Facebook. So what I would say to people is look, if you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is or you could host and then think about how is lead generation happening. It might sound weird when I say lead gen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn started with lead gen. All the productivity, the value started in the utility of being in this cocktail party today. And by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do. Today, we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So my Easter egg to people is it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive and you will probably find gold there.

Yeah.

Let's start with talking about consumer distribution which I understand better.

There's a one question we got to back up and really explore which is, is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use AI chat. But it's not in my mind a platform. A platform in the traditional sense was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least an interface platform whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how. I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And we're kind of like halfway to a platform. We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. The average app installs per user per month is zero. So it's really important to think about that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. There were something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So your odds are bad. So it's not an ideal moment to be, you can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. And it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. It's much easier to be prosumer or enterprise now. But for good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly.

So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas and you asked about distribution. Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer any business idea, but any consumer idea. And it can't be an afterthought. It's not I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come. Distribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, that's hope strategy, not a belief strategy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting. And now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because there'll be 100 times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. And I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach, that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business long before we can get out to consumer.

And there is a great idea that I got to that Gary Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week. If we get in the mindset of basically intelligence on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today will basically be free in a year or two, that the token supply is going to go up so much. Our demand will too, but if today we start building re-imagining consumer services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone and it could sound like a dot-com business plan. And I remember ordering pig ears for my dog Zynga and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco, right? That's not a good business plan. So giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be in a phenomenal business because what the dot-com thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't going to come down or delivery wasn't going to come down, but the price of tokens will. And so I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight that I'm intrigued by and I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it because games don't work premium games and premium apps that have to go and hit the AI that even if you wanted to spend on it you're hitting token limits right so getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation.

And I also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle and brokering our social relationships. And getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, general listings, but I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context. And we have this membrane. I call it the social membrane. This intelligent membrane of trust. And it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us like a great chief of staff. And it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, Lenny, let's hang out. You're like, Mark, I'd love that. So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend and hanging out. And how do we broker that without hurting one of our feelings? There's some really interesting spaces that the AI and the agent can broker between us in ways that start to give us both productivity. They find ways for us to get together without getting in a bad place of, you know, you see me on your calendar for Saturday and you want to be with your kids.

It's totally open available to you.

And even worse, you don't want it to schedule you for a meeting that was not.

I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it and it's a little more likely to me than just hope. I think right now there's a obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. I think they're going to get back to consumer and prosumer and developers hearts and minds. And I think they are interested in developers hopes and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. But I think where we will get to in one way or another is that there will be some kind of consumer-facing platform for AI apps and agents. I can see so many consumer-facing agentic services that make so much sense to me that I think consumers will want but they're not going to get it because if it's just buried in I doubt they're going to get it buried in the mobile app store and I think it's going to be in OpenAI's interest, Claude, Grok, to see these apps, consumer-facing agentic service apps happen and see them be successful with their LLM baked in. And the more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition. One example that is my number one is my Easter egg on this is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. Perfect example to me of a place where I think there is latent demand and the only reason we don't have it is because it doesn't make economic sense to offer it to us because we won't pay enough for it is a travel agent. I believe if I offered you a free 24/7 travel agent that was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you, and will actually book, not just book travel, but I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a trip, be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of your travel logistics as they're happening and often failing. And I think that's valuable to all of us, but not available to all of us because travel agents couldn't make a living. They weren't getting enough commissions and we weren't ready to pay enough. So the internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think the next area of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services and that's my prime example. But if someone built the best travel agent today, maybe we'd find out about it, but it's a tough road. But if it was specifically baked into OpenAI or Claude and gave me a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond, there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating and I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT and so they at some point and that's why they're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and that's an amazing business but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.

Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. They ate everything around them. And then with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music because it was really painful with IP rights and games because they didn't want to hire artists. But everything else they did absorb.

All my management principles I got to through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. And it's a necessary evil for us as product makers because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO because all a sudden the priorities get messed up and teams don't have to listen to us and we're now feedback not direction. So that's a failing path. So we have to be a CEO. But then the question is how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love and the least time doing what we don't? The bigger principle to me that I started to get to was that oh, all of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. So I was like, okay, if I give them a hill to take, and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO. I mean, they have operating control, degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want, and they can give me a plan, a budget, and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. So they're not coming back to me with questions. And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. I always say, I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. So can I hire other people like that? And I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. And those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're kind of a little bit of a know-it-all. They think they have the right answers and we're gonna find out if they do and so we let them actually be a CEO and they have all this pent up demand to actually go and prove that they were right and that's a beautiful thing. So, yeah, I love this principle of make everyone a CEO and we're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. That's really kind of to me the best CEO is like the best player at the position and is doing the thing they're great at and they're not wasting their time on management.

They go together. We start our careers in our 20s very close to the metal, meaning we are individual contributors and we are working on getting the primary data and building the actual product. Usually we're in the trenches and the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. And that's what I call the expert witness syndrome because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer and then you're excused and then they make a decision and then you have to deal with the consequences and you know disagree and commit. What if I'm disagreeing because I'm right and now I'm committing to clean up your mess because you're wrong. And that's why many of us become founders because we just are sick of being in that position. You're also closer to the metal. And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the paradox of it that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutia of the details. All the stories about Steve Jobs. I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms. And I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord and they came to this conclusion too that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, we realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX to our least experienced people, and they're doing this every day. And we decided to turn that upside down and say, we as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product. And we have to be the ones who bless our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience. And so to me that's being close to the metal. Brian Chesky believes in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. There's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing that mattered most. They would go and work two days a week deeply with the team on it. And it makes sense. If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. We want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.

But my point about management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. The first principle is be in the room if you can be as much as you can be and then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. And then all these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. And I love these non-scalable ideas that actually scale what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistance and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? Like you have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. So the idea of this teaching hospital was okay I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings and have my passion and ideas and approach spread to all of them too and that worked. And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant. Have them just follow you around for six months or 12 months and make it the mini me, the person who is you in your 20s who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know-it-all. And start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, absorb everything you do and give them projects to test them and then hopefully you've created a mini me that you can now put in a much bigger role somewhere else. And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the CEO staff used to be someone who had been the tech assistant to Bezos. So that idea actually scales and you kind of get it for free.

Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I got to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. And so I look for that in people like are they right? That's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something and I look for that in the team and it's less do I like your style or approach or personality fit. I'm like I'll take misfits who are right. I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest and the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net.

Thank you for asking about this. I think my greatest role and job and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. So I really put a lot into it and take it seriously and I get so much out of it. I like to say I'm growing my best friends. And so far it's true. So there's a couple principles that have come in philosophies that have been important to me as a parent that I've just seen. I do them naturally and I see that they work over time. The first one for me is I have five kids. Every one of them is just such a different version of a human. And I have a special needs son who's fairly extreme special needs. Our new one-year-old baby has a gene mutation and she actually may also end up being very neurodivergent. So you have this wide range and my 15-year-old girls are twins and they're completely divergent from each other. This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are. And with kids, we can kind of talk down to them. We could talk to them as kids or we can kind of treat them like adults and neither of those are right. It's like we got to engage with them at the altitude that they're at but as human to human and find the way to do that. And then once we do that and meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that may be way beyond where they're supposed to be in that moment. Like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught daddy math because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So I taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain. I didn't know where they were supposed to be. They were in fifth grade, but I just started for them and their friends just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. And then I found out we found out later I taught them all the way through eighth grade math. And I didn't know it and they didn't know it and that was cool.

And I'd say in the how does this apply in the age of AI and where we are, I feel like we're at the end of this hundred-year cycle of mass produced education which was get the most knowledge in, get everyone's averages up to the best place we can educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number, but it was factory produced and it was for a certain kind of work first factories then knowledge workers. Knowledge working is going away. It's changing, but we're still teaching knowledge education. And I feel badly about it with my kids. And what I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than and I say, I don't care if you go to college, which is a little hard for them because they're kind of achievers and like I don't care if you go to college. What I care about is that you develop critical thinking and you find a way to be useful to people in the world. And my one daughter Carmen, she's also neurodivergent. She has ADHD and dyslexia and she created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy. And she also has created a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called Neurosparkly. And it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit and it's making it a way that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. So I'm proud to see that.

I've also, the dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent is that my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over and I know so what do I want my kids doing? I try to teach them to look at the deeper meta of what's going on. When an adult is trying to convince you of something, when a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree with, try to understand why. What's their agenda? Where are they coming from? What's their lived experience? And how has that impacted it? So I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not know more answers. And I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, it's I try to promote how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive. So what can you do online or offline that is generative? That is actually putting something new out in the world because that's how you're going to get something back and not consuming, not being a passive consumer of content and experiences. And sometimes it works. I see them doing that and then sometimes it doesn't. But that's how I'm trying to navigate this.

I also tried to make it till they were 16 with no phones, no smartphones, and I got to 14. And I got them flip phones and they had internships at Niantic working on Pokemon Go. They built a first-time user experience. It's really good with that. They had to get smartphones for that and they still have them. So even I tried to make it and I didn't.

And I also I'll tell you one more thing. For my older girls, I keep a running Google doc of life philosophies and anything I say to them as like a quote I say over and over, I'm like, okay, I'm going to actually write that up with stories and I keep it in this document for them and who knows if they'll use it, but they do start to repeat some of them, so I know they read it. One is nothing's personal. Don't ever take anything personal. And if you assume nothing's personal, you're probably right 19 out of 20 times. And the 20th time, you probably handled it right because of that. So that's one. And don't be a victim. The world doesn't happen to you, it's happening around you. And we're defined how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us. So I'm trying to give them these and they're teenagers with the older two and I'm in it and learning and I've got two littles that, a one-year-old and a four-year-old who sleep with me every night.

Yeah. I wanted to write a book on parenting saying everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zynga because I had her before I had kids and she was like a person and I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between and she believed that she was a person.

The thing that I've gotten that's resonated most in writing in my book of life for the last 30 years, it took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zynga at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. And I think for all of us, it's so important to get there. And we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why. But I figured out that mine was I talk about in the book is I want to create an internet treasure. Like you know when people say Mark how do I know that you're going to work hard on this next thing or you're post economic or you're a board rich guy or whatever. I'm like well I haven't done my thing yet. I like to what does our soul need to do before we die or at least to be in integrity with it? What do I need to be working on and know that I gave everything I had against it? And it's to build an internet treasure which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend Bing Gordon says, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And I think he's right. And I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era is to build these digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. And so that's my ambition and why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and writing books.

It's right here.

Two copies somehow.

It is actually very easy to read. It's like very not that long and it's very bite-sized. So great job with that.

Thanks. This is fun. This is actually I've done some podcast about the book and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book on most of the podcasts and on this one I did and I'm trying to only go into places that I want to talk about, which I try to do in the book too.

Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product. My pleasure. Thanks, Mark. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.