Pod Insights a16z Podcast The Quest for True Signal: How Zynga Spotted Mobile About this episode You might recognize the name Mark Pincus but we almost guarantee you recognize the game Farmville.
Mark Pincus is the founder and longtime CEO of Zynga, known for its massive global franchise of games, including those household names like Farmville and Words with Friends. Zynga was also at the forefront of the transition to mobile and the use of large platforms like Facebook for distribution.
In this episode Mark joins Josh Lu from the a16z Games team for a fireside chat. They discuss navigating major tech waves and recognizing "true signal" opportunities, and explore a wide range of topics, from the strategic insights that propelled Zynga to success, the future of the Metaverse, and the philosophy behind minimum viable products.
This conversation offers invaluable insights for both gaming industry insiders and enthusiasts looking to understand the dynamics of tech innovation and entrepreneurship.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 I don't really even believe in minimum viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time, you do not have the time, to build your product and fail and do it again. I've always felt I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one way or another, every job I ever had, because I'm not a good employee. I was in DC. I had to hire these kids out of real estate brokerage firms and give them HTML textbooks. And I sat down next to them and we tried to learn HTML. We were clicking "View Source." We want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year.
0:44 Steph Smith? You might recognize the name Mark Pincus, but I can almost guarantee you recognize the game Farmville. Mark Pincus is, of course, the founder and longtime CEO of Zynga, known for its massive global franchise of games, including those household names like Farmville and Words With Friends. Zynga was also at the forefront of the transition to mobile and the use of large platforms like Facebook for distribution. And if you need any reminder of how big Zynga got, it was sold in 2022 to game publisher Take-Two for a whopping $12.7 billion. Mark, of course, has also founded several other companies, including Support.com and Tribe Networks. And today, he sits down with Josh Liu,
1:28 Steph Smith? partner on the A16Z Games team, who have previously worked at Zynga and Meta about how to prepare for major tech waves and specifically what "true signal" to pay attention to. Mark also candidly covers so many other topics, including how to give yourself permission to be too early, whether he thinks we're still getting the metaverse, broken resumes, and his take on a Silicon Valley standard: minimum viable products, or MVPs. This is a really fun conversation for people both inside and outside the games industry, and it comes directly from our A16Z Games accelerator, Speedrun, which is going through its second cohort right now. And we'll have more details about how you can potentially
2:11 Steph Smith? attend our Demo Day and March eTeek. All right, enjoy.
2:17 Steph Smith? Oh, and by the way, this was one of many more sessions recorded during our exclusive multi-week Games Fund Accelerator, which we call Speedrun. And the good news, in fact, the great news is that we just announced Speedrun 3.0, which is coming to Los Angeles. So if you're a founder, or have thought about founding a company, or quite frankly, just know someone that should found a company at the intersection of games and technology, make sure to tell them about Speedrun 3.0. You can learn more at a16z.com/speedrun3, or you can find the link in our show notes. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment
3:02 Steph Smith? or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
3:24 Speaker 02 You know, Zynga is best known for Facebook, and eventually mobile, but actually it started well before that. So maybe talk to us a little bit about that.
3:32 Speaker 00 Sure. I'm not well-known, probably for a good reason, for starting one of the first three social networks called Tribe.net, which failed, which is kind of an amazing feat to actually fail as one of the first social networks when everything worked. But that did ultimately lead to Zynga. And I'd say that where Zynga came from was after Tribe, in these times like right now, and this time when there was amazing growth around Web 2.0 and social networking, you start to feel this kind of weird FOMO because you're like, why haven't I figured it out? And so I went into what I call this abyss, where you're just kind of like...
4:17 Speaker 00 I know I want to do something and I want to be innovating on new consumer product ideas, but there's no obvious place. And I actually spent a long time trying to buy CNET because I thought if I own CNET, I have this captive audience. And I spent all this time with bankers and private equity people and it's, you're in a much better job. Their jobs are so boring. And so while that was happening, Facebook was opening their API. And I said, oh, that's free. I don't even have to buy. Anyway, they have this captive audience. They had 70 million DAUs. And I had this instinct from Tribe that what people really wanted to do at this social cocktail party was play games together.
5:01 Speaker 00 And I thought Games was this amazing business, which you may not even be aware of today. But in 2007, when I started, Games was a mature and even declining business. The whole game industry was $20 billion. It was mainly console gaming and there was maybe like a billion dollars of PC gaming and zero web. It wasn't even a top 10 activity, but it was big. So I thought it was kind of like Search before Google. That Search was a big but mature business and then Google reimagined it. And one thing you're probably all aware of so much today is that distribution is kind of the hardest part of the equation in gaming.
5:44 Speaker 00 And there was no distribution. There was no way to market games to a mass market audience. And so all games were made for a very hardcore audience. And then with Facebook, there was finally a distribution channel. So that's how I got to do it.
6:01 Speaker 02 So one of the really interesting things you said is suddenly this opportunity came along and it worked. So maybe a compound question is like, one, how do you as a founder prepare for these like big waves? And then second is, how do you sort of know when something's working?
6:18 Speaker 00 Well, I surf badly, but I surf for so long that it actually is a perfect analog. Because, I said this last year, but when you're surfing, all you can do is try to be where you think there'll be waves. Surfing is almost this chess game where you're trying to figure out the tides, the weather, the swell, what are other surfers thinking of it. It is this kind of interesting 3D chess game, and everyone's looking at Surfline, they have the same data you have, so you're trying to figure out, like, is this the day that I'm gonna go to Ocean Beach and it won't drown me and no other surfers will be there and I'll have this epic day?
6:59 Speaker 00 There's a lot of that around startups, and there's a lot of hurry up and wait, there's a lot of being too early and wrong, and then trying to decide, should I stay here and see if there's a wave or not? And one thing that my friend Reid Hoffman said to me a couple of months ago, and I think he's one of the smartest thinkers and earliest thinkers around AI, is he said, "You need to focus on the easiest unsolved problem that will have the biggest impact." Which is really hard, like, how do you come up with an easy problem that no one else has solved that has a big impact? And what I keep thinking is that what we're all trying to do is get to what I call true signal.
7:41 Speaker 00 So, not what's getting a lot of VC funding, or what everyone else is doing, or what's popular right now, but if it's a consumer-focused opportunity, you're like, how do I know that this is something that a lot of consumers and people would like if they just had it in front of them? And it's hard, because you've got to learn over time and to calibrate, like, which data should you listen to that has true signal in it, and which has false signal?
8:11 Speaker 00 Talk for a long, long time and I think it's probably a science to pursue by itself.
8:17 Speaker 02 And this is one of the hardest things, I think, for the games industry. Founders are making oftentimes experiences and they sometimes present as either working or not working, but really there's so much more under the surface.
8:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I have so much to unpack there and the core for me, when you think about this true signal concept is that I like to say that we have these winning instincts and you all probably being here today can probably already trust the instincts that you have being right, but then we put these losing ideas on top of our winning instincts. And I had this instinct in 2003 for a bunch of things, but one was that we should be able to order a taxi through our phone. And so I registered SMS taxi.com and I did a whole business plan around it and I thought, this is an awful plan. I'm going to have to work with the taxi companies. I could get a million rides a month at a dollar a
9:14 Speaker 00 ride. That's a lot of work to get to a $12 million business and dealing with these awful taxi companies. So I had this instinct, but my idea was completely wrong and it never occurred to me that years later Uber would figure out to let anyone be a driver and do this magical app that we all take for granted now. So that's just an example of it. But in the games industry, it happens all the time, or even right now with AI, we can get an instinct. I don't know about you guys, but I see something that's true signal right now with my friends and family, the way that they're using ChatGPT, the way that I have to literally stop my daughter from doing her homework on it because she's not going to learn it. She might learn the new skills she needs, but she won't learn
9:59 Speaker 00 the skills she's supposed to be doing in school right now. And even watching my partner, she's on mid-journey for hours doing room designs and imagining. So to me, that's true signal. And I look at it like, okay, there's something for sure that's happening that if that were easy. Here and more available, I think everyone would be using this all the time. So I'm like, okay, that's true signal. I don't know the right ideas to put on top of that, but that feels like a wave to me. And I'll say where I have gotten true signal wrong is when I was talking a year ago about blockchain gaming.
10:41 Speaker 00 I think so many people took the wrong signals in that. And we have to be careful when we say true signal of what? Because what we didn't see in blockchain gaming or blockchain was true signal of consumer adoption, right? What we saw, day trading and gambling, that's a real thing that people were into. But the adoption didn't happen. And a lot of the game companies were thinking, well, everyone's going to want to own assets. They were half right. I think what we kind of know now is we saw a true signal in blockchain gaming around monetization. So I do believe that people see more value
11:24 Speaker 00 in owning the money they spend in a game, having the potential that they could trade and sell that to somebody later. And Bing Gordon always said, if you have a marketplace in a game, you double the value of the assets that people buy. So that's real. So I think we should hang on to that true signal for monetization, but not adoption. So eventually, I think all these things get put together and we have a new reason that people want to play games, that they find really fun and emergent and new. And then there's blockchain assets and you monetize, you know, you have all kinds of new whales. Does that make sense?
12:06 Speaker 02 Makes sense. So you talked to someone about lessons from the Web3 wave. Obviously, we're big believers that generative AI is this new oncoming wave. And so you talked about some things that you've seen, some signal that you've seen. If you're a founder today and you see this wave coming, what would you do about it?
12:22 Speaker 00 The coaching I've been giving myself for the last 18 months, and it's a reminder of so many hard lessons that we got at Zynga, is give yourself permission to be too early. Because I feel like that's what we all need to write down and say to ourselves right now. And what I mean by that is it's okay to be too early and you're going to be too early. Now, it's tough. Like, you look at when Zynga went into mobile. Our biggest problem is we're way too early and too aggressive. That was a problem Zynga had everywhere. But we went big into mobile. We said, "This is gonna be our way off of Facebook and monetization." Every reason in the world to love mobile is Zynga.
13:06 Speaker 00 We had an 800-person division, but we were turning dollars into pennies. And so, we got to a point that an ambitious person like Josh is, "Okay, do I wanna work on the next mobile game that might get to 50,000 a day? Or I can work on this web game that's not that interesting, but it's gonna do 500,000 a day." We got all of our best people dove into mobile, and then they all left mobile early and we couldn't get really good teams to keep working on mobile. So today, with AI, I just think we've gotta keep trying things and it's moving so fast, and realize that what you're doing today might be obsolete in three months or six months. There might be a new release.
13:51 Speaker 00 But hopefully, you're learning, building skills, building team, and you're in the right place. So there might be little waves coming that are crashing over you on the head and you're like, "Shit, I'm in the wrong place." You're still in the right place. I would have the kind of staying power and fortitude. Think about the macro and accept that at least everything I've done, worked on the last 18 months or three years, has been wrong. I mean, it's been the wrong ideas. And I'm OK about it because I feel so strongly that this macro, and by the way, I still believe that what we're gonna end up getting is gonna somehow be the metaverse.
14:35 Speaker 00 And that's a really unpopular thing to say today. Even Zuckerberg doesn't really talk about metaverse. And maybe he'll change the name back from meta to something else. If you think about the definition of the metaverse as being blurring the lines between analog and digital, I like to say that we're headed towards life at the speed of play. So to me, the North Star that I think about, that I think all this comes together around is imagine like we can type a tweet too quickly and easily, so we're happy that there's an hour to edit it or delete it. I am at least because Dan Garen, who works with me, will, and now Kevin, will say,
15:17 Speaker 00 "That's awful. Take that down. It's misspelled. It's embarrassing." But I can put up a tweet and it actually has real-world impact. And so I think of the metaverse as being making the virtual real. We started that with Farmville in a little way, and that really had adrenaline. And I think that's an important part of gaming, but an important part of just what we're doing digital. You could put up a tweet and something real comes out of that. To me, that's powerful, and that's why I think Elon's so into Twitter as like the biggest, it's his metaverse. It's this big game that has real-world impact. And I think that's the beginning of this thread that we're on with AI. I think that we're gonna get to a place that you're going to type in something and it's going to turn into a whole business or store.
16:02 Speaker 00 Or maybe a lot of people are gonna come to you with services and an hour later, that's something real. And to me, that's life at the speed of play, and that's the metaverse. And so that's this bigger thing that I keep thinking we're headed towards.
16:15 Speaker 02 All right. We could spend a lot of time on the metaverse. Instead, I'm gonna pivot just a little bit. You've now gotten to sort of see the evolution of consumer tech in lots of ways. And you've also gotten to work with lots of amazing founders. What are the through lines on? What makes for a successful founder? Given that everything else changes, nothing is static. How do founders prepare themselves? And what are the attributes of really great founders?
16:40 Speaker 00 I keep thinking of founders from a consumer standpoint. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. But I spent a bunch of time with Brian Chesky, and he's kind of molded in the Paul Graham school of like, first start with something that you could use. He gets to his own true signal, and he does such a good job of building things in a non-scalable way. Even now, I mean, I'm so impressed with his commitment to getting to an A, not a B+. And I say, don't let a B+ be the enemy of an A. So I see him say it's not ready, it's not good enough, and build things by hand. You may not even have noticed, but Airbnb has something, I think, called Experiences.
17:25 Speaker 00 I got involved, and I renamed it Trips. It's done really well, but it took him years and years to make this experience product because he would set up by hand a dinner that Michael Mina would prepare for you, and the most interesting person would come as a guest. And you'd be like, I'm not that excited about it. Like, I personally, Michael Mina seems great, but I don't want him to come to my house and cook dinner because it feels like an obligation. Like, I have to fawn all over it and be impressed. And I just want good food, fast, you know? And I'll go to his restaurant if I want his food. So I wouldn't have gotten Trips Experiences either. But I was like, Brian, what I would like is, when I rent a surf house in Maui, I'd like some waxed surfboards already there.
18:10 Speaker 00 I'd like a local to paddle out with me so I don't get angry stink eyes from the other locals. I'm like, that's cool. So rethink this in terms of that experience. So he's done the best job of that. I think Reid Hoffman, I work on a lot of things with. So many lessons I get from Reid as a founder. He's so strategic. And what I've gotten as a lesson, that's a hard one I'm trying to learn now from Reid, is Reid doesn't pursue something until he has a CEO for it. And actually, this is how I did it at Zynga, right? So I couldn't do it all, so I had to get a CEO, someone to be a GM and owner of something before I could fund it. And I have too much of a tendency as a founder to just want to be the CEO of it myself,
18:55 Speaker 00 but then it doesn't move without me. And so I think there is this lesson that... Once you're trying to get a lot done of being really good at turning people around you into CEOs, letting them be CEOs, getting out of their way.
19:10 Speaker 02 Maybe as a follow-on on that, a lot of the founders here, they've got other co-founders that are going to be hiring their first teams here shortly. Any advice for the founders here on how to find amazing people to work with? Because I think Zynga had a really good track record of being a collection of amazing talent.
19:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think these are some pretty different ideas or principles that I've used around people that may or may not resonate with you guys right now. But I think you have to be realistic about where you are and who you can get. I was a multi-time successful founder. I couldn't even get A investors or any investors to start with. What I was doing just sounded so flaky. And just Facebook apps, do you have any respect for yourself? Is that really what you're doing? And I like to start rubbing sticks together. I don't start with a big amount of money and stuff. I don't build that. It's, hey, do you want to come work for Mark on this project?
20:10 Speaker 00 He's funded this with 350K and this little office he owns. No A people want to do that. There's no job security. We're doing this little Facebook app. So everything I've done has started off feeling flaky. And no matter what my track record is, even now, I'm trying to recruit people. I get what I can get. And I'm just realistic about it. When I started my first company, but you know what? You can find these diamonds in a rough. There's this kid, JW, Justin Waldron. I found him by fishing through failed Facebook apps with 10 users. And I would send messages out being, I love your app. Can we talk? That was the only message he got that month. He emailed right back.
20:54 Speaker 00 And I hired him for 50, 60 bucks an hour. He was living on his mom's couch in Connecticut. He was 18, self-taught. It was six months before I even met him in person. This was not someone who a lot of people were after. But he was passionate about games and he became like this. He's a super Super successful in his own right today as a co-founder. So you can get these broken resumes, non-resumes. I would say, don't over-optimize in the beginning on people. I mean, this is, I don't know if this is good to tweet. This is, you can, but this is not what you probably hear. I wouldn't waste a lot of time. I'd get the best you can and move the fuck on. And I'm also not good at interviewing.
21:38 Speaker 00 My interview process was hiring. I would just hire everyone who was willing and keep the good ones. I'm like, that's what I did. I was just trying to move, I'm like, PHP? Cool, you're hired. That's, all of our apps were in PHP, apparently. I don't know shit about coding. So also for me to hire coders, all I knew was which code worked. I'm like, this one seems like a great engineer because their app works. So, but I moved fast and I actually was shocked. I didn't know who would be great. And, and I found really great people that way. And then we were a lot more successful. Then Josh came a lot later. So Josh was obviously an A player I got later. But, once we got traction and we were more successful,
22:23 Speaker 00 I started being able to get better and better people. And I eventually did get these amazing CTOs and great people. But anyway, it's always hard to get great people. And I would tune more to who's excited about what you're doing and willing to dive in. And then if they're no good, don't keep them.
22:38 Speaker 02 Amazing. One other thing that I wanted to touch on from my time at Zynga is, you did this great job, we have this company value. Everyone is a CEO. Be your own CEO. And that is not easy to do at a small company and at a big company. How did you come up with that and how did it go?
22:54 Speaker 00 I've always felt that way because I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one way or another, every job I ever had. Cause I'm not a good employee. I've learned I'm only a good team player if I'm running the team. I mean, that's probably a lot of you. I was what I call the expert witness. Every job I was in, I was closest to the answer and the data. And I was furthest from the decision. And the adults... would make the decisions and then tell me it and then I had to make it work. And I was super frustrated and half engaged, disengaged. And I said, I want to find people like me who feel this frustration. And then I want to give them enough rope to hang themselves. And some will hang themselves, but others won't.
23:37 Speaker 00 And what I learned was I got so much more done and so much better things done by turning people into CEOs. It only works if you hire people who want to be a CEO. It doesn't work to take people who are passive and not interested in being a CEO and be like, you're a CEO. And they're like, they just sit there and do nothing. What I started to learn over time is that people who are really ambitious aren't actually focused right now on the pay and the equity and the money and stuff. And that, of course, matters, but they're actually really focused on being in a position of much greater responsibility that anyone else will give them. And you can hire people and give them a lot of responsibility, so much that it scares them in a way.
24:20 Speaker 00 They're like, I can't believe that they just asked me to do this. And get more out of them. And it's a really good management hack because I am not good at managing people. And I'm too impatient to learn how to be a good manager. I don't do one on ones. But if you get people that can be CEOs, you don't theoretically have to spend the time managing them. But you can't be a fake CEO. You can't say you're a CEO and they're not really. They have to have a real hill they're taking, some real responsibility, real degrees of freedom.
24:54 Speaker 02 Okay, one last follow up for me and then I think we'll try to open it up. Something that we think is really important and that you sort of pushed really hard on is when you're trying to ride a wave, you've just got to move fast. You've got to iterate. You're not going to know all the things. And so you might as well fuck up a few times, learn from it. And if you can do that faster than everyone else, you win. So maybe talk a little bit about that because we think we're at the onset of lots of interesting opportunities. So how would you sort of approach that?
25:22 Speaker 00 So I'll be in my book when it comes out someday. My core philosophy that made up product management at Zynga, and it took me so many years of being so inefficient and stubborn before I got to Zynga. Let's assume at the outset that your idea is just wrong. And it's like a time machine. Because what if you could come back from two years in the future, or you're on a shorter timeframe here, maybe it's six months or one year, and say, "Oh, the thing you're working on was the right wave, but your idea just was wrong. It just wasn't quite right." What would you do with that information today? Would you just heroically still go with this one idea? Because you're committed and you've got funding,
26:08 Speaker 00 and "I'm doing a B2B game tool." What if, from the future, you came back and said, "You know what? That thing you were building actually was the shit. But the time it was going to take you to sell that into some game companies are too dumb to know it's ever useful. You never got there. But the thing you were building, if you just unleashed that to consumers, they were going to just go bananas and love it." Would you do something differently? So I know everyone talks about pivots. Pivots are too slow, take too long. And people talk about MVP, building the Minimum Viable Product. I don't really even believe in Minimum Viable Product. I believe in Minimum Viable Idea State. We don't have the time. You do not have the time to build your product and fail and do it again.
26:52 Speaker 00 You may be out of money and time by then. So how can you move faster than that? That's too slow for what we need today in a world of AI. We need to get to Minimum Viable Idea State, and you need to separate what that idea is from the underlying instincts that you're pursuing, and say, even before you start that one idea, you and your team need to come up, "What are your 10 other variants of that idea? What's everyone else in your space doing? Are you spending as much time looking at their ideas that relate to your instincts as your own? You probably should be spending, brain cycles, 50 to 60% of your time looking at what everyone else around you is doing and trying to see why they're wrong
27:35 Speaker 00 or why they are kind of almost right, and then half the time on your own. And then when you're on your own... Can you come up with a faster process? When I started with Zynga, it was kind of shooting fish in a barrel. Because we were competing against the EAs, these game companies, who spent two years putting out a game to learn from. And we said, "We want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year." That was our mantra. How do we learn as many shots on that goal in one week as the industry in a year? And now with Hypercasual, they move faster than that even. I loved your idea. Is it Rishi? In his zone, where he's trying to build a whole kind of new way to leverage AI
28:20 Speaker 00 for game companies to build out 3D assets and animations, right? Unstable diffusion. God help you, because so much of the first part of what you're doing is already proven and done by other people. The hard part for him is, how does he build the proven pieces that everyone else is already doing also? And how do you do that quickly and cheaply and not waste any time on that? Because it's already done. You need to legally copy everything. You say, "Who's done it best?" Figure out how to copy what they've done, so you can get to the edge, right? And the edge is what's better and what's new. And better is not what you think is better.
29:04 Speaker 00 That's the first place we get it wrong. What you think is better is actually new. Better is nine or 10 out of 10 of your target customers say, "Fuck, yeah." Better is half the price, right? Better is everyone says better. Like, when we put out Zynga Poker, it was proven and better and a little new. And the better was, there was no download. It was a poker game that had no software download. 10 out of 10 people would say yes to no download. And they did, because one thing you learn in consumer is every time there's a click, you lose half your audience. So two clicks and you've lost 75% of people. So we had no download. That was better. The only new thing we had was you could see your real friends at the table.
29:49 Speaker 00 But we also had to build a poker game that everyone else in the world had built. We said, "How do we move quickly and just copy the best version of that we can and kind of make that not be a thing that we waste time and money on?" So you have to move fast and learn and fail fast on that idea state. And what we're all after with True Signal is conviction. And the other thing you learn from a Brian Chesky is the best product makers are not making bets. That is bullshit. This whole MVP, this whole lean startup thing that we've learned about or pursued for 20 years, there's something in that that is selling us a false prophecy. Steve Jobs didn't put out the iPhone to see if anyone liked it. He already fucking knew, right?
30:31 Speaker 00 If you were on his team, you were smiling like a Cheshire cat. You fucking knew this was gonna be the shit. You weren't gonna see how the iPhone did. That was not an MVP product, right? When Brian Chesky puts out new versions of Airbnb's products, he already knows that it's gonna do well. And so what I encourage you guys to try to get to is conviction that your idea state is right. Enough that you believe in it. And if you really believe in it, then Josh is gonna believe too. Not hope that it's right. That's different. That's false conviction. But real conviction, because you've found a way to prove to yourself that this idea state is right. And it's just as powerful to know that your idea is not right. You don't have conviction.
31:16 Speaker 00 And the real question, if you don't have conviction, is how ambitious are you? And I ask founders all the time, are you really ambitious? Because I consider myself really ambitious. And so I'm willing to be in this abyss for years. And I've had tons of products that were B pluses that I could have put out. And I have not released a single product because I haven't gotten conviction on anything yet. Amazing. Okay. Should we take some questions from the audience?
31:49 Speaker 00 The best game out... Well, good question. Obviously, that's... Question is for who? I've taken shit over the years, so I am not a committed hardcore gamer. There's very few games that hold my attention. And what I'll say is, the only game that I play right now every day, and that's on the front of my iPhone, is chess.com. And it's not that I'm great at chess either, but it kind of has value in the real world to me because I run into sometimes embarrassing moments like this weekend. My godson, I think he might be like eight now or nine, and he now beats me in chess, and it's really humbling. And I'll be like, "Oh, I've been studying this opening the Queen's Gambit. It's not just a show."
32:34 Speaker 00 And I start doing it, and he's, "Oh, you're gonna do the Queen's Gambit? Okay, no, that's probably not the right first move." But anyway, chess.com's the only one I'm addicted to now. When I think of what's the best game, I think it's games that can get to this Shakespearean level, that they can transcend just the kind of core addiction loop. I guess I would have to say, the game that I admire most and wish that I had built is Minecraft, for, I guess, obvious reasons. But it's amazing that what Notch built, the core of it, is still kind of relevant today, and it's still something that my kids want to come back to, and it's still probably kind of one of the most referenced games. So I'd have to say Minecraft.
33:18 Speaker 03 You mentioned the advice we're getting towards conviction. You also mentioned that, like, someone asked about financial condition. What tends to be like the first true signal that it's time to probably reevaluate?
33:29 Speaker 00 Reevaluate what you're doing? Oh, good question. I'd encourage you guys to at least do this exercise. Try to write down, here's what we think today. This is actually really powerful for intellectual honesty, because I don't know about you, but I get in arguments with my team all the time about what we agreed or believed or assumed even three months ago. But I would encourage you, write down, what is the instinct that you're following? What are the signs? That instinct is right or will be right. And then separate what is the idea variant that you are doing. So Rishi has an instinct that I agree with, that there will be this generative AI moment
34:14 Speaker 00 around 3D objects for games and other things. I share that instinct. I don't know that I have great signal yet around it, other than it seems cool to me. So when do you reevaluate? I think that your ideas and execution you're pursuing can change a lot, maybe monthly, maybe every sprint. Your strategy probably shouldn't change more than quarterly, unless you're like really running out of time. And hopefully, your vision and the instinct you're following doesn't change, but you're saying, what would shake that? Hopefully, that there's such a big kind of landmass
34:56 Speaker 00 that you're headed for, that you feel a personal conviction about.
35:02 Speaker 02 For what it's worth, Mark, in all my years of working with you, I've never seen you change your fundamental instinct. When you have an instinct, it stays. And then it's just about, do you believe that you can execute on that exact instinct at that moment? And sometimes it's microforces, and sometimes there are macroforces that you can't control. And that's kind of the decision that you've made.
35:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, patting myself here on the back, and also accepting that it can be humbling too. You've got to calibrate yourself and say, how good have my instincts been over time? And I have found that any time I've gotten a deep instinct in my whole career, it's always been right. And maybe it's self-serving, and you kind of read if your instinct is broad enough, it could be right. Every time I've had these deep instincts, they've been right. And usually, what I've been wrong is they've been just much bigger than what I imagined. And maybe they showed up in a different form. And so part of it is you've got to figure out, like, how good are you at your instincts?
36:05 Speaker 04 So AI is a recurring topic during the talk, you made it clear. You think it's a way of potentially a tsunami. But from the applications you mentioned, creation tools, you want to argue smart creators, businesses. So while AI is going to be very fast, and it's all right, how do you think it matches with the scene to play? Where do you think the adoption for consumers and casual, the casualification of AI?
36:27 Speaker 00 So first, consumer adoption. I think that we're in this moment now that I call prosumers. I don't know that I've coined that. I Googled it and saw that Marc Andreessen said this a bunch of years ago, so I'll give him credit. But I think we're in this interesting prosumer moment where it's like people are using this in this hobbyist way. They're kind of industry people are interested. I'm seeing people around me that I wasn't expecting become kind of power users. I mean, like I said, my partner or this other woman who's a friend of ours, who's not that technical. She figured out she could do her whole job on ChatGPT. And she moved to Aspen, she's doing her job in half hour a day at most.
37:11 Speaker 00 Then she had ChatGPT write a proposal for her company about how they could use ChatGPT to do their jobs. So but what I'm not seeing that much of right now is where it's really fundamental to what people are doing. Where it's really interesting and fun. And I've heard there was an Atlantic article actually that said it's a toy and they need their Farmville moment, which I found so many ironies in that, like they're non-toy, it was a game. But I'm curious where this adoption is going to happen. I guess the thread that I'm following, the true signal for me is the magic in this generative experience. And I think what we have to isolate is what is it that makes it so magical?
37:53 Speaker 00 And this weekend, watched my daughters and my partner use it to think about redesigning rooms. Using kind of a combination of Midjourney and Dolly. So they were annoyed because they're like, well, there's only one time that it looked like my room. And then the rest, the dimensions are off and it made the ceilings high. And so there was something magical, but it also was something missing. And what I'm interested in is like, how do we? Capture the magic, isolate the magic of it, of this generative thing, and then stick that into things that are proven. Okay, I like to call it Frankensteining. Just mash the shit up. Just put on one whiteboard,
38:35 Speaker 00 "Here are the most addictive game mechanics that are out there today. Match 3, it used to be Bejeweled Blitz." And then put on another thing, "What is the most magical thing about generative AI on another board? What is it that I can isolate that people get most blown away and turned on by? And then on another board, "What are the best social mechanics? What is it that works today and worked in the past that is the most proven for social?" And then come up with a lot of ideas, like, "How do I mash this all up together? So what does it look like to have match 3 mechanic plus generative AI plus social?" And keep doing that, and then don't build it.
39:18 Speaker 00 Then use some generative AI product to build what I call a ripomatic. A ripomatic is what we used to do at Zynga, which is, "How do I get to that experience so that I can put it in front of the audience and they understand enough that they get what the experience is without building it?" So we would do it in PowerPoints. Now you can do it better, screen captures and stuff. But so create a ripomatic and first say to yourself, like, "Is there something there that's interesting?" And then you start showing it to other people. I think that's what we're gonna get to. I think that the breakthrough moment is going to be, for me, it's less the co-pilots,
39:58 Speaker 00 it's less that the AI could create the art for you or the code for you. And it's more, how do we add a new dimension to this consumer experience that people say, Bing would say, "OMFG, I can't believe that I just did that in a game." But the game is probably a game they've already played. It's poker, it's match 3. Probably not a game or game mechanic the world's never seen before. And I also don't know, as much as I wish it were true, My friends and family aren't dreaming of being game makers or creators. We have to be careful that we don't just drink that Kool-Aid and say, "Oh my god, what if there was a Roblox that everybody could make games?"
40:39 Speaker 00 I'm just not sure that... I don't see true signal that they all want to make games. But I do see true signal about something really magical in the generative experience. But it's a lot less than making a game.
40:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, the interesting thing is that game is now a very loaded concept. But remember, the first social games came out, there was a game technically, but actually, the real game was in the community, where all the admin threads were going on, or the guilds, where there were lots of chatter. And so that ended up being where the engagement was. And so maybe it's not that everyone wants to be an advanced game maker, but certainly, I think people like creating cocktail parties. And cocktail parties have a little bit of structure, and this has been the thesis of yours for a very long time.
41:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would say on the social side, there's two threads in social that I have built deep instincts on that I would just tell you could trust as north stars. One is really simple and stupid, that I reminded game teams of at Zynga all the time, but for some reason, everyone shits on it and they're not that interested. It's community. Since the beginning of the web, there's a lot of lonely people looking for community, and they find it there. And community is trying to find a home, always. And nobody... there's Reddit, but for the most part, nobody really aspires to create a home for community. And if you give a single chance in anything you build for community to happen,
42:09 Speaker 00 it will just happen. It just captures there. It's like rain capture. If you have a little bit of a place for a pool, it happens. And one thing we found at Zynga was community always over-delivered. Like, in Mafia Wars, there was a hit list, and people would pay more and more money to put themselves at the top of the hit list, put a bounty on their own head because they thought it was cool and they'd be popular. And so they were trying to find this community. The other thread that's been true since I put up the original money for Napster, if any of you have heard of Napster, but, and I put up the original money for Friendster and Facebook. One of those is a humble brag and the other two are not. And this thread of the cocktail party is also a north star. It's still out there.
42:54 Speaker 00 People want the perfect cocktail party on the web, and they don't have it. And it happens for a while. Recently, it was Instagram for a long run, like the last eight or 10 years. I believe that the Instagram cocktail party is almost over. I mean, it just doesn't feel like it anymore to me. And I think Snapchat still is the cocktail party for younger people. But I think for the mass market, I think that cocktail party doesn't exist in an obvious place anymore. And I think that you could try to build the next Instagram. It's probably gonna look a lot different. But you also could build that in a game and create that. And I encourage you, if you go that route, to try to deconstruct, you know, what makes the best cocktail party
43:39 Speaker 00 the best cocktail party? Like, what is it for you? Try to throw great cocktail parties. I try to. But yeah, it sounds dumb and obvious, but I do think that the cocktail party is still just available.
43:53 Speaker 05 I'd love to hear thoughts on the UGC payments space. So for example, just Roblox or now a new that they provide as a platform. It's just supposed to be even if you're just a bit on things very quickly, putting my dreams.
44:07 Speaker 00 Sure. We have to, when we say UGC in games, I think that the whole games industry is on this kind of slow, bumpy path towards UGC. And I do think that people love the opportunities for UGC. I'm, I guess I'm, I think that Roblox will keep, Roblox will do their own generative stuff in it, and Fortnite will. I do think, and I can't say I have great true signal for this, this is just a deep instinct of mine. I do believe that we're going to get to something different eventually.
44:49 Speaker 00 I don't think, I think we're going to look back, and I don't think I'm saying anything contrarian really here, but I think we're going to look back on the Fortnites and the Robloxes as the AOLs of our time, as the walled gardens. I think we're going to look back on the iPhone App Store as the walled garden. I mean, it obviously is, they like it that way. But I do think that we're going to get to a new version of the web. And that's why I called .earth, .earth, because I thought eventually we'll just have these TLDs and the consumers will know to type in this one and that they'll get a full dimensional interactive experience. And I think it'll be generative, and it'll be extensible, and it'll be interoperable.
45:32 Speaker 00 And my vision is it'll be like HTML, and you'll see an experience you'll like, you'll right-click on it, you'll drag and drop it into something else. I can't separate how much is I want the world to be like that versus that I have a deep instinct that just, I can't say that it's coming from a true signal that everyone's asking for this and wants this today. We weren't asking for the iPhone either. So the whole phone experience, nobody, no one was like, "Oh, I wish I could just have this touchscreen, which we didn't know about," or download apps and things. I mean, I know it's obvious today. But so I do believe that we're going to get to a totally new paradigm for
46:16 Speaker 00 Computing, I don't know that it'll happen specifically from a UGC point, the way we think about it today. I don't know that it's kind of, I know people are like, imagine if it was like TikTok and anybody could just make games. That doesn't resonate for me and for my kids who are real gamers. They're not wishing for that, but I have this feeling that if this all existed and they could drag and drop things and just make a store and all of a sudden that store could be real and sell real shit, that they would do it without thinking about it. And I think, I don't think it's going to happen inside of Roblox and inside the iPhone. It's probably going to happen first on PC and web in some way and have some breakthrough
46:59 Speaker 00 moments and then have to make it to mobile, maybe to Android first. And I wish I had a better sense in my head about what that's going to look like because I've been trying to build this for, I don't know, 15 years and getting nowhere. So you guys have a better idea than me, I want to hear it.
47:19 Speaker 02 All right. On that note, Mark, thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you for all of your wisdom and advice.
47:26 Steph Smith? If you liked this episode, if you made it this far, help us grow the show. Share with a friend or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at ratethispodcast.com/basicteensy. You know, candidly, producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking into a void. And so if you did like this episode, if you liked any of our episodes, please let us know. We'll see you next time.
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