The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)

Mark Pincus founded Zynga—the company behind Words With Friends, FarmVille, and Zynga Poker—and has arguably created more hit consumer products than anyone in history. At Zynga, eight of 10 major game launches became massive hits, reaching over a billion players. Over the past five years, Mark has been synthesizing everything he’s learned about building successful consumer products and turning it into a book, Life at the Speed of Play, which comes out on June 23. This is the first interview he’s done about the book. *In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:* 1. His “Proven, Better, New” framework: copy what’s proven, make it better so that 10 out of 10 people say “f*ck yes, I’ll use this”—then add something new 2. Why being less ambitious is the path to the most ambitious ideas 3. His rule of thumb that your instincts are right 95% of the time, but your ideas are wrong 75% of the time 4. “Kill hope before hope kills you” 5. How to raise kids in the age of AI *Brought to you by:* WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more: https://workos.com/lenny Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: https://vanta.com/lenny *Episode transcript:* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-common-pattern-behind-successful *Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts:* https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 *Where to find Mark Pincus:* • X: https://x.com/markpinc • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markpincus • Website: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com *Where to find Lenny:* • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to Mark Pincus (02:46) The Proven Better New framework overview (07:29) Earning the right to innovate (08:30) What “better” really means (12:03) Quick summary of the framework (12:40) Examples of the framework in action (13:30) How to use proven correctly on your platform (15:13) The moral arbitrage of copying (23:55) Be less ambitious (28:25) The Bolt.new story and staying humble (33:15) Kill hope before hope kills you (37:00) Using AI as a failure machine (40:08) Why Zynga’s games succeeded (it wasn’t virality) (48:36) The future of consumer social apps (57:05) How to know if your product is a B+ (1:01:25) Distribution in the age of AI (1:15:39) Make everyone a CEO (1:18:18) Stay close to the metal (1:21:35) Why Mark says micromanagement is beautiful (1:23:35) The expert witness (1:25:05) The number one job of a CEO is to be right (1:26:35) What Mark is teaching his five kids (1:35:14) Mark’s “why” (1:37:08) Mark’s new book: Life at The Speed of Play *Referenced:* • Tribe.net: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net • Zynga: https://www.zynga.com • Sid Meier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier • Electronic Arts: https://www.ea.com • CityVille: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityVille • Words With Friends: https://wordswithfriends.com/ • Scrabble: https://playscrabble.com • Reddit: https://www.reddit.com • TED Radio Hour, MIT Media Lab founder, 1984 TED talk.: https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_5_predictions_from_1984 • Peter Thiel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterthiel • FarmVille: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille • Craig Newmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark • How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-consistently-go-viral-nikita-bier • Angry Birds: https://www.angrybirds.com/ • OMGPop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMGPop • Draw Something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_Something • Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/slack-founder-stewart-butterfield • Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach • Garry Tan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrytan • Brian Armstrong on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barmstrong • Jason Citron on X: https://x.com/jasoncitron • Stanislav Vishnevskiy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/svishnevskiy • Jeff Bezos on X: https://x.com/JeffBezos • Andy Jassy on X: https://x.com/ajassy • Niantic: https://nianticlabs.com • Pokémon Go: https://pokemongo.com • Bing Gordon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binggordon *Recommended book:* • Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Speed-Play-Launch-Products/dp/0063352575/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]._ Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume.

• 0:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Building a consumer social app. Very few people have successfully done it and built something durable.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  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 it, 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.

• 1:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen, both within Zynga and before Zynga. In over the past five years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today, the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this, and after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation,

• 2:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for Coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. Why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids, he's got five and so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product past.com for a free year of the hottest and most well crafted AI products in the world. Available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Mark Pincus.

• 2:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I've been a big listener.

• 2:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  And I'm excited to, I'm excited to finally be on, so.

• 3:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book, it's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed called proven better new. And the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea, it's such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Sure, well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the 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 in name. And I, I love this concept of life of this view to play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt of the book. So, but proven better new is this core.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  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? Okay, let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  And let's just test many, many ideas around that. And let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason." It might be, I mean, at Zynga, we'd see new game launches. Sid Meyers, like the godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer. He came out with, I think, 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 Fatui, his first-time user experience with so many clicks and so bad

• 5:53Speaker 00

  that no one was ever going to see his great game design." Even Sid Meyers tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga was 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.

• 6:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally,

• 7:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And so the point of proven better knew 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. You're the icon.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  The, 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 like great copies and bad copies. But But be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say, we don't, 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.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Better is usually very small increments in innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing, the existing users of that product would say, fuck, 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. And, and so better could be, it's now free. There's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, you know, is better and every user would say yes to. And, and usually it's, it's very small and it's polished and it's, it's things that intense

• 9:20Speaker 00

  users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, Words with Friends, you know, it was Scrabble. But if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must've been something, you know, 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? And in the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just, it's attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea, you know?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Even that, which you 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. And we really, I like to think if you do proven better new right, it's like a time machine.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Because what if I could go back to Mark, you know, 2003 and four and say, dude, you don't even realize how right you are. Like, one of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once, and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. That's, you know, I'm not gonna tell you which. I'm not gonna totally cheat, but I'm just gonna tell you there's something, there's another answer in this that you could pursue that'd be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your tribe's idea, that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company, industry, you know, listings.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  So there was a point in try where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm gonna look around me. Like, if you're doing proven better new, you're also looking around you for what's, what are you finding here that's proven in the market that you can also go test? And, you know, I would have massively changed my odds of success.

• 12:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, there's so much here. So just to summarize how I think about this framework, which is so good. Like, if you start to really think through all the products that have succeeded and how many of them actually follow this, whether they're conscious or not, it's wild. So kind of the steps that I hear is, so proven better new. Proven is make a list of the things that are proven to be working already in the market. Things people love about this sort of space. Better is make something that is not just better, but that 10 out of 10 people will say, F yeah, I would switch. This is better. And then add something new that nobody's tried before. That adds a little wrinkle.

• 12:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I think a little bit like you have a bunch of examples in the book Slack and Threads. There's also like, if you think about the iPhone and the iPod, like you don't think, you don't think about them that way. But basically the iPod, there was a music player. They made it better and they added some new stuff.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And 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, 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, is a touchscreen. It's the only new idea. And I want to say proven gets so misused.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  And that 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. Proven is, and they, they pick something that, and it's to their own detriment. They're, they're not using proven. You, 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.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  But, but it's not, if it's not on this platform, it's, you know, it doesn't count as proven. And, and yet the, the masters at this product craft do proven better new, whether they call it that or not. And they do it at such a, a beautiful level that nobody even thinks, no one realizes what it's derivative of. And Slack was a great example because I think Slack might've just been proven and better and no new. And that's even better. If you can get a, if you can have a successful product. And I don't want to sound anti-innovation, but you know, people don't like change.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  So if you take a behavior they like, but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack,

• 15:11Speaker 00

  people love that even more.

• 15:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's this threat of copying that comes through this framework that will turn a lot of people off. Talk about what you think people are missing and how you get over that hump of like, this is actually the right approach in most cases.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage. Because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur, because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we are taught in school copying is cheating. So there's, there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But, but that also makes that opportunity in some ways,

• 16:10Speaker 00

  you know, 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, and 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, 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.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  An experience that she loves more. And so if, you know, so and if you, 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. And so, and, and I think that the, the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it. Cause I think consumer taste also resists just a copy.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  I think that if movies, TV shows, you know, books, if, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it, it could go against, you know, our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark and Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And I was like, and 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. And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. And so he would sit and talk to me and he was working on, I was like, what are you working?

• 18:19Speaker 00

  I 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 don't know. 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 wanna, why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new. And I'm like, that's a world-class product maker because he, what he gets is that his, there's, 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.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  We're like angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition and we don't want to think about these things. And 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? You know, and 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 that. I don't know.

• 19:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I'm thinking like as you're talking, I'm just thinking, what are all the best products? And are they all just kind of one word? Are they copies and evolutions of existing products? Or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around like the iPhone that was, you know, there's phones before and they kind of took the elements of what was great, made them awesome. My Awala, I don't know, water bottle, like there was water bottles that worked and then they added things to make it better. Chrome, I don't know, I'm just like looking around like it's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens, most products are better versions of things that existed before. And then I'm thinking about as a product team, what do you often do? You go look at the competitors, look at all the flows, here's what they're doing, here's what's

• 20:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think there's like, it's easy to get turned off to this idea of like the word copy, but like as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Well, there's so much on this that we could, we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on, and I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. I, 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.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  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, right of his product. And he said, oh my God, they, 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.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  And then to your question of is every product derivative? Is every product from proven better? My answer is no. And 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? And 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, as far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures or the market.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  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. And do you want to have those odds? Or do you want to be, do what OMG Pop did? Which is very similar story, but opposite path. Which was 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 ever seen or tried it before. It failed completely.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. And now they did proven better new perfectly. They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in, 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.

• 23:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love this idea of moral arbitrage. That's such a... What do you think about this?

• 23:54Speaker 00

  It's very Peter Thielian.

• 23:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, so there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this. One is, any of all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products? One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this. And one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary 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. Because it's... It might... Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. And the Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. And the irony for me is that I've found that my career has gone in these waves and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of I just want to get to anything, any product market fit.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very, very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know 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, I'd say that we tend to, after success...

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Be feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct and we want to be more ambitious. And so 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. And there was multiple inside Tribe that worked. The tribes, the idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it, but I was too ambitious and so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  And I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41, multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world. And what did I do? I made a Facebook app, like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. It was, people thought I had no dignity. I mean, people were like, Mark, there's so much you could do in the world. But I was, I'd say my ambition came down to like a thousand foot altitude, you know, not 100,000 foot.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  And, and that was the key to that being successful. And, and I see this with, it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders and, and 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, you know? That's the good news for everyone watching. Like everyone has the same chance and in a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have, you have a better opportunity. So I, the paradox is the more ambitious you are.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  That the more humble you should be in the smaller place, you should be willing to start.

• 28:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  One of your insights along these lines is that this is your advantage as a startup is to be less ambitious because a zuck needs to go really big because the revenue is already so high. Anything they take on needs to be many billion dollar business opportunity. And as a startup, you don't need to do that. And, and this is how you end up discovering some of the biggest ideas in the end.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, being willing to pursue these little threads. When they're flaky, when they're, they're not a business, when there's so much earlier and so many of the successful companies today, you know, started there.

• 28:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Is there an example that comes to mind when, because yeah, what's like, what's a, what's a company or two that started very unambitious?

• 29:05Speaker 00

  I love the story of bolt dot new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much, I cold mailed the founder because I was just so impressed with. Yeah. And, you know, they, 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. And then they had this realization one day of, wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding co-pilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And, and I, I think that was just a great story that he, they were passionate about one thing and, you know, and they stuck with it.

• 29:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Eric was on the podcast, we talked about that.

• 30:01Speaker 00

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

• 30:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  But I think to your point, like he might try again to unhumble, go big.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but each time, right? So he started a, a big, uh, you know, idea for like the mass market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say. Okay, wait, there's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that. And it takes, it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. I mean, I can't imagine, I mean, I can't imagine, I guess, I've been there, how hard it is when

• 31:12Speaker 00

  you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction. And you have to, we have to express confidence as founders. Whether or not we have actual confidence inside, that's part of, I think, 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? You know, how do you, and I'm still learning. I had, I had people, I err on the side of transparency and honesty and, you know, being authentic to a fault. And I burn out people in that process.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And I did it at Zynga and I have since because, you know, people will say, the negative critique I'm working in me is, oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer. And every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea. And they're not wrong. But where I can get better at this maybe is, you know, if we can, 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 plus. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a North Star

• 32:37Speaker 00

  that we are not going to stop until we find product market fit against our North Star. And this isn't it. And it's going to take courage on our part. And 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? Which I, that's a fair career choice for you to make. But, but I think that, that's to me, the real founder mode is can you have the courage to?

• 33:12Speaker 00

  To tell your team and your investors that this isn't it.

• 33:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give, which is kill hope before hope kills you. Talk about just what that is, because so much of your advice is kill your bad ideas quickly. So just kind of talk about that. And then I'm really curious to know when you kind of, what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, okay, this will be plus, let's move on.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  I don't know if I get credit for, you know, making up that quote, but I love it. Kill hope before hope kills you. It's, there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Hope is just, you know, it's, it's a prayer, but it's, but it's, it's not, it's not founded in anything that you're, you're lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. And, and, and I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings, they're not making bets.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  They already know, you 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. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if, if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP, minimum viable. The viable is the word we gotta kill along with hope. Because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right? And there's a difference between. Get in the market early, learn.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  You're putting a product out that you're going to learn from, and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch, that you think, you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that... What I thought would happen where we'd be today

• 36:01Speaker 00

  is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines, that are testing, I like to say, 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 100 ideas in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say, we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that. Because if we start off, if we say, "Okay, what can I believe today?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  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. "Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product." But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. So often, 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 in the markets, an afterthought. And it was so often at Zynga, it blew my mind. I mean, I'll give you one story from Zynga.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  When we were launching our first expansion pack for Farmville, which became a mass, these became massive business drivers for us. It was, I think it was Farmville, English countryside or something. The team came to me and they 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? And, and what if you don't just start your product marketing?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  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. And you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. And at the same time, when people click on it, it says, coming soon. Click here to be a, a pre-user, you know? Click here to get access two weeks before anybody else. And it turned out, everybody clicked on it, right? Cause it's a change on your game board. And it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  But the unintended consequences 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, you know, the new expansion pack. And so we took something that was going to be Afterthought, advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn it into something that gave us signal and direction in the product and revenues. And so often, you know, you can have, you know, this is an existing product, but you can turn something, you could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind

• 39:38Speaker 00

  of scarcity and, you know, heat driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, Claude code, but build the, you know, the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on.

• 40:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I want to ask you about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when I think Zynga, they're not like, this is the product I want to build, you know? And there's a spectrum of products you guys have built. There's like Farmville and Cityville and all these things that I think turn some people off. Then there's like Poker, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars, that I think people are like, oh, that's amazing, I love that. Can you just speak to that?

• 40:33Speaker 00

  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. Now, Words With Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. It was 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

• 41:10Speaker 00

  its own success, that it was, our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that the, your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. And that's fair, but...

• 41:32Speaker 00

  What I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 mass 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. And we had lots of competitors, lots, and copying and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spamy or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  And Bing 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, it's why I call it a bold beat. It's, how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and rote, poker or whatever? How do I add a whole new dimension to it? And 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.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Well, the reason why people, so many, especially middle-aged women, love Farmville and these games was because they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. And they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There are things that let you do gifting and do things of, you know, value to your, for your friends. And so we called the games Invest, Express, and Connect. You could do something that was, you were being seen as creative. I like to say, people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Mid Journey does for me today. And then we were letting you, so you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing. And then at, if you think 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 to track day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about in the book, I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well statistically, this is

• 44:25Speaker 00

  true, they have the highest day 365 retention. You know, 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, you know, high day 365. So those track, you know, those are correlated. But you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and a zero day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have

• 45:07Speaker 00

  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, it's, am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this? Or, you know, is this, should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever? And I think there's a mentality to that. And I like to say, Viral-based companies, there's been many, you know, be real, there's, right, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right? They're trying to get more people in.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  You can either go faster, bail water out faster, you know, which is trying to get people back or plug the hole in the boat. And, you know, or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But, but yeah, so we, we were tracking both in our games, in our network, what, what was the retention? And we were, we were really constantly thinking about, you know, about that. And, and I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success, in my opinion, that I hold is, is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. That, and, and we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  This is an Easter egg, if anyone, if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening. We built a metric called ASN. And it stood for what, what, we measured what was your active social network? So 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. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually, you know, build and innovate against that metric. And, and it made sense, right?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments, you know, that. That's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.

• 47:28Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 48:09Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 48:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  And you've, you may be built more social consumer products than anyone. Like, there's like a dozen that have worked. AI obviously changes the game in, in theory. What do you think needs to be true for someone, for something to work again in today's world?

• 49:08Speaker 00

  It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and, and, and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that, 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? So if 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. And in 2007, when I started Zynga,

• 49:52Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  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 gotta 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, you know, to do this. And you're going to trip over it.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like say, we don't go to the comic book store. But if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read it. So. I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, you know, 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 some, it's very big, but none I know. So, so, okay, so social and consumer.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  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, it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram? Or, 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, I, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores. And we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus

• 52:51Speaker 00

  35 to a negative 35. There's, 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 it. So I think, so I think all that's to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I mean, I think, 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? You know, I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again, that they're

• 53:34Speaker 00

  going, part of what we got, people forget, Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or 1,000 friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity, and they still do. But they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn. But they might have ads now, but but definitely, you know, Instagram had TikTok envy. So, you know, 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 or, you know, but not wasting our time as much. So, and I'll also say this, there's a side of this, I call this social thing, the cocktail party. Okay, that's, that's the big instinct vein for me.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen? And how, how do we add things to the cocktail? 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's moves from like obligatory, I'm at this party, it's the birthday party to almost like greed, like I love this party, I'm love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at a great cocktail party? You often get great leads. And so that cocktail party that for me, it started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  But then Friendster, 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 Friendster and find a date and it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Friendster.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  So what I would say to people is like, 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 a utility in being in this cocktail party. Today, and by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm gonna go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm gonna drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they wanna be on Facebook. I wanna give them more to do.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  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, you know, find gold there. I wanna come back to your thread on your question was, how do you know when an idea is a B+? Right? Yeah. Okay.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  I love the question on, well, how do you know if it's a B+? And what I would say to you is, how do you know if you're with the right person? Like you're dating, what was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, is this the right person? I'm like, fuck, yeah. I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that. When you're with the A- person, you're with the B+.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  You're asking, could this be the one? You're like, you're, and you know, Osho said, if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. And you're full of hope. You hope it's an A. It doesn't mean you might not have the chance to turn that into an A. But the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not. And then, well, how do you know? How are you getting validation that it's not?

• 58:30Speaker 00

  You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotal. You love your product. You're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? Did we say, oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure. You know, we're like, no, I'm fucking living on that. And it's making me dream of new things to do. Right? So I'd say that the hard part about this is, you know, what do you? What do you do with a B plus?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B plus? And then what do we do with a B plus? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B plus. That that's the first point is, okay, this is not it. Now, what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? Do I? Can I? Do I see examples that are near this that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven? When when we realize it's not it, we we look for more things to do. And it's such a hard lesson. Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my dot earth project for like the fourth time.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Okay, I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zynga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. And by the way, I define the metaverse. I give Reid Hoffman credit for this definition as blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. And that is where our lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaversian. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  It's it's that the virtual and the real completely blur together. And but I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. And I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this game engine, web browser-based game engine. And I was not getting a product market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small, small idea. I was going for a really big idea. And it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it after four years and $25 million in just this one version of it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more, you know, on a D.

• 1:01:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's a whole discussion I have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book, of how that's such a source of good ideas. But I want to touch on distribution, just as we're on this thread. Something that's come up a lot on this podcast is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff, one of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. Always been a challenge, always been hard, harder than ever, because there's so much happening in the market constantly. So much trying to get your attention. All the channels are full paid and SEO. What's your just like advice to founders? What do you think needs to be true for a come for a startup to break out? Because it's so hard now.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Let's start with talking about consumer distribution, which

• 1:02:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  I understand better.

• 1:02:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yes.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  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 of it 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.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  And then it became at least a, an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And, and in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We, 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.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And there, we're kind of like halfway to a platform. I, we are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level, unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means we're, when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. You know, the average app installs per user per month is zero. So it's really important to think about that, that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, we don't, it doesn't stick. You know, there was something like 40,000 new games

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  launched last year in the App Store and zero, you know, became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So your odds are bad. Okay. So it's not, it's, it's not an ideal, you know, moment to be, you know, you, you can't launch consumer right now with, 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, you know, to be prosumer or enterprise now,

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, you know, that's hope strategy, you know, 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 100 times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because it'll be 100 times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But, but when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  And I, I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach, that find, 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, you know, long before we can get out to consumer. And there, 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, that if we get in the mindset of basically intelligence

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, you know, that will basically be free in a year or two, that, that, that token, you know, supply is going to go up so much, our demand will too. But if today we start building, reimagining consumer services based on free tokens.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  I think that's such an interesting innovation zone. And it could sound like a dot com business plan when 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, you know, 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, I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  That, because games don't work, freemium games and freemium 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'll also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle on brokering our social relationships and getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, you know, general listings.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  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, it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to change, dynamically change that trust, or change that attention level that it's going to take from us, like a great chief of staff. And, 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.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  There's going to be an asymmetry in your interests and my interests in any given weekend and hanging out. And how do we broker that without hurting, you know, one of our feelings or, you know, going into? There's some really interesting spaces that the, that the AI and the agent can broker between us in, in ways that start to give us both productivity. They, they find ways for us to get together without going, 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.

• 1:10:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love all these ideas you're sharing. Like what I'm hearing there, there's this, always this idea of why can't we just, here's my calendar. Here's your calendar. Let's just find time. And like the issue there is you don't want to ever feel like, you don't want to look like you're, you've got nothing going on and you're like the most boring person. Like you don't want the other person to know.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's totally open, available to you.

• 1:10:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, that's right. Just to close the loop on the distribution part, what I'm hearing is like, we might be on the verge of a new distribution platform, a way to get out and for people to discover you. It's not there yet.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  I, I'm somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it. And I'm, 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 one way or another is that there, there will be some kind of, there will be some kind of consumer facing platform for, for AI apps and agents.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  One example that is my number one, is my Easter egg on this is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. So a 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,

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  but I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a travel, 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 them enough. So the internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think that the next area of growth Probably include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  And that's my prime example. But if someone built the best travel agent today, you know, maybe we'd find out about it. But it's a tough road. But if it was specifically baked into OpenAI or Claude and was a gave me a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond, you know, there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating. And it's just, I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  And so they, at some point, and that's why they they're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and that's an amazing business. But but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.

• 1:14:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, to me, like, the question is, are they just going to do it? Or why do they need anyone to do it if they are building this AGI that can just do all the things? So I think it's going to be interesting to see if they just want to eat the entire market of everything or they play nice with other startups.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. You know, Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were a brutal platform. You know, they ate everything around them. And and then, you know, with us, you know, we saw it on Facebook, you know, they 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 like hire artists. But everything else they did absorb.

• 1:15:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to go in a different direction and touch on, you have all these really amazing nuggets of advice for scaling company, managing people, hiring people, working with people. I want to just kind of touch on a bunch of these. One is this idea of making everybody a CEO at your company. Talk about that lesson.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  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 of a sudden, the priorities get messed up and, you know, 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, I'm like, all of management is just,

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  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. You know, I always say, I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  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 going to 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. 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. You know, Brian Armstrong was saying everyone should be an individual contributor.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:18:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  You mentioned this idea of an expert witness and you also have this nugget of advice of staying close to the metal. I love this general advice. Talk about what you mean there, why that's important for someone in their career.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  They go together. We start our careers, you know, in our twenties, 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.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  And then you're excused and then they make a decision and then you have to deal with the consequences and disagree and commit. What if, what if I'm disagreeing because I'm fucking 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, you know.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  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. You know, 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, 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, we decided to turn that upside down and say, we as founders need to be kind of

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  the first and last mile for the product and we have to be the ones who bless. Our, 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, you know, in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. You know, the, there's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing that mattered most, they would go and work, you know, two days a week deeply with the team on it. And, and it makes sense. If you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. You know, we, we want to put you on the ice.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.

• 1:21:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Elon famous for this too. You have this line in the book, along these lines, "Micromanagement is beautiful. You should micromanage as long as you can."

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  I believe that and I, I did that building Zynga to a fault. I mean, we, we got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees. We had a stand-up call that would go on for two hours and I, I had everyone's name on a spreadsheet and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today. And I go through name by name and say, okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today? And I completely micromanaged, but we were...

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  Much more effective. And then I, you know, I kept micromanaging things as, I'm like, if you can be in the room, be in the room, assuming that you are the best player. So, yeah, I, I, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago. But, but when I was building Zynga, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or, you know, expecting, you know, massive results from our teams. And, and I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as more, it's closer to best practices today, I think. But, but my point about like,

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  that 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, 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 your, 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, and this idea of a teaching hospital.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  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. Like, 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, you know, spread to all of them too. And, 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.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  The person who is you in your twenties, who was the expert witness, a little bit of a know it all.

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  And, and start having them follow you around to pick up, learn, absorb everything you do. And give them projects to test them. And, and then hopefully you've created a mini me that you can now put in a, in a much bigger role. Somewhere else. And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff. Used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos. So it actually, that idea actually scales and you kind of get it for free.

• 1:25:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love this phrase of transferring your vampire blood. Oh, man. Maybe one last nugget from the book along these lines is you have this line of just the number one job of a CEO is to be right. Talk about that.

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I gotta pick one, if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, 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. Then you were phenomenal execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a, a great boat in, you know, a dead lake bed, you know, isn't going anywhere. And so I, I look for that in people, like, are they right?

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  Like, that's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something. And, and I look for that in the team and it's less, do I like your style or approach or?

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Your, you know, personality fit. I'm like, I'll take, I'll take misfits who are right. I'm like, I want, I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest. And, and, you know, the more people you have around you who are right, you know, that's, they're, they're putting balls in the net.

• 1:26:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to maybe end with a question about your kids and parenting. I talked to a bunch of people that know you well in preparation for this conversation, and every single person commented on just how wonderful a dad you are, and how much time you put into that part of your life. And a question I've been trying to ask folks that are parents and great parents in this AI era, and there's a lot of stuff I want to ask about, but let me start here. It's just, what's something that you are teaching them or helping them develop that you think is going to be important to them in this crazy world we're, we're entering of, of AI?

• 1:27:06Speaker 00

  Thank you for asking about this. I, it's, I think my greatest role and job and, and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. So I really, 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 of 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, the first one for me is, I have five kids. They're, every one of them is just such a different version of a human.

• 1:27:50Speaker 00

  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 see, I have this wide range. And my, my 15-year-old girls are, they're twins, and they're completely divergent from each other. This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are. And, and, and it's, with kids, I find...

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  We can kind of talk down to them. We could talk to them as kids.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  And or we can kind of treat them like adults and neither of those are right. It's like we gotta like find, 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 what where they're supposed to be, you know, in that moment. Like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really, 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.

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  And I just tried to teach them a math brain. Like I, and 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 I, we found out later, I taught them all the way through eighth grade math. And I didn't know it. They didn't know it. And that was cool. And then 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.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number, but it was factory-produced. It was, and it was for a certain kind of work. First factories, then knowledge workers, you know? 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

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  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, she created a brand of sweatshirts called Comfy Fancy.

• 1:30:56Speaker 00

  And she also has created a gathering, a grouping, a group for

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  neurodivergent middle school kids called NeuroSparkly. And, 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, I've also, what I'm, the, 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, so what do I want my kids doing? I, I try to teach them to, when, when in a,

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  look at the deeper, the 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 no more answers. And, and I think that's, you know, and, 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?

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  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,

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  Sometimes it works and I see them doing that and then sometimes it doesn't. But you know, that's, 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, I got them flip phones. And they had internships at Niantic working on Pokemon Go. They built a first time user experience, which is really good. But they were, they, I think, used. But they had to get smartphones for that and they still have them. And so, so even, you know, I tried to make it, I didn't.

• 1:33:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, man, that's hilarious.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  Oh, and, and also I'll say one more thing. For my older girls, I keep a running, uh, Google Doc of life philosophies. And anything I say to them is like a quote I say over and over. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna actually like write that up with stories. And I keep it in this document for them and who knows if they'll use it. But they, they do start to repeat some of them, so I know they read it. You know, one is, nothing's personal. Don't, 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.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  So that's one, you know, and don't be a victim. You know, the, the world doesn't happen to you, it's happening around you. And you're, we're defined how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us. So I'm trying to, you know, give them these, you know, and, and it's, and I'm, and they're teenagers, the older two. And, you know, and I'm in it and learning and, and I've got two littles that, you know, a one-year-old and a four-year-old who sleep with me every night.

• 1:34:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, man. You're busy. I feel like it's clearly what your next book is gonna be is these life philosophies. I feel like these are useful for people, for humans, for adults, I mean.

• 1:34:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wanted to write a book on parenting, saying, everything, 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, you know, I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between. And, you know, she, she believed that she was a person, so.

• 1:35:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything else you wanted to share before we wrap up?

• 1:35:19Speaker 00

  The thing that I've gotten, that's resonated most in writing in my book of life for the last thirty years. It took me a long, long time. It took me until I started Zynga at forty-one 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, what 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 know, you're post-economic, or you're a bored rich guy, or whatever.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  I'm like, well, I haven't done my thing yet. Like, I like to, like, what does, 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, you know, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And, and I think he's right. And, you know, I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  is to build these digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. And so that's, that's my ambition and why, why I'm still like rubbing sticks together and.

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  And writing books. Speaking of that, to help people build their own internet treasure, your book is coming out very soon, I think around the time this episode comes out. Tell people where to find it. Anything else you want to share about the book?

• 1:37:16Speaker 00

  Well, you have a copy. I just got a copy.

• 1:37:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Two copies somehow.

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  Two, because you're important. We hope you read it twice. Give it out to a friend. I would just say that Life is but a play is my... I'm trying to share my playbook and philosophies. And I'm hopeful that somebody will steal some of my ideas and take it further. And we're all kind of in a conversation, and I love this podcast and you hosting this cocktail party. And we're all trying to move the philosophies and the craft of product making ahead.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  And we're all learning as we go. And I hope that my book can be something referenceable. And I hope it's easy and fun to read, because I have pain reading a lot of books.

• 1:38:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  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.

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 1:38:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing all this wisdom with us.

• 1:38:32Speaker 00

  Thanks. This is fun. This is actually, I've done some podcasts 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, I'm trying to only go into places, you know, that I want to talk about, you know, which I tried to do in the book, too.

• 1:38:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  There we go.

• 1:38:53Speaker 00

  Thank you for inspiring me to want to talk about product.

• 1:38:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.