How to build breakout products, with Mark Pincus & Reid Hoffman

Mark Pincus is a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Zynga. He joins host Reid Hoffman to reveal the insights at the center of his new book: Life at the Speed of Play. The godfather of mobile gaming talks with Hoffman about building products people love, learning fast from your mistakes, and handling screen time for his own kids. The book: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/ Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 2:15Speaker 02

  It does feel very analogous to Internet Nuclear Winter, we called it. In 02 to 03, when, right when you started LinkedIn. Yeah. And I started Tribe. This feels very like a similar moment. Yeah. That it's not figured out, but you know it's going to be.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  This is Masters of Scale. This week on the show, Reid Hoffman sits down with Mark Pincus. You should know Mark, but if you don't, he's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Zynga. Thanks to games like Farmville, Zynga blitz scaled to 300 million monthly active users on Facebook at its peak. They were also huge on MySpace, but we don't remember MySpace so much these days. Now, Mark has a new book out, Life at the Speed of Play. The godfather of mobile gaming talks with Reid about how to build products people love, how to learn fast from your mistakes, and much, much more.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Mark, it's always an honor and a pleasure. Welcome back to Masters of Scale.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Happy to be invited back.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Part of the reason why we decided to do this, you have a new book coming out. And I wrote the foreword to the book. I'm a huge fan of the book, but okay, Internet Boy. Why did you write a book? What led you to writing a book? Very old school media.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Well, coming from someone who's been prolific with his books, Internet Boy.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  I would say after writing the book, I think everyone should write a book once. I think it's one of those things that's such a labor of love. But I wanted to capture a few things in the book. It's like one part Book of Life motivation, one part stories, one part product management bible, and... We'll see if they all work. Originally, you may remember, the first few years I was writing this book, I called it proven better new.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Because I was like, that's the core value, that's the core value. But I started to realize that that's in service of something much bigger. And to me, life at the speed of play, it has meaning on a bunch of levels. One is, it's the vibe, it's the way that I think we should approach making products. I think it should be fun and playful and light. Someone asked me at a party, they're like, is this book also targeted children? And I said, no, actually, they already know how to play.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  And so I think remembering the kind of level of fun and imagination that we have in play, you know, as kids, giving ourselves permission to play is important. I also think that in this AI era, which you told me about years before we got to it, I wish I listened harder, in this AI era, we are just hurtling towards living our lives at the speed of play. And I think that that's more and more accessible to all of us. That this idea that you don't have to quit your job to try out, build an idea that you've been thinking about. You don't have to go and mortgage your house, raise a lot of venture capital, do all these things before you can experiment.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  That wasn't true when you and I were starting out. And even a couple of years ago, that wasn't true. And now we're at this place that we have all the one-person founder teams. So that's the other part of it is like, it's the era that we're also entering.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  This proven better new, what's the framework? What's the baseline of understanding it? And we'll do that, and then we'll move to also talking about that in the age of AI.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  In order to explain proven better new, I got to start a chapter earlier on instincts versus ideas.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Literally a chapter earlier, I guess.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  The foundational point for me as a product maker is that we have winning instincts, these things in our gut. You just, you know it, and you're tuning into it, and you see it, you're like, I know that's right. So if you accept this premise that your instincts are right and your ideas are usually wrong, then what do you do with that? And what I mean by that is, like, you know, you could say, we all had the idea for Raya, the dating app, or whatever, but we didn't. We had the instinct that something was broken there, or there was a better way. But not that idea. So. Proven Better New is this framework that we got to. Out of the failure of Tribe came the commitment to winning in Zynga.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  And with that, this framework of Proven Better New. And the idea was to say, okay, we've got to be more scientific about this. It's a way to isolate and box in your innovation in one place. And to say, this is where I'm innovating and this isn't. And so if you're Zuck and you're building Threads, which is, you know, a copy, a fast follow of another very successful product. He did a very good, I give him an A minus, very good job of Proven Better New. And the things that are proven are things that on that platform for those users works and you're not planning to make better. And you should copy those legally.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  If you do it artfully, people don't realize it's a copy, but you should not change a single thing.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Stay as close to it as possible without doing anything that's illegal.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, the real art of it is that the end user doesn't feel like it's a blatant copy. That's the real magic trick.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  By the way, there are funny things in copies. Because in 2004, when I went to Shenzhen, there were three copies of LinkedIn. There were such exact copies in Chinese, I could fill out a profile. And I don't speak any Chinese. Speak, read, write, et cetera. But I just click on this button, type in this field. But that's proven is, no, no, we know what the game mechanic is. We know what the product mechanic is. We see the demand, we see the signal for how people use it, why they value it, et cetera. Stay close to that within what you're doing in your product.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the best product makers, the irony of this, the paradox of this, is that the best masters of the craft are the best at copying.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  And they have the least ego around it.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And the most junior amateur people feel the need to change everything. And they're the worst at copying and they fail for the wrong reasons. And that's the thing, if you don't do the proven right, you're going to get usually false negative signal, very rarely false positive signal. But your product will fail for the wrong reasons. And then better is, I like to say, what you believe is better is called new. Right? What's actually better is what 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, yeah. So better is usually very simple and basic things like it's now free, no download. It's something that they really care about is like one inch better.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Where you already have the consumer experience of what this thing is and what would be obvious, that would be immediate, like, yes, this is.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, it's clearly better. And it's clearly better because it's also something I really care about. And I care so much about this product that I noticed that you polished it more.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Okay. And then new is your novel idea that will probably be the reason why people will try this product, and it will probably also fail. So we called it the back of the box. It's new and improved. My favorite bad example was the game Risk, right? You and I love board games.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  I remember when I said, oh, some MBA at Microsoft decided to change my Risk game. What did they do? It was like proven worse and bad new. They took the wooden pieces that I loved and made them plastic. They made them Roman numerals. Like, I want to show my force. I don't want Roman numerals. That's not better. And then they had another game on the back called Castle Risk, which I never even learned. I'm like, what happened to classic Risk, right? So that happens too often, you know, that people try and make it better. But if we realize our new idea is probably wrong, then we can plan ahead for it and say, well, what are four other ones? And am I looking around at other products, other versions of what I'm doing?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  So I can learn faster. And so what you try to get to with proven better new is we want to be, we want to be like scientists with white lab coats. And we want to be prosecuting this instinct and saying, okay, I'm not attached to this idea and my team isn't. And I'm going to give myself and my team permission to change every Monday.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Now, take proven better new and use that lens to talk about the age of AI. Because one of the specific. Strangeness is, is there's very little proven.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Right? So you're suddenly in a, eh, proven is okay. ChatGPT is proven in some ways. Claude Code is proven in some ways.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  But they're pretty expensive proven. They're like, I can point at something proven and all you need, it used to be 10 billion.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Now all you need is 100 billion for that game.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  And the compute cluster.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And people say, does proven better news still apply in the AI world? When you're going to a new platform and we can come back to whether this even is a new platform. What do you do when there's no proven? It's much harder and, and I tried to deal with it in the book by talking about there's a fuzzy proven you're looking for. It's, is there something that was proven? There's an experience that was proven somewhere else and now I could try to apply it here. It's a better well to start with. That's a better vein than just, I'm going to come up with something the world's never seen before. That's much less likely because you and I know that behavior, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  And the other hard part of this is when we think, is there a platform? And I'm curious, do you believe that AI is a platform?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Well, there's several senses in which we talk about things as platforms. And so there's some senses at least in which is a platform, but platform is.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  How about in the consumer sense?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Well, AI certainly has platform technology for consumer applications, although the model underlying what could be a number of different agents. And so that model could be the technological platform for this. There's also the question of the front door, right?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  And so the fact that people will generally go to one, maybe a couple more. That's the front door for everything. That's why we use Google and search synonymously.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Right. For this. And there's the portal.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  There's a portal. And so there's platform sense in which I think there will be. People have an agent, maybe a couple, but certainly an agent that's kind of their general front door.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  But they don't yet, right?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Well, I think that's one of the benefits where the ChatGPT position is. I think the ChatGPT is the closest to that right now.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Totally agree. I would argue it is not yet a platform at a consumer level. There's, there's no-

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Despite the fact that it's huge-

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  It's not yet there.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Even contrast that with Google in early days-

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Was a platform for web distribution because there was SEO and SEM-

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Through Google. And so that was a platform. I mean, the web, obviously, and the browser were, but Google was itself a platform enabler, magnifier. And we are not, we're not yet there. I think we could see it, we hope for it.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  By the way, this is funny because this is echoing back to our very earliest conversations as friends. Because both you and I went to the, there was this internet winner. The internet was considered to be concluded.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  It was Yahoo, if you remember that, you know, like Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. And all of Silicon Valley broke in two directions. It broke to either enterprise, oh, we're just gonna go to enterprise, or clean tech.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  And we're like, you guys, the consumer internet just started.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  And you are the earliest web two guys.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Because it was like, guys, and then we, we formed a little group of people who were doing angel investing, we started doing companies and all the rest, because we're like, hey, the consumer's coming. And so what, part of what you're saying is that with AI, people haven't realized the whole consumer revolution-

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  That's gonna come with AI, and I agree with you. And as we know, as we see in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking, well, okay, enterprise is where the money is. That was the same thing back in the internet winner.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  You know, et cetera, and like, no, no, consumer is gonna be big. Now, enterprise will be big too.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Right? And by the way, they were right. The clean tech generally failed and the shift to enterprise did the cloud revolution.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  SaaS, yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  SaaS, right? So there will be a whole bunch of enterprise stuff.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  But like, it's funny how few people are thinking about the consumer thing right now. It's a very good illustration.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  And that was one of the things you and I started having dinners on going- The world is here and no one realizes it.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in fact, I remember when we both wrote checks for Friendster. It was not because we thought it had any chance. We just were like, this is an experiment that needs to happen because this is important for the consumer internet.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And it was later that venture came in and around because like, oh, look, the growth curve is beginning to happen.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  And it was one of the funny things is I hadn't realized there was such a demand for the consumer side that Friendster didn't understand virality or growth hacking.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  They just literally, the wave picked up the boat.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  And the tsunami moved it along.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Right. So I agree with you about the AI thing. It's not yet a platform in those regards.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  It does feel very analogous to internet nuclear winter, we called it in 02 to 03, when, right when you started LinkedIn.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  And I started Tribe. And this feels very like a similar moment that it's just, it's not figured out.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  But you know, it's going to be.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Still ahead, more with Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus on why great founders need to ignore the fear of embarrassment.

• 16:01Speaker 00

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• 17:49Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel and be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Part of the reason why I think the book is important is because when you were doing Zynga and I was doing LinkedIn, we had a bunch of things that we would trade like as friends, but it wasn't like Settlers of Catan, like too cheap for a rock. Yeah. It was more, hey, I'm seeing this. Hey, I'm seeing this. Hey, I'm seeing this. Hey, I'm seeing this. It's just like it's knowledge and intel. And part of it was Zynga more or less kind of wrote the modern book on game dynamics and thinking about game dynamics for everything, for product design, for interaction, et cetera. And frequently would get criticism because it was so rotated to getting game dynamics. It's like, well, wait a minute. Are you guys just a game dynamics company? We're the games. It's like, well, look, we're very professional at the game dynamics

• 18:46Speaker 03

  and we build the games at work with the game dynamics. And that's part of the reason why like Farmville, household name, Words With Friends, household name, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is ways of doing it. And I think this lends in life at the speed of play and the dynamics proven better knew, instincts and ideas, kill the bad ideas, keep the good ideas, et cetera. Is a general thing for everyone.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Games represent a perfect canvas to learn these concepts of proven better new because you can break it down into mechanics. But I do think I try to point out in the book that it really does apply to any consumer product.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  And I think the book is important right now because one of the things I think we're going to see with AI is a massive generation of products.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  This is just about to go bonkers large.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe that. I even see it with my partner Hillary that she started getting into vibe coding with Claude Code and got way ahead of me. I was like, wait a second, this is what I do. And she made this little mobile app for all of us and our nanny. It was pretty amazing based on the location. It would recommend activities for we have five kids, each kid by age. And I was like, wow, there's a great design aesthetic. And the point to me is I'm like, oh, that's where we're headed. We're all going to become product makers because it's democratized, because it's accessible. And my one daughter, Georgia, is making a poker app. I'm like, wait, that's what I do. Like, okay.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  So I do think that everyone kind of becomes full stack when the stack's automated and it's just promptable. And then it gets down to taste. Hillary has amazing taste, so I was so impressed with the subtle design of her app.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  And which are the key things from the Zynga playbook that you would recommend to, call it the AI native companies? For me, it would be like launch early, right? In order to learn, because that's kind of speed of engagement and learning. You obviously practice that. It could be things around, we'll build level one to 10, see if it works.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Right, which is kind of like I learned from Zynga and it's kind of a classic.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  All of that is like more possible and at your fingertips today than ever before with AI. And I like to say, do not build it right.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Build a culture of building it wrong. Build it right presumes some level of success. I love Eric Reese. We've had great debates. I'm in the same spirit, but but that word viable is actually hurtful because viable also means hope.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Of viability.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  And what you want is not viability, conviction. And viable is actually a very weak word to me. It's not strong. Conviction is strong. And so what I would say from the Zynga playbook that people should ruthlessly copy today that was proven was test more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. Build a testing and failure machine, usually at the top of the funnel. Like usually it's at the level of, especially in consumer, but is anyone even going to click on this? Don't be embarrassed. Don't build the rest of this, just the landing page, just the ad link and nothing else. And, and it's amazing to me even today.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  And I think we're in this weird paradox with AI that I would have thought by now that people would be all over the place with these testing machines and they'd be building prototypes in a day and testing. And they're not, and it's not what I see. Because you can almost get to that minimum viable product in three months instead of three years, people want to do that. But then they go native, the wrong native. You know, they get too committed to that product and then they can't kill it. Yeah. Cause they're like, well, we have a lot in this, you know? And so I'm going to keep iterating on this. Or so often teams say it's not ready yet. And, you know, it's so true that if, if you're not embarrassed, you're not launching early enough. Yeah. And launch is a wrong word.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  It's like you should turn it on to the level that you'll learn. Yes. But I kind of go to this question with founders, how ambitious are you? And everyone says a 10. And then when you unpack that 10, you're like, no, you're not actually. If you're really ambitious, you're willing to be wrong for a long time. Yep. You can be wrong for three years and then really right, or a little bit right every day. Most people take a little bit right. Like you, I'm an extreme AI optimist. And I believe that we are on the verge of the greatest gains in, you know, not just human productivity, but in proliferation of new kinds of services for humans by humans.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  I don't want to sound, you know, tone deaf about it, but my belief, just like every other era of the internet, the web, mobile, is that there's so many industries we can't imagine today that are going to pop up.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  In addition to being a great entrepreneur and creating stuff, you're also like one of the world's most dedicated dads. Your kids are amazing. You put a huge amount of time into it. You're always paying attention. You're doing things with them. Obviously, one of the things that games and, you know, social networks and everything else, people are worried about addictive phones, addictive games, addictive some apps. As a parent, what do you think? What do you do? What would you recommend the industry do the same or differently?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's a great question. The irony, right, is that so many of us who are spending our time building apps and working in this industry, shield our kids from it, but just the same way any parents could. And, you know, I'd argue should. So with my twin girls who are 15 now, I made it pretty far. I told them, no smartphone until you're 16. Now, they had to convince me eventually to get them a flip phone. So I said, you're gonna be the coolest kid. You're gonna be the only one with a flip phone. They didn't think they were cool. That got me a couple of years. And then, when they were 14, they did an internship at Niantic, working on Pokemon Go. They built a new first time user experience. I was very proud of it. And they convinced me they needed phones for that. And then I wasn't able to take them back away.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  But I said, you're permanently on probation. If I see you on your phone at dinner or not paying attention to your little brother or sister, your phone's gone forever. So I kind of put the fear of God in them. And it's a good question, though. I, we enjoy being together. We enjoy playing games together. We have really big debates. I try to meet them where they are. And they're, for the most part, they're on their phones way less than other kids. And I think that's really healthy. And, and I have noticed at times when one of them is on their screen for long periods of time, they get more isolated and, and just more flat and sometimes sad.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  And so I take it away and I'm like, go outside. But I think it's The reality is it's a parenting issue for all of us. And I don't, maybe it sounds self-serving, but I don't blame Facebook for this. You know, I don't think it's like cigarettes and it's a drug, or I don't blame games. I think it is a part of our culture and society that we, what are we modeling for them? We're on our phones constantly. We don't even want to look anymore at Apple showing us the amount of time we spend on our phones. And so I think most of us are. And so it seems hypocritical to, you know, for us to be doing this. It's like we're smoking cigarettes and then we blame the cigarette companies for our kids smoking.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Like, who do they see doing that? Now you say, well, how did we get addicted? But I think it's a, it's a real challenge. It's kind of giving all of us ADD. And it makes it, you know, harder than ever with our, we have a one-year-old, we have a four-year-old. And my partner is, she's very vigilant about like no screens ever. And a lot of my friends who are new parents are the same way. So I think, I'll tell you the other thing. The second I had my first, my twins, when they were born in 2010, I had two thoughts immediately. One was, how do I implant GPS devices? Because I never lose them.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Classic dad.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  And I was like, well, that's a good business model. You'll never stop paying for that. Someone told me it was not okay to do. People still don't do that. And then the other one was, could we make an app for parents that would gamify screen time for our kids? That would let us limit it and, you know, incentivize them? And I did, I did have a, I had one of those job wheels, like an analog job wheel, you know, that they would spin and they really enjoyed. So, yeah, so I don't, I don't have any magic answers other than, yeah, what, what I've done with my kids is to keep them off as, as long as I could. And, and they went through being into games.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And now my daughter, Georgia, is obsessed with chess and chess.com. And I was like, that's a more okay addiction, you know, than.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Well, and like obsession and commitment are a part of what can lead to a lot of success. You just, it has to be healthy versions present healthy.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  And the game that I really am trying to get them into, and I tell every parent, I'm like, Clog code.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Whether it's Clog Cowork, Codex, whatever it is, like, I basically think my kids should, and it pains me to see what high school is like today. And you, you don't go through this, you don't witness the way I do, but high school, it feels like it's the end of a hundred year cycle and our poor kids are stuck. My poor kids are stuck in it and it just doesn't feel efficient. They go there all day and then they come home and they get so much homework. My kids have homeschooled for the last semester and they were missing the social, but they had so much more time. They, they told me they learned more, so the learning efficiency went way up and they had way more time for other things.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  And I was like, okay, in an ideal world, they'd be doing, you know, much more efficient learning. And then if they were on a screen, it would be like for Clog Code and otherwise they're outside doing stuff and nothing in between.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  There was a huge amount of focus on the metaverse and now it's completely pivoted to AI. What prognostications on the future of the metaverse?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  I think that the metaverse is starting to happen and I think it's going to happen and it's going to be as big as Zuck thought. And it's just not going to happen inside of an immersive game goggle that is painful and hot to wear on your head, even if the form factor gets better. I think whether we start to wear devices that listen to us, whether we have AR, Ray-Bans, or whether we're just on the phone we've always been on. Like I was saying before, I, I think that everything is going to get more metaversian. I think that what's going to be the big unlock for games is the more that we put the real world,

• 30:06Speaker 02

  real humans, real social in our games, because basically games should be a good use of your time. There, it's this big a [bleep] industry and it's total waste of time. Imagine if games improved your life skills. Imagine if games were doing LinkedIn for you, you know? Imagine if you were getting a job by playing a game, like how much bigger would it be? So I think that's an unlock. And at the same time, I think that all of these, you know, the Duolingo's of the world, all of these apps are going to be more and more gamified. And I think that we're going to see.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  More playful, the winning services are going to become more fun and more rewarding, which is kind of, to me, part of the promise of the metaverse. And I also think just, once the unlock happens for consumer agentic AI, what's that gonna be? That's the [bleep] metaverse, right? When we have avatars that are roaming the world while we're not there and networking and finding us dates and jobs and new ways to make money, that's the metaverse, right? It just doesn't have to be immersive 3D. It could all happen in your brain because you're getting a message back, a text back that says, "Read AI just gave an amazing talk in Bombay.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  You crushed it."

• 31:32Speaker 03

  So, last question. What's a piece of advice you're glad you ignored?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Hmm. Well, I had a junior partner at Axcel once tell me, I think it was when I was trying to raise money for Zynga, and Axcel had backed Support.com for very successful outcome. And he said, "I just worry that you're not coachable." And I said, "That's a tricky one. I actually have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all them and I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job, who's never sat in this seat." And so, I guess it's not exactly advice, but it was implied advice of, I should pretend that I'm gonna learn something from the person with money or the adult, and I've always kind of said no to that.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  By the way, I agree with you. The classic VC stupidity is, "I'm a pattern recognizer and I see patterns." Look, patterns are useful. Also know how to play the game.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you just look at patterns, you might miss the pattern interrupt.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Which is usually like AI.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Which is also usually the thing that is the discontinuous investment.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Right, which is usually the best outcomes. And everyone else is looking at patterns, playing the same game, and you know from your brilliant Settlers of Catan that you have to have some different strategy in your back pocket, or you can't expect a different outcome.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Mark, always a pleasure.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  It's been 10 years, but worth it to get to-

• 33:00Speaker 03

  And we'll do it again soon.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Thanks again to Mark Pincus for joining us on Masters of Scale. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love. It's a fantastic read, full of actionable insights like the ones he shared in his conversation here with Reed. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you for listening.

• 33:30Speaker 00

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• 34:10Speaker 00

  Before we get to the rest of our conversation today, I want to spend a moment sharing with you about Masters of Scale Summit, which returns to San Francisco this October 20th to 22nd. So many of us feel overwhelmed right now. It feels like so much of the world is careening and we don't have power. We don't have agency. That's the thing about the Masters of Scale Summit. It's really designed to remind us that we do have agency. Agency to lead, agency to design, to build the relationships and the partnerships that empower us and to make the change that we want to see. We program a stage, we curate an audience, we set a schedule that builds in time for these relationships to be made and to grow, so

• 34:53Speaker 00

  that by the time you leave Summit, you are fired out of a cannon, ready to run through walls to do better in the world with the agency that you actually have. I hope to see you there. Visit mastersofscale.com/summit.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Senior supervising producer is Tricia Bobita. Associate producer is Masha Makatana. Video editor is Noah Wallstein. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lee Tal Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And be sure to check out our YouTube channel.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  How do we build a future that is human centered?

• 36:47Speaker 08

  I'm Rana Elkhawyubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.