Mark Pincus: Lessons from Zynga & Tribe

Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur and investor who founded the early social media company Tribe Networks, and the mobile social gaming company Zynga. More recently he co-founded investment firm Reinvent Capital in 2018.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpa the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, a company that pioneered social free-to-play gaming.

Beyond Zynga, Mark is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and tech visionary, who's got his fingers on the pulse of many different industries. One thing I love about Mark is that he's always learning, always trying to get better. 

Mark: Are you trying to learn? And I've been there, I started one of the first three social networks tribe and I managed to fail because I stubbornly held on to one losing variant and I wasn't trying to learn. That was a painful lesson.

And with Zynga, I said, I'm not going to do that. I'm really going to [00:01:00] test and let this combination of intuition and data feedback loops drive me in the right direction. 

Amy: Come listen in as I talk with Mark about the lessons he learned as the founder of Zynga and the social network tribe and what his vision is for web three and beyond.

Welcome Mark to the Game Thinking Academy. You're a entrepreneur and an investor. And everybody knows you co-founded Zynga, but not everybody knows about your track record of being a visionary and seeing the future. I hope I'm not making you blush, but you have an amazing track record. Help desk automation, social networking, gaming.

Now you're pioneering SPACs, like you're always one step ahead in non obvious ways. What's the thread there for you? What is it that makes you jump into these new things that you're seeing that the rest of us aren't? 

Mark: It depends on how far back we want to go [00:02:00] with threads. For me, it goes all the way back to when I was in college, which is in the late eighties, before maybe some of the audience is born, I read George Gilder and he had this book called the microcosm and he said, the next 50 years are going to be about building out everything inside the world that we can't see.

And it's the microchip and the network and I got really into it. And I said, that's what I want to do. Not the technology part of it, but thinking about how do we make all of this technology useful in people's daily lives. And that became my career passion. I went to work for John Malone at TCI and Liberty Media because I thought cable companies were the super tankers and in the best position.

And I worked, it used to be called New Media, which was like the flake department. And then the internet came along and a bunch of us were like, Oh, now there's [00:03:00] something quasi real. It still felt like a hobbyist thing, but I said, okay, now there's actually a way for this to get to someone's desktop computer and matter.

And I'd say my career started when I became a product manager. So I worked at a venture capital firm in DC and I became a product manager at a company. That was the first real day of my career, my career learning and progression was I love the job of a product manager of having to bring all the pieces together and connect all the dots between your engineers, your end users, your business constraints, and, um, I really devoted my career to being what I call the product maker and really caring about user experiences down to the pixel level and then applying discipline approaches to testing and really valuing engineering days like gold and saying, [00:04:00] they're so limited.

It's our job to use them in a responsible way that is more likely to deliver value for people. And so in the first round of the Internet, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and mobile, each time I got really turned on by it. The new things that the network could do and thinking, how can that be relevant in people's lives?

A breakthrough moment for me. My matrix moment was the first time I used Napster, which Sean Parker, who worked for me for the summer when he was 14, emailed me the business plan. And I got on Napster and I was blown away. I said, Oh my God, I'm not alone. There's four and a half million computers connected to mine right now.

And that was for me, the beginning of very early beginnings of the social networking revolution, but a lot of years earlier. So that also led to me getting excited about investing in other [00:05:00] founders and entrepreneurs where I thought they were early on to. Amazing new products and thought I could help.

And so I try to be kind of full stack product person and a full stack investor and be thinking all the way from a product experience to public markets. 

Amy: I love it. So what you said about Napster. Being early really reminds me so much of what's going on in crypto and we could go down a two hour crypto rabbit hole.

No problem. But let's keep it tight. I would like your thoughts and take on crypto in general because everybody, let me start by saying everybody's trying to figure it out all around me here in Silicon Valley. People are working in and investing in and talking up crypto and there's also tons of scams.

And they're just right there and it can be a really [00:06:00] tricky landscape to navigate. So as someone who's got your perspective, what do you see? 

Mark: So first of all, if I backtrack for a second, um, before I say what I think is interesting about crypto for me, every time there's been a next generation of this network platform, there's been an opportunity to invent new, what I call internet treasures. 

And John Doerr coined this term for me of an internet treasure. And it's a service. We can't remember life before or imagine life without. And in the first iteration ended with giving us Google, which I think we'd all think of as a quintessential, um, example of an internet treasure.

And on the next generation, we got these social services, Instagram to Facebook, to WhatsApp. We can debate how treasured they are at the moment, but I think [00:07:00] people just rely on them. And now we're at this, um, juncture of this, but some people are calling web three, some people calling metaverse. And first of all, let me just tell you how I define my criteria at a consumer level.

How do you decide, is this going to happen? Is this the next platform or not? To me, and this is the way I try to describe it to my mom or, you know, people who don't care about technology. It needs to deliver a three X improvement in productivity. So in the beginning, we love it because it's cool and new and emergent.

So a lot of us fell in love the web and played with it. And we tell our friends and family, it's going to be amazing. And they roll their eyes. And then eventually it actually delivered. And we saw the same thing, whether you think of web 2.0 or the social web. And for sure, we saw that with mobile. I think that was the easiest to see that this bar of a three X [00:08:00] improvement and productivity. 

And I believe that we are going to get there with this new decentralized internet and then in so many ways, it's going back to where we were with web 2.0. Web 2.0 was open databases. It was decentralized API services that developers could mash up together and dynamically deliver new services for end users very quickly.

And that's where Zynga came out of. It was a quintessential product of the web 2.0 platform. And I think it was a 3x improvement in productivity, even though you might not think of that for people playing games, because it was free. It was much more accessible. It was three clicks and you're in, and it was immediately social.

And I think that led to mass market adoption of gaming, which obviously mobile multiplied that even magnified that even more. And [00:09:00] now in a lot of ways, to me, the power of this metaverse is getting back to that decentralization of services of APIs and the ability to innovate. And I feel like we've gotten off of that path.

I feel mobile has frozen all of us as developers and users in this fragmented state that it's nearly impossible to connect all of these apps together for developers or users. And what excites me most about the metaverse is not the version of ready player one, that's. The VR immersion side of the sci fi future.

It's the speed. When I think of the book, ready player one, the magic in it to me was the idea that you could just talk to some agent and amazing magical things would happen. And so much of it is, can we automate these functions in the digital world [00:10:00] that affect our lives, our real lives in the analog world?

That's the magic of Uber, of Airbnb, of so many of these services. My example is my daughter, Carmen. She has been working all through the pandemic on her own fashion brand that she calls ComyFancy, and ideas to build, to create sustainable, fast fashion for girls design for girls by girls. And she calls it ComyFancy.

Cause that's what she wants. And it's daunting for her and me to build that online today. The number of steps to figure out a trademark and a website and help on design and manufacturing and supply and prototype. But there's probably three or 400 steps that I think could be massively automated, and that's just to get to the product.

I imagine a day in the Metaverse where some [00:11:00] other girl is gonna have her own version of Aviator Nation and she's gonna franchise her store out and without ever meeting Carmen, she's gonna drag and drop Carmen's cool new Save the Reef sweatshirt into her store. And another girl is going to find that store somewhere and drag and drop the sweatshirt, which might be numbered, limited edition, NFT, whatever, into her backpack.

She'll wear it on her avatar and it'll get mailed to her house. And none of them will actually ever meet unless they want to. That would take a lot of steps to make work today. But it's all possible from a technology standpoint. It's just, I think, at a system level, it hasn't been architected for that to easily occur.

Amy: That's fascinating. I love your perspective. It's really interesting. Everybody's got a different definition of the metaverse and what's important in it, right? And, but what your perspective locks in on is the economic and [00:12:00] increased throughput and accessibility layer of it. And so many things are driven.

By the economy, the big hit Axie Infinity, which I'm sure you're aware of, right? 

Mark: Yes. 

Amy: To me, I look at that and it's like, some game devs are like, Oh, we could do better graphics, but they're missing the point. It's the economy going on in there. That's really interesting. 

Mark: Yeah. I, I was lucky enough to be amongst the first investor in Dapper Labs when CryptoKitties was blowing up.

You could look at it as so primitive at a technology level or at a game design level, but it was just so innovative to be the first NFT really that, and it captured the imaginations of so many people. And it's fun for me to see people combine all these things and play with it. And, And we're just in a massive time now of innovation and playing with things.

And so I, I think the rate of [00:13:00] innovation right now is incredible. And out of it, I think we will. answer this question of the productivity gains. 

Amy: That's interesting. So you invested in dapper labs with CryptoKitties. That's early, right? So what are the signals? You're sitting in a meeting with someone and there's going to be some signals that make you go, Oh, I'm leaning forward.

You're listening more. What are some of those signals? Maybe some of the ones that triggered that investment. 

Mark: Well, there's really the best, easiest, obvious ones are, they've touched a nerve, that you can tell that they've hit some new vein. And that was when I invested in Napster or Facebook or Twitter or Dapper in each of those cases, I saw this flame lit and that they capture the imaginations of a lot of users.

So that's the first. But then [00:14:00] beyond that, you're looking for the team. And is this a founder that got there for a lot of good reasons and not necessarily just by accident that they're hungry, they're curious, they're humble. They want to learn in each of these cases, these founders were just sponges. And so it's a good marriage because they want to learn and there's.

Some things that I have to offer, especially around thinking about game mechanics and how to be efficient at product management and testing. And so they're all of a sudden on a rocket ship and they need to be really smart and efficient. And they're looking to have investors who, you know, have something to offer.

Amy: So conversely, when you think about all the meetings you've had, are there any signals that jump out to you that make you lean back. Let's say you're interested. You hear something, you see something, you're like, "Nope!" 

Mark: For me, the core [00:15:00] lesson that I'm still trying to learn and I'm trying to share is that as product makers, we really need to be these scientists in white lab coats.

To be successful, we've got to be passionate, but not emotional, which is a weird juxtaposition. We have to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. And so what I look for is that signal that entrepreneur is trying to tune into the instincts and they're not in love with their own ideas. And the danger is, and I also say, be careful not to let a B plus be the enemy of an A because it's easier to just fail with an F.

Then with a B plus and so the B plus you're getting some signals back that tell you it's worth going on, but they're not that crisp a they're not. Yes, they're a little off. And what do you do with that? How do you [00:16:00] recognize that? How do you know when it's a B plus you should kill or a B plus you should work in on a part of it is.

Are you trying to learn? And, and I've been there. I started one of the first three social networks tribe, and I managed to fail. And I say managed to fail when everything works. When people open the email that said, Amy wants to be your friend. Oh, cool. I'll be Amy's friend. What is that? And I still managed to fail.

And it's because I stubbornly held on to one losing variant, and I wasn't trying to learn. And, and I was, that was a painful lesson. And with Zynga, I said, I'm not going to do that. I'm really going to test and let this combination of intuition and data feedback loops drive me in the right direction. 

And so I'm looking for founders that are on that journey. And it's hard because so many game designers see this as an art [00:17:00] and it's art and science much more so than an e-commerce site. No one cares if you copy the exact button location and color of Amazon, but they really care if you do that in a game. 

And so there's this respect for originality and a desire to be original. And how do you know when you're doing new for the sake of your player or for the sake of walking around and getting respect at GDC. 

Amy: Oh, guilty as charged. That one hurts. 

Mark: I don't have that problem because I've never been invited to GDC. 

Amy: No.

Mark: Yeah, honestly. Actually, in the very beginning of Zynga, they invited me to be on a panel on what is social gaming, and then they never invited me back. 

Amy: Wow. Yeah, I think we know where the important stuff is happening and it's not impressing smart people in a small group, but it all depends on which game you're playing.

I think it's hard, especially for people raising money. Cause [00:18:00] when you're raising money, you're a salesperson, you need to sound confident. And then when you're building product, you're a scientist, you need to be brutal. You're like, is it working or not? I'm not attached. Let's make it work. And I think that shift from salesperson to scientist is underneath what you're saying.

Like the person has to be able to do both and know the difference. 

Mark: And if you exude self confidence, but not false confidence, I think you'll probably attract the smartest investors. 

Amy: So, you know, this conversation about game design and testing and et cetera, leads into one of the really interesting and controversial things happening in crypto gaming.

And this question comes from Adam Chelmers, one of our participants here who's working on a blockchain game. This question is about the emerging trend of collectibles first gaming, objects first gaming. Right. Loot project is the high profile example of [00:19:00] that, but you see a lot of other examples and touch points.

What do you see? What are your thoughts on this? 

Mark: I'm fascinated and I'm trying to learn as well. I think we're all learning with what we see in the market. And I think on the one hand, we see a lot of old game mechanics. working in a great way. And then I think on the other hand, I think that the buyers and investors in this market are increasing in their sophistication very quickly.

And so we're starting to already see different value in what you're collecting and there's collecting for the sake of the art, the scarcity, the collectability of it. And then we're seeing the utility And then we're seeing the potential for passive income or an increase in value. And we're seeing people mash up all three.

And I don't know which is going to [00:20:00] win or why, but my instinct, as I look at the market is that I would bet on the systems. That are the most generative over time. Is it a generative company economically that you believe is going to generate a lot of positive economic news in the future and economic results in the future that will increase the network effect of investors around that stock that will support it because each of these are a marketplace.

And I think there's, like you said, where there's scams. There's also a gray area where there are marketplaces launching that have a lot of initial support, which is great, but then are they going to have support ongoing? And are they going to organically be generative systems that will continue to attract that support [00:21:00] in a more and more competitive market over time?

Amy: Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? And there's no simple answer. In fact, it seems like maybe the teams behind them don't even know if they're going to keep going, cause they have to see how they do. So it's, so it's, it is not for the faint of heart, this market. One of the things that's so iconic about Zynga is the way that you figured out how to harness virality for better and for worse navigating that.

And now there's something very similar going on, but different in crypto, which is how you build a community that's interested in your project, essentially, right before maybe largely before I see a ton of that. Do you see that too? 

Mark: Yes. 

Amy: Yeah, and then you have this great product management background and like goggles to look at the world through. So, how do you now think about driving virality having been through web to run through all [00:22:00] the experiments that you ran through at Zynga.

Learned what you learned. You're bringing that now into your advising startups and you're investing. How do you think about that? And how do you see like current best practices or just interesting ideas on the horizon? 

Mark: The playbook is always changing and evolving. And it was even for us, even when we, we weren't on what I would call just a totally stable system.

It was an evolving system. The mobile ecosystem is also evolving. And now there's more dimensions. In this system, and this system has way more about network effects and about community and perception, both potentially in the underlying token that a project is on, as well as the perception of the project and the people behind the project, you get a lot of false signals.

So you're deconstructing and trying to figure out what, [00:23:00] what works, why is it working? Right? So I hear so many different opinions on why Axie is successful and I hear people say, well, cause it's a real game and it's the first one that's a real game. And then I hear other people say, no, it's because they've developed this system for people to work and be paid minors in the game and they create more network effects.

And then I hear other people say it's the best drug delivery system because It's the least clicks to get an increase in value. And I can't tell you today why Axie broke out and others didn't. I think in six months we'll all have, I think, a much more accurate. opinion around it than we do today. And so you, you've got to also be careful that you're not taking away the wrong lessons.

That part was the same. When we saw Fortnite breakout, you see these [00:24:00] breakouts and you wonder, okay, is this a new genre of gaming? It kind of was not, we didn't see 10 other fortnights. 

Amy: Same with Minecraft. Same with Among Us. Remember when like everybody was going to copy Among Us and now they're all like, oops.

Mark: Yeah. And it's definitely the idea of fast following and just copying something is going to be much harder to make happen in this market because there's so many other parts of the playbook around community and perception. The one thing that was true, I think in the beginning of Zynga and it's been misunderstood and I see it as a thread, a through line to today is that you grow through retention, not virality.

I responded to Chris Dixon or somebody On Twitter the other day. And I said, it's a sinking speedboat and you decide whether to drive faster or bail out water [00:25:00] faster, or try to fix the hole in the bottom and fixing the hole in the bottom is what drives the long term value. And it turns out it's where you're most aligned with your players too.

So if you can try to build products and systems that feel forever, and if the player feels like you have a. A long term commitment to it. And you give them a reason to want to invest in it. And now they can own part of it. You're most likely to get retention, drive long term value. And oddly it's what drives the internet treasures.

I look at the Day-365 retention and an internet treasure probably has a D-365 of north of 90%. And if it's north of 30%, you end up with a Twitter, you know, or a Snapchat. And if it's north of 10%, you end up with a Candy Crush Saga or a World of Warcraft or a Words with Friends. And those are forever [00:26:00] franchises, even at 10%.

What encourages me about where we're heading is. that clearly when someone feels invested and they feel ownership in the game and in the community, they're more likely to be there in a year. And it's a self fulfilling prophecy. 

Amy: Love it. I love everything you just said. So if you folks in the audience have questions, type them in and we'll get to you.

We do have a question that came in from Chris, one of our students. He wants to know, about the relationship between in game analytics and strategic thinking. And boy, are you the right person. Says, did your in game analytics help your strategic thinking? Did they ever get in the way? What do you know now about using in game analytics you wish you'd known earlier?

Mark: Sure. That's a, it's a great question. And one that I could talk about that one question for a long time. Yeah, it's. You live and grow by the sword and then you die on that same sword. [00:27:00] And that's, that Zynga was a victim of that, that we were a victim of our own data and analytics. And, and the one muscle that I wasn't able to really replicate and teach across the company was intuition and knowing which data to listen to and which not to, and I'll give you one example of the way we got it wrong is when you.

Misread the short term data and you don't listen to your own intuition. We had a game called Yoville and we created this bakery and the bakery used the Farmville harvest mechanic and said, great, it's an appointment mechanic. And if you commit to be back at the same time tomorrow at the bakery, we're going to give you a lot of coins.

So in the short term, it increased engagement. And we saw more and more users coming back on the next day and it looked [00:28:00] great. But then over time, after a month or so, we saw the long term retention going down and it's cause it wasn't fun. It was all of a sudden another job. And that's where we have to be careful.

When we look at systems like Axie, we may fall into that trap where we create a job for somebody, literally. That's not fun. And as soon as it doesn't pay well enough, or even if it does, they leave. And so we constantly have to triangulate between our own intuition and experience with that game and what the data is telling us, and we can go the other direction and be wrong that we feel great about something, but the data says no one else does, but the best is when it all lines up together and.

For me, the biggest hits that we put out at Zynga were the ones that had amazing data and I was addicted to the game. So I was addicted to FarmVille and CityVille and Words with Friends and the data [00:29:00] played out. Another way that I try to encourage my teams to think about it, at least to follow me, cause people will accuse me of coming in with a totally different idea every Monday and in my own defense, I say, let's make sure we're, we're talking at the same altitude.

So sometimes we're at 5,000 feet and we're deep in the data and we're talking about our D1 retention and what's our ROAS on whatever, payback on our ads. And then sometimes we want to go up to 25,000 feet. And to me, that's at a product strategy level. And now we're thinking at a bigger level of our roadmap and where is this getting us over time?

And is this In line with where we want to go and then we could be at a 50,000 foot or 100,000 foot level. And now we're talking about, okay, does this line up with our overall objectives and vision and of where we think the market's going? And I think it's important. [00:30:00] for teams that are bigger than two or three people to check in on what altitude you're at, because you can get to the wrong places because One person's talking about data loops at a 5,000 foot level and another is talking about company strategy.

Amy: Oh my God. I'm so guilty of that. I get an idea and I want to tell everybody, but we try and have a meeting once a week where we talk strategy and channel it into that. I don't know if you do anything like that. 

Mark: Yes. And I also have to constantly preface things by saying I want to be clear. That I'm giving you feedback right now, not direction, or this is a brainstorm, not direction.

And we do everything in Google docs, which seems to be the best enterprise software I've found. And, and we say, what is our plan of record? And is that changing? Because my teams are amazing and they will change the product plan based on. [00:31:00] me arguing passionately for something, but I'm saying, wait, wait, let, that's not the plan of record.

Amy: And we have another question that came in from Adam, and this is about a talk that you gave at village global. It's on YouTube. And you use this term, go after bold ideas, but design in early bold beats where you can discover how players are responding. I want to dig into bold beats. What are bold beats?

Mark: Okay. So bold beats, and, and I also, I don't know if I should have been invited to this, but I gave a talk at American express to their top 50 managers and the board of directors. And what, what I talked to, as I said, we find ourselves in every size organization, product organization. As a product leader, if you're not the one doing the product, if you're managing through other people, we, we tend to get frustrated by this barbell.

We either have [00:32:00] teams that are at one side of the barbell and I've in the past said they're pursuing little features that have a very clear ROI per engineering day, very short feedback loops, and they can prove it was a good use of time, but they don't change and improve the product. In fact, they might make it worse.

So it's a lot of local optimizations or they're at the other end of the spectrum and they're boiling the ocean. And they're working on a three year rattan death March of this project that people by forgotten even what the point of the project is, but they're committed to it and it takes on a life of its own and everyone feels shackled by it.

And you're building a product or a game and you find yourself six months in and you're not excited anymore about the exact direction or you're on a live product. And oh my God, I'm so bored with this. And I wish we could do something more exciting. The idea of bold beats is to give you permission to go [00:33:00] after your big ideas today.

And the idea of a bold beat is, can you take your biggest, boldest idea and boil it down to something that you could bring out to your users in the next month or less? This doesn't have to be, but that's the way I think about it. It's. at least within this quarter, it's going to have isolated impact. So if you're wrong, it's not painful to tear it back out, but it's going to tell you something directionally.

And a great example in Farmville, we did a bold beat around crafting and we talked about it forever. We were so into Minecraft. We introduced one little crafting feature that took about a month and our players loved it. And so then we spent six months building crafting as a system, crafting cottages became a core system into FarmVille. 

And then it was so popular that became the basis of FarmVille too. So you can do something [00:34:00] bold. And also in FarmVille, another example of bold beat was an engineer spent one day just animating the GIF so that the animal moved and it made our players dream with us that they were giving more dimensions to the game.

And so It's like, Oh my God, is this going to lead to breeding and which is now a big part of Farmville three or horse racing or whatever. And so an amazing bull beat is something that you do that's really teeny, but it gets your players and everyone dreaming of a new dimension. The power of a bull beat is it's, it can make your team move much faster because when you get that level of feedback loop.

From your users that you saw at work, it's like just pouring fuel on the fire. And your team all of a sudden is so excited that the rate that you move towards this idea might be 10X faster. 

Amy: It almost sounds like the Bold B in its ideal form [00:35:00] is an MVP for a potential new system. 

Mark: Yeah. It's a way of testing an idea, usually in an already live product. And yeah, it's, it gives you an advantage if you're an incumbent in the market and you can test these ideas, you're not in a vacuum and someone else competing with you is in a vacuum and they, especially in games, they spend a year or two speculating on, on what players are going to want and you're able to be in the market, trying these big ideas and when you get it right, and sometimes we got it right, This is going to sound hokey, but it's almost a religious spiritual experience.

It's a feeling of grace. It's a feeling of communion with your players, especially making social systems. I've had players hug me because they just loved something that we did. And if you get it right, [00:36:00] you're getting to surprise and delight. We get so jaded, especially in games. a bad relationship. You're just, you open the game, you know exactly what's going to be.

I, I feel like I'm a cog that they're moving around and I know the plot line and it's not fun and there's nothing new. Like a bold beat is a positive disruption and it's so fun when you do it right. To really just deliver something, my friend Bing Gordon calls an OMFG moment. I can't believe that they just did that.

And it's like breaking some rule in a great way that your players love you for. 

Amy: I love it. Oh, that's so cool. That's really inspiring. So we got a bunch of questions pouring in and I know we're, Um, definitely get committed to stopping at the hour, but Amir, who is working on a blockchain products and is joining us from Russia [00:37:00] asks, are there any lessons Mark that you've learned from building tribe.

net that would still be relevant today for those who are looking to build a new social network? 

Mark: Wow, yes, there's so many. You want to give yourself this gift of a time machine. What if Amir, you could go forward in time, two years. Or backward in time two years. What if a mere 2023 could come back and talk to you today and say, dude, I've got some good news and bad news.

The good news is you were right. The world did want another kind of social network that was blockchain, blah, blah, blah. The bad news is you were slightly off. It was a B plus and your variant didn't make it. It just it didn't. The dog didn't hunt. What would you do with that information today? Would you just go on and say, okay, I'm just committed to this path?

No, hell no. You'd say, great, I'm going to [00:38:00] try four other variants and I'm going to increase my frequency tuners to what other people are doing. And I'm going to spend the next two years moving my ability to execute on this. Not just my execution. I'm going to be, I'm waiting for someone else to get the variant and show me the way, what is the breakthrough here?

And I'm going to test a bunch myself, but I'm going to use everyone else in the market as part of my crowd based learning and R and D. And it turns out if I had done that with tribe. I think I would have been far more successful if I said, okay, my space is a different variant and Facebook is really going deep on trust.

So I'm going to build a different variant that is all about trust and dot edu or inside the. com of your company. So the first lesson to me to take away from that is to think about what you're doing in terms of your ability to execute [00:39:00] and your ability to test. And try lots of ideas and get your team thinking that way as well.

The second lesson, don't be too complicated. I was too complicated with tribe as part of, I have. Pretty extreme ADD, a lot of product makers do. And I love all my ideas equally. And it's so hard to just pick one of them. And I'm like, but how can I not do these other ideas? And with tribe, I did so many more ideas than Facebook or Myspace or LinkedIn.

They were all in tribe. I had, you got a professional profile. You had a social personal profile, the tribes had threaded message groups. And each of those could have been its own whole product or industry. We were before Reddit, but I couldn't go deeper than an inch on any of those ideas. So those are, you know, two lessons.

And I, to this day, literally yesterday, I said to my team, let's make sure that we're not doing tribe on our next product. 

Amy: [00:40:00] That's incredible. Oh my God. That was so valuable. And again, been there. Deep breath. So Maurice, who's working on a really incredible location based product asks, when has a bold beat gone wrong for you?

And then how did, what did you do? How did you recover? 

Mark: Most bold beats fail. Most new things fail. And what, what, We tried to do it Zynga and Frank and team. They've still do to this day is they try for every team to launch. At least one bold beat a quarter on their product roadmaps. And I think that's a good goal.

That's very achievable, even though the bold beats may not break through. I think it's more inspiring for a team that you want them to try. I'll give you off the top of my head. Probably the worst bull beat I can think of again was in Yoville. And I'm not trying to pick on Yoville. We had this bull beat idea in Yoville [00:41:00] that you could.

Get married or you could have a, an avatar child. So. Amy and my avatar could have a child together and there was a lot of heat and interest around it, but it just, it was a little weird. It just was maybe flirty in ways you don't want to be flirty and a little just awkward. So we killed that. 

Maurice: That's an incredible story.

So you guys just, you put it out there and then you got the, you got the feedback. This is a little creepy. And then you just pull back. What'd you do? 

Mark: Yeah, it's really important when you launch a bull beat that we take our users with us in terms of their expectations and that we don't launch it in a way that they feel this is a new permanent feature, because the other problem you have is inevitably two to 5 percent of your users actually like it and don't want it to go [00:42:00] away and they're angry at you when you take it away. 

There is an art to this. Like, it's great to call this beta. It's also great to say, Hey, we're beta testing this. Do you want to opt into this beta test and take them with you?

The truth will set you free. And the transparency of just saying, we're trying out this new idea for a month. Do you want to be part of this experiment more people Actually want to try it that way. And they want to give you feedback and they're more forgiving of you. 

Amy: Wow. That is great advice. So I'd like to invite everyone to turn on their cameras so we can thank Mark and let Mark see us as well.

Man, this is so fun, Mark. 

Mark: And feel free to email me to at super.iomark. And I had this policy at Zynga that I responded to every single email employees sent me and I still try to live up to that. And at times I, [00:43:00] I don't achieve it. I get emails and people say, I loved what you said. Will you mentor me?

And can we have one on one time to help me on my business plan? And I've learned that's not a high leverage way for me to help people. But, you know, email me. I try to answer questions and redirect towards other people who can be helpful. So I do my best. 

Amy: Thank you so much. I'll share all of that. We do have one last question, which is a deep question, but again, just getting a quick perspective for you would be great.

What do you see as the main advantages of decentralization versus centralization? I think you touched on it, Mark, when you talked about speed and automation. Is there, So you nailed that. There's a lot of stuff being decentralized that shouldn't be. Is there anything that really nails it that, Oh my God, yes, that should be decentralized.[00:44:00] 

Mark: I think that we got to get to smaller, easier beats on innovation so we can test and move faster and it feels too heavy right now to me, the metaverse that I've wanted since. I first blogged about my idea for the metaverse in 2006, and I called it dot earth is life at the speed of play. And when you think about why are games more fun, we feel like our decisions can matter, but there isn't a lot of negative consequences.

They're just, it's just fast and fun and easy. And that's what development should be like. And that's what using these systems should be like. And right now. It doesn't feel like that, that the mobile development world to me is a grind. It's just, it feels a lot heavier than when I was starting Zynga and I could just [00:45:00] in a couple of weeks, put out an app and test it on a Facebook canvas page.

Look, there's these monolithic apps, like the photo app. Nothing against Apple, but Apple is not going to be able to come up with all of the cool new ideas that we should have around photos in a time frame that's going to help us. I think that the photo apps just suck. I don't know about you, but every time I want to show pictures of my daughter Carmen surfing, it's like I have to trick the app.

I have to go into search and I'm like, okay, 2017 Hawaii. And why can't I just talk to the metaverse and whatever? And can you find me these awesome pictures of Carmen surfing in Costa Rica in maybe 2017 and they should just come up and why isn't voice recognition, just an open API service that we can all use?

Why isn't photo apps? Why isn't that just an open API system? Everything should be open [00:46:00] API systems that we can all play with and mash up and try new things with. And it just frustrates me. Life at the speed of play is about the shortest time from your idea to other people. How do I make it short and fun in terms of cycles to take my idea and get it out there so that other people can consume it?

And tell me if It's worth investing more in, or so I oddly feel like our, this mobile app ecosystem has massively slowed down the rate of innovation. There's no question on social between Facebook and Apple and Google. I feel like we've come to a total standstill on the innovation evolution of social. I don't feel like social has really moved much in the last 7 or 8 years. 

When's the last time that was a breakthrough social app or [00:47:00] even social game, not even one a year. So I have a lot of frustration around this. And I think I'm hopeful that decentralizing this and making more open interconnected APIs and services is going to get us all back in the game. 

Amy: Yay. I love that. Thank you, Mark. Let's all thank Mark. That was amazing.

Oh my God. My head is spinning. Thanks for carving out this time for us. We appreciate it so much. All right, take care. Bye. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpa with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpa.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast [00:48:00] episodes.