Mark Pincus Took Zynga Public Then Named “Worst CEO” in 12 Months Before a $12.7 Billion Acquisition | Ep. 431 with Mark Pincus Founder of Zynga

0:00You have an instinct that probably is a multi-billion dollar company right now, but you'll f*** it up because of your ego. He founded Zynga, took it public, and the company was acquired for$12.7 billion. But first, he almost lost everything. This is Mark Pincus. I went from being named founder of the year in the end of 2011 to fortune naming me one of the five worst CEOs in America. and then in 2012, Facebook changed their algorithm and we lost a third of our traffic in a day soon after we were a$2 stock. And my dad saying, I didn't finish the job in raising you and you didn't turn out to be the man I hoped.

0:40I just said, and I left. A lot of young people right now, they don't see billionaires as heroes anymore. And they're almost telling me that the system is rigged. I could sound toned up like...

1:02Zynga was one of the most influential stocks I've ever purchased. It really was one of the first high-performing stocks that I had. I think maybe it was 10 years ago when I purchased. But let's go back in your childhood. What was something that happened to you when you were a child that remained an influence up to this day? Well, two things come to my mind right away. One is, I would say I was addicted to video games and just games and playing, as is my son who's sitting here off camera. He's not video games. He's addicted to playing. He always wants to play. And so I was always trying to get people to play games with me from an early age.

1:47but what I'd say was even more impactful in my life direction was a falling out I had with my dad when I was about 18 and I think so many of us especially men kind of hit this point where we either kind of double down on our parents especially our dad and become more like them or we kind of rebel. And, and in this case, it was kind of my dad calling me on it saying, he kind of said, I, I, I didn't finish the job in raising you and you didn't turn out to be the man I hoped. And so I'm taking you out of college and you're going to come work for me so I can finish raising you. And since I was so much like my dad, I just said, fuck you.

2:34And I left and, uh, and, and, And ended up supporting myself, and it really just put me on a totally different path. And it kind of made me grow up at a much earlier age, because I not only let go get jobs and have to become self-sufficient earlier, but I had to think more about what I wanted to do in the world and how was I going to make money, because I thought money was freedom. And, you know, it would let me go have the life I want and not have to buckle under to my dad or anybody else. Let's talk about your father. I know that he passed away in September. You rang the bell in December. When you were standing there at that bell, were you thinking about him?

3:26Yeah, I was. He and my dad and I repaired the relationship by the time I graduated from college. And he was really proud of me. And he turned into being, his greatest role in life was being Grandpa Teddy. And he was like the greatest grandpa to everybody and just the sweetest guy. And we really became friends. And yeah, and he was really proud. And I actually, another little fight we had was, I originally didn't want to let him invest in Zynga because I'd had such a bad experience with my previous company, Tribe.net, and I had some friends invest and lose their money, and I was scarred by it. And I thought, this is so risky.

4:09This could all fail, and I don't want to have to carry that burden again. Like, you're going to war, and you don't want to have to worry about the people who are relying on you. And I said, I'm not letting anyone invest this time. And then my dad got really mad at me, and he said, how can you not let your family invest? And I said, okay, okay. And so I let them invest. And yeah, he was really proud. And my dad had built this financial PR firm called the Financial Relations Board. They took nationwide. And he was really into public company communications and IPOs and all this stuff, way more than me.

4:52So he would have... And I'd had a company go public. support.com went public in 2000 so he got to go through that but but this was on a much bigger scale so i think he would have really loved it or the me what did it feel like when you went public when you saw this massive success i mean zynga was huge i remember when it actually went public and did you think about all those failures those hardships getting fired everywhere going through rock bottom, doing something that you thought was going to be amazing and it just didn't, it collapsed. Was that going through your mind? In some way that that's always present.

5:34And it's, it's, it's always been in my consciousness, like the, the, the thin, thin line between success and failure for me and for so many other people. And I don't, I can't say, I think for a lot of founders, the IPO is kind of like a false peak. You know what nobody warns you about as a founder? How fast the years catch up on you. Late night stress, bad sleep. I started feeling it. And that's why I began taking Blueprints longevity mix. If you spend time online, you've seen Blueprints founder, Brian Johnson. He's the don't die guy running one of the most measured longevity experiments in the world, tracking his biometrics and publishing all the data.

6:23This is the exact formula he drinks every morning. Instead of a cabinet full of pills, it's one scoop of water done. It helps support energy, focus, sleep, and healthy aging with ingredients like magnesium, one of my favorites, creatine, taurine. everything is third-party tested for purity and they publish the results for a limited time new customers get 20 off plus free shipping at blueprint.brianjohnson.com with code founders at checkout that's code founders it's it i think if you i had been through it once before so i knew it was a false peak i mean it's not a real victory moment it's like that's why they always say okay this is day one.

7:10It's a reminder to them and their company to say this is not an endpoint. I don't want to celebrate. It feels kind of icky to me. It felt a little icky, but everyone around you wants to. The world is. It's the ring the bell. We did it in our lobby at our headquarters, partially because I didn't want to be away from my kids. Then Facebook did it in a bigger way at their headquarters. But it's just, it feels, it's kind of like being on the cover of Fortune Magazine. It's like, okay, things can only go down from here. And you're kind of setting yourself up energetically for that. The world isn't, they're kind of applauding you in that moment, but then they kind of don't want to see you succeed.

7:55That's what it all felt like. And you have a lot of employees that say, I wanted to be at a public company. I wanted to go through an IPO. oh, now I have goodbye. And so the culture changed. So anyway, all that stuff was on my mind. It's probably, if I look at a picture of myself then, I probably was carrying a lot of anxiety and no sleep and just like, okay, now I've got 10 more jobs. So people say, what did it feel like? Wasn't this great moment? If I'm being totally honest, it's like your stomach sinks a little bit. You're just like, oh, oh, this is like now I could have the biggest public belly flop in the world.

8:36And in fact, I did. Right. Because, you know, we went public in December of 2011. And then in May of 2012, Facebook changed their algorithm and we lost a third of our traffic in a day and then missed our guidance. And then soon after we were a two dollar stock. And so and I went from being named, I don't think I talk about this in the book, but I went from being named founder of the year by whatever the techie, the crunchies or whatever, in the end of 2011 to fortune naming me one of the five worst CEOs in America. And then of 2012, I probably had that. I'm probably the only founder who could say that they have that distinction.

9:20What is that to you as a founder? knowing you put your, because I don't think people understand if you've never created a business and then obviously created a business at that size, you don't know how hard it is. Like the crap that you have to go through knowing that somebody out there on a magazine is making this decision that probably has never even founded a company. What do you think about that? Um, I, unfortunately, I kind of think things have changed for the better. I'm so happy that there's podcasts like yours. So if there were then, I would have gone on your podcast exclusively and I would have said no to all the press.

10:00Just the reality to me back then is the press was not your friend. So they had an agenda of their own. They would make up a narrative about you if you didn't give them one. and I hired a PR firm early on to keep us out of the press because the press wasn't going to get me any more users or revenues, just more competitors or just more noise. And then at one point, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each had quotas. They had to write a certain number of stories about our company a month and they just said, look, we're going to write stories about you whether they're working with you or not, good or bad, we're just going to write them.

10:41so you might as well give us content. And, you know, it's just this, like, annoying thing that's going on. And other people think you must love it, the fame, whatever, you hate it. It's just a distraction from what you're really focused on, which is, you know, your players, your customers, your teams, your product. And it's, like, it's a tax. So I wish I could sound more, you know, triumphant about it. There's some people who breeze through it and love it. But, you know, I also, when I see people, CEOs and founders on panels or giving talks, I say, why are they there? What's their agenda? Are they doing this because they need me in some way for their business?

11:32Or do they not know why they're there? And that's kind of a fake CEO moment, which I didn't want to have either. And so, you know, I mostly avoided the press and it was to my own peril because then they started writing really bad things about me. In fact, when I started dating my partner, my current partner, Hillary, who I have two kids with, I said, just don't Google me. It's not good. You're not going to like it. I think it's like this. It's like a fame perception. It's built to create a perception and narrative that they can control to drive clicks. Because sadly, people don't really click on happy stories.

12:12Like if you're a nice person, nobody cares or wants to know about you. We've had many people on from athletes to actors to different founders, and they've all had to create a persona that was many times slightly negative than a positive persona. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Reid Hoffman said early on, like, Mark, what's what's your narrative? Because if you don't write one, the press will for you. And I said, no, Reid, I'm I'm authentic. I'm me. I'm nuanced. I'm not like any one thing. And that's what makes me me. And he's like, no, that's that's never going to work. And he was right. It didn't. you've obviously gotten to interact with a lot of very interesting people i mean reed hoffman i'm looking at your book right now brian chesky wrote a quote gary tan sam altman talk about an interesting character right now who's in the news shane ceo polymarket i mean you have some fascinating people that you've been able to interact with throughout the years was there somebody that stands out that maybe wasn't exactly who you thought they were going to be not in a negative way just maybe impacted you?

13:25I love these questions. So yeah, the one that comes to my mind immediately, and he actually gave me a quote for the book too, but not in time, was Tony Robbins. And I saw him speak at the tech conference and it was fairly early on, like, I don't know, maybe it was 02 or 03 and I got to get my years right but but it was right after right after the the presidential election Al Gore had lost because of the Supreme Court remember the hanging chad and and Tony Robbins said you know we all make up victim stories we all give ourselves excuses to fail and Al Gore is in the front row and yells out do you mean like the Supreme Court.

14:13And Tony Robbins didn't miss a beat. And he said, yeah, that's exactly what I mean. You didn't fail because of the Supreme Court. You failed because you didn't want to win. You didn't bring any passion. You were kind of like cardboard. And now we see you talk about climate change and you're really passionate. If you brought half of that passion, you'd be president. You just didn't want it. And he said what we all thought. And then everyone, like my stomach sunk. I was like, wait, I'd have pinned my stomach. What's he, what's going to happen? And then Al Gore got up and hugged him. And I was like, holy shit, this guy's got something to teach me.

14:52And then he said to the audience, if anyone ever wants to come to my seminar thing, just email my team and we'll get you a pass. And I was like, I'm going. So I went with my friend Gary to his Unleashing the Power Within in like 2006 or something. And it was really cheesy. Sorry, Tony. It felt cheesy. It was like a convention hall in New Jersey with 5 ,000 people, mostly out of work real estate agents, and did all these things. But I learned so much about the emotional center of leadership and how do you get people, how do you get through to people in their emotional center in a way that's beyond intellectual, beyond compensation.

15:38And I used so much of his stuff when I was building Zynga and motivating people. I was like, okay, if I do like a full Tony Robbins for this company meeting, I'll know because people, it's a Friday and people will be back at their keyboards again, like after the meeting, after the party. So yeah, Tony Robbins. You know, funny enough, a few weeks ago, we just did something with Tony Robbins and somebody else and his wife, Sage, sent me the most amazing voice note. I'm like, she didn't need to. And it wasn't I was blown away. Also, the fact that my last name is Robbins in my book, many times if I go to the store and I say, hey, do you have this book?

16:19Because I want to see it. You know, I want to see it on the shelf. they always think it's by Tony Robbins since we have the same last name but I'm going to go to Unleash the Power Within in November by the way so great great walk across the coals like take notes by the way I can't remember if we plugged my book or not we got into it the whole I mean I was going to put this across the whole thing you're not even going to see my face it's just going to be this here we should just talk as the book okay this is just the book talking to you I was on X Twitter this morning and Nikesh Arora from Peloton Networks.

17:00I love seeing people like him wake up and be like, I'm going to do my own Twitter as myself, not my social media manager. And he's like, I'm liking this. And I said, we're happy to have you here, Nikesh. This is 100 % what it's for. It's like a place to authentically connect to people. and he said he said mark i or he wrote something back like thanks i'm learning from you and i immediately said great do you want to order some copies of my book for palatine networks and someone's like wow always be selling so i was like yeah i'm pouring out my books you know abc you always have to be you always have to be closing writing a book is one of the most painstaking things that I've ever done in my life.

17:47Like what the heck made you, I mean, why? Like Mark, why, why would you even put yourself through it? I don't know. It's, I say everyone should write a book one time. And, and if you get the chance, like build a house one time, but, but not more because the, the ratio of, you know, time to payoff is not there, but it's like you could start a company or write a book um but but i i had this class at stanford and i i had this body of work and i give this advice my class at stanford at stanford business school stanford cs and to so many founders over and over and over and i just said last week i I opened up my fridge four separate times, hoping something new would magically appear, and it never did.

18:41I ended up eating crackers over the sink. That is why Huel Black Edition became my default. It is not a shake on top of food. It is a complete meal you have instead of food. 40 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors, and it mixes with water or milk in about 30 seconds. When I'm running out of the door, I grab the RTD bottle instead. 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, under$5 a meal. New customers get 15 % off online with code founder at Huel.com slash founder. That's H-U-E-L. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting this show.

19:27I'm gonna put in a book. I know books rarely get very broad, but at least I hope it could be referenced. I hope some of these concepts, and I say somewhere in the book, if it gets through to a few people and really changes their course and they do something important, hopefully that'll be worth it. My dad wrote a lot of books. He was prolific. I was like, I'm just doing one book. But the idea of the book, was that it's my playbook and I wanted it to feel like a cheat code. It is like a cheat code because if you can stick to some of these principles, like proven better new, you can change your odds.

20:15And it's so hard. I barely can stick to proven better new. And it's my own framework. And I fail at it so often because our ego gets in the way. And it's, you know, to me, it's kind of self-indulgent to just pursue this one idea because you like it and not be scientific about it, not force yourself to like pull out the proven, you know, isolate the new. That's just not as fun. It's not like vibe coding, you know. We just want to like go and like build and just jam, you know, I get it. But we have to combine it with this, in my opinion, if we combine it with this really disciplined approach, which usually it's a founder on their last dollar.

21:07They do proven better new. It's like they tried all these things. They all failed. Now they have to show something. And now they narrow it down to something very commercial. Can you die deeper? Because launching products that people will love, I think will resonate now more than ever. because everyone is vibe coding an app every five seconds. If you have$20 a month, you can get software that can make you anything. And I don't know if that's a good thing, democratizing so much access to create, or if that makes things, I don't know if it makes things worse because people just make a lot of crap that maybe will never turn into anything.

21:46But what is, with all these people making things? Well, here's the whole premise. it's that any of your listeners right now many of them have some idea and maybe it's haunted you for some time maybe you've had some idea some dorky idea but it's stuck with you like a good joke or something and it just keeps coming back and things keep reminding you of it and you've should i go pursue it and you probably don't in this era for twenty dollars a month you finally can try your idea. Okay. You'll, for those who do, they'll probably fail. So that's a beat down. The whole point to me of getting to life at the speed of play is to say, okay, let's, let's be a little more disciplined.

22:34Let's separate this instinct that you have. Let's go really deep on what is the instinct that's driving this, this idea of yours. And let's separate it from the idea, the way you're instantiating that, which is probably wrong. But you have an instinct that probably is a multi-billion dollar company right now, but you'll fuck it up because of your ego if you even build it. But if you can be disciplined about it the way the best product makers in the world are and say, okay, I'm going to really, really study what's proven around my idea. And then I'm going to look for any opportunity to make it better for the people who already like this kind of product and use it.

23:22Better is not easy to get to, but something that 10 out of 10 of those users will say, fuck yeah, I'll take it. It's free, half the price, much faster, whatever they really care about. And then new is most of what's in your idea. It's this novel thing, which will fail. One of the principles of my book is all new fails. But it's also how you're going to get them to try your product. Because if it was just copying something that worked, there's no reason to try it. But you have some new novel idea, probably around AI now. Like, now get the weather, but it's smarter than you are. And it can tell you what to wear today or whatever because of the AI.

24:01That's a gimmick, usually. and the point is that you don't just try your one idea. You try, hopefully you test tons of ideas. I say more ideas in a week than the industry you're going into tests in a year so that you find signal. So you give yourself a better chance. You don't build a whole product. Even with AI, maybe you're building a product in three months instead of three years. Great. Now it's gonna take you three months to fail instead of three years. Let's change your odds. Let's spend this week testing ads. Once you build your product, then you think, how am I going to market it? Let's start with that now.

24:42How am I going to market it? Oh, shit. Nobody wants this. That's good data. You know, there's some really dumb, obvious things that we don't see. Our brain doesn't start learning until after we are in the market with our product. And unfortunately, it's just backwards. It's like, start with the ad. Start with who are you going to, who are you trying to get this to and how? And can we test that before we build anything and find heat? And then let's build a bunch of versions. And the other thing is that you can also, the fastest way to test your idea is just talking to people, like a stand-up comic.

25:23Like, you just tell people, here's what it is, and they kind of look at you with a blank face like you're looking at me right now. Or they kind of go, oh, wow, that's amazing, which they almost never do, right? so that's the fastest way I think is just talking it through with people but I so I said hopefully this book is like a cheat code for people like you have an idea you want to like jump in and try it great there's never been a better time than now um I really think that people are going to build amazing businesses and they are all around us um but but give yourself a chance of succeeding It might be the most important time to have this book, Life at the Speed of Play.

26:10There was a lot of anxiety right now around AI, and there's a lot of generational anxiety around AI, which fascinates me. You've seen it all. You've been through every internet technology wave that's happened. What's your honest take? Okay. And yes, I'm that old. I've even been through the beginning of cellular phones. Similar to when cellular phones first started, when you look at the underlying adoption curve, the valuations on the companies bubbled, crashed. They went like this, but adoption just went like this. We wanted our mobile phone. We still do. The internet was a little different because the bubble, the consumer internet got way overheated.

27:03This is different. During the dot-com bubble, all of my peers, we all thought the financial public markets were crazy. My company, support.com, went public the last day of the IPO window because we were an enterprise software company. Now, but I think everyone's getting, we're getting smarter as a society and a culture. We're more used to adopting a new technology because we've been through it before. We absorbed the internet. We saw that eventually it did deliver. And so we're just a little smarter. Yet every new platform and technology seems to be like 10 times bigger magnitude and AI feels like it might be 100 times bigger.

27:50And no one really thinks anyone's being kind of falsely exuberant, even if there is any temporary bubble. People think there's no question this is going to be more important than the internet in the long run. So then there's this fear and anxiety people have around anything new. And there's all this talk about our jobs going away, which was stoked by Sam Altman and Dario. And, you know, those guys are kind of too close to their own technology and they believe in it too much. So they are like, okay, it's creating the age of abundance and no one's going to ever work again. I'm like, dudes, like maybe in 20 years, some of what you're talking about is going to happen.

28:31I don't want to sound like maybe this won't age well. And maybe if you'll watch this in a year and be like, Pinkus, they were right. And you are a Luddite, But I have a feeling I'm going to be right, which is the more things change, the more they stay the same, which is the Internet was a net job creator. The Internet created new industries. The Internet helped our economy massively. It's part of the reason we have like twice the economy of the EU now, because our country doubled down on the Internet and they didn't. They use it, but they didn't double down on it. I think the same and more is happening with AI.

29:08I think that job openings have gone up in the last year, not down. Both CS, computer science, customer support, all the jobs that were supposed to go away seem to have gone up. I think there's going to be a new gig economy where people... I mean, I can get on mid-journey and design a beautiful room for you. I'm happy to do it later. I designed a logo for my partner, Hillary that in like five minutes I made a logo that she absolutely loves and uses. So the potential for people to now live their life at the speed of play, the potential to not have to learn the skills of drawing, of the art, but actually just get close to the metal of the creativity and then bring that to life and sell that to somebody.