Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder

28:34I'm a huge long-term believer in Snapchat, and I've been crushed. So this year I've been crushed in Snapchat, crushed in Bitcoin.

28:41Sam Parr:Trading is stressful. Why are you even trading in the first place? Is it just because you love it? That's why I said I shouldn't be. I mean, I should be in some place where I'm kind of set it and forget it. I enjoy it. And sometimes it feels like because there is no fund manager, there's some things I need to do just to be responsible. For instance, this AI infrastructure trade, I don't it's a belief trade right now like I don't know whether or not all these hyperscalers are going to re-up in q1 of next year or or take a pause and I love these companies and I love the trade almost too much because it looks generational that you could buy these companies at peg ratios that are like 0.3 or 0.25 where nvidia micron so many of these companies are trading their trade their PE rate is a fraction of their growth rate.

29:37That's called the PEG ratio. So on the one hand, that looks generational, but it's because the market is worried that the buying, the CapEx rate isn't going to keep up at this. And so I collared all of it just because I don't want to worry about it. But that made me be like a day trader because I had to put all these collars on like 10 or 15 different positions. But now I can set it and forget it because they're like, Like, down 15, up 50 for the next year. Okay, I don't have to worry about it. One thing I really like just listening to you is that I like that you are kind of unabashedly willing to just have fun.

30:18And like you said, blur the lines between work and play. I actually want to read you this. I think you'll appreciate this. I screenshotted this from Blake Mycoskie, who started Tom's Shoes. He put this on the wall of every office he's had. He said, A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To him, he always appears to be doing both.

30:50Yeah, I love that. I really do believe that there's like a singularity of ideation and building, which is that we all will feel like Elon. That's why I started the book, saying that we're so close to this future point where we'll all live like Elon and we'll just put our intention in the world and won't need to go through all of the painful steps of raising venture capital and hiring lawyers and all of the beatdown of life. And we'll just turn our idea into something in days that other people are using. And in some ways, we're there already. But I think at a business creation level, I think that's the very near future.

31:35And it's awesome.

31:37Sam Parr:You have this cowboy gunslinger attitude that I love. I admire it. I would not say that's how I roll. And I'm envious of you. It's like when I see a guy with great style and fashion. It's like, I appreciate it. Couldn't be more different, but I appreciate it. The way that you view life, it's not exactly how I do things, and I'm envious of you for it. Are there downsides to this sort of, like, you have this very stereotypical Silicon Valley energy that I love. Do you think that you feel stressed the same as the normal person? I don't think there is, like, a constant state of Mark, you know? Like, I'm not like, I love, what's the name of the guy, the music guy who wrote the creation, the creativity book from Hollywood?

32:25Rick Rubin? Rick Rubin. Like, I wish I was like more like, I admire Rick Rubin, right? He's so zen. I'm not, I'm not, not that level. And here's what's so weird, Sam. Maybe you guys can relate to this. And I guess it is funny to hear that I'm kind of stereotypical Silicon Valley because I've spent so much of my career feeling like such an outsider to Silicon Valley culture that I'm like, okay, I don't know what that means now to be in the middle of the whole thing. I'll have to think about that. But this whole idea of work-life balance relates to this because I find that when people say, like, how are you doing?

33:08Are you stressed or relaxed? I say I'm not stressed enough. I miss the level of intensity that I was the storm I was in the middle of at Zynga. And because it was such a high to be in this creative loop that I could be working with amazing product teams and making these huge leaps every week and come up with ideas, get them out, see users love it, see metrics move, see our financials move weekly. that's a high that I miss. And when I'm in like the abyss, which is what I call anytime in between those, I have a different kind of stress and anxiety. It's, it's not like my aura ring is happy. And now the most stress it shows is, is around my family, my five kids.

34:00And I'm like, I want to, I want my work stress in some way to, to trump my family stress. And it's not, It's too calm. And I want to crowd out the time for investing or anything else. I want to be in the middle of this just creative storm, and I'm not. And so that's where I feel kind of antsy. I think it's like the cavemen. We were designed to get restless, and that makes us go out and hunt. I definitely resonate with that. And when you had the Zynga thriller, in some ways, you can always be chasing that feeling again, right? Because it's such an entrepreneurial thrill ride that you caught one of those waves and you were surfing it.

34:47You may be out there paddling in the ocean for another decade. You may never get another wave like that, but you want it and you found yourself riding in it. And it's a bad addiction. In some ways, my life would be so much easier if I didn't have that addiction because I could just go be a venture capitalist full-time or, I don't know, a professor or something. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow.

35:17Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I want to ask you a different question. I kind of want to brainstorm with you, actually. You're a creative guy, and you talked about being in the right body of water. Right now, AI might be the right body of water. Maybe you have a different definition. Where do you see the opportunities?

35:48Where do you get excited? Where do you brainstorm with an entrepreneur right now of what sort of products to build, what sort of experiences to build, what sort of problems to go try to solve? What do you think the moment is now for? I did a podcast with Gary Tan, and we started brainstorming like this about, can we close our eyes and imagine two years from now where the tokens that we use today are free? there might be an overall spend on tokens this higher but the per token spend per kind of unit of intelligence is going to what we look at today will probably be close to free, it'll be like water and then I think we already passed the singularity sorry I don't know if I can say the singularity but I'd say we already passed AGI the way it was defined and so if you could have a human that was available 24-7 live for anything you wanted, I think most of the time we would take that if they were available and knew the context.

36:58And so I get back to like, you know, that's why I kind of showed the front of my iPhone in the book. I don't know if you can see it there. And I said, this is what makes me so optimistic about the consumer future because...

37:12Sam Parr:Your Nanit one was missing there. In the book, you had Nana. Oh, yeah. Well, now she's 18 months. I don't need the Nana. Well, now they all sleep with me. So I don't even need the camera. But what I'd say is like half of that screen is empty and the other half of it is generic apps. And maybe we won't even have the screen, right? So maybe I'm even dating myself with that. This may not age well. But either way, we will still do that digital life stack of those functions. We'll still want to know about the weather. We're still going to want to look up your podcast, calendar, photos, whatever. And if there was a live human agent that was managing all that all the time, 24-7, I think we would use it if it was free.

38:05and I think freemium will come back because I think we would use it free I do believe I'm an AI optimist I also believe that jobs are going to skyrocket not go away and I think that we're going to be pulled into these services and then we are going to want to get to a human sometimes like take travel I think we could have an amazing travel agent but when your flight was cancelled and you're trying to get home from London and it's July 4th and you're racing to rebook the next flight, I think in that moment, you'd probably pay$50 or$100 to have a human jump on, book it, get it right, trusted. Those are the zones that on some level kind of turn me on.

38:57And then the biggest thing I talk about in the book is this social cocktail party. I read said he's about people people and people and i'm with him I think what we care about most across all these services is the social and I think we're moving from Consumptive to generative I think that what the dopamine hit that we're gonna get and we get already from being generative Is so many times bigger than the dopamine we get from consumptive Entertainment and we feel bad about ourselves. I got off instagram. It was like a bad drug. It was giving me very little value. Now X is my thing and I love X, but now these reels, sometimes they do such a good job of looping into others.

39:43And my daughter will come in and be like, dad, what are you doing? I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just, I don't know. I'm watching Matthew McConaughey and he's awesome talking about July 4th. How can I not watch this? And then they're stringing me into somebody else, but it wasn't a good use of my time and I don't feel good. I think that with AI, we are going to literally make music. You know, I think that we are going to, look at MidJourney, the magic of MidJourney. I could make you guys believe I'm a good, like, home designer or logo designer just using MidJourney. It makes me more creative than I really am.

40:21Sam Parr:So I like the proven better new bit from the book. I mean, that's one of the biggest pieces of the book. Can you kind of like close your eyes and put yourself in the position of like a 25 or 30-year-old, a young person, you know, just like Mark was when he started Freeloader. You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework of what you're going to do to figure out what you're going to work on in the next couple of weeks. I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards. Awesome. Great. Great, great, great. This is fantastic. Okay. This is like showing us nudes for My First Million.

40:56This is exactly what we like. Whiteboard number one is what are we passionate about? Doesn't matter. Do not worry. Give zero f***s about business or anything. I mean, I'm passionate about surfing, being a dad. I am passionate about cocktail parties, connecting people. We call this swirging people together, like merging people. I love connecting disparate people and they form interesting. I introduced two friends and they made the movie The Dissident. That turns me on. I just love doing that. So here's your passion board. So then we want to write, what is a real business? Let's not forget about real businesses.

41:53what what is on the internet or what are industries they might be mature that are that are making a lot of money like you know like that guy uh who started the peptide company okay peptides they're making a lot of money um but then you could put like you know online dating you know jobs, video games, like it doesn't matter. Just what are just things that are addressable that are real businesses? Okay. And then on your third board, you kind of Frankenstein these things and And he says, well, okay, if I connected these boards, okay, you know, I don't know, being a dad plus jobs or dating, you know.

42:50You're looking for the intersection of proven business with things you give a shit about. We're not at even the proven better new part yet, which is you come up with any mashup idea, okay, that kind of turns you on. And it could be like you're into agents or you're into Clawbot or what, you know, I'll give you like an example. Here's a real life example for me, okay? I invested in Riot and I found them because I was single. They were 60 % DAUs to MAUs.

43:20Sam Parr:And Riot is a dating, is like Tinder, but for high profile people. It's human curated online dating. Okay. So you have to apply. It's like the really high end social club that has facilities. Like Soho House. Like Soho House. Thanks. So it's like Soho House in a way. So it's curated. You have to have an Instagram account and they have committees in each market. Just famous, hot, rich, cool people only. That's the reputation. Okay. Okay. It has grown beyond that. What it really is, is I like to say that online dating feels like a one out of 10 experience and Raya feels like a three out of 10. Like it's still not great.

44:07I mean, I don't want to diss it because I'm an investor. I think we're one of the biggest equity investors. And I think Raya is amazing. But the difference from the one to the three is that I found with just using these online dating apps, there was the same odds of second date if I went on the date or didn't go on the date. So it was like 0%. So I was like, why don't I just not go? Because I'm saving myself so much time and agony. And with Raya, it was not a waste of time. I had second dates and things. And it just wasn't curated enough. Okay. So the point is the insight from that, that is human curation.

44:48So then the mashup is, can we apply that same thing? And it's a lead business. You're paying for lead generation. Well, could we apply that to anything else? Could we apply that to, I had an idea to create like a Lux BNB. Like, could we do human curated listings? Or what about human curated Uber. Like, could we have a high-end Uber where the black cars actually are black? They're not just colored black. That's actually, Sean,

45:20Sam Parr:what you were talking about the other day with Jack's Diner. Yeah. I don't know if you, Mark, have you ever heard of Jack's Dining Room? He's this Instagram kid who goes around the world. He's like, I'm at this place in Italy with the best gelato and there's like a, you know, amazing visual hook for Instagram where there's like this crazy gelato thing that he's about to try. He tries it and he just, he's trying to find the best foods of different genres in the best places around the world. And when I met him, I told him, I said, look, you're trying to cut these brand deals. You should create the new Yelp because Yelp is this completely generic platform with everything.

45:54But if I trust you and I have trust as a service or human curation as a service, if I go to New York and I want the best ramen, I would trust Jack over Yelp. Great. So let's freeze frame on that. Okay. and now I'm like Professor Pincus. I created a class at Stanford around this, two classes, and the students still didn't do that great, so it tells me either my framework's not perfect or I'm not the best teacher. But let's freeze frame on that, okay? So let's do Proven Better New on Yelp. So we say, okay, well, Proven is let's not f*** with anything about the way that Yelp displays listings, rates listings.

46:37Let's do a legal copy of Yelp. We're not going to change it. We're going to freeze and isolate and assume that Yelp has taken the time over the years to make that what the world wants most, okay? So we copy that pixel for pixel. I mean, we copy their onboarding of a new user. Everything, we copy it. Then we say, do we have anything that's better? Meaning 10 out of 10 users would say, yes, that's what I want, not Yelp. We probably don't have that, okay? Better is actually really hard to get to. What we think is better is new. So we probably are just proven and then some new ideas. I think our new idea here is human curated and probably can we human curate it first and get to, can we take some slice, some verdict, some blade in a city?

47:33So we take, you know, Florence barbershops or, you know, Florence, maybe better, is like coffee shops in Florence. We're going to go do that ourselves and then put it side by side and test in some way and see whether people like ours better or not. Like there used to be tablet hotels, which was like a better version, cooler design hotels. is that better or not? This is kind of the Brian Chesky way, is do it by hand first. If people don't like it better, you do not pass go. There's no reason to even try to build this in software. If they do, then we can start to use AI and say, is there a way to use AI agents to automate this?

48:17But that's a very, very secondary. The first is, can we get to a clearly better product experience? That's the hard part. That's the lightning in the bottle. not the AI. And then what I would tell Mark at 23 or 25 to do is just force yourself to do everything in AI right now. Like force yourself to code this. I've tried Vibe coding. I personally find co-work plus cloud code easier. I get to more real things for myself. But force yourself to use it and see how far you can go creating agents as employees and other things. And then do some like, hire some, in addition, hire some really cheap people who can just do some of this stuff by hand.

49:11You know, I would avoid founding a company around it. I would avoid hiring expensive engineers or people before I've connected all the dots.

49:21Sam Parr:Hey, you have this interesting kind of dichotomy about you, which is you seem like you're all about like going big and building these huge viral things that get big fast. But at the same time, in your book, I think you said, I think one of the titles is like, big or something like that scale. And it's like, you're like, it doesn't matter how many people you're going to get, you have to nail the product. And that's sort of what you're talking about right now. But also, I know that you're big on goal setting. You have this, I forget what you call this. Do you call it a book of life? Yeah, which I want you to have to explain that.

49:51Sam Parr:That's pretty cool. But you have this cool thing of goal setting. So when you're ideating new companies, one of the things that kills ideas amongst successful entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs is asking, well, how big can this really get? And that's always the challenge. People always ask that question. And like you said earlier, and we all know this to be true, you never really know. And whatever things can get big oftentimes shock you. No one really knows entirely. So do you set goals early on? And how do you deal with that thing in your head or with entrepreneurs you work with of like this constant like question of, well, how big can this get?

50:26Yeah. Yeah. It's so hard. And part of this book, A Life Practice, and part of this painful journey is killing our ego and our ego wanting, our ego is where the hope comes from, that we fall in love with the idea, we fall in love with the potential of it. And that works against us because we've got to get to a very, very small, small use case that really works before we can do anything else. and I'm guilty of this too and we tend to skip it and we get so excited about the bigger macro, the bigger idea, the bigger body of water and we get so committed to this and it's part of the danger of AI and vibe coding that we can build something in three months instead of a year or two and so we do and we skip testing it and we don't set real objectives for ourself like absolute objectives and goals that we hold ourself accountable to and the next thing you know, you're just kind of in this B-plus relationship and you don't love it.

51:39And all these things are paradoxes. On the one hand, I start the book talking about this book of life practice that I've been doing since 1994, of really trying to have a conversation with yourself over time and writing in this book for one period of time every year about the same things so that you can go back and see, like, did you, what were your hopes and dreams and have you done anything about them? And the real point that's come to me over all these years is not, do you achieve these goals, but are you attuning to these goals and are you in alignment? Are you living in alignment with your goals?

52:21That I've found is more important to my well-being and happiness than achieving. So if my goal for 20 years has been to launch Dot Earth and create my version of the metaverse, which is different than Zuck's version, okay, cool. It's okay that I haven't done it, but have I gone for it? Or have I just talked about it? And I say these ideas and things haunt us and over time weigh on us because it's like, I've had this idea, but I haven't ever done it. I've always wished I could do this. and the point of the book of life is let's stop time let's stop time right now and let's go to an absolute place and have a real honest conversation with ourselves and say you know sam are you are you serious about this desire or are you just around and if you're serious about it well what's wrong with you like you're you're capable you're a free human and why in the last year have you, let's be honest, you haven't done shit about, Mark, every year you say you want to learn guitar.

53:28You know you could do it, but you don't. So why don't we just stop putting that down as a goal because you're not serious about it? I'm not going to beat myself up, or I'm not going to beat Mark 2025 up. And Mark 2025 did go for it and launched Dot Earth, and the version I launched wasn't right and I pulled the plug on it. I'm good with that. It doesn't have to win for me to feel like I'm living a full life. I have to at least know I went for it. And that's the point of the book of life. When did you start doing it? I started doing it in 1994. And I started the book off talking about this, that I had made a series of terrible career decisions.

54:12And I was being pushed out of this kind of fledgling venture capital firm. And there was nowhere to go to. Like, it wasn't like a next job. And so I'd kind of messed up my resume. I had nothing to lose when I started, a year later started my first company. But in 1994, I went to Temple. I hadn't been to Temple for the Jewish high holidays, Jewish New years for since I was a kid, someone invited me, I was in DC, and I sat there, didn't understand what anyone was saying or doing. And I just wrote a notebook about how shitty my life was, and all the hopes and dreams that I hadn't pursued. And the thing that I came back to, I hated most about myself that represented just how little control I had over my life was that I smoked cigarettes.

55:06And I was part of my book of life practice. What can we do this year that would make this a seminal year in our life? Like, what could the three of us do that you would remember this year for the rest of your life? And thank you. Because so many of our years, I can tell you at age 60, that there are years I can't write anything down for. Most years are like that, I feel. It's sad to not have something seminal, not one thing that's memorable about that year. And so I was like, okay, at least if I quit smoking, if I do a lifetime quit, I'll remember this year and I think I'll be happy later that I did it.

55:42So I'm partnering with my future self. It's important enough, but it's easy and in my control. And for me, that was my path to changing my life.

55:54Sam Parr:Hey, are you still doing like, you know, you said it's sad that you don't have like a seminal year, you don't have this thing. And like, you know, Sean and I both have young kids. You have young kids too. I don't know how old your oldest is, but you have at least one young kid. I'm in the phase now of my life where I feel like a little bit treading water and that's okay. Like, I'm like, I don't think that's sad. Like, you know, a kid being born is seminal, but I didn't achieve anything. It's not like I did that. No, it counts. But I'm enjoying it. Are you still achieving great stuff? And are you still a dog even after you've had kids?

56:28Yes, but you also have to be realistic because now you've committed to be in service of raising these great humans. And that feels great too. And I think the best thing I've ever done in life is be a dad. And I think the greatest achievement in my life is my five kids. So every year that I've had a kid, that's been the seminal thing that year. And to your first question, yes, you can still achieve. It's just different than some of your friends that made different decisions, and you've got to stop comparing. But you can—I built Zynga while raising, you know, Carmen, Georgia, Wyatt, my third kid.

57:14Sam Parr:Hey, what was your schedule then to accommodate them, taking a company public while still trying to be— it sounds like you've mentioned being a father many times. It sounds like that's super important to you. How did you balance the schedule? If you treat the things in your life like these are non-movable rocks, everything else becomes the river that moves around it. And it turns out that it's great modeling for your company to show that you are prioritizing your family. I mean, like if you ever walked into Zynga, you saw kids and dogs everywhere. And so people loved it. We worked really hard and we played hard and we familyed hard.

57:52And we integrated our kids and our pets. You know, we brought them to work or we brought work to home. So the way I did is my friend and coach, Bing Gordon, he said, the most important thing is they are there for the first and last 15 minutes of their day. And they're always going to remember that. and I made that like my religion. I was like, I'm never going to miss the first or last 15 minutes of their day. I'm never going to miss breakfast with them. Hopefully not dinner, but I'll always do bedtime, bath and bedtime. And I did. It's so funny. So many of the things you say are echoed by other guests, but they came up in their own way with their own words.

58:33But we'd have to be dummies at this point, either listening to this podcast or doing this podcast to not pick up on some of these. Ryan Smith who did Qualtrics and he owns the jazz now. I went out and visited him for the podcast and hung out at his house and stuff. He goes, hey, let me just... He's like, I just got to do one thing. It's going to take me three minutes. And I was like, that's a weird number. I've never heard anyone say... He's not going to the bathroom. He's got a task to do that's going to take three minutes. And he basically said, I have these three minute moments. I just make sure I'm fully present with my kids.

59:05And it's basically right before dropping them off at school. I'm not like half here, half in my mind somewhere else. I'm fully there. Three minutes right when they get home and three minutes right before bed. He goes, those are the most important nine minutes of the day because you could be a busy guy, but you always got nine minutes. And if you could be fully, fully present, he's like, it's not like he's only doing nine minutes, but he's just make sure that's sacred. My kids know, like my 15 year olds know, I will always answer when they call. Like I'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and I might be like, guys, I got to take this.

59:36so they just know they can always reach dad and there's there's like a a priority that they get you know they they feel that and some of this stuff carries over i think to like management principles like i my policy at zynga was i will always read and respond to your email to everyone in the company we got to i don't know 3 ,500 4 ,000 employees globally and it was a lot but i said I'm always going to read and respond to your email and now I kind of try to I come close to pretty much do that on on X that anyone listening if they go to my X at Mark Pink I'll pretty much reply to everybody I probably don't hit it 100 % of the time but I'm probably like 95 % of the time and so there's an availability that we can prioritize that's important in life so yeah I'm on that Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury.

1:00:34They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. Very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. one click and I get savings yield.

1:01:03It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC. Can I ask you a question? You know, I'm a framework guy. So whenever you have these frameworks, I love it. At the same time, some of my friends who are much better entrepreneurs than me don't use any of these frameworks.

1:01:33They just sort of operate on pure law instinct and sort of following their nose. Did you start Zynga by doing all this stuff, mapping out your passions and then cross-referencing it with proven models or existing business models? Or did you just, now you think about it this way? Or did you create your biggest hits doing this? Like most people, this was all going on, but it wasn't written down. so I didn't just set out to show that I could make a poker app on the Facebook like I was 41 you know I think my friends peers thought I had no dignity then it was this was not like impressive I mean I did it because I had my ego been so beaten down at tribe that I had to do something small that worked I just like I need to do something at work but I wasn't gonna just make, like at the time, the obvious apps to make were these wall apps and these throw a drink, these pokes.

1:02:30I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to, that's what was working, okay? Poker was not working. Games were not working on the Facebook ecosystem. I did it because I saw this ocean. I saw two oceans, you know, two bodies of water, social networking and video games. So I was thinking, okay, if this works, it opens a little crack into mass market casual gaming. And I had this belief, one of the things I talk about in the book that I just love, and I will encourage your listeners to consider, this is available to all of us all the time. Find a mature market that's over, that's done, that's dead, that's been played out online dating, eBay with listings, or analog businesses that are not attractive.

1:03:24They're almost not investable. VCs won't like them. They're red oceans. They're not growth markets. Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it, and it has a proven behavior in it, and that's video gaming. By the way, here's a gift. Here's an Easter egg. Take video gaming. In 2007, it was a$23 billion industry. It was barely growing. There was no... It wasn't a top 10 behavior on the consumer web. And it was stupid to go into. It was not fundable. Here we are, 19 years later, it's a$283 billion industry that's not fundable. It's not growing. It's mature. You'd have a really tough time getting a VC to fund it.

1:04:07Perfect place to try to do something innovative because if you can find a new dimension to this that sparks people, you don't have to prove that anyone's going to do it or wants it or is going to spend money on it. It's unlimited, right? And that was search when Google showed up. So I do love that. And I was thinking like that when I started Zynga because the year or two before I was trying to buy CNET, they were a public company. And I said, I need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming. I need to solve distribution. Consumer was not investable because of distribution.

1:04:48Today, consumer is not investable because of distribution. It's a perfect parallel. The new thing then was social networking. The new thing today is AI and agents. This is like a mirror in time. So we are living today in 2007. Go for it. Consumer's not investable. Do consumer.

1:05:09Sam Parr:You've made these bold claims multiple times. And I love that. You did it with investing. You said, I believe this. You have a point of view, which I like. And I think people who have points of view where they're confident, they're either stupid or they're well-read and educated. And that has shaped it, their point of view, and that's why they're confident. You see them in that category. Do you have any good honeypots of information that you consume on a regular basis that aren't well-known that you could fill us in on? Like people you follow on Twitter, people you follow on Substack, books, newspapers, anything that shapes how you think?

1:05:47Yeah. Yeah, they're really wide-ranging and disparate. I gravitate towards people that have non-mainstream, more contrarian views. I love everything Peter Thiel says. It's like catnip for me. I just heard him talk, and he's saying that we've lived in this 50 years of stagnation, Even though the economy, GDP, stock market's up so much, when we think about how people live and how our parents, the gap and how our parents live versus their parents, we didn't see that gap again from our parents to us and now the next generation, like the kids of the 90s and the early 2000s, they don't look at their life and opportunity.

1:06:40you know if our parents were in the 19 or my parents you know in the 1960s and 70s their parents were in the 1930s and 40s and you think about that difference and it's just the middle class was formed and so much and so peter's kind of coming at this thing from the the same problem but the opposite side of like the democrat socialists and the far left progressive democrats and he's saying the only solution is growth we've got to grow the economy and grow the opportunity base for the middle class and for people in order to save capitalism and democracy. And I thought, I hadn't thought about it in that way because I think of the last 50 years as unbelievable growth in the worldwide standards of living and in technology and, you know, stock markets and all these things.

1:07:35But I thought that was a really brilliant insight that's got me thinking. But I'd say that who I follow, I love Pirate Wires, you know, Mike Solano. And there's so many insights that Dave had early that were not mainstream, you know, that have changed my thinking.

1:07:55Sam Parr:Do you read a lot of books? What genre of books do you like? I have a lot of trouble reading books. I do books on tape. I'll tell you that I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm walking or driving. but I get a lot and I connect with a lot of friends around social political issues first where we have non-mainstream views like I came out for Trump a few days before the election that was not a mainstream or popular thing in my community to do but I guess I pay a lot of attention to people that break through in any way in consumer that's probably something that I pay more attention to and I think it was announced like two weeks ago or something, I invest in this company, FOMO.

1:08:42When I find the resume for me in consumer is traction. I have no idea who or why. I cold milled Shane at Polymarket on Twitter when they broke through. I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer because it's so broken and it's so rare. So, you know, I think those are good leads. And I do, I get a lot of macro and stock investment ideas on X.

1:09:15Sam Parr:Have you outperformed the index over the last 10 years, you think? Last year, I definitely did. But no, I can't say, I know I got to look at the last 10 years. I don't know if I've outperformed the index. I probably, I haven't this year. We've had more fun and memories and that's what counts. You beat, you probably beat the two, you beat 2 % maybe. I'm way behind. I think this year I'm up like four and a half percent. Not including, I was, I got a big distribution of SpaceX. I don't include that in my returns because that was a private investment, you know? So not including SpaceX, I think I'm up like four and change.

1:09:57And I think that the market's up probably like, I don't know, three times, two or three times that. So you don't want to follow me this year. One thing I really like about you is you're insightful. That's great. The second thing is I like some of the kind of life wisdom, like the book of life practice and having an honest conversation with yourself. I think ultimately that's actually the most useful thing that any of us could go do. And then the other thing I like is that you're not one of these people who makes everyone feel bad because you're so disciplined. I like that you're a little not disciplined and you do some stuff you shouldn't do or you're doing things for other reasons than just like what's purely utilitarian and optimal.

1:10:35And I like that because a lot of times people come to this podcast and I'm like, I should be doing this, we should all over ourselves.

1:10:42Sam Parr:You're like this strange amalgamation of like investor, punk rock, consumer, good dad. Like it's a very rare, you have this very weird. That's why I was like so misunderstood by the media. you know when Reed Hoffman said to me Mark what's your narrative what's your three bullets and I'm like I don't know I don't have one he said well either you make that up or they're gonna for you and I think you said before we started that when you when Zynga was big you saw me as this villain I think that I'm authentic and nuanced and people will meet me in person or hear me talk and they'll say wow I really connected with you I really like you and I'm like thank you but it feels like this backhanded compliment because they really mean like...

1:11:28Oh, I'd hate you. Yeah, what I Googled about you was so bad. When I first started dating my partner, Hillary, I said, just do both of us a favor. Just don't Google me because you're not going to like anything you read.

1:11:40Sam Parr:Yeah, I'm trying to understand why people hated you. I'm trying to like, not hated you, but by villain. But like, did you wear a lot of black? I don't know. Like, what was this villain? I don't even think I found my black t-shirt yet. No, it's... I was telling you this before that all I cared about was winning. All I cared about, and winning was in the eyes of like a teenage girl or a middle-aged woman, you know, who wanted to play one of our games. And they weren't going to read this. They're not reading the Wall Street Journal. I hired a PR firm to keep us out of the press. And when we were in the press, to dampen down the story.

1:12:16Because I just, we had figured something out with user pay and I didn't want to like go announce it to the world. And we were just trying to win as many sprints as we could before inviting a lot of competition and venture. And we were buying a company every month. You know, a lot of the companies we bought, you know, no one else was bidding on them. You bought the company that became Farmville, right? Well, not really. The real story is that I couldn't get anyone in Zynga to build Farmville because they thought it wasn't cool. They wanted to build like Coasterville, Cafe World. and nobody in video gaming wanted to make a farm simulation game.

1:12:55That was not, there was nothing less cool. Why did you want to make it? I wasn't from video gaming. I wanted, I had a farm fantasy. I wanted to create Pincus Valley Ranch and, you know, have our vegetables served at Chez Panisse, you know. So I had that fantasy and I have four sisters and I feel like I really connect with middle-aged women. And I'm like, I don't want Twitch, you know, fast moving games. I want something I don't have to pay any attention to. I don't have to pay any attention to a farm. You know, I just, I wanted that game. And I thought that would be the game that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play.

1:13:34Bing won't admit it, but he tried to convince me not to build it, even from a business standpoint. He was like, farm simulations never do well, Mark. and I finally bought this little failed Flash gaming company because they had four Flash engineers and then I put them and like four or five other people in an alcove outside my office and checked in with them every day and we built Farmville together in six weeks. Did it come out the gate hot? What was day one, day two? You know, we were going to buy this company that made Farmtown and the guy was, to be honest, kind of a jerk. And he had the right to be a jerk.

1:14:13He was winning. I think he doubled the price he wanted from like 40 million to 80 million. And he had the right, but we were building our own version and we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game. So ours was not proven better new, it was proven better less. So our crops were better than his, our art and math were better. And we had more polish, but that was it. and we took out the stranger danger part. He had ways to meet other community members and we just thought our users didn't want that. So we turned it on. I said, on a Friday, I had this tough call with him. I said, you know, I don't think this is going to work.

1:14:55We're not going to buy you. And in our game, our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go. And so then on Sunday, we turned on FarmVille and it was one of those lightning in a bottle things that for some reason, so many things was thinking it just worked. and which isn't great to hear because how do you repeat that but we turned on farmville and i think it did like 171 000 installs the first day with no marketing it was just viral it just was viral and and we were doing like a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing and you know we passed farm town within like three or four weeks they were at like four million daus What was the peak, the absolute peak of Farmville?

1:15:39What was it doing? I think it peaked at like 30 or 32 million DAUs. And at its peak, I think like 15 or 20 % of people on Facebook were using it or had used it. And what did it make in terms of revenue at that game? Farmville 2 came out with a lot more lessons and mechanics and made more revenues. you know i know farmville 2 did over a billion in revenues no one at that time thought a video game you know definitely not a casual video game could do over a billion in revenues and i remember trying to explain that to fidelity i'm like that's gonna be a normal thing like three million a day baby that's gonna be the new benchmark for a good game but you had a question i really liked that It was like the beginning of this whole thread.

1:16:28So I hired this PR firm because I said, I don't want to have my fur coat moment. I don't want to be on the cover of Fortune. And the fur coat moment came from that movie, American Gangster, when he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur coat. He's on the front page of the New York Times. And everything goes downhill from there. Like, I don't want to be on the front page of anything.

1:16:47Sam Parr:And the police are like, this young black guy wearing a fur coat in the front row, he must be something. What's his situation? I was the equivalent of that. this 41-year-old retired guy that's not supposed to be doing anything important, that's when people were writing articles saying, can you back a founder under, you know, over 30 in consumer? And so I just didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual and consumer wasn't supposed to be working. And so our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors. I said, I'm going to tell you a price. you decide if you want to invest afterwards i'll show you our financials and if you don't like it you can get out but if if they're not better than you think which obviously made people even want to invest more when you say that you know wait what was your what was your first five years revenue and profit i mean we went public we were forced to go public after four years i mean we had over a billion dollars in cash on our balance sheet when we went public we had never spent a that we raised in capital from, I didn't know we wouldn't spend it, and I think that the year before we went public, I think we did like 450 million in free cashflow.

1:18:04Sam Parr:Oh my gosh. So in year three, you're doing 450 million in free cashflow. Is that what you just said? That might've been year four, yeah. I mean, we started in mid-July of 07, so 07 wasn't like a full year. You know, we did like maybe a million and a half in 07. Of cash flow or revenue? Revenue, revenue. I mean, we were cash flowing. Maybe I did more than that revenue because by October, November, we were making like 200 ,000 a month in cash flow. We, in 08, we did like 38 million in revenues and we probably made like, I don't know, 12 or 15 million in cash flow. But we were putting all that money, we were putting it into big data and then data centers.

1:18:49And then we were raising more and more money because I didn't want to ever slow down. But my point is, I let our story be told by our competitors and by press I didn't talk to. And I'm kind of nuanced and Zynga was nuanced. And so I let the story go out that we're making all money from advertising, but it was really user pay. And I was fine with that. I didn't want to say, no, you're wrong. And then Michael Arrington wrote for TechCrunch a whole series called Scamville. they said they must be making all their money from these really scammy ads they're showing and they were no different than the ads on google but we also were not all of our money was user pay and i didn't want to come out and say no you idiot we're making money from our whales you know and and then errington who i'm friends with i'm an investor in his fund now he used cityville he played cityville he spent 550 in the game and then he said i'm so sorry i was wrong.

1:19:47I get it why adults would spend money in your games now. Because remember, there was no in-op purchase yet. And so all of the adults were like, there's no way adults are paying money for art. But we had, you know, a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in Farmville. And this was her hobby. And maybe her husband was spending more than that, you know, to go fishing and skiing and hunting. This was her hobby. And so we reframe this as we are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has. And this is a small amount to spend on a hobby. Whereas, you know, for a video game, it was a lot.

1:20:23And I did not do myself any favors. I did not go on press tours. I didn't talk to investors. I said, I'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees. I'm not going to talk to anybody else ever. My kids, my players, my employees. And so my, everyone else told the story and it was, and, and we fired a lot of people and they were out telling our story because I had a meritocracy, a forced curve. We forced you to rate 10 % of your team as a low performer every quarter. And if you were two quarters in a row, you're fired without question or exception. Wow. You also have one other theory for that, which is you have the Nickelback problem.

1:21:05If you've ever heard of a Veblen good, it's a good where the demand goes up the more the price goes up. The Nickelback problem is basically everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's like an easy, it's a easy thing to look down on. You look cool for looking down on it, but yet somehow they'll sell millions of records. Nobody knows them, but somehow they're selling millions of millions of records. Like it was never cool to say, I love Farmville. Yeah, I love to play Farmville. But somehow everybody's playing, but nobody wanted to say it was cool. So you had a little bit of a problem there.

1:21:35The video game industry hated me. I was like the Darth Vader. So it didn't help either. Exactly. They said, you're not real games. we're never going to give you an award or invite you to GDC. I was like, that's cool. None of my users go to GDC.

1:21:49Sam Parr:There's this article. I'm looking at old articles of you. There's one from 2011. And it says, old Mark Pincus had a farm. And it's a picture of you. You look like a motorcycle guy with your boots up, like overlooking the city. You had that swag that you talked about with Zuck. I mean, you had swag and you looked pretty cool and you kind of had like a, f*** you, I'm going to win, like, smile on your face. And I think that's kind of cool, but also that will be, that will rub some people the wrong way. Yeah, and there was a great tweet that I loved by this guy yesterday. He has some company called, like, Tiny Co.

1:22:26or something. Yeah, Andrew Wilkinson. That's our good friend. I loved his tweet, and he referenced the courage to be disliked, and he said it was a huge turning point for him when he stopped trying to be liked, and he stopped trying to be like Warren Buffett and worry about his reputation, basically his resume. I'm like, yes, that's my career and that's what I advise people. I'm like, burn your resume. Don't look for respect from your peers. I say, if you're truly ambitious, do not look for respect from the people around you because you will not get it if you're doing things differently than them because they don't like that.

1:23:00I mean, you're supposed to like stick to this one mold and if you do something different, just like you were saying Sam and it works it makes them question themselves so they don't they kind of don't want to see you succeed do it it's like it's like but I paid all these dues and I don't want you to make it without paying the same dues because I'm in a job I hate you're supposed to be in a job you hate or else I didn't have to do this

1:23:27Sam Parr:a lot of people made fun of Mark Andreessen because he had that thing where he says like no one successful is introspective which I thought was I disagree with him I think that's kind of silly that was a very introspective thing of him to say but you are you are an example of someone who uh i think you live life fairly intentional and fairly introspective and trying to like live like a full good life while also you have this like swag about you but also bowl in the china shop like this like really cool dichotomy that i think is like very admirable and really exciting yeah you got like the california woo woo and then zynga and your stuff is so was so metrics driven you were ever wanted to hire somebody who I knew would be like super metrics driven on the product side Zynga was the the perfect pool to go hire from because you guys had like a navy seal training for for PMs it was unbelievable they still do it I'm happy to say I do want to say it was just what you're saying Sam that it felt a little like funny and bad to come out with my book like pretty much the same week that Andreessen and the all-in guys they all started saying how it's a waste of time to be introspective.

1:24:34Shout out your book, man. Can you show it? Show your book and shout it out. Oh, okay. I do have one copy. Life at the Speed of Play. There was something on the All-In where they were talking about how, I forget the word, they said contemplation is a total waste of time.

1:24:53Sam Parr:This is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things. That's just a really stupid thing. Or it's right for them. I mean, I don't think there is. But that's not what they do. I just saw a thing about Chamath being retroactive, looking at his time doing SPACs. Oh, yes, yes. Well, Chamath is a lot of things, but he has no problem whatsoever contradicting himself. I mean, I heard them all talk about how AI was going to put everyone out of work. And now they're proudly saying, like, I think just yesterday I saw something from them saying, that's bullshit. Look, the facts don't support it.

1:25:28AI is not putting anyone out of work. I'm like, but you guys were the ones saying it. And I kind of love that they don't care. They'll just contradict themselves, you know, a few months later and they don't, they're not self-referential. So in that sense, there's a freedom to it. I'm not tied to what I said three months ago. I'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view. Unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I do think there's a mix of all of it. I think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is useful tool used in the right way. And sometimes you should just go do stuff.

1:26:10All right. Well, we should leave it at that.

1:26:11Sam Parr:You're awesome, man. You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it. I really like talking to you guys. We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod.

1:26:29All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q &A sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.