The Quest for True Signal: How Zynga Spotted Mobile

0:00I don't really even believe in minimum viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time. You do not have the time to build your product and fail and do it again. I've always felt I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one way or another every job I ever had because I'm not a good employee. I was in DC. I had to hire these kids out of real estate brokerage firms and give them HTML textbooks. And I sat down next to them and we tried to learn HTML. We were clicking View Source. We want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year.

0:43You might recognize the name Mark Pinkis. But I can almost guarantee you recognize the game Farmville. Mark Pinkis is, of course, the founder and longtime CEO of Zingga, known for its massive global franchise of games, including those household names like Farmville and Wordsworth Friends. Zingga was also at the forefront of the transition to mobile, and the use of large platforms like Facebook for distribution. And if you need any reminder of how big Zingga got, it was sold in 2022 to Game Publisher take two for a whopping $12 .7 billion. Mark, of course, has also founded several other companies, including support .com and tribe networks.

1:26And today he sits down Josh Lu, partner on the A16Z games team who have previously worked at Zingha and Meta about how to prepare for major tech waves, and specifically what, quote, true signal to pay attention to. Mark also candidly covers so many other topics, including how to give yourself permission to be too early, whether he thinks we're still getting the metaverse, broken resumes, and his take on a Silicon Valley standard, minimum viable products, or MVPs. This is a really fun conversation for people both inside and outside the games industry, and it comes directly from our A16z games accelerator Speedrun, which is going through its second cohort right now, and we'll have more details about how you can potentially attend our Demo Day and March 18th.

2:14Alright, enjoy. Oh, and by the way, this was one of many more sessions recorded during our exclusive multi -week Games Fund accelerator, which we call Speedrun. And the good news, in fact, the great news is that we just announced Speedrun 3 .0, which is coming to loss Angeles. So if you're a founder or have thought about founding a company or quite frankly, just know someone that should found a company at the intersection of games and technology, make sure to tell them about Speedrun 3 .0. You can learn more at a16c .com, slash Speedrun 3. Or you can find the link in our show notes. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only.

2:58Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see A16Z .com slash Disclosures.

3:24Zingga is best known for Facebook and eventually mobile, but actually it started well before that. So maybe talk to us a little bit about that. Sure. I'm not well known, probably for a good reason, for starting one of the first three social networks called tribe .net, which failed, which is kind of an amazing feat to actually fail as one of the first social networks when everything worked. But that did ultimately lead to Zinga. And I'd say that where Zinga came from was after tribe in these times like right now and this time when there was amazing growth around Web2O and social networking, you start to feel this kind of weird fomo because you're like, why haven't I figured it out?

4:11And so I went into what I call this abyss where you're just kind of like, I know I wanna do something, and I wanna be innovating on new consumer product ideas, but there's no obvious place, and I actually spent a long time trying to buy CNET because I thought if I own CNET, I have this captive audience, and I spent all this time with bankers and private equity people, and it's, you're in a much better job. Their jobs are so boring. And so, while that was happening, Facebook was opening their API, and I said, oh, that's free. I don't even have to buy. I know they have this captive audience. They had 70 million D .A .Us.

4:51And I had this instinct from tribe that what people really wanted to do at this social cocktail party was play games together. And I thought games was this amazing business, which you may not even be aware of today. But in 2007, when I started games was a mature and even declining business. The whole game industry was $20 billion. It was mainly console gaming. And there was maybe like a billion dollars of PC gaming and zero web. It wasn't even a top 10 activity. But it was big. So I thought it was kind of like searched before Google that search was a big but mature business, and then Google reimagined it.

5:34And one thing you're probably all aware of so much today is that distribution is kind of the hardest part of the equation in gaming. And there was no distribution. There was no way to market games to a mass market audience. and so all games were made for a very hardcore audience and then with Facebook, there was finally a distribution channel. So that's how I got to do it. So one of the really interesting things you said is suddenly this opportunity came along and it worked. So maybe a compound question is like, one, how do you as a founder prepare for these big waves? And then second is, how do you sort of know when something's working?

6:18Well, I surf badly, but I surf for so long that it actually is a perfect analog because, like I said this last year, but when you're surfing, all you can do is try to be where you think there will be waves. Surfing is almost this chess game where you're trying to figure out the tides, the weather, the swell, what are other surfers thinking of it? It is this kind of interesting 3D chess game. And everyone's looking at surf line. They have the same data you have. So you're trying to figure out, like, is this the day that I'm going to go to Ocean Beach and it won't drown me and no other surfers will be there?

6:58I'll have this epic day. There's a lot of that around startups. And there's a lot of hurry up and wait. There's a lot of being too early and wrong and then trying to decide, just stay here and see if there's a wave or not. And one thing that my friend Reid Hoffman said to me a couple months ago, and I think he's one of the smartest thinkers and earliest thinkers around AI, is he said, you need to focus on the easiest unsolved problem that will have the biggest impact, which is really hard. Like how do you come up with an easy problem that no one else has solved that has a big impact? And what I keep thinking is that what we're all trying to do is get to what I call true signal.

7:41So not what's getting a lot of VC funding or whatever else is doing or what's popular right now, but if it's a consumer focused Opportunity you're like how do I know that this is something that a lot of consumers and people would like if they just had it in front of them And it's hard because you got to learn over time and to calibrate like which data should you listen to that has true signal in it and which has false signal I could and talk for a long, long time, and I think it's probably a science to pursue by itself. And this is one of the hardest things, I think, for the game's industry. Founders are making oftentimes experiences, and they sometimes present as either working or not working.

8:28But really, there's so much more under the surface. Yeah, I mean, I have so much to unpack there. And the core for me, when you think about this true signal concept, is that I like to say that we have these winning instincts, and you all probably being here today can probably already trust the instincts that you have being right. But then we put these losing ideas on top of our winning instincts. And I had this instinct in 2003 for a bunch of things, but one was that we should build a order of taxi through our phone. And so I registered SMStaxi .com, and I did a whole business plan around it, And I thought, this is an awful plan.

9:10I'm going to have to work with the taxi companies. I could get a million rides a month, and a dollar a ride. That's a lot of work to get to a $12 million business and dealing with these awful taxi companies. So I had this instinct, but my idea was completely wrong. And it never occurred to me that years later, Uber would figure out to let anyone be a driver and do this magical app that we all take for granted now. So that's just an example of it. but in the games industry, it happens all the time, or even right now with AI, we can get an instinct. I don't know about you guys, but I see something that's true signal right now with my friends and family, the way that they're using chat GPT, the way that I have to literally stop my daughter from doing her homework on it, because she's not gonna learn it.

9:57She might learn the new skills she needs, but she won't learn the skills she's supposed to be doing in school right now, And even watching my partner, she's on mid -journey for hours doing room designs and imagining. So to me, that's true signal. And I look at it, I'm like, okay, there's something for sure that's happening that if that were easier and more available, I think everyone would be using this all the time. So I'm like, okay, that's true signal. I don't know the right ideas to put on top of that, but that feels like a wave to me. And I'll say where I've gotten true signal, wrong is when I was talking a year ago about blockchain gaming, I think so many people took the wrong signals in that.

10:47And we have to be careful when we say true signal of what, because what we didn't see in blockchain gaming or blockchain was true signal of consumer adoption, right? What we saw day trading and gambling, that's a real thing that people were into. But the adoption didn't happen, and a lot of the game companies were thinking, well, everyone's gonna wanna own assets. They were half right. I think what we kinda know now is, we saw true signal in blockchain gaming around monetization. So I do believe that people see more value in owning the money they spend in a game, having the potential that they could trade and sell that to somebody later.

11:34And Bing Gordon always said, if you have a marketplace in the game, you double the value of the assets that people buy. So that's real. So I think we should hang on to that true signal for monetization, but not adoption. So eventually, I think all these things get put together and we have a new reason that people want to play games that they find really fun and emergent and new, and then there's blockchain assets and you monetize, you know, you have all kinds of new whales. Does that make sense? It makes sense. So, you talked some about lessons from the Web 3 Wave. Obviously, what are big believers that Gen.

12:12of AI is this new, oncoming wave. And so, you talked about some things that you've seen, some signal that you've seen. If you're a founder today and you see this wave coming, what would you do about it? The coaching I've been giving myself for the last 18 months, and it's a reminder of so many hard lessons that we got at Zingha is give yourself permission to be too early, because I feel like that's what we all need to write down and say to ourselves right now. And what I mean by that is it's okay to be too early and you're going to be too early. Now, it's tough. Like, you look at when Zingha went into mobile, our biggest problem is we're way too early and too aggressive.

12:54That was the problem Zingah had everywhere. But we went big into mobile. We said, this is gonna be our way off of Facebook and monetization. Every reason the world to love mobile is Zingah. We had an 800 person division, but we were turning dollars into pennies. And so we got to a point that an ambitious person like Josh is, okay, do I wanna work on the next mobile game that might get to 50 ,000 a day, or I can work on this web game that's not that interesting, but it's going to do 500 ,000 a day. We got all of our best people dove into mobile, and then they all left mobile early, and we couldn't get really good teams to keep working on mobile.

13:34So today, with AI, I just think we've got to keep trying things, and it's moving so fast and realize that what you're doing today might be obsolete in three months or six months. There might be a new release, but hopefully you're learning building skills, building team, and you're in the right place. So there might be little waves coming that are crashing over you on the head and you're like, shit, I'm in the wrong place. You're still in the right place. I would have the kind of staying power and fortitude. Think about the macro and accept that at least everything I've done worked on the last 18 months or three years has been wrong.

14:23I mean, it's been the wrong ideas. And I'm OK about it because I feel so strongly that this macro. And by the way, I still believe that what we're going And then, up getting is going to somehow be the metaverse. And that's a really unpopular thing to say today. Even Zuckerberg doesn't really talk about metaverse, and maybe he'll change the name back from meta to something else. If you think about the definition of metaverse as being blurring the lines between analog and digital, I like to say that we're headed towards life at the speed of play. So to me, the North Star that I think about, that I think all this comes together around, is imagine like we can type a tweet too quickly and easily, so we're happy that there's an hour to edit it or delete it.

15:12I am at least because Dan Garen who works with me will, and now Kevin will take that's awful, take that down, it's misspelled, it's embarrassing. But I can put up a tweet, and it actually has real world impact. And so I think of the metaverse as being making the virtual real. We started that with Farmville in a little way and that really had adrenaline. And I think that's an important part of gaming but an important part of just what we're doing digital. You could put up a tweet and something real comes out of that. To me, that's powerful. And that's why I think Elon so into Twitter as like the biggest, it's his metaverse.

15:47It's this big game that has real world impact. And I think that's the beginning of this thread that we're on with AI. I think that we're going to get to a place that you're going to type in something, and it's going to turn into a whole business or store, or maybe a lot of people are coming to you with services and an hour later, that's something real. And to me, that's life at the speed of play, and that's the metaverse. So that's this bigger thing that I keep thinking we're headed towards. All right. We could spend a lot of time in the metaverse. Instead, I'm going to give it just a little bit.

16:19You've now gotten to sort of see the evolution of consumer tech in lots of ways, and you've also gotten to work with lots of amazing founders. What are the through lines on what makes for a successful founder? Given that everything else changes, nothing is static. How do founders prepare themselves and what are the attributes of really great founders? I keep thinking of founders from a consumer standpoint, so you have to take over the but I spent a bunch of time with Brian Chesky and he's kind of molded in the Paul Graham School of like first start with something that you could use. He gets to his own true signal and he does such a good job of building things in a non -scalable way.

17:03Even now, I mean, I'm so impressed with his commitment to getting to an A, not a B plus. I say, don't let a B plus be the enemy of an A. So I see him say it's not ready, it's not good enough. And build things by hand, you may not even have noticed, but Airbnb has something I think called experiences. I got involved and I renamed it Trips. It's done really well, but it took him years and years to make this experience product because he would set up by hand a dinner that Michael Minna would prepare for you and the most interesting person would come as a guest. And you'd be like, I'm not that excited about it.

17:42Like, I personally, Michael Menace seems great, but I don't want him to come to my house and cook dinner because it feels like an obligation. Like, I have to fawn all over it and be impressed. And I just want good food fast, you know, and I'll go to his restaurant if I want his food. So I wouldn't have gotten trips experiences either. But I was like, Brian, what I would like is when I rent a surf house in Maui, I'd like some wax surfboards already there. I'd like a local to paddle out with me so I don't get angry stink eyes from the other locals. I'm like, that's cool. So rethink this in terms of that experience.

18:18So he's done the best job of that. I think Reed Hoffman, I work on a lot of things with. So many lessons I get from Reed as a founder. He's so strategic. And what I've gotten as a lesson that's a hard one I'm trying to learn now from Reed is, Reed doesn't pursue something until he has a CEO for it. And actually, this is how I did it at Zingga. So I couldn't do it also. I had to get a CEO. So I'm going to be a GM and owner of something before I can fund it. And I have too much of a tendency as a founder to just want to be the CEO that myself, but then it doesn't move without me. And so I think there is this lesson that once you're trying to get a lot done of being really good at turning people around you into CEOs, letting them be CEOs, getting out of their way.

19:10Maybe as a follow -up on that. A lot of the founders here that got other co -founders, they're gonna be hiring their first teams here shortly. Any advice for the founders here on sort of how to find amazing people to work with? Because I think Zingah had a really good track record of being a collection of amazing talent. Yeah, I think these are some pretty different ideas or principles that I've used around people that may or may not resonate with you guys right now. But I think you have to be realistic about where you are and who you can get. I was a multi -time successful founder. I couldn't even get A investors or any investors to start with.

19:52Like what I was doing just sounded so flaky and just Facebook apps, do you have any respect for yourself? Is that really what you're doing? And I like to start rubbing sticks together. I don't start with a big amount of money and stuff. I don't build that. It's hate you want to come work from Mark on this project. He's funded this with 350K and this little office he owns. No A people want to do that. There's no job security. We're doing this little Facebook app. So everything I've done is started off feeling flaky and no matter what my track record is, even now I'm trying to recruit people, I get what I can get and I'm just realistic about it.

20:32when I started my first company, but you know what? You can find these diamonds and a rough. There's this kid, JW, Justin Waldron. I found him by fishing through failed Facebook apps with 10 users, and I would send messages out, being like, I love your app, can we talk? I was the only message he got that month. He emailed right back, you know, and I hired him for 50, 60 bucks an hour who was living on his mom's couch in Connecticut. he was 18, self -taught. It was six months before he met him in person. This was not someone who a lot of people were after, but he was passionate about games and he became like this.

21:09He's super successful in his own right today as a co -founder. So you can get these broken resumes, non -resimés. I would say don't over optimize in the beginning on people. I mean, this is, I don't know if this is good to tweet, this is, you can, but this is not what you probably hear. I wouldn't waste a lot of time. I get the best you can and move the fuck on. And I'm also not good at interviewing. My interview process was hiring. I was just hire everyone who was willing and keep the good ones. I'm like, that's what I did. I was just trying to move, I'm like, PHP? Cool, you're hired. That's all our apps from PHP, apparently.

21:52I don't know shit about coding. So also for me to hire coders, was all I knew was which code worked. I'm like, this one seems like a great engineer because their app works. So, but I moved fast and I actually was shocked. I didn't know who would be great. And I found really great people that way. And then we were a lot more successful than Josh came a lot later. So Josh was obviously an A player I got later. But once we got traction and we were more successful, I started to be able to get better and better people. and I eventually did get these amazing CTOs and great people. But anyway, it's always hard to get great people and I would tune more to who's excited about what you're doing and willing to dive in.

22:36And then if they're no good, don't keep them. Amazing. One other thing that I want to touch on for my time at Zing is you did this great job of we have this company value. Everyone is a CEO, be your own CEO. And that is not easy to do at a small company and at a big company. How did you come up with that and how did it go? I've always felt that way because I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one way or another every job I ever had because I'm not a good employee. I've learned I'm only a good team player if I'm running the team. I mean, that's probably a lot of you. I was what I called the expert witness.

23:14Every job I was in, I was closest to the answer and the data and I was furthest from the decision and the adults would make the decisions and then tell me it and then I had to make it work and I was super frustrated and half engaged, disengaged. And I said, I want to find people like me who feel this frustration and then I want to give them enough rope to hang themselves and some will hang themselves but others won't. And what I learned was I got so much more done and so much better things done by turning people into CEOs. It only works for higher people who want to be a CEO. It doesn't work to take people who are passive and not interested in being a CEO.

23:51You're a CEO and they're like, they just sit there and do nothing. What I started to learn over time is that people who are really ambitious aren't actually focused right now on the pay and the equity and the money and stuff. That of course matters, but they're actually really focused on being in a position of much greater responsibility that anyone else will give them. And you can hire people and give them a lot of responsibilities, so much that it scares them in a way. I can't believe that they just asked me to do this and get more out of them. And it's a really good management hack because I am not good at managing people and I'm too impatient to learn how to be a good manager.

24:36I don't do one -on -ones, but if you get people that can be CEOs, you don't theoretically have to spend the time managing them. But you can't be a fake CEO. You can't say your CEO and they're not really. They have to have a real hill. They're taking some real responsibility, real degrees of freedom. Okay, one last follow up for me, and then I think we'll try to open it up. Something that we think is really important, and that you sort of pushed really hard on is when you're trying to ride away, if you just gotta move fast, you gotta iterate. You're not gonna know all the things, and so you might as well fuck up a few times, learn from it, and if you can do that faster than everyone else you win.

25:14So maybe talk a little bit about that, because we think we're at the onset of lots of interesting opportunities. So how would you sort of approach that? So I'll be in my book when it comes out someday. My core philosophy that made up product management at Zingga, and it took me so many years of being so inefficient and stubborn before I got to Zingga, let's assume at the outset that your idea is just wrong. And it's like a time machine. Because what if you could come back from two years in the future or you're on a shorter time frame here, maybe it's six months or one year and say, oh, the thing you're working on was the right wave, but your idea just was wrong.

25:58It just wasn't quite right. What would you do with that information today? Would you just heroically still go with this one idea because you're committed and you've got funding and I'm doing a B2B game tool? What if from the future you came back and said, You know what? That thing you were building actually was the shit. But the time it was gonna take you to sell that into some game companies or to dumb to know it's ever useful, you never got there. But the thing you were building, if you just unleashed that to consumers, they were gonna just go bananas and love it. Would you do something differently?

26:32So I know everyone talks about pivots. Pivots are too slow, take too long. And people talk about MVP building the Mino and Viable product. I don't really even believe in Mino and Viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time. You do not have the time to build your product and fail and do it again. You may be out of money in time by then. So how can you move faster than that? That's too slow for what we need today in a world of AI. We need to get to minimum viable idea state and you need to separate what that idea is from the underlying instincts that you're pursuing and say, even before you start that one idea, you and your team need to come up.

27:15What are your 10 other variants that I do? What's everyone else in your space doing? Are you spending as much time looking at their ideas that relate to your instincts as your own? You probably should be spending brain cycles 50 to 60 % of your time looking at whatever all surround you is doing and trying to see why they're wrong or why they are kind of almost right, and then half the time on your own. And then when you're on your own, can you come up with a faster process? When I started with Zingha, it was kind of shooting fish in a barrel, because we were competing against the EA's, these game companies who spent two years putting out a game to learn from.