YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Pincus

lines on the record: 111
first: 2026-06-14
most recent: 2026-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This is fun. This is actually, I've done some podcasts about the book, and I didn't want to talk about the content of the book on most of the podcasts. And on this one, I did. And I'm trying to only go into places that I want to talk about. Which I tried to do in the book too.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a copy. I just got a copy. Because you're important. We hope you read it twice. Give it out to a friend. I would just say that life is the speed of play is my, it's, I'm trying to share my playbook and philosophies. And I'm hopeful that somebody will steal from my ideas and take it further. And we're all kind of in a conversation. And I love this podcast and you hosting this cocktail party. We're all trying to. The philosophies and the craft of product making ahead, and we're all learning as we go. And I hope that my book can be something referenceable. And I hope it's easy and fun to read because I have pain reading a lot of books.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be working on and know that I gave everything I had against it. And it's to build an internet treasure, which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world. And my friend Bing Gordon says, you know, one day those treasures will be in the Smithsonian. And I think he's right. I think it is the greatest opportunity that we have as product makers in this era is to build this digital skyscrapers that the next generation can't believe anyone ever lived without. And so that's my ambition and why. I'm still rubbing sticks together. And writing”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I've gotten that's resonated most in writing in my book of life for the last 30 years, it took me a long, long time. It took me until I started zing at 41 to finally identify and articulate my why. I think for all of us, it's so important to get there. And we might do for a long time before we actually can say the why. But I figured out that mine that I talk about in the book is I want to create an internet treasure. Like, you know, when people say, Mark, how do I know that you're going to work hard on this next thing or, you know, you're post-economic or you're a board rich guy or whatever? I'm like, well, I haven't done my thing yet. I like to like, what is our soul need to do before we die? Or at least to be an integrity with it, what do I need to?”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to write a book on parenting saying everything I know about parenting I learned from my dog Zinga because I had her before I had kids and she was like a person and I gave her clear boundaries and freedom and love in between and she believed that she was a person so”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm trying to give them these, and it's, and they're teenagers, the older two. And, you know, and I'm in it and learning, and I've got too littles that a one-year-old and four-year-old who sleep with me every night”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and also, I'll say one more thing. My older girls, I keep a running Google Doc of life philosophies. And anything I say to them as like a quote I say over and over, I'm like, okay, I'm going to actually like write that up with stories. And I keep it in this document for them. And who knows if they'll use it. But they do start to repeat some of them. So I know they read it. One is nothing's personal. Don't ever take anything personal. And if you assume nothing's personal, you're probably right 19 out of 20 times and the 20th time you probably handled it right because of that. So that's one, you know, and don't be a victim. The world doesn't happen to you. It's happening around you. And we're defined how we react to the world, not by the events that happen to us.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not being a passive consumer of content and experiences. And sometimes it works and I see them doing that and sometimes it doesn't. But that's how I'm trying to navigate this. I also try to make it till they were 16 with no phones, no smartphones. And I got to 14. I got them flip phones. And they had internships at Niantic working on Pokemon Go. They built a first-time user experience. It's really good. I think used, but they had to get smartphones for that and they still have them. And so I tried to make it. I didn't.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To when look at the deeper, the meta of what's going on, when an adult is trying to convince you of something, when a teacher has a point of view that you don't agree with, try to understand why, what's their agenda, where's their lived experience, and how has that impacted it? So I'm trying to teach them to ask better questions, not no more answers. And I think that's, you know, and I'd say in terms of how that spills into their online use and what I try to promote and discourage, I try to promote how can you be generative in what you're doing and not consumptive. So what can you do online or offline that is generative, that is actually putting something new out in the world because that's how you're going to get something back and not consuming.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I feel badly about it with my kids. And what I've tried to do with my older kids is teach them to have critical thinking more than, and I say I don't care if you go to college, which is a little hard for them because they're kind of. Called Comfy Fancy. And she also has created a gathering, a grouping, a group for neurodivergent middle school kids called neurosparkly. And it's taking this thing which should be a problem and a deficit. And it's making it a way that she can connect and help a lot of other kids. So I'm proud to see that. I've also The dissonance that I feel in this moment as a parent is that my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker. And I know that game is over. And I know, so what do I want my kids doing? I try to teach them.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be there in fifth grade. But I just started for them and their friends just trying to teach them how to approach math in a way that's fun and curious. And then I found out we found out later I taught them all the way through eighth grade math and I didn't know it. They didn't know it. And that was cool. And I'd say in the how does this apply in the age of AI and where we are? I feel like we're at the end of this hundred year cycle of mass produced education, which was get the most knowledge in, get everyone's averages up to the best place we can educate 20 million graduates a year or whatever number, but it was factory produced and it was for a certain kind of work, first factories, then knowledge workers, you know, knowledge working is going away. It's changing, but we're still cheating knowledge education.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can kind of talk down to them. We could talk to them as kids, or we can kind of treat them like adults. And neither of those are right. And it's like, we got to find, engage with them at the altitude that they're at, but as human to human and find the way to do that. And then once we do that and meet them where they are, I think we can bring them to surprisingly sophisticated places that maybe way beyond what they're supposed to be, you know, in that moment. Like my twins, I started playing with math with them when they were really, really little. And then during the pandemic, I taught daddy math because I saw that their school was not equipped to do online homeschooling. So I taught them and their friends daddy math. And I just tried to teach them a math brain. Like, and I didn't know where they were supposed to.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, may also end up being very neurodivergent. So you still have this wide range. My 15-year-old girls or their twins and they're completely divergent from each other. This first principle that I've found is meeting them where they are. It's with kids, I find.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for asking about this. It's, I think, my greatest role and job and service to the world is trying to grow good humans. It's like really, really put a lot into it and take it seriously. And I get so much out of it. I like to say I'm growing my best friends. And so far it's true. So there's a couple of principles that have come in philosophies that have been important to me as a parent that I've just seen I do them naturally and I see that they work over time. The first one for me is I have five kids. Every one of them is just such a different version of a human. And I have a special needs son who's fairly extreme special needs. Our new one year old baby has a gene mutation.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your personality fit. I'm like, I'll take misfits who are right. I'm like, I want those really smart expert witnesses who are intellectually honest. And, you know, the more people you have around you who are right, they're putting balls in the net.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's another one that I stole from Bezos. But if I got to pick one, if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than your phenomenal execution or inspiring people or managing because being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat. And a great boat in a dead lake bed isn't going anywhere. And so I look for that in people. Like, are they right? Like that's the best resume. I could see that you were right about something. And I look for that in the team. And it's less, do I like your style or approach?”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 months and make it the mini me the person who is you in your 20s who was the expert witness a little bit of a know-it all and and start having them follow you around to pick up learn absorb everything you do and give them projects to test them and and then hopefully you've created a mini me that you can now put in in a much bigger role somewhere else and in fact Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos. So that idea actually scales and you kind of get it for free.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas that actually scale your skill what you're trying to do as a product maker in the right way. And one of the ones I love is this idea of tech assistance and this idea of a teaching hospital. How do you pass the vampire blood of you to other people? Like you have this burning mission and passion around your product. How do you spread that to other people and have them spread in the organization? The first thing is put them in the room with you. So the idea of this teaching hospital was, okay, I'm just going to put as many people as I can in the room while I'm doing these product management meetings and have my passion and ideas and approach, you know, spread to all of them too. And that worked. And then grab someone from the ranks and make them your tech assistant, have them just follow you around for six months.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was building Zingo, we had to apologize for things like micromanaging or, you know, expecting massive results from our teams. And I think I'm happy to see that that's becoming kind of accepted as more, it's closer to best practices today, I think. But my point about That management is get people to do the right thing when you're not in the room. The first principle is be in the room. Much as you can be. And then only delegate when you get to the point that you can't possibly be in all these rooms at the same time. All these management principles are just different strategies to try to get people to do the right thing when you're not there. And I love these non-scalable.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that, and I did that building Zynga to a fault. I mean, we got to a point that I had all the way to 50 employees, we had a stand-up call that would gone for two hours and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're going to do today. And I go through name by name and say, okay, did you get that done? Can everyone else verify they got that done? Okay, what are you going to do today? And I completely micromanaged, but we were much more effective. And then I, you know, I kept micromanaging things as I'm like, if you can be in the room, be in the room, assuming that you are the best player. So yeah, I think it's less contrarian saying it now than it was 20 years ago, but.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And work two days a week deeply with the team on it. And it makes sense if you were the best product maker in the company, we want you on the field. We want to put you on the ice. We don't want you to spend your time talking to investors and managing and scaling.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came to this conclusion too that they needed to actually be an inverted pyramid. And they said, we realized that we outsource, we delegate the most important product decisions, the UX to our least experienced people. And they're doing this every day. And we decided to turn that upside down and say, we as founders need to be kind of the first and last mile for the product. And we have to be the ones who bless our best use of our time is making these minute decisions that change the product user experience. And so to me, that's being close to the metal. Brian Cesky believes in doing things in non-scalable ways and doing it himself with the team by hand. There's so many stories about Jeff Bezos and Zuck of the thing that mattered most, they would go.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clean up your mess because you're wrong. And that's why many of us become founders because we just are sick of being in that position. You're also closer to the metal. And when you go become a CEO, when you become a founder, part of the paradox of it that I believe we have to be careful about is that we stay close to the metal. And I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutiae of the details. You know, all the stories about Steve Jobs, I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting and the conference rooms. I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel level details that matter. And I had a great conversation with the founders of Discord and they.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They go together. We start our careers in our 20s very close to the metal, meaning we are individual contributors and we are working on getting the primary data and building the actual product usually. We're in the trenches. And the people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision. And that's what I call the expert witness syndrome because you're called to the stand by the adults and you plead for what you passionately believe is the right answer. And then you're excused and then they make a decision and then you have to deal with the consequences and disagree and commit. What if I'm disagreeing because I'm fucking right and now I'm committing to”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go and prove that they were right. And that's a beautiful thing. So yeah, I love this principle of make everyone a CEO. And we're kind of going there in Silicon Valley with this idea of get rid of middle management. You know, Brian Armstrong's saying everyone should be an individual contributor. Everyone should be managing a lot of other people. That's really kind of to me the best CEO is like the best player at the position and is doing the thing they're great at and they're not wasting their time on management.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have operating control degrees of freedom to take that hill however they want. And they can give me a plan, a budget, and then do whatever they want within that. What I found was I didn't have to manage them. So they're not coming back to me with questions. And certain kinds of people really want to be a CEO. What I also found was it was incredibly motivating for people. It's motivating to me. I always say I'm a team player as long as I'm running the team. So can I hire other people like that? And I like to say I was a frustrated expert witness when I worked for other people. And those are the best people to turn into a CEO. They're kind of a little bit of a know-it-all. They think they have the right answers and they're going to find out if they do. And so we let them actually be a CEO and they have all this pent up demand to actually.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My management principles I got to through desperation. I don't like managing people. I say every day you're managing people is a day of work. And it's a necessary evil for us as product makers because we can't abdicate and just have someone else be CEO because all of a sudden the priorities get messed up and teams don't have to listen to us and we're now feedback, not direction. So that's a failing path. So we have to be a CEO. But then the question is, how do we get to spend the most time doing what we love and the least time doing what we don't? The bigger principle to me that I started to get to was that, oh, I'm like all of management is just how do we get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. So I was like, okay, if I give them a hill to take and if I make them a CEO, make them a real CEO. I mean, they...”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is going to be interesting. And look, we can see past examples with Microsoft. Microsoft was a brutal monopoly. They were brutal platform. They ate everything around them. And then, you know, with us, we saw it on Facebook. The two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music. But everything else they did absorb”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why they're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and that's an amazing business, but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The internet has grown through us getting a better deal. But I think the next area of growth probably will include deals, but I think it's going to be about getting amazing services. And that's my prime example. But if someone built the best travel agent today, maybe we'd find out about it. But it's a tough road. But if there was specifically baked into open AI or Claude and gave me a real clear reason that I'm getting value from my GPT beyond, you know, there's a lot of generic value I get through AI chat today that I'm having more and more trouble differentiating. And it's just, I don't even know anymore if I'm asking a question to Claude or to GPT. And so at some point,”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason we don't have it is because it doesn't make economic sense to offer it to us because we won't pay enough for it is a travel agent. I believe if I offered you a free 24-7 travel agent that was always there for you, knows your travel context, knows you, and will actually book, not just book travel, but I think the most valuable part is when you're in the middle of a travel trip be ready to rebook your flight and be on top of your travel logistics as they're happening and often failing. And I think that's valuable to all of us, but not available to all of us because travel agents couldn't make a living. They weren't getting enough commissions and we weren't ready to pay enough. So we're.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make so much sense to me that I think consumers will want, but they're not going to get it because if it's just buried in, I doubt they're going to get it buried in the mobile app store. And I think it's going to be in open AI's interest, Claude, Grock to see these apps consumer facing a gentic service apps happen and see them be successful with their LLM baked in. And the more it's uniquely instantiated to OpenAI, the more it drives their consumer value proposition. One example that my number one is my Easter egg on this is I think there should be an agentic travel agent. So a perfect example to me of a place where I think there is latent demand and the”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am somewhere between belief and hope in this because I don't have enough evidence to believe it. And it's a little more likely to me than just hope. I think right now there's obvious race and competition around coding between the major LLMs. I think they're going to get back to consumer and prosumer and developers' hearts and minds. And I think they are interested in developers' hopes and minds, but first they're competing on this coding front. I think where we will get to in one way or another is that there will be some kind of Will be some kind of consumer facing platform for For AI apps and agents. I can see so many consumer facing a gentic services that”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hanging out, and how do we broker that without hurting, you know, one of our feelings or, you know, going into, there's some really interesting spaces that the AI and the agent can broker between us in ways that start to give us both productivity. They find ways for us to get together without going, without getting in a bad place of You see me on your calendar for Saturday and you want to be with your kids.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being in the middle and brokering our social relationships and getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, general listings. But I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context. And we have this membrane. I call it the social membrane, this intelligent membrane of trust. And it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to change, dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us like a great chief of staff. And it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, Lenny, let's hang out. You're like, Mark, I love that. So, okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it because games don't work. Freemium games and freemium apps that have to go and hit the AI, even if you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits, right? So getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation. And I'll also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we get in the mindset of basically intelligence on tap, free tokens, and if we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, that will basically be free in a year or two. The token supply is going to go up so much. Our demand will too. But if today we start building reimagining consumer services based on free tokens. Think that's such an interesting innovation zone, and it could sound like a dot com business plan when I remember ordering pig ears for my dog, Zynga and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at PETCO, right? That's not a good business plan. Giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be in a phenomenal business.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. And I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach that go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it up front to sustain a business long before we can get out to consumer. And there is a great idea that I got to that Gary Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week that”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer, any business idea, but any consumer idea. And it can't be an afterthought. It's not, I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come distribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, you know, that's hope strategy, you know, not a belief strategy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting. And now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because it'll be 100%.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard. It's much easier, you know, to be prosumer or enterprise now. But for good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas. And you asked about distribution.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever install new apps. You know, the average app installs per user per month is zero. So it's really important to think about that, that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. There was something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the App Store and zero became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. Your odds are bad. Okay, so it's not an ideal, you know, moment to be, you can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge. And it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investable. They're still getting investment.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how. I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be, I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And we're kind of like halfway to a platform. We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start with talking about consumer distribution, which. Understand better. There's one question we got to back up and really explore, which is, is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use, AI chat. It's not, in my mind, a platform. A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. It's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. Trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaversian. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world. It's that the virtual and the real completely blur together. And, but I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. You know, I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this game engine browser-based game engine. And I was not getting a product market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small, small idea. I was going for a really big idea. And it was really hard. And I pulled the plug on it after four years and $25 million in just this one version of it. And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired. Around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more on a D.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power is knowing it's a B. That's the first point is, okay, this is not it. Now what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? Do I see examples that are near this that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven? When we realize it's not it, we look for more things to do. And it's such a hard lesson two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my dot earth project for like the fourth time. Okay. I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zynga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. And by the way, I define the metaverse and I give Reid Hoffman credit for this definition as blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. And that is where our”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotally. You love your product. You're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. I mean, did we have to ask if GPT was it? Do we say, oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure, you know. We're like, no, I'm fucking living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do, right? So I'd say that the hard part about this is, you know, what do you do with a B+? First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B? And then what do we do with a B? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn?”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't mean you might not have the chance to turn that into an A, but the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not. And then, well, how do you know, how are you getting validation that it's not?”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you know if you're with the right person? Like you're dating, what was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, is this the right person? I'm like, fuck yeah, I love this person. This is my person. And that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that. When you're with the A- person, you're with the B plus, you're asking, could this be the one? And, you know, Osho said if you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You know, you have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. And you're full of hope. You hope it's an A.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do. Today, we're all hanging out on our clod, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So my Easter egg people is it is, it's a, it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party, like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive. And you will probably, you know, find gold there. I want to come back to your thread on. Your question was how do you know when an idea is a B, right? Yeah. Okay, I love the question on, well, how do you know if it's a B? And what I would say to you is.”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist. And it was a lot of noise to signal. And now we're like, oh my God, I could get on Friendster and find a date. And it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Friendster. What I would say to people is like, look, if you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is or you could host and then think about how is lead generation happening. It might sound weird when I say lead gen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn start with lead gen all the productivity, the value started in a utility and being in this cocktail party. Today, and by the way, with Zynga, I said, I'm going to go to the...”
2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source