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Mark Pincus

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2026-06-14
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2026-06-14
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  1. “There's a side of this, I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay, that's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party. And I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how do we add things to the cocktail? We'd love to host the cocktail party. And if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You know it. You feel it. You're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. And it moves from like obligatory. I'm at this party. It's the birthday party to almost like greed. Like, I love this party. Love the people I'm meeting. And what do you get at great cocktail party? You often get great leads. And so that cocktail party that for me, it started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file. But then.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “A new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about, but not wasting our time as much. And I'll also say this.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age. But how are they going to do it? I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again, that they're going, part of what we got, people forget. Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or 1,000 friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity and they still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of Wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely Instagram had TikTok Envy. So they started doing that. And so I think there is.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Like, is there a heat in it? Like, are you excited to go get on Instagram? Or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Like, are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell. I think all that's to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I mean, I think.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And yet, it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth weighting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be some. It's very big, but none I know. So, okay, so social and consumer. I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social, we are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them free, not just free even, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So I made it free and I said, I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in. And I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you know, to do this. And you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. You're not going to, like I say, we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read it. So I believe there was a latent demand. And in fact, today, you know, gaming is a 280 billion dollar industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “To play Rise of Nations with Me, and we set up two machines for them and two for me. And we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server. And we did that one time. I was like, that is a lot of effort. And it was fun, but we did it once. And I said, my premise was, okay.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven, nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there latent demand? So if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. In 2007, when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business, but I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me. And it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. You literally, I got my nephews who are intense gamers.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have kind of given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral. And I see them every so often.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That's still not used by anyone. This is an Easter egg if anyone, if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening, we built a metric called ASN and it stood for what we measured what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player, meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually, you know, build and innovate against that metric. And it made sense, right? Because if you saw. Positive feedback loops. It's like someone likes your photos, comments. That's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Viral based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real. We've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right? They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster. You know, we just try to get people back or plug the hole in the boat or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But yeah, so we were tracking both in our games and in our network what was the retention and we were really constantly thinking about that. And I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success, in my opinion, that I hold is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. And we even built a metric.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Day 365, we can find early indicators of a positive day 365 and a negative day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high day 365. So those track, you know, those are correlated. But you can have the opposite. You can have very high day 30 and a zero day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, is this worth investing in, whether it's a game or a camera? Am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this? Or, you know, is this, should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever?”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what mid journey does for me today. And then we were letting you, so you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing. And then at, if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew, we outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about it in the book. I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world will statistically this is true. They have the highest day 365 retention. Can you build against day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “By giving you this, you're doing social networking. You're in this cocktail party, and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. Well, the reason why people so many, especially middle-aged women, love Farmville in these games was because they had this kind of hobby, but they weren't doing it alone. And they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of value to your friends. And so we called the games Invest, Express, and Connect. You could do something that was, you were being seen as creative. I like to say people don't want to be creative. They want to feel creative.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else. And we had lots of competitors, lots and copying and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games and being Gordon and an I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more dimensionality? I love this idea of it's why I call it a bold beat. It's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and wrote poker or whatever? How do I add a whole new dimension to it? And by adding social, by adding real identities.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Words of friends and poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and other games didn't was a whole other story. But I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success, that it was our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it. And that's fair. But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of ten mass large game launches. We had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we're good at.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Sure, I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that the privates turn people off, it's funny you say that because Farmville and Cityville were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Intended consequences was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to the new expansion pack. And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn it into something that gave us signal and direction in the product and revenues. And so often, you know, you can have, you know, this is an existing product, but you can turn something. You could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Have these people engaged? What if you just put something on the game board? And what if you don't just start your product marketing? You're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat. What if you start putting different art forms of your English countryside locked on the game board? And you just see how many clicks you get. And you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message. And at the same time, when people click on it, it says coming soon, click here to be a pre-user. You know, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else. And it turned out everybody clicked on it, right? Because it's a change in your game board. And it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product. But the unintended...”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. It's so often, it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put in the markets, an afterthought. And it was so often at Zynga, it blew my mind. I mean, I'll give you one story from Zynga. When we were launching our first expansion pack for Farmville, which became a mass, these became massive business drivers for us. It was, I think it was Farmville English countryside or something. The team came to me and they said, okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch. I'm like, wait, you have. 25 30 million people a day using your product but you're going to put ads”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Would it look like? I like to say, we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that. Because if we start off, if we say, okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product. What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea? And I think we can usually.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Thought would happen where we be today is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like to say more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than 100 ideas, you know, in a day.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “MVP minimum viable. The viable is the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right? And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn, you're putting a product out that you're going to learn from and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch, that you think you believe, not hope is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that what I...”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Anything that your lived experience is not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers I like to say they're collecting winnings. They're not making bets. They already know, you know, if you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it, kill hope before hope, kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If we can build a culture with our team that says, okay, we are ambitious. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold on to a B, even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a North Star that we are not going to stop until we find product market fit against our North Star. And this isn't it. And it's going to take courage on our part. And hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship, which that's a fair career choice for you to make? But I think that that's to me the real founder mode is can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that This isn't”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Part of, I think, the dissonance of this, how do you express confidence? How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team? I'm still learning. I had people, I err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault and I burn out people in that process. And I did it Zinga and I have since because it, you know, people will say the negative critique I'm working with me is, oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea. And they're not wrong. But where I can get better at this maybe is, you know, if we can.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, but each time, right? So he started a big idea for the mass market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, okay, wait, there's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that. And it takes, it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. I mean, I can't imagine, I mean, I can imagine, I guess, I've been there how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction. And you have to, we have to express confidence as founders whether or not we have actual confidence inside.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Oh, he was so impressed. In a lot of ways, Slack also, you know, was humbled. Stuart keeps trying to start game companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does. Naxy now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I love the story of bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much, I cold mailed the founder because I was just so impressed with. They toiled in obscurity on something that they were into, and then they open sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. And then they had this realization one day of, wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding copilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has. And I think that was just a great story that he were passionate about one thing and, you know, they stuck with it.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, yeah, being willing to pursue these little threads. When they're flaky, when they're not a business, when they're so much earlier, and so many of the successful companies today started there”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “That's the good news for everyone watching. Like, everyone has the same chance and in a lot of ways, if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. So the paradox is the more ambitious you are, the more humble you should be in the smaller place you should be willing to start.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Could go do something important in the world. And what did I do? I made a Facebook app, like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. It was people thought I had no dignity. I mean, people were like, Mark, there's so much you could do in the world. But I was, I'd say my ambition came down to like a thousand foot altitude, you know, not a hundred thousand foot. And that was the key to that being successful. And I see this with, it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders. And it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit. But the world doesn't care about your resume.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct. And we want to be more ambitious. And so when I got to tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. And there was multiple inside tribe that worked, the tribes, the idea of these urban tribes work. People loved it. But I was too ambitious. And so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss. We can talk about for so long. And I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zinga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41 multi-time successful founder that”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Girls and guys, you know, at Harvard, right? And the irony for me that I've found that my career has gone in these waves and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of I just want to get to anything, any product market fit, had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know Elon has the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, but then he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us more. I'd say that We tend to after success.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say. There's so many paradoxes in this, and one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it's it might usually that the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many Of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble, non-ambitious places. And the Facebook was just an app to check out.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “But OMG Pop was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative. No one ever seen her tried it before. It failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit. And now they did proven better new perfectly. They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from words with friends and they made a massive hit.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And I talked about this a little bit in the book and in my course. But the question is, at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard. Don't look at any other products. That is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different. Not as far as I could tell learning from the previous failures or the market and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds and it was a hit and it was innovative. But the odds, that's wildcat drilling. And do you want to have those odds? Or do you want to do what OMG Pop did, which is very similar story, but opposite path, which was OMG pop. Created the hit game draw something. And Zing”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “That I was like, oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature. Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version, right, of his product. And he said, oh my God, they nailed it. So I think. When we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product, but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold. And then to your question of is every product derivative, is every product from proven better? My answer is no.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “There's so much on this that we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me on the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on. And I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company freeloader. I found was in the Netscape browser and in the internet explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing, but they had it as this buried power user feature. And I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Why wouldn't you want to? Why isn't that better in his mind? It was new. And like, that's a world-class product maker because what he gets is that we feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day and we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're like angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition and we don't want to think about these things. What if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was? And what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold? You know, and a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew that I don't know.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark, who Craigslist, took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. I was like, and he lived in my neighborhood. And he was friends with my dog Zynga more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially and he connected more with the dog. And I tried to be friends with him through the dog. And so he would sit and talk to me and he was working on I was like, what are you working? I said, I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings. I'm like, what do you mean two years? He's like, well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways. I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years. But if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “An experience that she loves more. And so if, you know, so and if you, if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And so And I think that the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that consumer movies, TV shows, you know, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go again.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “There's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. And if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers, you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville, you're going to define innovation differently. And you're not going to worry about whether you're going to take the best ideas wherever you can. Find them if they are in service of giving her.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “The Peter Teal sense, it's almost a moral. There's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur, because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we were taught in school, copying is cheating.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And yet the masters at this product craft do prove even better new, whether they call it that or not. And they do it at such a beautiful level that nobody even thinks, no one realizes what its derivative of. And Slack was a great example because I think Slack might have just been proven and better and no new. And that's even better. If you can get, if you can have a successful product, And I don't want to sound anti-innovation, but people don't like change. So if you take a behavior they like, but you make it much more accessible or something much more fun about it, like in the case of Slack. People love that even more.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And I want to say proven gets so misused, and that what I've found over the years with founders is that they start to use proven better new to justify a wrong idea. And they're like, look, Mark, I'm doing proven. Proven is this game that was popular in the 90s. Proven is, and they pick something that, and it's to their own detriment. they're not using proven we have to be precise we have to think at the pixel level of this experience proven is on this platform for this audience for this experience and you can look to what's been proven before as great sources of new ideas but but it's not if it's not on this platform it's you know doesn't count as proven and”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah. I was there at the tech conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touchscreen and they did it on a gigantic whiteboard. And Steve Jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it. And I watched him and he spent the whole time there with this team obsessing over their touch. I don't know if that's the first time he saw it, but I know he was obsessed with it like, okay. There's his new idea is a touch screen. It's only new idea.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So there was a point in tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working. Our D30 retention was terrible. We were sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. Like if you're doing proven better me, you're also looking around you for what's, what are you finding heat that's proven the market that you can also go test? And I would have massively changed my odds of success.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “A time machine. Because what if I could go back to Mark 2003 and 2004 and say, dude, you don't even realize how right you are. Like one of your instincts is going to be a 1.6 trillion dollar company once and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a 1.6 trillion dollar company. That's, you know, I'm not going to tell you which. I'm not going totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you there's something, there's another answer in this that you could pursue that'll be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your tribe's idea that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company industry, you know, listings.”

    2026-06-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source