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Mark Pincus

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111
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2026-06-14
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2026-06-14
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podcast

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  1. “Social friends are just attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that which you'd think, of course, I want, you might not get 10 out of 10 people saying, yes. And we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do proven better new right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not feeling for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right, and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. And we really, I like to think if you do proven better new right, it's like.”

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

  2. “Better could be it's now free, there's no download, there's something that you can both statistically show works is better and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polish and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, words with friends, you know, it was scrabble. But if it was just scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must have been something, you know, better and novel about it, but it had such a polish for mobile was the better and the new, what's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it. In the case of words with friends, it was.”

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

  3. “With hopefully some taste, we can get into like great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD and proven first. And I like to say, we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations. And better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing users of that product would say fuck yeah. 10 out of 10, not you, what you think is better is called new, right? What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new. And so”

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

  4. “And so the point of proven better new is to say, let's take all the proven off the table. If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now AI cameras. Fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on. The icon, maybe just the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat.”

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

  5. “And we thought, oh, God, here comes like the ultimate game designer. And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said it's dead on arrival because it's Fatui, his first time user experience with so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design. Even Sid Meyers tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first time user experience on the Facebook platform, but because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right. His innovation never got seen by anybody.”

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

  6. “Put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of proven better new takes that philosophy and says, okay, what do we do with that? Okay, let's isolate your innovation zone. Let's isolate that thing you have in your gut. And let's just test many many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason. It might be, I mean, Zinga, we'd see new game launches. Sid Meyers, like the godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer. He came out with, I think, a social civilization on Facebook.”

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

  7. “Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga, and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zinga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book, we called it proven better new. But then I was like, oh, that's too dry in the name. And I love this concept of life or the speed of play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt of the book. But proven better new is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we...”

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

  8. “We have beyond a latent demand for social, it's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel you're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. Today, we're all hanging out on our clawed, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy.”

    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 almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur, because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer.”

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

  10. “If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works.”

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

  11. “Your instincts are right 95% of the time, your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea”

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