Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm os Vloschin. Today we're joined
Speaker 1: by Mark Pinkus. He got his start in tech during
Speaker 1: the dot com era and has gone on to found
Speaker 1: multiple companies, including Zinger, producer of.
Speaker 2: Hit game Farm Film.
Speaker 1: Mark found a Zinger in two thousand and seven, and
Speaker 1: the company was acquired by Take two Interactive in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two.
Speaker 2: For over twelve billion dollars.
Speaker 1: He's also invested in startups like Facebook, which changed the
Speaker 1: Internet as we know today. Mark's new book, Life at
Speaker 1: the Speed of Play Launch Products People Love is pop memoir,
Speaker 1: pop playbook for running a successful business when everything around
Speaker 1: you is in flux.
Speaker 2: Mark pink is welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 3: Thanks.
Speaker 2: What does it mean to live your life at the
Speaker 2: Speed of Play?
Speaker 4: Well, there's so many dimensions that that line has meant
Speaker 4: to me that I wrote a whole book.
Speaker 3: I was like, that's got to be the title.
Speaker 4: So on the one hand, I think I think culturally,
Speaker 4: I think we're on the precipice of being able to
Speaker 4: feel like we're living our just our normal lives more
Speaker 4: at the speed of play.
Speaker 3: Speed in a good way.
Speaker 4: I know there's speed that also is hectic, but the
Speaker 4: ideas that life can feel like a beat down, especially
Speaker 4: when we want to do something creative or launch a
Speaker 4: product or a company.
Speaker 3: And in games we get to skip all that.
Speaker 4: We just get to the good stuff and there's really
Speaker 4: no consequence, especially in you know, simulation games, there's almost
Speaker 4: no consequence. Just someone else wins more than you. And
Speaker 4: I think that when we lower the barriers to being
Speaker 4: generitive and creative, we also unlock a lightness of being
Speaker 4: a playfulness because we can try and experiment and a
Speaker 4: lot of things and afford to be wrong, as opposed
Speaker 4: to putting all your wood behind one arrow and saying, Okay,
Speaker 4: this has to work and this If this doesn't, my
Speaker 4: company is going out of business or losing my house.
Speaker 4: It's not like that, and it's getting less and less.
Speaker 4: And now in the age of AI, you don't need
Speaker 4: to quit your job. You can even simulate and see
Speaker 4: whether this idea might work before you even bother to
Speaker 4: try it. So I think life the speed of play
Speaker 4: speaks to all of that. And then it's also this
Speaker 4: whole kind of product manager bible and playbook that we
Speaker 4: developed at Zinga that I tried to lay out the
Speaker 4: case for it in the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm curious.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously you're most famous for Zinga, which is
Speaker 1: a game company, and the title of the book is
Speaker 1: life that the speed of play and playing games are
Speaker 1: kind of two sides of the same coin, right, So
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess what is it you in games?
Speaker 4: Well? I never thought that I'd be able to work
Speaker 4: entrepreneur in games. It seemed like such a such a
Speaker 4: closed off, different kind of industry, and it always was
Speaker 4: and kind of is. But for me, I thought, okay,
Speaker 4: there's a chance, a very decent chance, that games have
Speaker 4: missed their real opportunity, and that in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 4: you know, it was a twenty three billion dollar, fairly
Speaker 4: mature industry.
Speaker 2: This was mainly like traditional video games.
Speaker 4: Console video games was kind of flatlining, and the computer
Speaker 4: gaming business was in constant slow growth.
Speaker 3: But it was not a top ten activity on the web.
Speaker 4: Definitely not mass market, I mean in the sense of
Speaker 4: that we think about it. It was a very very big,
Speaker 4: niche business, but it was the size of the movie industry.
Speaker 3: Now it's a lot bigger.
Speaker 4: So my hypothesis was, I love the idea that there
Speaker 4: can be a mature industry that has lots of revenues
Speaker 4: has a existing behavior that hasn't even started its real
Speaker 4: growth yet, and that was searched before Google. It was
Speaker 4: fairly mature, and a lot of times those industries get
Speaker 4: mature and they lack real innovation. That was the defense industry,
Speaker 4: you know, it was the rocket industry. And it's such
Speaker 4: a terrific place to go because you don't have to
Speaker 4: prove people want to play games. In this case, you
Speaker 4: just had to make it much more accessible to people
Speaker 4: and ask less of them, you know, drop it where
Speaker 4: they are and ask them to play, you know, for
Speaker 4: fifteen minutes and not have to learn anything.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to Zinga and games, but
Speaker 1: before we get that, I want to talk a bit
Speaker 1: more about your family life. You don't talk too much
Speaker 1: about like individual scenes I mentioned as pot memoir, but
Speaker 1: you're not kind of you know, telling this happened, then,
Speaker 1: that happened type of story. But your dad is this
Speaker 1: kind of Homeston presence and touchstone, and I was quite
Speaker 1: struck by the lesson he really seemed to impart on.
Speaker 1: You is controlled, Oh yeah, yes, where to control and
Speaker 1: play fit together as concepts.
Speaker 4: I actually think it sounds paradoxical. But they actually do
Speaker 4: come together. They are necessary. If you think about when
Speaker 4: we were kids, we could play when we felt the
Speaker 4: most freedom, and in a sense, in order for you
Speaker 4: to have freedom, you need control. If someone else, if
Speaker 4: our parents were controlling our time and behaviors in those moments,
Speaker 4: we wouldn't have felt the freedom to really let loosen play.
Speaker 4: And similarly, for us as creators and founders, we start
Speaker 4: to learn the hard way what happens when we don't
Speaker 4: have control.
Speaker 3: It's not fun, it's not playful, and we don't.
Speaker 4: Get to to really explore our full expression and creativity.
Speaker 4: And so if you have control, then you're guaranteeing yourself
Speaker 4: the open canvas or open highway for you to go
Speaker 4: for it and try whatever it is that you believe in.
Speaker 4: And in a lot of ways, I think that the
Speaker 4: more control founders get, the more room there is to
Speaker 4: see people do really risky, audacious things. Because investors don't
Speaker 4: like risk, you know, they they want certainty. They like upside,
Speaker 4: but they like certainty even more than upside. I mean
Speaker 4: they say they want upside, but they'll take a guaranteed
Speaker 4: three X. You know, most of them over you know,
Speaker 4: a very small potential of one hundred x. Some may
Speaker 4: argue with me, some might be right, but but you know,
Speaker 4: and as you get to be more and more capital
Speaker 4: you might say that there's seed investors that are fine
Speaker 4: with that, but they also have a model that assumes
Speaker 4: a huge loss rate. By the time you get to
Speaker 4: growth investors, public market investors, you're looking at almost a
Speaker 4: zero tolerance for a loss rate.
Speaker 1: So control gives you confidence. Confidence allows you to play.
Speaker 4: The confidence is a part of it, but it also
Speaker 4: gives you degrees of freedom, and it's not very fun.
Speaker 4: It's not a lot of fun to play if you're
Speaker 4: told you can do anything you want between this one
Speaker 4: foot wide expanse. You know, if it's like infinite do
Speaker 4: whatever you can imagine, that's a lot more creatively, you know,
Speaker 4: exciting and has more potential, and you need as a
Speaker 4: foundered you need the freedom to make very very hard
Speaker 4: decisions and bet the company decisions. And you feel that
Speaker 4: you have less and less of that freedom as you
Speaker 4: have more and more constituents, more employees, more investors, higher
Speaker 4: stakes in this more you know, people have more to lose.
Speaker 4: You're carrying a bigger responsibility, and you're kind of going
Speaker 4: to war to be your best. You can't worry about
Speaker 4: you can't be sitting there on the front lines worrying
Speaker 4: about the people that aren't going to like this decision
Speaker 4: if you believe this is the best decision.
Speaker 1: Your dad gave you this advice about control long before
Speaker 1: you were a founder. What did it mean to him?
Speaker 1: And what did you What did this word to control, like,
Speaker 1: how did you internalize? How did you explain the importance
Speaker 1: of it to you?
Speaker 4: Well, it had a It was a double edged sword
Speaker 4: for me with my dad and control, because I saw
Speaker 4: him in building his business. He had a nationwide financial
Speaker 4: pr firm, investor relations, and he had complete control of
Speaker 4: his firm, and that made it very fun for him.
Speaker 4: I think it made it somewhat less fun for other people, and.
Speaker 2: I either the people who work for him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he had very you know, he also had
Speaker 4: complete control and you know, running our family, and sometimes
Speaker 4: that made that a lot less fun for us.
Speaker 3: But I did.
Speaker 4: I did get from him this idea that I talk
Speaker 4: about of a democratic dictatorship, and there was room. There
Speaker 4: was always room for us to express an opinion or
Speaker 4: a preference, but then he was going to make the decision,
Speaker 4: and that was very clear and there is a value
Speaker 4: in that certainty. I think that having uncertainty around decision
Speaker 4: making and letting people think a lot of the problems
Speaker 4: we got into a Silicon Valley companies was a false
Speaker 4: sense of democracy and employees starting to think that it
Speaker 4: was democracy and being led to believe that somewhat because
Speaker 4: they're being given more and more agency, and then this
Speaker 4: rude awakening when they found out it wasn't the democracy. People, Oh,
Speaker 4: this is a business, and I run it, you don't.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: You're known as the technologist today, but your early career.
Speaker 2: Had quite a lot of intersection with media. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There are two funny scenes in the book which involve
Speaker 1: you as a young man telling, in one case, the
Speaker 1: most successful media company in American history and the other
Speaker 1: case the most successful media entrepreneur in American history, Disney
Speaker 1: and John Malone, that they were wrong and you were right.
Speaker 3: It can happen.
Speaker 2: So but talk about both those stories.
Speaker 1: I mean, you were a job interview for Disney and
Speaker 1: they were saying, what would strategy look like if we
Speaker 1: opened a park in every city?
Speaker 2: And you just said that's a dumb idea, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I said, gatting more questions Yeah, Well, I'm not good
Speaker 4: at interviewing. So I have one, you know, one mode,
Speaker 4: and that's authentic and that's what I aspired to and
Speaker 4: I don't really inspired anything else. And corporations want people
Speaker 4: who are going to be team players. And I've always said,
Speaker 4: I don't know if I put this in the book,
Speaker 4: that I'm a great team player as long as I'm
Speaker 4: running the team like your dad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just like my dad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What I liked about I mean, you've obviously had an
Speaker 1: amazingly successful career, but you're very open in this book
Speaker 1: about the dark moments, something you call the abyss, and
Speaker 1: not just you don't just describe the abyss, but you
Speaker 1: talk about how the abyss is almost a necessary precondition
Speaker 1: of the most successful periods of your life.
Speaker 2: Can you explain that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Because
Speaker 4: then you're like, oh, I'm in a dark period. It
Speaker 4: means the darkest for the dawn. It means I'm about
Speaker 4: to have great stuff happen. So that's an optimistic view, Yeah,
Speaker 4: not always true, not always true. Or how long that
Speaker 4: abyss is going to go on?
Speaker 2: For it?
Speaker 3: You know, it could be six months, it could be.
Speaker 1: But in your case, you hate the abyss, and therefore
Speaker 1: it gives you the motivation to do whatever you want to.
Speaker 3: Get out of the abyss.
Speaker 4: Yes, but you got to be really careful that you
Speaker 4: don't have such a strong desire to get out of
Speaker 4: the abyss that you pursue a B plus idea or something.
Speaker 4: So it's the longer you've been in the abyss, the
Speaker 4: more desperate you are to not be in the abyss,
Speaker 4: the more dangerous you are to yourself in terms that
Speaker 4: you have to really have the discipline still. And that's
Speaker 4: why I think I try to talk about pathways out
Speaker 4: of the abyss. Are lots of little steps like engage
Speaker 4: but realize that what you're engaging in may not meet
Speaker 4: your ambitions, and that's powerful knowledge for you to have.
Speaker 4: I would say one thing I've realized in talking about
Speaker 4: this since writing the book is when I look at
Speaker 4: the pattern of my career, it seems to have gone
Speaker 4: in waves of success and failure. And it seems to
Speaker 4: be that I had a lot of success early on
Speaker 4: with Freeloader, with support dot Com going public my second
Speaker 4: company right after that in like four years, and then
Speaker 4: I had a long payeroerod of failure the whole two
Speaker 4: thousand and one all the way, I mean through tribe
Speaker 4: dot net all the way.
Speaker 1: Tribet was your social network, which you found it at
Speaker 1: the same time as basically read Holfum was founding LinkedIn
Speaker 1: buk Zuckerberg was founding.
Speaker 4: Just before Facebook. Yeah, I still managed to fail. And
Speaker 4: that's when I remind people there were a lot of
Speaker 4: social networks that succeeded. We just don't know them because
Speaker 4: they didn't win ultimately. But tagged bibo, you know, there
Speaker 4: was a whole bunch. There was like seven or eight,
Speaker 4: so lots of social networks worked. You know, people were
Speaker 4: into it. I was one of the only ones to fail.
Speaker 4: So this wasn't like there was one that made out
Speaker 4: of one hundred. You know, there might have been like
Speaker 4: seven or eight that made it out of I don't know,
Speaker 4: twelve or ten, you know, so I was in a minority.
Speaker 4: Like it was like an active will to do it
Speaker 4: in a feeling way, and it was so humbling that
Speaker 4: I think it prepared me well for Zinga and being
Speaker 4: ready to do something, start something very small and really
Speaker 4: get to product market fit first and then ambition after.
Speaker 1: And you saw it with your own money, right, You
Speaker 1: can't take any excellent on funding. You got it to
Speaker 1: be cash for positive before you started talking to investors.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I mean it was actually cash flow
Speaker 4: positive a month after we launched poker the first game.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I put up three hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 4: to start the company. We were cash flow positive and
Speaker 4: we actually never needed any of the money that we
Speaker 4: raised all the way up to going public. But I
Speaker 4: didn't know that, and we kept spent doubling down and
Speaker 4: spending more and more. But then our revenues and profits
Speaker 4: kept growing ahead of that. And I will say a
Speaker 4: lesson I've got an investing that comes from Zinga is
Speaker 4: when you see these companies that are growing like that
Speaker 4: and they're beating their own numbers, you just invest at
Speaker 4: any price they asked for, like the.
Speaker 1: Other type of company. So you's always invested in. When
Speaker 1: you've got a call saying we don't have enough computer, right,
Speaker 1: yeah we just need more service. Yeah, just send them
Speaker 1: a check.
Speaker 2: But I don't want to come back to zincer.
Speaker 1: But starting in the beginning, as a quote in your book,
Speaker 1: at twenty eight, I found myself washed up and living
Speaker 1: in a junior one bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. I'd
Speaker 1: been the only kid in my hav A business school
Speaker 1: section to graduate without a job. Over the years, my
Speaker 1: classmates have become partners at Goldman or McKinsey, started hedge funds,
Speaker 1: while I managed to get fired from every place I
Speaker 1: worked or.
Speaker 2: Standing in your way? And how did you change that
Speaker 2: with freeloader?
Speaker 4: If I didn't change it, what was standing my way
Speaker 4: was self realization that I'm not employable. Right, So once
Speaker 4: once I accepted that, and I was probably undermining myself.
Speaker 4: I mean, I know I was undermining myself in all
Speaker 4: these jobs because I know at Columbia Capital there was
Speaker 4: a path I could have gone down to fit in
Speaker 4: to their culture. We see that, right, We're like, Okay,
Speaker 4: it's not me, but I could adapt me. You know,
Speaker 4: I could dress more like they didn't have a dress code,
Speaker 4: but they all dressed like in khakis and stuff, you know,
Speaker 4: And I was just in like beat up jeans and
Speaker 4: now it's normal the way I just but it was
Speaker 4: not then. But I was I think on some subconscious level,
Speaker 4: I was my father's son and I just was never
Speaker 4: going to.
Speaker 2: You're forcing yourself to fail in some way.
Speaker 1: So you could do your own thing or inviting failure
Speaker 1: without even being fully aware of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think I just was never cut out to.
Speaker 4: Fit into some corporate culture, and I tried to All
Speaker 4: that shaped the way I created companies because I wanted
Speaker 4: cultures to not be so oppressive, and I wanted I
Speaker 4: wanted to invite divergence, and I wanted to invite in
Speaker 4: weird different kinds of people and mindsets and not have
Speaker 4: people say this is and it happens the at Zinga
Speaker 4: people would say this isn't the way we do it,
Speaker 4: and I would fight that.
Speaker 3: It was like fuck that if? What if the way
Speaker 3: we do it is stupid?
Speaker 4: Like we need some maybe the people who are going
Speaker 4: to say, well, your way of doing it is dumb,
Speaker 4: and like bring that the fuck on?
Speaker 2: After the break?
Speaker 1: Why online poker became Zinga's first success story, stay with us.
Speaker 1: There's a concept in your book which is right, instinct,
Speaker 1: wrong idea. I guess with Tribe don't Net that was
Speaker 1: a classic example, right, Yeah, you're correct that social media
Speaker 1: was going to become basically the whole Internet. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you're actually was the wrong one. The company before that,
Speaker 1: which was called Freeloader You essentially had the idea that
Speaker 1: you were going to sort of push information from the
Speaker 1: open Internet onto people's screen savers, and I slowly downloaded
Speaker 1: overnight because that was the speed of the interests. That was,
Speaker 1: in a sense, the wrong instinct but the right idea,
Speaker 1: right because you managed to sell that company for thirty
Speaker 1: eight million dollars, whereas in fact the Internet was kind
Speaker 1: of moving on just as you were selling it, right,
Speaker 1: or how how do you characterize them right now?
Speaker 4: It's a really interesting way of framing it. I haven't
Speaker 4: thought about it that way. I think that it was
Speaker 4: the right instinct in that moment. It was the right
Speaker 4: instincts that I think I did tap into that the
Speaker 4: Internet was too hard for most people and not accessible,
Speaker 4: and it was too slow. Those are my two big instincts.
Speaker 4: It's like, it's too hard and it's too slow for
Speaker 4: normal people. I mean, you could also say it was
Speaker 4: wrong instinct about the Internet being slow, because bandwidth came
Speaker 4: eventually got faster. But in that moment it was right,
Speaker 4: and I think the idea was I think it was
Speaker 4: the right idea, and I think our execution was like
Speaker 4: a B minus. I mean, it was a pretty janky product,
Speaker 4: but it was. But it was so interesting that you
Speaker 4: can bring out kind of a really bad product that
Speaker 4: really has an idea that resonates for people, and it
Speaker 4: can do well despite that. You know, it could work
Speaker 4: twenty percent of the time and that's enough for people.
Speaker 3: And in the beginning, when something's emergent.
Speaker 1: It's also I mean, so you sold that company within
Speaker 1: less than a year of building it, yeah, for thirty
Speaker 1: eight million dollars, which is exactly the same price your
Speaker 1: father sold his company for. That's weird, Which is weird?
Speaker 1: What's the conversation like?
Speaker 4: It was a real kind of wake up moment for
Speaker 4: my dad because he had built his company over thirty
Speaker 4: eight years and sold it for thirty eight million dollars
Speaker 4: and it was a huge success and his company produced
Speaker 4: very lo large income for him and his partners. You know,
Speaker 4: he is an agency and agencies at agencies and pr
Speaker 4: firms don't have a lot of assets they build up,
Speaker 4: you know, it's just the people and the brand. So
Speaker 4: that was a huge success at his time. But then
Speaker 4: this was on a different order magnitude because the Internet
Speaker 4: is a marketplace of everybody, so it was just such
Speaker 4: a different scale and my dad shifted the relationship, and
Speaker 4: all of a sudden he was like, okay, you you
Speaker 4: get something that I don't get, and you're like surpassing me,
Speaker 4: you know, and men are very thinking a lot about,
Speaker 4: you know, money and achievement, and my dad was very
Speaker 4: achievement oriented. And so it did change the relationship in
Speaker 4: good ways. I mean we we since I was eighteen,
Speaker 4: we had had more of a p your relationship when
Speaker 4: he wasn't supporting me financially, and then this really changed it.
Speaker 1: So then you sort of you took the money and
Speaker 1: then you started thinking about basically this was was this
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five?
Speaker 3: Was it nineteen ninety six, nine ninety six?
Speaker 2: And then you made support dot com.
Speaker 1: You took it public, another big success, and then the
Speaker 1: kind of dot com boom outside the dot com bust
Speaker 1: happened and you had time on your hands, as did
Speaker 1: a lot of other interesting people like bread Hoffmann, and
Speaker 1: you started thinking about what you referred to as like
Speaker 1: the social cocktail party on the internet. And you made
Speaker 1: tribe dot net. What why do you think tribe dot
Speaker 1: net failed where LinkedIn and Facebook succeeded.
Speaker 4: Well, I saw the potential to acquire a big audience
Speaker 4: through the virality of social networking, and that worked, and
Speaker 4: Tribe was very viral and got a big audience quickly,
Speaker 4: much bigger than LinkedIn. But what I didn't see was
Speaker 4: how important trust was for mainstream Internet users. And they
Speaker 4: were just putting themselves on the Internet and they didn't
Speaker 4: like the idea of strangers seeing them and contacting them.
Speaker 4: But my business model, which was to be like Craigslist
Speaker 4: meets Friendster, the business model of Craigslist, was at odds
Speaker 4: with that because to be a Craigslist a listing, everyone
Speaker 4: needed to be able to contact everybody. So what really
Speaker 4: worked on Tribe, and this is still an opportunity that's
Speaker 4: not explored that someone should go steal and use, is
Speaker 4: the value of the loose ties of these urban tribes,
Speaker 4: these psychographic in some cases demographic, but interest based groups
Speaker 4: that you have affinity groups. And that's what Tribes was
Speaker 4: that it was based on Ethan Waters, I think that's
Speaker 4: his name, essay on urban tribes, and that really worked.
Speaker 4: I mean people loved it. They would be in the
Speaker 4: Mission something tribe or they had their burning Man camps.
Speaker 4: And so now you have these people, you have enough
Speaker 4: of them affinity to and you can that was enough
Speaker 4: to go to Brazil and somebody who knows someone from
Speaker 4: my burning Man camp or from my Mission Freaks or whatever,
Speaker 4: you know, weird group had enough of an affinity for
Speaker 4: that social filter and lens to create a likeness and
Speaker 4: a connection for me with someone in Brazil they've never met.
Speaker 4: And so in a way it was like LinkedIn's two
Speaker 4: or three degrees away and that worked. The two problems
Speaker 4: with that one I ignored it. So that's a problem
Speaker 4: in the Paul Graham sense. I should have just focused
Speaker 4: on that one part and said, Okay, that's working. How
Speaker 4: do I be that right? And in some ways that's reddit.
Speaker 4: But and then the other problem though with that is
Speaker 4: that that for that loose ties concept to work, you
Speaker 4: still need people to be able to see and connect
Speaker 4: with people that they are not that are not in
Speaker 4: their networks, and so that's violating that trust thing. So
Speaker 4: there's still going to have the membrane of trust being
Speaker 4: very difficult to get right. So you know, it ends
Speaker 4: up being a lot of mainstream women getting you know,
Speaker 4: undesirable interest you know from a lot of men, so
Speaker 4: you know, which comes off in the form of dick pics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So anyway, that was Yeah, that was a big
Speaker 3: miss with.
Speaker 2: Tribe, but it was the right instinct.
Speaker 4: It was like three killer instincts and one losing idea,
Speaker 4: and it put.
Speaker 1: You in put you in the right stream both meeting
Speaker 1: a young monk Zuckerberg and being one of the very
Speaker 1: first investors in Facebook. I think you invested like was
Speaker 1: it fifty dollars thirty eight act number? Yeah, thirty eight again, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, and that if you kept it with worth
Speaker 1: six billion dollars today. Yeah, yeah, you didn't keep all
Speaker 1: of it, have done some of it.
Speaker 4: The only like sliver I kept was what I put
Speaker 4: in my kids accounts eventually, so they.
Speaker 2: Got to thank you Dad.
Speaker 1: And also, I mean, what would you so take a
Speaker 1: step back, what is Zinger And would you have been
Speaker 1: able to come up with it if you hadn't done Tribe?
Speaker 4: I guess I know I wouldn't have gotten to Zinga
Speaker 4: if I hadn't done Tribe first. And because when we
Speaker 4: were doing Tribe, we were thinking there's going to be
Speaker 4: this massive competition on plugins. We call it plugins but APIs.
Speaker 4: We thought there's going to be these video services and
Speaker 4: games and all these other things. We were right to
Speaker 4: some degree. We said, we'll never be able to keep
Speaker 4: up with the other social networks. So the only way
Speaker 4: is going to be having a plug in architecture.
Speaker 1: So we have this captive audience, will allow the people
Speaker 1: to access it and will charge them some.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then that didn't happen until eventually it did,
Speaker 4: and later than I thought. So I thought this happened
Speaker 4: in you know, two thousand and four, two thousand and five,
Speaker 4: you know, it didn't happen until two thousand and seven.
Speaker 4: I'm still always thinking about this. But I was like, Okay,
Speaker 4: it's so annoying to have to go get distribution. It's
Speaker 4: so annoying to have to raise venture capital line to
Speaker 4: build all of this infrastructure of accounts and password reset,
Speaker 4: like all that stuff that now we take for granted.
Speaker 3: You had to build yourself then.
Speaker 4: And but then at the same time, Facebook announced they're
Speaker 4: opening up their API access, and I said, great, I
Speaker 4: don't have to build any of this infrastructure. I can
Speaker 4: just be on someone else's network. A lot of what
Speaker 4: I think about in social networks and games is dimensionality,
Speaker 4: and I like the idea of there's a richness of
Speaker 4: being able to do something that opens this other dimension
Speaker 4: that wasn't there.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it creates a new paradigm of interaction. You're
Speaker 1: on Facebook and then you get to go into poker.
Speaker 4: Actually on the whole web, it's a quiet experience. It's
Speaker 4: like you're in a library. You are just looking at
Speaker 4: your browser that hasn't changed since nineteen ninety four. It's
Speaker 4: the same browser. It's the same type in you know,
Speaker 4: URL window, and it's still links and pages, right, And
Speaker 4: I thought, when's it going to get rowdy? And so
Speaker 4: what I want to do with poker? I was like,
Speaker 4: I want to make it kind of loud and rowdy.
Speaker 4: I want to be like, turn the lights up a
Speaker 4: little bit. And on Facebook, nobody could talk to each other,
Speaker 4: you know, live or anything. And now all of a
Speaker 4: sudden they could drop in here and meet the other
Speaker 4: people and often their friends.
Speaker 1: And they're not playing for money those it's it's no,
Speaker 1: it's spoke of additional chips. Yes, And nonetheless it was cuptivating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, people are afraid of losing even a dollar, so
Speaker 4: people don't want to be the sucker. So there's a
Speaker 4: mentality that people would rather practice their poker without having
Speaker 4: to spend money. But an insight that I had was
Speaker 4: that they wanted more chips, first of all, because they
Speaker 4: always do, but second because they wanted to play against
Speaker 4: better players.
Speaker 1: But they would play real money. They would pay real
Speaker 1: money to get more chips. They will later and back
Speaker 1: into money. But so Poka takes off, then Foamville you
Speaker 1: become most famous for right Yeah, And all this time,
Speaker 1: basically all of your business is coming through Facebook, and
Speaker 1: Mark is your friend and you're one of the first
Speaker 1: invests in his business. And then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: they turn around to you and say, if you don't
Speaker 1: play by all of our rules and effectually become a subsidiary,
Speaker 1: we're going to kill you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: How did that feel? Well?
Speaker 4: I didn't take any of it personally, because it's the
Speaker 4: only reason that we were able to scale so quickly
Speaker 4: was because we were, you know, an app apps riding
Speaker 4: on top of Facebook. So at one moment you're on
Speaker 4: strategy for them, and another moment you're not on strategy,
Speaker 4: and that's life and it's there.
Speaker 3: You know, that's their right to do that.
Speaker 4: I didn't like the way they went about it, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of taking us in a dark alley and beating
Speaker 4: us up and In fact, the only reason that in
Speaker 4: the end they came back to the negotiating table with
Speaker 4: us is because at some point we realized that we
Speaker 4: didn't have any NDA signed between the two companies, so
Speaker 4: we I don't know if we threaten this, but we
Speaker 4: heavily implied that there was nothing stopping us from taking
Speaker 4: their agreement they asked us for to sign and publishing
Speaker 4: it on the internet, which would not have helped their reputation.
Speaker 2: And because they would have been seen to be bullying.
Speaker 4: It's not going to help you being an app developer
Speaker 4: platform when your lead app developer was just given like
Speaker 4: put the barrel. Yeah, a contract you know that says
Speaker 4: you're going to be captive to our company and and
Speaker 4: nothing that you launch on Facebook can go anywhere else
Speaker 4: on the internet. You know, like that might dry up,
Speaker 4: you know, interest in your platform pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: So you, with John Doo's support, turned around and said
Speaker 1: we're going to fight this and rather go down than
Speaker 1: except becoming your subsidiary.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It was a very heroic, romantic moment for our
Speaker 4: company and scary, but I knew it wasn't going to matter.
Speaker 4: That Zuck and I were friends and at this point
Speaker 4: I'd been to his wedding. You know, we were legitimately friends,
Speaker 4: but he had such a sense of fate and destiny
Speaker 4: that nothing was going to get in the way of that.
Speaker 4: And so if if there was something about Zinga that
Speaker 4: was in the way, it didn't.
Speaker 3: Matter if we had a friendship. I said.
Speaker 4: It was more like he wouldn't take pleasure as he
Speaker 4: like pushed the sword into my neck.
Speaker 2: So look how much to ask you.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's the sort of fomo era all
Speaker 1: over again, right like, I mean there it's a space
Speaker 1: x ipo anthropic ipo, and I mean that's just that's
Speaker 1: just money, but everything that goes around it is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the moment where everybody in Selicon Value is
Speaker 1: feeling that the future is being built in real time. Yes,
Speaker 1: your friend riad Hoffmann wrote the wrote the forward to
Speaker 1: your book, and he I thought it was very very
Speaker 1: interesting essay actually, but I.
Speaker 4: Think what he wrote was so good that it I
Speaker 4: was like, oh shit, I got to make the book better.
Speaker 1: That's a funny a funny way around, but I mean
Speaker 1: he he Basically I always ask people two questions, what
Speaker 1: game are you playing?
Speaker 2: And what's your theory? Of the game.
Speaker 1: So I guess I want to ask that question to you,
Speaker 1: and in particular to ask you know, as you think
Speaker 1: about this moment, everything you've done so far, you know,
Speaker 1: what's the game you're playing, what's your theory of it,
Speaker 1: and what comes next?
Speaker 2: For Mark Pinkers in the Age of AI.
Speaker 4: I asked myself that all the time. Luckily I have
Speaker 4: some answers, and I talked in the book about that.
Speaker 4: I realized in the midst of building Zinga, what my
Speaker 4: why was that I want to build one of these
Speaker 4: Internet treasures, these services. We can't remember life before or
Speaker 4: imagine life without. And that's my why. And what I
Speaker 4: also realized in this kind of came through my book
Speaker 4: of Life Practice just.
Speaker 2: For the audience, that this is basically an annual review
Speaker 2: cycle you give to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and the first part of it is read
Speaker 4: it or throughout it, I'm reading everything I've written before,
Speaker 4: and it's a conversation and a dialogue with yourself over time.
Speaker 4: And the painful weight of time and weight of pages
Speaker 4: is how many years you talk about doing the same
Speaker 4: things and you don't do it right And we all
Speaker 4: feel that, but there's nothing like reading it in your
Speaker 4: like shit, five years ago, ten years ago, I was
Speaker 4: trying to do the same thing. I was still talking
Speaker 4: about launching dot earth next year, and I still haven't
Speaker 4: fucking done it right, And it's like, what am I
Speaker 4: going to do differently this year? How am I going
Speaker 4: to stop time and make a difference? And so it's
Speaker 4: it's been a powerful practice for me. It hasn't always worked, obviously,
Speaker 4: because I kept talking about launching dot earth and I
Speaker 4: didn't do it. But what I have learned is this
Speaker 4: that there's It's the most important thing over time is
Speaker 4: not It's not whether or not you achieve it the goal.
Speaker 4: It's not whether or not I build that internet treasure
Speaker 4: that I dream of, It's did I go after it?
Speaker 4: Am I in integrity with that goal or out of integrity?
Speaker 4: Because if I went for it last year, which I
Speaker 4: did and it didn't work, which it didn't.
Speaker 3: I don't feel bad about last year.
Speaker 4: I can check that off and say, Okay, I tried
Speaker 4: that approach, it didn't work. I'm not going to do
Speaker 4: that again. What did I learn from that that I
Speaker 4: can do definitely this year if I didn't do it
Speaker 4: last year, and it's just another broken promise to myself.
Speaker 4: The deeper thing is I'm out of integrity with myself.
Speaker 4: It means in some level, I can't trust myself. So
Speaker 4: you're kind of full of shit. You're writing this down
Speaker 4: here as you did last year, but I.
Speaker 3: Don't what's the point.
Speaker 4: I don't believe you because you're going to get distracted
Speaker 4: and you don't really mean it. So when are you
Speaker 4: going to be honest with yourself that you don't really
Speaker 4: have this goal? So you know, I'm being very Northern
Speaker 4: California about this, but you know it's it's true. And
Speaker 4: so for me, what is the game? The game is
Speaker 4: I enjoyed building innovative, emergent products, trying to connect the
Speaker 4: dots before they're obvious, trying to bring that to the
Speaker 4: mass market, make these things accessible to them in ways
Speaker 4: that they don't feel stupid. And the game is I wanted.
Speaker 4: I want to be prosecuting that with great teams, and
Speaker 4: I hope to get back to the high that I
Speaker 4: had with Zinga of just this loop of every week
Speaker 4: coming up with ideas and working with great teams and
Speaker 4: then seeing them go out, learn and do, rinse, and
Speaker 4: do it again.
Speaker 2: The book is life at the speed of Play. Not thinkers.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thanks for tech stuff. I'mos Vloscian.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
Speaker 1: Executive produced by me Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and Katria Novel for iHeart podcasts. Our engineer today
Speaker 1: was Bahid Fraser. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle
Speaker 1: Murdoch wrote our theme song