Zynga Founder: Your Product Strategy Framework is WRONG

1. 0:00 – 1:50

   Intro

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      You've said copying is okay. It's a form of moral arbitrage. That's gonna make a lot of people angry. So walk us through this. Why is this even a defensible position?

   2. MPMark Pincus0:09

      I think the actual question is, like, why are we even debating it? Because that's all that we're all doing all the time. I copied the leading poker game, the table, the UI, like the sounds the chip made, the colors of the chips. Like, you could not tell my table from any other leading poker game.

   3. SPSpeaker0:27

      Oh.

   4. MPMark Pincus0:27

      By design. There was no differentiation.

   5. SPSpeaker0:29

      Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, these are like names that are legends. Sean Parker was there. I've never really heard, like, the full story. What happened there? What did you guys do?

   6. MPMark Pincus0:38

      Nobody was legends then. Zuck and Sean and... It was 2006, so the Facebook was like two years old. Zuck was staying up all night drinking Diet Cokes and eating M&M's and-

   7. SPSpeaker0:47

      Whoa

   8. MPMark Pincus0:48

      ... working. Peter did a brilliant presentation for all of us on housing bubble, which he was two years too early on. None of us had an agenda. No one was trying to network. No one was trying to, like, sell anything to anyone, get anything, and that's what made it great. It was just 35 people came together by choice to, like, all be in these conversations. That's why I called it think weekend.

   9. SPSpeaker1:06

      Talking about consumer, you said it isn't investable right now, but that's the reason to build it. Can you break that down? Before we get into today's show, please take a second to check that you're subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. If you want access to all of my favorite AI tools, I've gotten them to give you an entire year of their paid plans. Check out bundle.aakashg.com for an entire year of Bolt.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise, and Mobbin. And now, into today's show.

2. 1:50 – 3:24

   Who Mark Pincus is and why Proven Better New matters

   1. SPSpeaker1:50

      If you've been working in tech for any period of time, you know Mark Pincus. He is the founder of Zynga. Billions of people literally [laughs] have played his games. And like me, if you've been around San Francisco, it has been one of the institutions in San Francisco, walking by the Zynga building every day for years myself. I've always looked up to Mark. He's a legend in the product space. He recently just published "Life at the Speed of Play". Literally, the subtext for this book is launch products people love. There couldn't be a better billionaire to have on this product podcast than Mark. He is somebody who has thought very deeply about how it is that you build really successful products, and he has a bunch of hot takes that we're gonna cover today. We're even gonna go to the whiteboard so you can learn his Proven Better New framework, which is a framework I personally use when I'm thinking about building products. And so I'm at the edge of my seat to get a personal masterclass. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I do. Mark, thanks for being here.

   2. MPMark Pincus3:01

      Yeah, I love hearing that you use Proven Better New.

   3. SPSpeaker3:04

      Yes. There's, you know, frameworks get a bad rap, I think. There's some frameworks that what a good framework like Proven Better New does is it helps you actually in your work. It's not just something you put on a document to send to an executive. [laughs]

   4. MPMark Pincus3:18

      Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker3:18

      It's something that actually tactically shows you how to work better, so we'll cover that in just

3. 3:24 – 6:06

   Why copying is a form of moral arbitrage

   1. SPSpeaker3:24

      a second. I wanna start with one of your most, I would say, controversial ideas. [laughs]

   2. MPMark Pincus3:30

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker3:31

      Which is you've said copying is okay. It's a form of moral arbitrage. That's gonna make a lot of people angry. So walk us through this. Why is this even a defensible position?

   4. MPMark Pincus3:43

      I think the actual question is, like, why are we even debating it, because that's all that we're all doing all the time. There's a certain taste and sensibility where people, there's some line you cross where it's not inspired by and it's copying. And, and we feel that as consumers when we're like, "Wait, this movie is a copy of this," or, or we don't like plagiarizing because that's cheating, right? So there's some paradoxes that have been deeply instilled in us, yet at the same time, we kinda know all music, all movies, all stories, all games, you know, everything is a derivative work, and everything artists have built on shoulders of other artists, right? And there's a whole philosophy we could get into on, like, well, at, at what point is it copying or it, or is it crossing a legal line of copying, right, of it, an illegal taking someone else's work illegally. But then there's a kind of moral line and a taste line.

   5. SPSpeaker4:48

      Mm-hmm.

   6. MPMark Pincus4:49

      And it, where it really comes down to taste is it's really about who does the magic trick better. And so Steve Jobs, he was a master of copying, and he had a deep appreciation for it, and there's some quote that I think was from Picasso, but people credit Steve Jobs, right? "Great artists copy, and the masters steal," or something like that.

   7. SPSpeaker5:13

      Yeah.

   8. MPMark Pincus5:13

      Right? Bill Gates was not as good at the magic trick as Steve Jobs, and so it looked like Bill Gates was just copying Apple. Steve Jobs was, they were both copying from Xerox PARC's work. Then they were copying each other. Mark Zuckerberg is arguably not that good at copying because when you see Threads and a lot of his products, they look like blatant copies-

   9. SPSpeaker5:34

      [laughs]

   10. MPMark Pincus5:34

       ... or, you know. But, so to me, the magic trick is just can you learn from other people's proven success and emulate it, you know, perfectly but have it feel new to people, and that's why I call it a magic trick.

   11. SPSpeaker5:51

       And I think it's intimately tied to the Proven Better New framework. So I would say maybe only 10% of my audience really understands the framework, so can you give us kinda the 101? We have the whiteboard here. Maybe you can even draw it out for us.

4. 6:06 – 7:12

   Trust your instinct, assume your idea is wrong

   1. MPMark Pincus6:06

      Sure. And, and first of all, when we get into Proven Better New-

   2. SPSpeaker6:09

      There's a couple points. One is the underlying philosophy, the few underlying philosophies, and, and one is that my mantra as an entrepreneur for the last 30 years has, to myself, has been trust your instinct. Your instinct's more right than you know. So I like to say your instinct's right 95% of the time. And assume your idea is probably wrong.

   3. SPSpeaker6:32

      Hmm.

   4. SPSpeaker6:32

      Either very wrong or a little wrong. And so if your instinct's right 95% of the time, and if your idea is right 25% of the time, what do you do with that? And what I mean is we have this instinct, this... And right now we're feeling an instinct around the product instinct or our muse, right? That we've all talked about AI assistance for the last two years, and we've all assumed everyone in the world was doing it, and yet none came out. And now all of a sudden, two have come out, and they feel, to me, at an instinct level, like the Clawbot craze of, you know, earlier in the year, of nine months ago.

5. 7:12 – 10:22

   Ads

   1. SPSpeaker7:12

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6. 10:22 – 15:58

   What Instinct and Muse prove about consumer AI agents

   1. SPSpeaker10:22

      It feels like that was the beginning, the gun went off for agents, and everyone said, "It's gonna be all, you know, you need to go and buy your own MacBook Studio and set this up and give it access to your WhatsApp," and all these things that a lot of us tried and scratched our head, and some people were living their lives off this. But it's, it was an early shot across the bow that I think formed some instinct or informed us about how this agentic future might work at a consumer level. But then it kind of faded a little bit. And now Instinct, we can get into it, but Instinct AI came out and Muse, and they feel more consumer-ready, right?

   2. SPSpeaker11:00

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker11:00

      Because you don't have to do all those things. It's dumbed it down. It's accessible. It's kind of doing the same thing, which is what is the big thing at an instinct level that they're doing? Well, they're moving from just being better than Google. Okay, I can get an answer faster on GPT than I could on Google. And if you think of this progression without... I'll get back to Proven Better New, but you know, in search in the beginning, it was Lycos and Ask Jeeves and all these kinda crappy search engines where you'd have to click into the second page of results of links to find what you're looking for. It took a lot of time for links to load. And when Google came out, and in the first three links they got to what you wanted, and it was in nanoseconds, that felt magical. GPT comes out and feels like a magical leap because, like, you don't have to click on a link. They're actually going to just read for you and give you the answer, and that felt magical. Okay. But then you get to this agentic thing, right, which is now it's able to take actions for you, and that feels magical. Again, it's not just giving me an answer. It's

   4. MPMark Pincus12:16

      ... booking me the table or buying me the thing on Amazon or whatever. And so that feels magical. Again, in an Instinct level, you're kinda like, "Yeah, I, I, I think I'm gonna do that in the future." Will it be this product? I don't know. The idea that Instinct AI is doing that's through your text, and it might be wrong. It's, I think there's some trust questions. Like, do you really wanna give this random chat AI company run by a 23-year-old somewhere, you know, access to your life and credit cards? How do I know it's not gonna get hacked? And then you're like, "Well, Muse, maybe I trust Meta more 'cause they have more to lose." But is Muse right? I don't know. So both of them, I think, at an Instinct level, they're clearly onto something, and I think we all can tell and feel that. At an idea level, it's like, I don't know. The, the use cases, I'm still searching for the use cases in my head, and so we can get into that. But anyway, this is underpinnings o- of Proven Better New. So where does Proven Better New come in? It comes in that I was gonna talk about this later in your pod, but we'll go right to it. So if we want to go after that space, which a lot of people are probably thinking about, "Well, can I go and create a competitor to Muse or Instinct?" We can use Proven Better New to say, "Okay, what have these products proven so far? And can I get to the pixel level of that experience?" And so what have they proven? What is my idea? So if I'm like, "Okay, I wanna make Instinct a- that is more narrow, it's just a family assistant." Okay. Am I going to very carefully copy every single thing Instinct has done, from their onboarding to how they work in text, and then just isolate my new idea, which is, okay, mine is going to be multiplayer, so mine can have your whole family on this chat, and mine is more trustworthy maybe. Mine is more narrowly use case focused. But I don't wanna fail for the wrong reasons, and if I don't copy everything Instinct d- did or Muse did, and I'm like, "I don't know. I'm gonna put mine in WhatsApp, not an iMessage," or, you know, "I'm gonna make mine an app. I'm gonna be just like Instinct, but I'm an app," I'm probably gonna fail for the wrong reasons. I'm never even gonna get to my hypothesis. And one more recent example I'll throw out at you is, like, this product Retro. I don't know if you saw this, but it- it's from-

   5. SPSpeaker14:59

      No

   6. MPMark Pincus14:59

      ... some of the early team from Instagram, and they called it Retro, and they said, "Okay, we're going to make something that's more purely like the early Instagram. W- and Instagram's no longer just the beauty of social networking and we'll be just that." Great. That might be a good shot on goal, right? I didn't make it past their onboard. It was so many clicks and so many questions that it was dead on arrival. Now, I don't know that, but to me, at my taste level, I'm like, "Who are they copying?" My brain goes to, like, "Where's the proven in this?" And they might be applying Proven Better New the wrong way, which a lot of people do, and that's why let's get into, like, a very clear definition of it. But, but they might say, "Well, Proven is Instagram." Ding, you lose. Okay. That's too broad. You can't say Proven is the overall concept. So-

   7. SPSpeaker15:51

      Okay

   8. MPMark Pincus15:51

      ... um, maybe, maybe it's worth stepping back for a minute to, like, go through, like, Zynga Poker. Like, why is that a perfect

7. 15:58 – 19:05

   Proven Better New on the whiteboard

   1. MPMark Pincus15:58

      Proven Better New?

   2. SPSpeaker15:59

      Yeah.

   3. MPMark Pincus15:59

      I can put it on the whiteboard.

   4. SPSpeaker15:59

      I think that's a really good-

   5. MPMark Pincus16:00

      Okay

   6. SPSpeaker16:00

      ... canonical example.

   7. MPMark Pincus16:01

      Okay. Let's see if I can-

   8. SPSpeaker16:02

      And it's a little simpler to understand-

   9. MPMark Pincus16:04

      ... reach around from here. Get it. Okay

   10. SPSpeaker16:04

       ... if people don't know Instinct.

   11. MPMark Pincus16:06

       Yeah. So let's get into the concept. Okay. So if we go to Proven, and in my book, I ... Someone pointed out that if you get the audio of my book or if you get, I guess, the, uh, Kindle version, you don't get all of my whiteboard pictures and stuff-

   12. SPSpeaker16:23

       [laughs]

   13. MPMark Pincus16:23

       ... which I did myself by hand. So, so let's say prove, what was proven and what was better and what was new.

   14. SPSpeaker16:31

       Mm.

   15. MPMark Pincus16:31

       Okay. A- and I wanna make sure I, I define Proven Better New here before I jump in. So proven is down to the pixel level of the experience, click to click. Anything you need to pick, what experience that's close to yours, either your exact one or close to it, is, was proven for this audience on this platform.

   16. SPSpeaker16:55

       Mm.

   17. MPMark Pincus16:55

       And then anything that's proven, you are gonna legally copy, and I f- the better product maker you are, the better you are at copying. The worse product maker, the worse, the more you change things. So Steve Jobs was amazing at it. Um, better is what 10 out of 10 of the existing users would say, "Fuck yes, I want that."

   18. SPSpeaker17:18

       Oh.

   19. MPMark Pincus17:18

       Not, not what you think is better. This is where people do this wrong.

   20. SPSpeaker17:21

       Mm.

   21. MPMark Pincus17:22

       What you think is better is called new. What they all think is better is better. So better is more micro level innovations. It's more polish. It might be no download. It might be free. It might be less clicks. It, better onboarding experiences. Something that people care about who use this, but it's every one of them says, "Better." Okay? So it's very clear better.

   22. SPSpeaker17:48

       Mm.

   23. MPMark Pincus17:49

       New is your new novel idea, your innovation zone. New is what you're most excited about. Great. But what we wanna do is isolate that new zone so that you don't fail for the wrong reasons, because if you have a shitty onboarding experience ... I, another story is, you know, Sid Meier's did, came out with a social Civilization on Facebook, and EA came out with a social SimCity. And in both cases, we were terrified at Zynga. We thought we were dead. And within five minutes of the launch of their products, Zynga PMs sent their deconstruct around the company and said, and already predicted dead on arrival because their onboarding experience was so bad. Because brilliant game designers want you to go through long tutorials to see all their brilliance.

   24. SPSpeaker18:38

       Yeah.

   25. MPMark Pincus18:39

       Okay, on the case of Facebook games and most casual games, you've gotta be at the good stuff in three clicks.

   26. SPSpeaker18:44

       Yeah.

   27. MPMark Pincus18:45

       Not, you know, three minutes. So that proven you c- you gotta get right. And your new is great. I'm sure that there was amazing new from Sid Meier's or from Social SimCity, but no one ever sees it if they don't get past, you know, the onboard and the, you know, the

8. 19:05 – 28:36

   Zynga Poker through Proven Better New

   1. MPMark Pincus19:05

      proven stuff. In the case of Zynga Poker, and I would say I was so humbled after my failure with Tribe.net, after being one of the first 10 social networks. That was one of the first three social networks. There were 10 launched, eight succeeded on some level, two completely failed, and Tribe was one of the two failures. So after that, I was so humbled that I set my sights very narrow to start with, with Zynga Poker. So what was proven? Poker, I copied the leading poker games. I mean, like the table, the UX, like the sounds the chip made, the colors of the chips. Like you could not tell my table from any other leading poker game-

   2. SPSpeaker19:50

      Oh.

   3. MPMark Pincus19:50

      By design, okay? There was no differentiation, okay? What was better? Really clear. No download. So because why? We weren't playing for real money. We didn't care about security.

   4. SPSpeaker20:07

      Mm.

   5. MPMark Pincus20:07

      The, all the other ones had a download because they cared about security. You probably know this, Aakash, you lose 80% of your users at least when you say download.

   6. SPSpeaker20:17

      Yep.

   7. MPMark Pincus20:17

      You know, there's a 90% drop-off in the App Store. And that also is better for a casual audience that doesn't care that much about poker. What was new? It was real people with real identities through the Facebook graph and the MySpace graph.

   8. SPSpeaker20:33

      Yeah.

   9. MPMark Pincus20:33

      And sometimes you would join your friends at the table. It turned out to be 25% of the time.

   10. SPSpeaker20:39

       One quick question on no download, though. Does that not fulfill the 10 out of 10 criteria? Because one or two out of 10 might want the s- payment and the security of it.

   11. MPMark Pincus20:51

       Nobody wants a download. Even if you want to play for real money-

   12. SPSpeaker20:55

       Mm.

   13. MPMark Pincus20:56

       If you were offered, "Do you wanna click and download it or no download?" They're still, they're voting with their feet, with their clicks every day.

   14. SPSpeaker21:05

       Yep.

   15. MPMark Pincus21:06

       The 80 or 90% drop-off is all you have to know, that just the no download is gonna win at the upfront. You know, you're gonna get people in, you know, your day one retention or even day 30 because you're not losing 90% at the top of the funnel.

   16. SPSpeaker21:22

       Yep.

   17. MPMark Pincus21:23

       In this case, we are going after a really, really casual, you know, adult audience who were not going and, and playing real money gambling poker games. And for them, 10 out of 10 were gonna take the no download.

   18. SPSpeaker21:41

       Yep.

   19. MPMark Pincus21:41

       And then our new, and this is just the way life fucks with you, we gotta be dispassionate, even though we're so passionate about building products, dispassionate about this one product instantiation, ready to kill it. Like, say, you're, like, in the lab with a white lab coat. You know, we're scien- product scientists. I was not attached to this, and of course it worked.

   20. SPSpeaker22:05

       [laughs]

   21. MPMark Pincus22:05

       And of course my new worked. And my mantra they still say inside of Zynga today is, "All new fails." And if you start with the expectation that all new fails, you won't be disappointed, and you won't go the other way and stay too long with a failing idea. The other point about all new fails is when we see new make it, we need to have a reverence for it. We need to-- There's a sacredness to that. So undertune against the hope and the potential of new, overtune against what works, which is again, proven, right? A new proven thing, the fact that Instinct and Muse are now at least blowing up initially, pay a lot of attention to that, you know?

   22. SPSpeaker22:48

       Mm.

   23. MPMark Pincus22:48

       Pay more attention to what is working outside that is new than to your own new.

   24. SPSpeaker22:54

       Mm.

   25. MPMark Pincus22:54

       So that was Zynga Poker.

   26. SPSpeaker22:56

       Okay. So how do we determine, like, what the right new to go after is? Like, how did you identify real people and friends?

   27. MPMark Pincus23:04

       That comes from your instinct.

   28. SPSpeaker23:05

       Mm.

   29. MPMark Pincus23:05

       And the best new has been proven somewhere else. You know, like, today, if I was trying to do new, let's say I'm trying to find different vectors to compete against Instinct AI. Uh, like, well, what have they proven? I think they've proven that text messaging is a better place to try to bring a new viral AI service to lots of consumers.

   30. SPSpeaker23:33

       Yeah.
9. 28:36 – 32:26

   The platform-cycle paradox and Hay Day's 0% new

   1. MPMark Pincus28:36

      Number two, you've got to be aware of the context. Where are we in this platform cycle? And that gets to Supercell with Hay Day or, you know, Zynga with FarmVille, which is, here's the other paradox that fucks with our brains, okay? The earlier we are in a platform shift, the beginning of the internet, beginning of mobile, the beginning of AI, the less new you should pursue.

   2. SPSpeaker29:03

      Hmm.

   3. MPMark Pincus29:03

      The platform is new. AI is the new thing.

   4. SPSpeaker29:06

      Yeah.

   5. MPMark Pincus29:07

      It's like, AI weather app, do you want it? It's not AI app you've never used in your life, in my not so humble opinion. You're being too clever. Right now, at the beginning of a cycle, beginning of a platform, people are in a discovery mode. They're like, "Oh, really? There's a AI weather app? Tell me more. An AI camera? Tell me more. An AI Craigslist?" There's a thing you've always been doing now with AI inside. Okay, if you were trying to build a mobile game today or not thinking of AI at all, the, the level-- If you're mature in a cycle, late in a cycle, like we kind of are for mobile anything other than AI, you need-- We're trying to find a vein. We need a lot of new.

   6. SPSpeaker29:52

      [laughs]

   7. MPMark Pincus29:53

      So this changes, right? So it goes to extremes. At the very beginning, when Supercell did Hay Day, it was 0% new. There's no new.

   8. SPSpeaker30:05

      Yeah.

   9. MPMark Pincus30:06

      So, so Hay Day was FarmVille 2. Better was-

   10. SPSpeaker30:11

       Pure copy, basically.

   11. MPMark Pincus30:12

       It was a copy. If you put the two side by side, you almost couldn't tell the difference. It was a beautiful-- And I mean this with admiration. I have so much admiration for Ilkka and that team. They are master product makers, and they've integrated the best of game design, you know, and the best of really being Brilliant product makers, not just game designers. So if you held Hay Day and FarmVille 2 next to each other, you almost couldn't tell the difference. They had the same half-circle driveway that we had. They had the white mailbox, the house with the picket fence, the blue pickup truck. What did they do better? It was built for mobile.

   12. SPSpeaker30:56

       Yeah.

   13. MPMark Pincus30:57

       And we brought out FarmVille for mobile, and it was not built for mobile. What did that mean? They loaded faster. They also had shorter crop cycle times. They had touch, right? Was touch new or better? I would-- You could make a case, like, they optimized for the touch screen. The reason I'd say better is I think they nailed it so right that I think 10 out of 10 people would rather be able to touch their iPad screen than not. Okay?

   14. SPSpeaker31:29

       Than use a cursor.

   15. MPMark Pincus31:30

       You could have said new, you know, and no new. Okay? So that was the right place to be at the beginning of the mobile cycle. If you were trying to compete with Hay Day today, you couldn't say, "Oh, it's Hay Day available on mobile." People are like, "I already got Hay Day available on mobile."

   16. SPSpeaker31:49

       Yeah.

   17. MPMark Pincus31:49

       There's nothing better. So you would just be proven no one's looking for a new farm simulation game today, right? You'd have to have a lot of new. You're like, "It's AI, it's agentic. You're controlling robots in, you know, real farms." I mean, you really, to get people's attention today, it's hard. You're, you're trying to find a vein.

   18. SPSpeaker32:11

       So how do you figure out what type of product you should be building? Should you be building a product at the beginning because it's in the beginning of the AI cycle that has a lot more new, or-

10. 32:26 – 35:59

    Too clever for the moment: Fomo and Paraform

    1. MPMark Pincus32:26

       A lot less new. So, so my argument is, and I apologize if people right now, you know, wanna be in deep innovation, and I'm pouring cold water on that. But in my, I guess, not so humble opinion, right now... I was just with this brilliant class of kids at Harvard Business School Monday, and I was at Union Square Ventures' annual portfolio gathering on Tuesday. Such smart people, but a lot of people who are being too clever for the moment.

    2. SPSpeaker33:01

       Mm.

    3. MPMark Pincus33:02

       So now is not the time to try to come up with an idea the world has never seen or thought of before. Okay? So there was two brilliant women at Harvard Business School working on an idea for, to come up with perfumes, like scents that help you sleep better.

    4. SPSpeaker33:23

       Hmm.

    5. MPMark Pincus33:24

       Okay? I was like, "Guys, that'd be a great idea for five years ago, a great idea in five years. In my opinion, too clever for right now." Then at Union Square, I ran to the founders of Fomo, who I invested in in the spring. They are doing an idea that is not new at all, and I told them this. I meant this from a place of admiration. They built a social crypto trading app. Okay? Uh, there was, in the last two rounds of the internet, people built social trading apps where you're doing something, and I can follow your trades, okay?

    6. SPSpeaker34:03

       Yeah.

    7. MPMark Pincus34:03

       And they did reasonably well in each of those periods. What they're doing is they're, like, more accessible crypto trading app. They're more accessible, easier to use than, you know, Robinhood, easier to use than Coinbase. What they're clearly better at is they have every single crypto and meme coin where the other ones have 10.

    8. SPSpeaker34:28

       Right.

    9. MPMark Pincus34:28

       So if you're a degen trader, you want that. And then the social is still a little bit of new, but their idea was gonna work even if the new didn't work, and they're crushing it. They just hit 500 million ARR.

    10. SPSpeaker34:42

        Whoa.

    11. MPMark Pincus34:42

        Yeah. And they're not being too clever for the moment. Are they doing something that's really riding the AI wave? Not directly. I'm an investor in a company called Paraform. I almost didn't invest 'cause I was like, "They're a recruiter marketplace. There's lots of those." They get paid a percentage on success, but they leveraged AI to do all kinds of smarter things to get a lot of leverage, and they're crushing it. I think they just hit 150 million ARR. So my point is just, right now, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, and I have this problem too. We just wanna be too clever. I want it too. Like, we just love the new.

    12. SPSpeaker35:25

        Yeah.

    13. MPMark Pincus35:26

        And you-- we gotta be a little more disciplined right now and look at where can we be better because of AI, you know, better because of this moment. When there's opportunity to be better and people are in discovery mode, you don't have to dive into extreme new.

    14. SPSpeaker35:41

        How do you figure out what you shouldn't copy?

    15. MPMark Pincus35:44

        I guess when we were making FarmVille, which we built in six weeks, we copied most of what was in Farm Town legally.

    16. SPSpeaker35:54

        Oh.

    17. MPMark Pincus35:55

        Farm Town copied My Farm, and they copied

11. 35:59 – 39:55

    What FarmVille copied from Farm Town and what it cut

    1. MPMark Pincus35:59

       YoVille. So Farm Town took My Farm, which was the first farm simulation game that was like an Etch A Sketch. You could move the whole board around. You could click anywhere. You could put crops anywhere. So it felt almost Minecraft-like. Minecraft was being launched around the same time. Farm Town took the YoVille avatar, literally took our avatar, and dropped it into My Farm, and that was Farm Town. We copied, very carefully benchmarked and copied gifting in Farm Town, which was brilliant. And gifting created a whole new level of virality and social. They were the first ones to have a lot of friction around the neighbor mechanic. So Playfish invented the neighbor mechanic. Having strong competitors, having really smart people copying you and going past you builds markets. So you want people to copy you who are smart-

    2. SPSpeaker36:58

       Mm.

    3. MPMark Pincus36:58

       Okay? If you're ambitious. Playfish built Restaurant City, and they were the first to have the friend bar, and anyone else who you knew was playing, you saw there, and it was brilliant. Okay? Farm Town created the neighbor bar. It would show you who you knew was playing the game, and then you had to send them a request to be your neighbor, and they had to accept it. It was a two-way opt-in. And you'd say, "Why would you do that? That creates friction." It created another level of engagement and virality. Gifting and the neighbor request meant that you started playing this game and maybe forgot. You get neighbor requests from me and five other friends, it reminded you to come back to the game. This will sound really little, but it's not, because you want social density. You wanna see that all of your friends are also doing this right now, and it did that. We copied those things, okay? Those were brilliant. They had one feature, they had a, a marketplace and a town square where you could go and meet anyone else in the game and trade with them and neighbor with them. We cut that. We didn't copy that-

    4. SPSpeaker38:08

       Mm.

    5. MPMark Pincus38:08

       'Cause we thought that was stranger danger, and we thought that was not in the ethos of what mainly middle-aged adult women on Facebook wanted. So there is a level of taste, but for the most part, if you are copying something that works, you wanna default to copying everything that they've done as your base case. We're trying to be in the lab with white lab coats. If we're copying Instinct doing Proven Better New, even if Instinct did something that looks illogical to you and dumb, for your base case, I would say you should copy it. And then you can try a variation that you believe is better, but it's probably new. Because if we had not done the neighbor bar, and we'd called that better, that would've actually been a new thing, and that would've made our product less viral.

    6. SPSpeaker39:04

       Mm. So is part of figuring out what not to copy having a very specific target user in mind, like middle-aged women on Facebook?

    7. MPMark Pincus39:12

       Yes, and yourself is the best. It's very tough to have empathy and build a great product, at least for consumers, if you're not part of the audience.

    8. SPSpeaker39:22

       Mm.

    9. MPMark Pincus39:22

       Because it's like you're crawling around, you know, in the dark, and you're coming upon something and you're like, "I think that's a plant. It feels like a plant. It might not be a plant." If I can go, "Oh, yeah, that's, that's me. I, I know I don't like this," that's so much easier and faster.

    10. SPSpeaker39:41

        Yeah. So while we're on the topic of zero to one, an adjacent thing you've talked about is this idea of shipping 100 ideas a day.

    11. MPMark Pincus39:51

        Testing.

    12. SPSpeaker39:52

        Testing 100 ideas a day instead of shipping one.

12. 39:55 – 48:45

    Testing 100 ideas instead of shipping one MVP

    1. SPSpeaker39:55

       So walk us through that. What is that idea, and how does that help us build zero to one products?

    2. MPMark Pincus39:59

       And it's part of the paradox that we're in with AI, which is, I just ran into Eric Ries, and we got in a terrific debate about this, and basically, in this moment, we can build a quote unquote MVP in three months instead of maybe a year.

    3. SPSpeaker40:19

       Mm.

    4. MPMark Pincus40:20

       And so we're so tempted to do that. But what's-

    5. SPSpeaker40:24

       It feels like three minutes. [chuckles]

    6. MPMark Pincus40:25

       Right. Well, at least a working version in three minutes. But the problem with that is that it's causing us to skip steps, and we're failing too slowly. We don't have time to wait three months to test the top of the funnel. I'm not saying don't build incredibly quickly, but, but there's a temptation to, to skip the top of the funnel and just go to the whole product. And, and I said the problem with MVP is the word viable, that once we say viable, we're full of hope, and we think, "This could be my launch product," so it's not done yet.

    7. SPSpeaker41:01

       Mm.

    8. MPMark Pincus41:02

       And so we gotta start-- If in consumer, but even enterprise, we gotta find a way to start at the top of the funnel and test our early assumptions, and before we commit to building the product. And I'm shocked that at this point there is not a good product that I can just say to an AI agent, and maybe I should try it just b- doing it with Instinct or with Muse, but why can't I say... And this is where the agentic thing isn't far enough yet and we haven't really gotten to RSI. Why can't I just say to my agent, "Hey, I would like to do a Proven Better New and come up with something I compete with Instinct on. I have these vectors. One vector is family assistance. And can you come back to me tomorrow and test a whole bunch of names and concepts, come up with a whole bunch, tell me if you need my help to brainstorm them, and then I want you to go create ads, web ads, 'cause mobile may not let me do ads without something in the App Store, and I want you to come back with any winning variant in an absolute and relative?" There was just a great X post from the founder of Pocket FM, and he said their magic number, I can't believe he shared all this, but he said, once they got to 2.25% click-through rate on their ads in any country, they could grow to 10 million ARR in three months. I was like, "Wow, that's beautiful." Okay. So if I wanna do Proven Better New on Pocket FM, [chuckles] no AI-generated content is copyrighted. I could literally Take Pocket FM's own content

    9. SPSpeaker42:47

       Mm.

    10. MPMark Pincus42:48

        I could, you know, vibe code something at least good enough to be an ad to a website, and I could say, "Go into these countries and try Proven Better New against Pocket FM in France, in Italy, you know, in Saudi. See if you can get to a 2.25% click-through rate and come back tomorrow with it," right? And if you do, then maybe I should build it, right? So we're living in a moment where this kind of growth hacking at the top of the funnel-- And I'm not saying it's a good idea to... Who knows if you can go compete with them or whatever. But the point is, there's all kinds of really valuable information that could help us build conviction that our idea has, you know, legs. And I don't really see anybody doing it. If you are doing it, I wanna know.

    11. SPSpeaker43:41

        [laughs]

    12. MPMark Pincus43:41

        Like go to, you know, @markpinc on X and let me know. But-- And if your product can do this-- There was one I think called Icon that said they did this, and we tested it and it didn't.

    13. SPSpeaker43:51

        Talking about consumer, you said it isn't investable right now, but that's the reason to build it. Can you break that down?

    14. MPMark Pincus43:59

        Well, and when I said it wasn't investable now, that was in June.

    15. SPSpeaker44:04

        Mm.

    16. MPMark Pincus44:05

        Now we're in September. Now we have Instinct at ten billion valuation. If feeling a lot more investable today than it felt in June. There isn't clear distribution. There's not clear distribution hacks. But every month that goes by, more of America and more of the world is starting to discover AI. We have to remember in Silicon Valley, my family in Chicago is just getting on the AI train, and they're as much falling in love with AI as falling in fear with AI. Both are happening. So and Chicago to me is like very early indicator of mass-market America. So we forget that the rest of the country is not living and breathing AI every day the way that we are, and I went through this with the internet. I remember in 1996 trying to convince my friends that they would want email. And I remember in 1999 convincing them that they would want the web and not AOL. I have these wake-up moments where it's like, don't assume everyone else is living your digital life. We can get through our day today w- just fine without AI. So-

    17. SPSpeaker45:24

        Yeah

    18. MPMark Pincus45:25

        ... we gotta be aware of where we are in the market, and at the same time, we gotta really pay attention to what's going on out there. And so anyway, I think that consumer is more investable. I think now is terrific time to be working on consumer ideas because the floodgates of VC funding is not open. We're not seeing hit after hit after hit. At that point it might be too late. But I feel like a lot of low-hanging fruit because I don't have new AI-enabled versions of all the apps on my phone. I don't have a new AI weather app or AI camera or AI calendar, any of that. So it's a good moment.

    19. SPSpeaker46:07

        Mm. So that's consumer tech. What about broad consumer? You have a hot sauce called Hot Pink, I believe. [laughs]

    20. MPMark Pincus46:14

        I've had an idea, an instinct for a hot sauce, and, and I do have 1,000 bottles of it 'cause my friends, like, made me a prototype.

    21. SPSpeaker46:24

        Whoa. And you've talked about maybe an olive oil or something like that.

    22. MPMark Pincus46:27

        Yeah.

    23. SPSpeaker46:27

        So how does this work for things that you don't code?

    24. MPMark Pincus46:30

        Proven Better New is actually perfect for a hot sauce. So to me, the proven, at least at a product level, at a taste level, is a sauce called Caribbean hot sauce. Every time I put it on the table with five other hot sauces, everyone comes back to it. I mean, I can just see that everybody I give this hot sauce to loves this hot sauce. [laughs] So copy the formula. Now, it's a lot harder than I thought to copy the formula because you actually need to go and find the right chilies. You can't just go to a lab and say, have the same vinegar and the same pepper. It just doesn't taste the same. So getting to their exact formula is, that taste, is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

    25. SPSpeaker47:26

        Yeah.

    26. MPMark Pincus47:26

        I tried it twice in a lab. That's just the taste. Then there's Proven on the consumer marketing and the distribution and all the other things, and that's just an instinct for me. I, I don't have Proven on that. I haven't gone deep enough on all those parts of, is there a proven path to come out with a new brand of a hot sauce, get awareness, get it on shelves? So that's really just a hobby for me. I don't have any obvious better and, and I don't even really have an obvious new.

    27. SPSpeaker47:59

        Is there even new in a category like that?

    28. MPMark Pincus48:02

        Well, I think there could be new because you have a taste that does better or-

    29. SPSpeaker48:07

        Mm

    30. MPMark Pincus48:08

        ... a package that does better or a direct-to-consumer marketing or different pricing model, or people keep coming out with new tequilas, right? Casa Dragones, and they seem to be able to come out with new tequilas every five years or so that break through. So there is some Proven Better New that is working, you know, in those categories.
13. 48:45 – 55:16

    The 2006 think weekend with Thiel, Zuckerberg and Parker

    1. MPMark Pincus48:45

       Yeah

    2. SPSpeaker48:45

       ... that you had. I believe there was Mark Zuckerberg- Peter Thiel, these are like names that are legends. [laughs] Sean Parker was there, but I've never really heard, like, the full story. What happened there? What did you guys do?

    3. MPMark Pincus48:58

       Well, nobody was legends then.

    4. SPSpeaker49:01

       Oh, okay.

    5. MPMark Pincus49:02

       Not really. I mean, this was in, um, March of 2006, and I had these friends like Peter and Reid, and we really liked to just... At that time, I'd say it was like geeking out and just talk about more intellectual topics. Like Peter and I have always talked about macroeconomics, and I love the way his brain works, and that he can go from big macroeconomics of, like, geopolitics all the way down to micro level things of, like, a product or how to invest in startups given that's going on in the world. And he processes data amazingly. And Reid and I love talking about politics and, and the internet. We all love talking about the internet. And there was no channel for us to have the conversations we wanted to have, 'cause you go to conferences, and they're boring, or you're supposed to sit and listen to a speaker, and we wanna talk to each other. You sit next to each other at someone's dinner party or cocktail party, and we wanna go deep on something. We don't wanna make small talk. And so the point of the think weekend is like, what if we just bring the 30, 35 smartest people we know together and there's no small talk? No one's gonna ask you about your family. No one's gonna [laughs] you know, talk to you about anything. We're only gonna talk about really big topics the whole time, and we're all gonna talk. The, if someone's presenting, it's to be the catalyst of a conversation. And we did it in Aspen in March, and I got like kind of classrooms at the Aspen Institute, and it was like an unconference. And I-- a ranch down-valley from Aspen, and like half the people stayed at my ranch. Zuck and Sean and... And it was 2006, so the Facebook was like two years old, and Zuck was staying up all night drinking Diet Cokes and eating M&M's and-

    6. SPSpeaker51:01

       Whoa

    7. MPMark Pincus51:01

       ... working. Peter did a brilliant presentation for all of us on the housing bubble, which he was two years too early on. Yeah, and it, it just was... And then it was the only time I did it, and everyone, and, and some smart hedge fund people were there, and everyone was like, "Let's do this every year." And I was like, "Nah." I was like, "I don't want this to be like a conference. I don't wanna like..." None of us had an agenda. You know, like, no one was trying to network. No one was trying to, like, sell anything to anyone, get anything, and that's what made it great. It was just like-

    8. SPSpeaker51:30

       Mm-hmm

    9. MPMark Pincus51:30

       ... 35 people came together by choice to, like, all be in, you know, these conversations. That's why I called it think weekend.

    10. SPSpeaker51:40

        Insane, and I can't believe it happened. I mean, could something like that happen today? Should people be thinking about bringing their network together-

    11. MPMark Pincus51:48

        Yes, for sure

    12. SPSpeaker51:49

        ... in this way?

    13. MPMark Pincus51:50

        And it doesn't have to be Peter Thiel. Like, you have your own Peter Thiel, like your own really, really smart thinkers that are around you, and they have different superpowers. And yeah, it's great to just bring them all together, host it, make it like an, a kind of unconference, not too big. And I asked people to come and make some deeper presentations to the group on topics that they had kind of superpowers in, and then have a conversation about that.

    14. SPSpeaker52:22

        Mm.

    15. MPMark Pincus52:22

        You know, and then a debate or whatever topics you wish you could... It's like the dinner party you wanna have.

    16. SPSpeaker52:29

        Mm.

    17. MPMark Pincus52:29

        Like, what are the topics, you know, that you wanna go deep on, and who do you wanna do it with? And-

    18. SPSpeaker52:35

        So it's not putting up a whiteboard of proven, better, new and talking about what next product you're gonna build.

    19. MPMark Pincus52:39

        I mean, no, but it's not trying to, like, start a company or something.

    20. SPSpeaker52:44

        Mm.

    21. MPMark Pincus52:44

        It's, I would maybe present on my proven, better, new, you know, present the points in my book, and then have a debate. Like, a lot of people could be like, "Mark, I don't believe at all that this is a good..." You know, and they could give me counterfactuals of, "Mark, you never would've created Angry Birds," or, "You never would've created, you know, I don't know, Instinct. Maybe, you know, maybe there wasn't enough to copy," or, "How was that proven, better, new?" Or there's a great debate because frameworks are a lens to look at. You never wanna be dogmatic. You wanna have counterfactuals. You wanna say, "But here's where this isn't useful to you, and here's where you're gonna miss things." Yeah, that's the point.

    22. SPSpeaker53:24

        Can't think of a better way to end it, guys. That's where the framework takes you. I think today, as far as I know, this is the deepest content on YouTube on Proven, Better, New that Mark has done. If they wanna find you online, where should they go?

    23. MPMark Pincus53:39

        My only social network is X. You can go to @markpinc and, you know, post something to me.

    24. SPSpeaker53:47

        All right, everyone. I think that was the deepest dive Mark has ever done on Proven, Better, New. I hope you got as much out of the episode as I did. His new book, it's pretty awesome. If you watched till this far and you comment below, "I watched till the end," I will reach out to 10 of you guys, and we will get you a copy of his book so that you can learn more from Mark. And if you want more content like this, do make sure you are subscribed to the channel, and we'll see you in the next episode. I hope you learned as much from today's episode as I did. If you can do one thing that's totally free that would help the show, it would be to check that you're following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. Check that you've left ratings and reviews on those platforms. Check that you're subscribed on YouTube. Leave a like and a comment on this video, and then share it with your friends. We're trying to make better and better podcasts. After two years, we think we've gotten something pretty good going. So let us know what we can do to make it even better, who else we should interview, and we will put on the best shows we possibly can. Finally, don't forget my offer for the bundle. You get an entire year of my paid newsletter, plus my favorite AI tools, Bolt.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise, and Mobbin'. That's $27,000 worth of value for just $150. So check that out at bundle.aakashg.com if it interests you, and I can't wait to share our next episode soon.

Episode duration: 55:26