You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful | FarmVille Creator

Pincus developed the "Proven Better New" framework: for products, you should legally copy what's proven to work (don't reinvent proven elements), identify what's measurably better (usually mundane things like faster, cheaper, easier), and then introduce one or two genuinely new elements—this separates successful product design from failed attempts to reinvent everything.

“From this concept and the failure of tribe, I ended up getting to this uh framework at Zingga that I called proven better new. Um and it's based on my philosophy that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. And the problem is that I see with so many products and founders is that they're losing for the wrong reason. So they're losing because they didn't just stick to their one isolate their one area of innovation. They tried to reinvent every single part of their product. And you don't have enough time to make every single part of your product better.”

Pincus founded Freeloader with Sunil Paul (who was the only internet product manager at AOL) by each investing $30,000 (totaling $60,000), and sold the company for $38 million, enabling him to gain conviction that great ideas could be built with small capital and great founding partners.

“Sunil was the only internet product manager, the only internet employee at AOL. So it turned out the one good thing about being in DC is there was this company AOL there and they had one guy who was focused on the internet and had the same kind of crazy bug I did. And so we started talking and we came up with this kind of uh you know peanut butter and jelly idea that like he wanted to build hardware, I wanted to build software, but we both want to make the internet easier for people.”

When Pincus returned as CEO to Zingga for the second time, Words with Friends (a core franchise) was projected to drop from $120M to $79M in revenues in 12 months; everyone wanted to pull resources and shut it down, but Pincus believed it was the beginning of a turnaround and committed to fixing it.

“I was going to start my fight with our core franchises. And the CEO before me had bet on all these new games and this whole slate of games looked like it was gonna fail and our franchises had been neglected. And I said, I'm gonna go back to Words with Friends. People love that. I want them to fall in love with that game again. The game when I came back was projected to do uh to drop from 120 million revenues to 79 million in revenues um in the next 12 months. And everyone was saying, "Let's pull resources off. Let's send the game to our team in India to shutter it." And I said, "No, we're gonna this is the beginning of the turnaround. We're going to turn around this game and then the whole company."”

Ian Cinnamon was a star MIT recruit who initially failed in Zingga's poker team (too entrepreneurial), so Pincus pulled him out and made him his tech assistant; he later went on to found a successful multi-billion-dollar satellite launch company.

“And so I started doing that and and all my tech assistants were great and went on to be very successful as entrepreneurs. And this kid Ian Cinnamon who was like I fought I personally fought with Meta to hire him. He was like the star recruit from MIT and I said I'm going to personally manage your career at Zingga and he joined. I put him in poker and within a year poker was trying to fire him from the company and I met with him and it was organ rejection cuz he was too entrepreneurial. It was like me at Bane, right? And I said, "Fine, pluck you out. You're going to just work for me." And and he worked for me and then I left eventually and did an incubator. He worked for me at that. Uh then he went off on his own and now he has a I wish I had invested in it. He has a really successful like multi-billion dollar satellite launch company.”

In Zingga's early fundraising, Pincus got caught between Peter Thiel (who wanted to invest $5M in Founders Fund) and Sequoia (who had just fought with Thiel over his firm's founding); this conflict made both firms gun-shy, and Zingga ended up as "damaged goods" having to raise from second-tier VCs at worse terms.

“The first round I raised was impossibly hard. and and I got caught in between a fight in a fight in between Peter Teal and Sequoia and he had just started Founders Fund and Sequoia didn't like that and they were mad at each other and Peter had said I'm going to fund I want 5 million. He's like, "I'll fund it." And I said, "Great." And and then I went and I had this meeting with Sequoia and it was really funny meeting because I was asking for 20 million pre and we were doing 200,000 a month in free cash flow.”

Pincus believed play could become one of the core daily digital activities, like search or email, and that games could deliver not just entertainment but actual value to relationships and social connections.

“I started saying play could be this one of the core things that we do in our digital life stack or every day. And and I think that what we got right with social gaming was make it for the mass market, not for gamers, and give you enough value in it that an adult would give themselves permission to play. And the value came from asking very little of you.”

Pincus invented the concept of a "failure machine"—a systematic process for rapidly testing many variants of many ideas to find what works, as opposed to the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) trap where teams waste time perfecting a single unproven concept.

“I got to failure machines through a lot of failure, painful, slow failure. I'd say when I when I came back to Zingga as CEO for the second time, and I had to move fast to make this turnaround happen.”

Pincus shifted Words with Friends' development to daily click testing at the top of the funnel (testing hundreds of ideas per iteration), starting with what players actually wanted; the team discovered "weekly achievements" was a feature that drove engagement, and this shift allowed the game to go from projected $79M to $180M in revenues.

“And it's probably much smaller things. They don't want a different game. They came here for this game. and the team to their credit and V who ran the team who ran on to become a terrific uh product maker and he ran product for Reddit. He shifted gears and they did start test click testing every day hundreds of ideas starting with what will our core audience thank us for and they got to one idea which was uh weekly achievements and they realized that these people playing want to feel like they're getting better every week and a huge percentage of players clicked on it engaged with it and because of V and the team and committing to this failure machine. This testing machine first game did 180 million in revenues did 100 million in contribution.”

Friendster was the first social network to prove the model works; Pincus and Hoffman invested early thinking it was a "science experiment," but when Friendster gained traction and they realized they could build competing social networks (Tribe and LinkedIn), they faced a choice: copy the model or stay true to their own approaches.

“Reed and I were during this nuclear winter for consumer internet after the dot crash, we were there was like six of us who were still excited about consumer internet and we would get together and re coin the term web 2.0 and it was this idea that like anything on the internet that can be free will be free starting with data and we got to set the data free. But so we both came to Friendster at the same time and we just thought it was the perfect science experiment. We didn't think it was a real business and we both put in the first money because we thought it was such an important experiment. Fster in a month started to really work and at the same time we were working on our own social networking ideas and Reed was close to launching LinkedIn but Fster was the first thing I saw work and didn't copy it didn't fast follow it”

When Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker visited Pincus at Tribe about a year after Tribe's launch, Pincus recognized that they had solved the trust problem (the core flaw in his model), but he was bound by a cultural norm against copying and his own ego, so he doubled down on his losing strategy rather than pivoting.

“Zuck came through my office with Sean Parker um about a year after I started Tribe and I was already I think struggling because I had amazing virality and I had amazing user growth and I had terrible retention and should have told me something but it didn't. It was like a sinking speedboat which a lot of viral apps became. you know that we kept putting new users in at amazing rates and we'd lose them at amazing rates. And the real answer to sinking speedboat is to fix the hole in the bottom, you know, not go faster, more people. So, Zuck and Sean Parker came through and I saw they got it right and and I think it was my ego and and the kind of morality at the time that's still there, not as much around the culture of startups and internet that you don't copy people.”

Before you have the right to improve or innovate on any element of a product, you must become a world-class expert on what's already proven in that domain—you must have a "PhD" in existing solutions and be able to articulate why they work the way they do.

“Before you have the right to do better or new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven. So, I remember at at Zingga having a roadmap meeting with the poker team and a newly minted product manager proudly showed me the new poker profile that he was going to launch. And I said, "Okay, show me your PhD in profiles. Show me what are the best game profiles on mobile ever done and tell me why." He's like, "I don't know." And I'm like, well, you haven't earned the right to change the profile if you're not an expert.”

Pincus believes voice interfaces will become the dominant mode of digital interaction; people will transition from typing/texting/reading to speaking/listening, and this shift will feel obvious in retrospect, like a huge waste of time spent on keyboards.

“Anything that can be free on the internet will be free. Anything that can be less clicks, less friction will be less friction. I think voice is one of those places. And I know Reed Hoffman had a great post about being voice pill I don't know beginning of last year and voice became a meme really hot beginning of last year and then it died down but and and I think a lot of these new devices that people are working on are all based on a voice interface but I do think that voice will be the the biggest thing that'll feel obvious that we wasted so much time typing and texting and reading and I think we're going to turn on our ears and our voices a lot more.”

Pincus had amazing virality and user growth with Tribe but terrible retention (a "sinking speedboat"), which was a clear signal the product was fundamentally flawed; however, he mistook virality for product-market fit and didn't fix the underlying problem (user trust model was wrong).

“I had amazing virality and I had amazing user growth and I had terrible retention and should have told me something but it didn't. It was like a sinking speedboat which a lot of viral apps became. you know that we kept putting new users in at amazing rates and we'd lose them at amazing rates. And the real answer to sinking speedboat is to fix the hole in the bottom, you know, not go faster, more people.”

Pincus developed a 'Book of Life' practice where each year he identifies strategic commitments and holds himself accountable by asking "What would my future self thank me for doing this year?", enabling him to be intentional about life decisions and prove he can control his circumstances.

“I think that a practice like the book of life, what it's done for me and I think it could do for a lot of people is just be strategic about your life. Like be thoughtful about like I like say what would your future self thank you for doing this year. We can be strategic, hold ourselves accountable and and force ourselves to make some tougher decisions. now because you know you'll thank yourself later.”

When asked about valuations by Sequoia while Zingga was doing $200K/month in free cash flow, Pincus argued that if you're worried about whether the pre is $15M or $20M, you don't have the right risk posture—a company like Zingga will either go to zero or multi-billion, and intermediate valuations don't matter.

“And they said, "How do you justify that valuation?" Which at the time was a lot. And I said, "If you care about this valuation, this isn't the right deal for you because this is either going to be a multi-billion dollar company or nothing. And it just won't matter." And now they everyone thinks that way. Call options. But I was like, if you're worried about whether it's 15 pre or 20 pre, don't play because you're looking for an outcome that you're never going to see we're never selling this company for 200 million is either like zero or multi-billion.”

The Words with Friends team spent 6+ months and hundreds of engineering days on a "fast play" feature that was never tested with real users; when tested, only 1% of players clicked on it, meaning they would need to accept a 99% rejection rate just to be at the minimum 5% target for a viable feature.

“They'd spent six months on this, hundreds of engineering days, and they never really tested the top of the funnel. And I said, "Well, what percent of our players clicked on this?" And I used to say, "We need like 25% minimum." And they said, "Well, we think we think we can get to 5%." I'm like, "So, the best you can get to is 5%." What did you get in your click test? And they said, "Well, we're currently at about 1%." So 99% of Words of Friends players say no [ __ ] way when you show them this game and you're building this game. I'm like that's a crime. That's that's a crime to our players.”

The worst user feedback is "meh" (a 5-7 rating), which is ambiguous and doesn't signal conviction either way; "no" is better than "meh" because it gives clear direction, and "yes" is better still—the goal is getting to clear signals, not viable products.

“So the worst thing people can say is meh. No is better. Meh is like ah it's a seven. it's a it's a five to seven. Exactly.”

"False democracy" is the illusion that a company runs on democratic principles; in reality, the CEO is a single decision-maker (the chef), and healthy companies run as "democratic dictatorships" where all voices are heard but the CEO makes the final call.

“It's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.”

Early at support.com, Pincus gave every employee responsibility for something significant they personally owned (making them a "CEO" of that domain), ensuring everyone understood what they were accountable for; this solved organizational clarity and made people like their roles.

“I wrote I put a sticky note on the wall. I wrote everyone's names and I said, "By the end of the week, write down what you're CEO of." And it should be something everyone else understands and believes is important. I said, "Everyone's gonna be a CEO. Everyone here needs to own something that that matters." and that way we all know what you're doing and we can all get more done.”

A "tech assistant" is a non-scalable way to scale an organization; the CEO picks a promising employee (often a smart misfit), and they become the CEO's shadow, attending all meetings and absorbing leadership style and decision-making; this is how Jeff Bezos trained C-suite executives at Amazon.

“eventually I got to sit down with Jeff and he took like he generously spent two hours explaining to me his concept of tech assistance which originally Andy Grove was the first one to have a tech assistant and then Bill Gates and then Jeff Bezos and I learned about it and I loved it and it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.”

To succeed as a founder or entrepreneur, you must be in a mental state of playing offense by thinking "What if everything goes right?" rather than playing defense by starting with "What if everything goes wrong?"—because if you start with catastrophe thinking, you've already lost before you begin.

“We've got to be in a mental state where we're playing offense and not defense. You've got to be in this place that you're thinking, "What if everything goes right?" If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defense. You've lost before you're even out of the gates.”

Pincus had to be beaten down by Tribe (abject failure) to approach Zingga with unambition—if he'd succeeded once, he might have carried forward the same ideas and frameworks that failed; failure made him humble and willing to listen to the market.

“And I got there um with this little poker game and it was really fun and it started to take off in ways right away and it was one of these like lightning in a bottle things that it just worked and everything about it worked. But also, I think I think I've gone through this like success beatdown, success beatd own. And I think I had to be so beat down with tribe to be so unambitious to start Zingga.”

At age 28, after multiple career failures (rejected by Bain, Malone dismissing his ideas at TCI, unable to secure a job out of college), Pincus experienced a crisis and went to a synagogue to reflect on why his life was failing, ultimately deciding to quit smoking as a concrete proof of self-control and personal agency.

“At 28, you realize you're not getting the results you want. Things aren't working out. You find yourself in a synagogue again. Walk me through what was going on.”

Many founders get attached to early failures and define themselves by those failures, which is self-defeating; success or failure depends significantly on whether you internalize setbacks or remain open to the next opportunity.

“I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it and and it would have been me too, but it wasn't.”

In Zingga games, the value proposition was minimal time commitment (asking very little of the player) plus delivering something valuable (a moment of connection, a social dimension) that justified adults giving themselves permission to play—entertainment alone was not enough.

“So, we're going to ask very little time from you and then giving you something of value in your life, not just entertainment. So, not just being dead empty calories, but actually you're here for this cocktail party to do social networking. What if in our game we give you a new dimension to your social networking that can improve a relationship in your life?”

After Tribe, Pincus experienced "the abyss"—a prolonged period with no structure, no company identity, and uncertain whether he would ever work on anything meaningful again; this is a psychological state many founders experience after a company dies or is sold.

“The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure. That's we've been on this hamster wheel that of our career.”

Pincus intentionally made fundraising for Zingga difficult by being highly selective about partners and refusing compromises with "jerk" investors or board members, even though the company was already cash flow positive; his philosophy is that ensuring alignment on the long-term vision is worth more than capital.

“This time I had a chip on my shoulder. I had like the multiple bad experiences with VCs. I made this way harder for myself when it should have been easy at this point to raise money for Zingga. It was cash flow positive. I was a multi-time, you know, I was a two for three founder. Like one sold, one public, one failed, right? And I made it so much harder on myself. But for for a reason, because I said, I'm going to make sure everyone's aligned on this trip, this road trip.”

In Words with Friends turnaround, Pincus started every meeting with "What will our players thank us for?" and eventually put up a neon sign with this question in the office lobby; this question became the north star for evaluating all product changes.

“So I started meeting with that team every week. We started going through their app reviews and ratings. It's amazing how dumb this [ __ ] is, but the ratings had fallen to like the mid-3s from the high fours. So we would read the ratings. I started and ended every meeting with, "What will our players thank us for?" And the team thought I that was like an unfair question. Eventually, we put a neon sign in the lobby that said, "What will our players thank us for?"”

Pincus felt like he was "on a five-story high unicycle, adding another story" during Zingga's growth on Facebook—with no stable platform, unstable APIs, and the constant threat that Facebook could change terms or shut down apps, he kept raising money despite being profitable as a protective measure.

“I'd say my experience in building Zingga and the reason I kept raising money even though we were profitable was I felt like I was on a fivetory high unicycle and I kept adding another story. And it was like whoa, it's be really far if we fall now. And we didn't have any stable there was not a stable platform.”

The video game industry was considered a mature, slow-growth market worth ~$23 billion globally in 2007, and mainstream consumers were not seen as a viable audience; Pincus recognized latent demand from people like him who would play games if they were accessible (no download, minimal time commitment).

“In 2007, the whole video game industry worldwide was like $23 billion. It was mature, not interesting. And yet there was, I believe, this latent demand because people like me, I I would have played games if they were made accessible for me and I didn't have to go be on someone's couch or whatever it required.”

The mantra at Zingga is "build it wrong before you build it right"—because viable is often wrong, founders shouldn't aim for viable, they should aim for fast and wrong, then iterate to right.

“build it wrong before we don't have time to build it right. Don't [ __ ] build it right. Build it [ __ ] wrong and build it fast. and don't make it viable. Viable is the bad word. Let's take viable off the table because we gota because it's probably wrong. So, we don't have time to build viable. Let's build wrong and see if it proves right. Then let's build right.”

The cultural taboo against 'copying' in startup culture is misguided—Steve Jobs's maxim 'great artists copy and masters steal' and the concept of innovation-through-inspired-adaptation suggest that copying with aesthetic refinement and meaningful additions is legitimate, distinct from 'blatant copying.'

“Copying sounds bad. You don't want to copy someone's homework...But then we juxtapose that with like Steve Jobs, he has famous quote like, you know, great artists copy and the masters steal, right?...But but then we can see other people copy something and there's something icky about it, right? And I think it comes down to there's a certain aesthetic that we feel of is it just copying and blatant copying or did you add something to the conversation?”

A formative falling out with Pincus's father occurred on a sailboat in the Caribbean when Pincus intervened to save the vessel after his father (an incompetent sailor) got the boat stuck; Pincus's father responded by saying there could only be one captain and later told Pincus he would be taken out of college to be 'finished raising,' prompting Pincus to leave and transfer to Wharton.

“my dad was the worst sailboat captain ever. I mean just famously like epically bad captain like we would get stuck on a sandbar because he didn't read the tides right”

Pincus's father referred to the period between major career achievements as "in between successes" rather than "unemployed," which reframes the abyss as a natural part of an ambitious life, not a failure.

“My dad used to call this in between successes. He's like, you're not unemployed. You're in between successes.”

While in the abyss after Tribe, Pincus worked on small side projects without intensity or full commitment (dabbling), including a poker game project; his work ethic is bimodal—he's either completely all-in or half-heartedly dabbling, with no productive middle ground.

“I got to Zingga. I was in the abyss and I was I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling. I was doing them all wrong. I was not intense. I have a terrible work ethic until I don't. You're either all in or kind of like dabbling.”

When Pincus is truly all-in, he becomes fierce and maniacal—wanting only to work, not wanting to sleep, experiencing continuous dopamine from always having more to do; this is the highest level of engagement available to him, and for others.

“What does it look like when you're allin? It's fierce. I think that that my all-in has always been underestimated. When I was all in with Zingga, I was a maniac. I mean, I just I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to sleep. I It's all I wanted to do all the time. And it was the ultimate high because there was always something more I could do.”

At age 41, starting Zingga with no external funding and low credibility (VCs were dismissive, thinking it was a lifestyle hobby because of his age and prior success), Pincus had a personal chip on his shoulder that drove him to work with extreme intensity and prove his value despite the skepticism.

“cuz you were 40 when you started Zinga. 41. When I was all in with Zingga, I was a maniac. I mean, I just I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to sleep. I It's all I wanted to do all the time. And it was the ultimate high because there was always something more I could do. So you are in the abyss and you come out of it and you have I mean by all objective standards all this money and success and you want to go do it again. Why did you do that with Singa? Part of what I deeply realized in that abyss. As founders we may or may not be faced with having to answer our why.”

Engineers are often exploited in companies—they work the hardest hours, build the product, but then leadership may change direction and discard their work, breaking a social contract; Pincus believes in a "moral contract" where if you ask engineers to build something, you're obligated to work just as hard to unlock value from that work.

“And when I first started working with engineers, these guys, Scott and Kadir, I saw how much the engineers get screwed in these companies. They're the ones who maybe it'll change, but I don't think so. They're the ones who have to work the most hours and they constantly get screwed because they build this whole product and then the CEO doesn't the salesperson doesn't sell it. The CEO says, "You know what? I know I asked you for that, but that was wrong. Now we need something else." But they just took this hill. They think they killed themselves to do this. You owe it to them.”

John Doer and Bing Gordon told Pincus that the greatest thing a founder could do is build an "internet treasure"—a service you can't remember life before or imagine living without (examples: Google, iPhone)—and this became Pincus's motivational north star for Zingga.

“Soon after I started Zinga, John Dor and Bing said to me, "The greatest thing you could do is build an internet treasure." Okay? And that's what they called Google and eventually like the iPhone and and what I attached the tagline I attached was it's a service you can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I love that vision and I said, "Yes, yes, yes, that's what that's what I want to do."”

Founders often make compromises to secure capital, hires, or investor prestige, and over time these compromises compound until the founder wakes up running a company they don't want to work at—this is a "death by a thousand compromises" that Pincus intentionally avoided.

“know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. Because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's company we don't want to work at.”

"Founder mode" is a state where a founder maintains full agency and control over the company, refusing to outsource decision-making to professional managers, boards, or coaches who might homogenize their style—founders have earned the right to do it their way, and this autonomy drives deeper learning.

“Founder mode is why we became founders in the first place. We were all expert witnesses. We were all in one way or another in these jobs where we were closest to the answer and furthest from the decision. We're all suffering under the adults and now we get to be the founder and hopefully you've positioned yourself to be a complete founder and have total agency and not be now under a new boss. Your VCs, your board, your employees that you're now like working for in some false democracy.”

Pincus grew up in a highly competitive, game-focused family where his father was playful and willing to modify game rules if he felt the game design was flawed, which shaped Pincus's own approach to problem-solving and design.

“I grew up in a family that was very competitive around these kind of, you know, family social games like charades and Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.”

Pincus attributes much of Freeloader's success to luck and the fine line between startup success and failure; he is highly aware of this luck/chance dynamic and believes many founders underestimate it or fail to internalize that their early success could have easily been failure.

“Do you feel like you were lucky? Uh yes. I I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company.”

If a product makes it to the front screen of your iPhone (meaning you use it frequently enough to keep it there), it signals billion-dollar potential, because front-screen real estate is too scarce to waste on apps that don't provide regular value.

“if a product speaks to you, or at least this is my experience, if a product speaks to me and it makes it on the front of my iPhone, I think it has a billion dollar stick value. Or maybe I should update that. That's what I thought 15 years ago. Now maybe it's trillion.”

At TCI, a major cable company, Pincus secured a position by asserting that the company should pursue deals in what would become the internet/information superhighway rather than remaining focused only on cable, and specifically referenced George Gilder's book 'Microcosm', which impressed the interviewer who was dining with Gilder that evening.

“I got was lucky enough to get a 15minute interview with TCI, John Malone's company, the biggest cable company in the country. And I interviewed with Brendan Clus, who was the president, and and he said, 'Why do we need a second MBA here?'... And I said, 'Because I read this book by this guy, George Gilder called Microcosm, and I think that your company is positioned for this coming, you know, information superighway. There's no internet yet. And I said, 'There must be all these deals, other things you could do besides cable, and I can go do that.' And he said, 'Well, it's funny you say that. We're having dinner with George Gilder tonight.'”

During the abyss period, the strategy is to embrace it and have process (like the Book of Life) while finding small projects that might unlock passion, understanding that until you find your thing you're in a non-intense state where you're dabbling rather than all-in.

“all we can do is embrace it and have more process. That's why my book of life is helpful. I find finding lots of small things to work on that are on maybe going to unlock the passion thing. I I got to Zingga. I was in the abyss and I was I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling. I was doing them all wrong. I was not intense. I have a terrible work ethic until I don't. You're either all in or kind of like dabbling.”

At Zynga, a critical moment came when Pincus had voting control and his board refused to approve a $400M acquisition of Supercell (which was showing strong early metrics with Clash of Clans at #18-25 but about to become dominant), and a lawyer told him he could technically override the board but it would result in personal liability.

“In the fall of 2012 after we were public and we were like a $2 stock... I had a handshake with Ila the founder and CEO to buy the company for 400 million in cash and I went back to we easily had the money and I went back to my board and they said until you show us you can manage what you've hot, you can't buy anything else... And I had voting control and I went to the lawyer who was actually I learned later, not my lawyer, he was the lawyer to the company and I said, 'Can't I just override them? I have voting control.' And he said, 'Technically, yes. Really, no.'”

When you give people responsibility that exceeds what they think they deserve, they become slightly scared, feel adrenaline, and actually like their jobs because they're challenged rather than because of title, money, or accolades.

“I learned this idea like, oh, if I give people way more responsibility than they think they deserve, they're going to be a little scared and they're going to feel some adrenaline and they're going to probably really like their job and not like it because of the title or the money or the accolades, but actually be challenged.”

If you're in the trenches with your builders and you genuinely value their work and do something with it, they feel that care and intention and will do more work next time; this is a self-reinforcing cycle of respect.

“if I can show you that I'm in the trenches with you and I'm really valuing your work and doing something. I think you're going to feel better and you're going to do more work the next time.”

Pincus found his way out of the abyss by working on small side projects, one of which was a poker game that began to 'take off in ways right away'—this 'lightning in a bottle' experience proved the concept had heat and could return him to the startup journey.

“I was in the abyss and I was I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling...I got to Zingga. I was in the abyss and I was I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game...and it was really fun and it started to take off in ways right away and it was one of these like lightning in a bottle things that it just worked and everything about it worked.”

For Zynga Poker, the 'Proven' element was the rules and aesthetic of poker copied from real-money gambling games, the 'Better' element was removing the download requirement (which increased conversion by preventing 80-90% user drop-off), and the 'New' element was adding profile pictures of real players around the virtual table.

“For Zinga Poker, our proven was poker games. We didn't mess with the rules of poker. We didn't We copied what the best, you know, real money gambling and other poker games looked like. The table, the dealer, the cards, the sounds, just copied it... Better for Zinga Poker was no download. Okay. Why do we have no download? Because we had no security issue... 90% or more in the app store. And so I knew that was better... And the new in Zinga poker was pictures of real people often your friends”

Despite graduating with ambitions and being intelligent, Pincus was unemployable as a traditional employee due to a 'fatal flaw' of overindexing on honesty in interviews rather than telling interviewers what they wanted to hear, causing him to graduate without a job offer.

“I had these kind of fatal flaws as an employee. One is I'm terrible at interviewing because of this like overindexing desire to be honest more than to please the interviewer even though I wanted to get these, you know, highpaying jobs. Um, so getting out of college, I was the only kid in my section to graduate without a job.”

Pincus's core 'why' that emerged from the abyss period is that he can offer the world something unique: building products that move people emotionally, and he would be most happy doing this work regardless of whether he succeeds again.

“Part of what I deeply realized in that abyss. As founders we may or may not be faced with having to answer our why. So, my why I got to is like what I can offer the world is building products that move people and and I'm going to be the most happy doing that. And I don't know if I'll ever get to do it again, but I'm going to try to get there.”

Product makers have a sacred responsibility to their users—the more seriously they hold this responsibility, the more care and intention they put into the product, and the more users feel that care in their experience with it.

“And we have a responsibility to our users like it's sacred. And the more we take that really like hold that up as our as our most important purpose in this, the more we're going to treat this with the level of respect and care that that it deserves and the more they're going to feel that care and intention in our product.”

The Words with Friends team (mostly young men) was making design decisions for middle-aged women; they wanted to add "fast play" for adrenaline, but the actual audience wanted zen moments and escape—a fundamental mismatch between team makeup and user demographics.

“The problem was that this team was um a bunch of mostly 20some dudes making g a game for middle-aged women. That's the first problem, right? So, they wanted fast played. They said, "This game is too slow. We want more adrenaline." That's not why middle-aged women were playing Words with Friends or Candy Crush Saga. They actually wanted a zen moment, a me moment. They wanted escape.”

A good CEO seeks intellectual honesty and truth from everywhere in the organization, then makes decisions based on what's right rather than what's popular within the company.

“I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.”

At age 41, starting a consumer app company on Facebook was viewed by society (including friends and VCs) as embarrassing and lacking dignity, with people questioning why someone already successful would pursue this rather than becoming a VC or pursuing more prestigious ventures.

“At that point to be like 41 and starting a consumer app company and doing it on Facebook, it's like there was no dignity in it. Like I think people were embarrassed for me. It was like, Mark, really? Like there's so much you could do in the world. like go be a venture capitalist, you know, like all my friends had done or you've already been successful. You don't have anything. You don't have to prove anything. Why are you doing this?”

In the future, technology (particularly AI) will enable founders to test and build ideas with minimal capital, reducing the duration and severity of the abyss, though Pincus believes the abyss will likely remain a necessary part of entrepreneurial life.

“I think that the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon that the ultimate vibe coding is life at the speed of play and it's that you get to have an idea and bring it to life in some way for almost no capital and get to instantiate your idea maybe not with billions of capital. So, I do think that there are going to be more and more outs from this abyss and it's going to be easier in a lot of ways, but I think the abyss is for sure there for me and I think it will be for most founders.”

At TCI under John Malone, Pincus made career-limiting mistakes by openly criticizing strategic decisions (opposing an acquisition of Prodigy, suggesting AOL as a better target, recommending shorting another company's stock), which earned him the dismissal that 'I don't need some wet behind the ears MBA telling me what's a good deal.'

“they had another deal, this other public company. They were going to put a bunch of money in. And I said, "Not only should we not invest or take take equity in this company, we should short their stock cuz they're just going to go straight down. They have no capital." And Malone said, "I don't need some wet behind the ears MBA telling me what's a good deal, you know."”

Pincus learned about this no-one-on-one practice from Bing Gordon (former EA executive and Amazon board member for 20 years), who shared that Jeff Bezos uses tech assistants to pass down operational wisdom rather than doing one-on-ones.

“I was lucky enough to meet Bing Gordon who was at EA. They were like our arch enemy in the beginning. He was part of the founding team there and he became uh an advisor, board member, uh coach, godfather of my kids and and he was on the board of Amazon for like 20 years, wasn't he? Yeah. And he gave me all this brilliant wisdom indirectly from Jeff Bezos.”

At Bain, Pincus proved that Mitt Romney's graph (showing that high relative market share correlates with high return on sales) was wrong in the snack industry, presented this finding proudly to the partners, and was asked not to return mid-summer—making him one of only two summer associates in firm history to receive this rejection.

“they had this graph in the company that Mitt Romney had first made that said they probably still have it. It says if your relative market share is high enough, your return on sales, your margin will be high, which is basically saying you can have like more monopolistic pricing or oligopolistic. I proved that in the snack industry it breaks.”