About this episode

Mark Pincus discusses his framework for building successful consumer products and shares insights from his upcoming book.

Mark Pincus founded Zynga—the company behind Words With Friends, FarmVille, and Zynga Poker—and has arguably created more hit consumer products than anyone in history. At Zynga, eight of 10 major game launches became massive hits, reaching over a billion players. Over the past five years, Mark has been synthesizing everything he’s learned about building successful consumer products and turning it into a book, Life at the Speed of Play , which comes out on June 23. This is the first interview he’s done about the book. In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 1. His “Proven, Better, New” framework: copy what’s proven, make it better so that 10 out of 10 people say “f*ck yes, I’ll use this”—then add something new 2. Why being less ambitious is the path to the most ambitious ideas 3. His rule of thumb that your instincts are right 95% of the time, but your ideas are wrong 75% of the time 4. “Kill hope before hope kills you” 5. How to raise kids in the age of AI — Brought to you by: WorkOS —Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more Vanta —Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI — Episode transcript…

People in this episode

Host: Lenny Rachitsky

Guest: Mark Pincus

Topics covered

• successful products
• consumer products
• game development
• entrepreneurship
• parenting in AI age

Keywords

• Zynga
• successful products
• Proven Better New framework
• entrepreneurship
• AI parenting

Sponsors

WorkOS, Vanta

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Zynga

Products: Words With Friends, FarmVille, Zynga Poker

Books & works: Life at the Speed of Play

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