Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:15:27 · Mark Pincus
[00:15:27] S0: In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. So it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we are taught in school, copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. And if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers, you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville, you're going to define innovation differently and you're not going to worry about whether ... You're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. So if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And I think that the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it. Because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that if movies, TV shows, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark and Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And he lived in my neighborhood and he was friends with my dog, Zynga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially and he connected more with the dog and I tried to be friends with him through the dog. So he would sit and talk to me and he was working on ...
00:18:02 · Mark Pincus
I was like, "What are you working on?" He said, "I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings." I'm like, "What do you mean two years?" He's like, "Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways." I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years. But if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new. And I'm like, "That's a world-class product maker because what he gets is that his ..." We feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day and we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition and we don't want to think about these things. And what if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was and what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold? And a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew that ... I don't know.
00:19:30 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:30] S1: Yeah. As you're talking, I'm just thinking what are all the best products and are they all just kind of one word ... Are they copies and evolutions of existing products or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around like the iPhone, there's phones before and they kind of took the elements of what was great, made them awesome. My Owala, I don't know, water bottle, there was water bottles that worked and then they added things to make it better. Chrome, I don't know. I'm just looking around. It's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens, most products are better versions of things that existed before. A. Nd then I'm thinking about as a product team, what do you often do? You go, look at the competitors, look at all their flows, here's what they're doing, here's what's working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think it's easy to get turned off to this idea of the word copy, but as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway.
00:20:24 · Mark Pincus
[00:20:24] S0: Well, there's so much on this that we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on. And I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing. But they had it as this buried power user feature and I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, "Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature." Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version of his product and he said, "Oh my God, they nailed it." So I think when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product, but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold. And then to your question of is every product derivative? Is every product from Proven, Better, New? My answer is no. And I talked about this a little bit in the book and in my course, but the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard, don't look at any other products, that is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different, not, as far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures or the market and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds and it was a hit and it was innovative. But the odds, that's wildcat drilling and do you want to have those odds? Or do you want to do what OMGPOP did, which is very similar story but opposite path, which was OMGPOP created the hit game Draw Something and Zynga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 days in 2012. But OMGPOP was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative. No one ever seen or tried it before, it failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit and now they did Proven, Better, New perfectly.
00:23:29 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
They said, "We're going to take this proven game and do everything about it as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile." And they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words With Friends and they made a massive hit. [00:23:49] S1: Hell yeah. I love this idea of moral arbitrage, that's such a ... Thinking about this- [00:23:54] S0: It's very Peter Thiel-ian, you know? [00:23:57] S1: Yeah. So there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this. And you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products.
00:24:12 · Mark Pincus
[00:24:12] S0: I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this and one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it might ... Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble- Started with such humble non-ambitious places and The Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. And the irony for me is I've found that my career has gone in these waves and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of, "I just want to get to anything, any product market fit", had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, but then he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, I'd say that we tend to after success feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct and we want to be more ambitious. And so when I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. And there was multiple inside Tribe that worked. The tribes, the idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it, but it was too ambitious and so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long and I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41, multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world and what did I do? I made a Facebook app like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. It was people thought I had no dignity.