Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:28:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[00:28:59] S1: Is there an example that comes to mind when, because what's a company or two that started very unambitious? [00:29:05] S0: I love the story of Bolt.new that really blew up last year. I loved it so much. I coldmailed the founder because I was just so impressed with- [00:29:14] S1: [inaudible 00:29:14]? [00:29:14] S0: ... Yeah. And they toiled an obscurity on something that they were into and then they open sourced it. I think they were barely able to keep going with commercial development. And then they had this realization one day of, "Wait a second, if we take these web stacks, this virtual machine that we've been making work on the web, but we actually add that to an AI coding copilot, we now have something that's better than what anybody else has." And I think that was just a great story that they were passionate about one thing and they stuck with it. [00:30:00] S1: Eric was on the podcast. We talked about that. [00:30:02] S0: Oh, he was? I'm so impressed. In a lot of ways, Slack also was humbled. Stewart keeps trying to start game companies and those turn into unexpected bigger hit companies. We'll see what he does. And actually now has probably so much capital he could just keep doing a game company this time. [00:30:27] S1: But I think to your point, he might try again to unhumble, go big.
00:30:31 · Mark Pincus
[00:30:31] S0: But each time, so he started a big idea for the mass-market MMO, which I've also loved, but really difficult. And they were humbled in that enough to say, "Okay, wait, there's this little teeny thing that our engineers use. Let's build a product around that." And it really takes a really attuned, curious, humble founder to call the ball on that. I mean, I can imagine, I guess I've been there how hard it is when you've got investors and team and everybody going in one direction and we have to express confidence as founders. Whether or not we have actual confidence inside, that's part of, I think, the dissonance of this. How do you express confidence? How do you stay in a place of intellectual honesty? How do we stay authentic and transparent and not rattle our team? And I'm still learning. I err on the side of transparency and honesty and being authentic to a fault and I burn out people in that process and I did at Zynga and I have since because people will say, the negative critique I'm working with me is, "Oh, working for Mark is like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in excited about a different idea." And they're not wrong. But where I can get better at this maybe is if we can build a culture with our team that says, "Okay, we are ambitious. We're so ambitious that we're not going to hold onto a B+. Even if we could get funding, even if it has some traction, we have a north star that we are not going to stop until we find product market fit against our north star and this isn't it and it's going to take courage on our part. And hey, let's look around the room. Is everyone ambitious enough to do this? Or do you want to peel off and go join someone else who's already a rocket ship?" That's a fair career choice for you to make. But I think that's to me the real founder mode is can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?
00:33:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:33:17] S1: That's exactly where I wanted to go, which is this other piece of advice you give, which is, "Kill hope before hope kills you." Talk about just what that is because so much of your advice is, "Kill your bad ideas quickly." So just talk about that and then I'm really curious to know what it takes to realize an idea is bad. When do you decide, "Okay, this is B+. Let's move on."
00:33:38 · Mark Pincus
[00:33:38] S0: I don't know if I get credit for making up that quote, but I love it, kill hope before hope kills you. There's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience. It's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data. And I think that too many founders and teams keep going with the hope that this next release is going to do something magical. And I think that the best product makers, I like to say they're collecting winnings, they're not making bets. They already know. If you talk to Brian Chesky about his launches, he already knows that he has a hit. He's not launching it to find out if people like it. And I talk about the difference between launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, and a maximum launchable product. Because if we're going off hope, we're getting to this MVP, minimum viable, that the viable is the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from. If it's viable, it might make it. And there's a difference between get in the market early, learn. You're putting a product out that you're going to learn from and you're putting a product out that you're going to launch that you think you believe, not hope, is going to be a hit. And it's really important to be crisp and to make that distinction. And AI is a dangerous tool today. It's so powerful that it's dangerous. It's so powerful that it means we can get to a viable product in much less time and money than it took maybe three months instead of three years. And that's a dangerous drug because it means that... What I thought would happen where we'd be today is that people would be using AI to build these incredible testing machines, failure machines that are testing, I like to say more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year. How are you testing a 100 ideas a day instead of one in three months? I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas in a day. And what would it look like? I like to say we should build it completely wrong before we know it's the right product. So build it wrong before you know it's right. And if you could build it right, great, but don't be slowed down by that.
00:36:35 · Mark Pincus
Because if we start off, if we say, "Okay, what can I believe today? I believe this is the wrong product." What are you going to do differently because you believe it's the wrong product? You are not going to waste three months building the wrong product. "Oh, I'd rather waste a day or a week building the wrong product. But the point of what I'm building is to learn. So is it good enough to get signal and to test my idea?" And I think we can usually pull that apart and test those pieces in the wrong way. It's so often it could be an ad. I cannot believe how many times a team hasn't even tested the ads for their product before they go and put in the markets an afterthought. And it was so often at Zynga, it blew my mind. I mean, I'll give you one story from Zynga. When we were launching our first expansion pack for FarmVille, which these became massive business drivers for us, I think it was FarmVille English Countryside or something. The team came to me and they said, "Okay, we have a $10 million ad budget and we're going to start running ads before the launch." I'm like, "Wait, you have 25, 30 million people a day using your product, but you're going to put ads somewhere else for coming soon. You have these people engaged. What if you just put something on the game board? And what if you don't just start your product marketing, you're still doing product testing to see what gets the most heat? What if you start putting different art forms of your English Countryside locked on the game board and you just see how many clicks you get and you just start testing the look, the feel, the marketing message and at the same time when people click on it says, 'Coming soon, click here to be a pre-user, click here to get access two weeks before anybody else.'" And it turned out everybody clicked on it because it's a change in your game board and it both gave us direction on what was the right marketing and the right variant of the product, but the unintended consequences was we started selling keys to people for you and a friend and we ended up selling $19 million worth of keys to get early access to the new expansion pack. And so we took something that was going to be afterthought advertising, try to drum up interest in this product and turn into something that gave us signal and direction on the product and revenues.
00:39:34 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
And so often you can have, this is an existing product, but you could turn something that was going to be marketing into a kind of scarcity and heat-driving feature, something that could drive revenues or something else that matters. So the way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine and a way to vibe code, Claude Code, but build the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on. [00:40:08] S1: Awesome. I want to ask about something that I think might be on people's minds as they hear you talk. For a lot of product builders, when I think Zynga, they're not like, "This is the product I want to build." And there's a spectrum of products you guys have built. There's like FarmVille and CityVille and all these things that I think turn some people off. And then there's like Poker, Words with Friends, Mafia Wars that I think people are like, "Oh, that's amazing. I love that." Can you just speak to that?