Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:46:29 · Mark Pincus
This is an Easter egg if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening, we built a metric called ASN and it stood for, we measured what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player, meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back, you gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually build and innovate against that metric and it made sense because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments, that's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.
00:47:28 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:49:08 · Mark Pincus
[00:49:08] S0: It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral and I see them every so often and they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there latent demand? So if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. And in 2007 when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business, but I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web and I... ... A top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me and it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me and we set up two machines for them and two for me and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server and we did that one time. I was like, "That is a lot of effort." And it was fun, but we did it once. My premise was, "Okay, I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them." Free, not just free event, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So I made it free and I said, "I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in and I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you to do this. And you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. Say we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them." So I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be some.
00:52:02 · Mark Pincus
It's very big, but none that I know. Okay, so social and consumer. I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social, we are being social online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok, but I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Is there a heat in it? Are you excited to go get on Instagram or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing, we looked at NPS, Net Promoter Scores and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. They're like, "Whoa, I got off it." So I think all that's to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age, but how are they going to do it? I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again, that they're going ... Part of what we got, people forget Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or 1,000 friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity and they still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely Instagram had TikTok envy so they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about, but not wasting our time as much. And I'll also say this, there's a side of this, I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay. That's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how do we add things to the cocktail? We'd love to host the cocktail party and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party, you know it.
00:54:49 · Mark Pincus
You feel it, you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." And it moves from obligatory, I'm at this party, it's the birthday party to almost like greed like, "I love this party. I love the people I'm meeting." And what do you get a great cocktail party? You often get great leads. And so that cocktail party that for me, it started with Napster when all of a sudden all of us were connected to each other and the great lead was a music file, but then Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, what we were getting was better lead generation. That was better productivity for our time. Before that, we would go to Google for a lead or Craigslist and it was a lot of noise to signal and now we're like, "Oh my God, I could get on Friendster and find a date and it's actually a good lead. I had a good date on Friendster." So what I would say to people is like, look, if you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is or you could host and then think about how is lead generation happening. And it might sound weird when I say lead gen, but what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn start with lead gen. All the productivity, the value started in a utility and being in this cocktail party. Today and by the way, with Zynga, I said, "I'm going to go to the cocktail party. Everyone's hanging out on social networks. I'm going to drop games in the middle and give them a new dimension to network in the games because they want to be on Facebook. I want to give them more to do." Today we're all hanging out on our Claude on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. So my Easter egg people is, it's a quiet, lonely cocktail party like the web was before social networking. And my challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy, figure out how to make that cocktail party social and socially productive and you will probably find gold there. I want to come back to your thread on your question was how do you know when an idea is a B plus? Right?
00:57:13 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:13] S1: Yeah.