Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:57:14 · Mark Pincus
[00:57:14] S0: Okay. I love the question on, well, how do you know if it's a B plus? And what I would say to you is, how do you know if you're with the right person? What was your experience dating? And my experience has been that when I'm with the right person, I know it. I'm not asking, "Is this the right person?" I'm like, "Fuck yeah, I love this person. This is my person and that's the best feeling ever. And I hope everyone can experience that." When you're with the A minus person, you're with the B+, you're asking, "Could this be the one?" And Osho said, "If you're torn between two paths, they're both wrong. You have feet in two canoes. If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A and you're full of hope. You hope it's an A. It doesn't mean you might not have the chance to turn that into an A, but the first point of intellectual honesty is to say, okay, it's not." And then, well, how do you know how are you getting validation that it's not? You don't have the validation that it is. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. It's anecdotally, you love your product, you're addicted to it. You show it to friends and they love it. Your metrics show that it works. Did we have to ask if GPT was it? Did we say, "Oh, is GPT it? I'm not sure." We're like, "No, I'm fucking living on that and it's making me dream of new things to do." So I'd say that the hard part about this is what do you do with a B plus? First, can we be intellectually honest that it is a B plus? And then what do we do with a B+? Do we just kill it and start all over again? Do we use it to learn? The power is knowing it's a B plus. That's the first point is, " Okay, this is not it." Now what do I do with that? Is it a way to learn? D I see examples that are near this, that are it? Can I find anything proven or near proven? When we realize it's not it, we look for more things to do and it's such a hard lesson. Two weeks ago, I pulled the plug on my do.Earth project for the fourth time. I've been building my version of the metaverse for 20 years. It's what led me to Zynga. I call the metaverse that I want life at the speed of play. We're getting closer and closer to that anyway with AI. And by the way, I define the metaverse and I give Reid Hoffman credit for this definition as blurring the lines between the virtual and the reel.
01:00:19 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
And that is where our lives are going anyway. So we're getting more and more metaverse in. It's not being in this other escape to immersive world. It's that the virtual and the reel completely blur together, but I kept coming at it from the game side and I went native, not in the good way. I got so into wanting to prove I could build this experience that I was building this game engine, web browser-based game engine and I was not getting a product market fit. I was being too ambitious. I was not going for a small, small idea. I was going for a really big idea and it was really hard and I pulled the plug on it after four years and $25 million in just this one version of it. And in the last two weeks since then, I've been more inspired around ideas than I have been in four years. So there is power in pulling the plug on a B+ and even more on a D. [01:01:26] S1: There's a whole discussion I want to have about the abyss, which you talk a lot about in the book, about how that's such a source of good ideas. But I want to touch on distribution just as we're on this thread. Something that's come up a lot on this podcast is just how with AI making it so easy to build stuff. One of the biggest challenges becomes distribution. Always been a challenge, always been hard, harder than ever, because there's so much happening in the market constantly, so much trying to get your attention. All the channels are full paid and SEO. What's your just advice to founders? What do you think needs to be true for a startup to break out? Because it's so hard now.