Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:01:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[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. [01:02:00] S0: Let's start with talking about consumer distribution, which I understand better. [01:02:06] S1: Yes.
01:02:08 · Mark Pincus
[01:02:08] S0: There's one question we got to back up and really explore, which is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use, AI chat, but it's not in my mind a platform. A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And we're kind of like halfway to a platform. We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. The average app installs per user per month is zero. So it's really important to think about that, that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. There was something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So your odds are bad. Okay. So it's not an ideal moment to be ... You can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge and it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investible. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. It's much easier to be prosumer or enterprise now, but for good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas. And you asked about distribution.