00:44:58 · John Coogan, Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[00:44:58] S1: It is. [00:44:59] S6: But I would say that it's probably you need a shift. You need something new, I think, to get consumers, to get all of us. We are lazy and apathetic and low attention span. And so, you know, no one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something probably AI and agents that that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party. Yeah. I I But I do believe it'll happen. [00:45:26] S1: Even though I'm I'm, like, skeptical about the particular go to market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital because if you go back to Zero to One, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're very enduring. And everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. And so I guess I have been surprised, even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network, I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a $1,000,000,000 premarket Well, round [00:46:00] S0: yes. So that's what I'm saying. So that was [00:46:01] S1: the interesting capital community to actually buy their way into network effect. [00:46:05] S0: Yeah. You can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars, and like TikTok is evidence of TikTok was spending Yeah. How much money on Meta, how much money on on Snap, all these other platforms. [00:46:17] S6: Advertiser on the Internet for [00:46:18] S1: a while. [00:46:18] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For for a minute there. So I do think it's Snap, I [00:46:21] S6: think they were getting their users, you know, from social networks.
00:46:21 · Mark Pincus, John Coogan
[00:46:21] S6: think they were getting their users, you know, from social networks. [00:46:24] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:46:24] S6: But But I I I would just say, your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you gotta pull the camera back and just also say we're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It it almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator, probably less than 10% of their companies [00:46:44] S1: Yeah. [00:46:44] S6: Are consumer. But I'm investing in some consumer, but it's after I see traction. [00:46:49] S1: Sure. [00:46:50] S6: And it feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. So I just think distribution is pretty broken even though AI feels like platform. At a consumer level, it's not. We have kind of a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember, like, we're so early. GPT is a single player experience. Right? There is no multiplayer version of Claude or GPT. [00:47:15] S1: Yeah. [00:47:15] S6: There is no app connection. None of the things that enabled Zynga MySpace was started. I mean, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. So there isn't an obvious way to jump start distribution, and I think, you know, VCs rightly wanna see something predictable. And so the small number a company called FOMO announced a big round last week, I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction. Sure.
00:47:15 · Mark Pincus, John Coogan
[00:47:15] S6: There is no app connection. None of the things that enabled Zynga MySpace was started. I mean, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. So there isn't an obvious way to jump start distribution, and I think, you know, VCs rightly wanna see something predictable. And so the small number a company called FOMO announced a big round last week, I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction. Sure. [00:47:53] S1: Yeah. How how do you think vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development? Because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very, very close to some inflection point there. The indie dev community is already booming. But how do you think it'll play out? A thousand flowers bloom. The simulators are fun. But yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that there's like a business opportunity there or if it will just be more like the d to c boom where there were a ton of small brands. A couple breakouts, but by and large it was just that, oh, there's a ton of, you know, solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today, and that's great.
00:48:43 · Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[00:48:43] S6: Right. It's it's a it's a $280,000,000,000 industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation. You know, I think games have gotten really boring and have kind of stagnated. And I think it's because distribution's broken. Will AI change distribution? Probably on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas like what some of the hyper casual game companies like a company called Rolliq that Zynga bought was brilliant at that. So they would say what was TikTokable. So they would figure out what's a TikTok meme. They made a game in a week called High Heels that became the number one game in the app store. So that happened. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to, well, okay, AI can reduce the cost. Sure. And I think it is making headway in reducing the cost, but I don't think you get hits in games because of less cost. You get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. Yeah. And so I think you [00:49:58] S0: do think triple [00:49:59] S6: a, you know, will come down from a 100,000,000 to maybe 30,000,000. But but I don't I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market.
00:49:59 · Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[00:49:59] S6: a, you know, will come down from a 100,000,000 to maybe 30,000,000. But but I don't I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market. [00:50:09] S0: It's so fascinating that I can't think of a single even media asset game, anything like that, where AI created the hit factor that whatever. No. Like, we go back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video that was one of the first AI videos that really went went super viral and people were like, woah, this is actually entertaining and Yeah. And it's always like the human that used the AI to do something that they wouldn't have done Yeah. If they had just had an idea pre AI because it would be like, well, I'm not gonna pay for all the CGI to do, you know. Mhmm. It would've just been way too much work. But the human still is the hit maker. Yeah. We still got it. [00:50:52] S6: Yeah. And even if It's awkward because when we were doing games, there was Flash, we were doing web games, and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower, but AI is really well suited for web languages, you know, and web gaming. Web gaming is 1,900,000,000 out of 280,000,000,000. So a lot of people are betting that Three. Js Yeah. Is going to unlock innovation and growth, but you're gonna have to see people embrace web gaming, which, you know, is is a tough bet. So
00:50:52 · Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[00:50:52] S6: Yeah. And even if It's awkward because when we were doing games, there was Flash, we were doing web games, and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower, but AI is really well suited for web languages, you know, and web gaming. Web gaming is 1,900,000,000 out of 280,000,000,000. So a lot of people are betting that Three. Js Yeah. Is going to unlock innovation and growth, but you're gonna have to see people embrace web gaming, which, you know, is is a tough bet. So [00:51:35] S0: What do you think app how how how would you how do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting interesting challenge. They're kind of I don't think they necessarily know. At least they have they don't necessarily know how they wanna approach it or they haven't made it clear yet. They've made it hard for these apps to you know, I think they kind of froze updates on a bunch of apps and said like, you know, we're just basically like saying like your business is like over until we figure something out. So clearly they wanna make money from it and they wanna protect users, which I think are both, you know, developers are gonna be annoyed at at, or at least good developers will be annoyed at at both of those things. But it seems like a tough one where users are clearly gonna want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences that they can imagine and then share with friends, but it feels like it's at odds with all of Apple's kind of principles.