00:58:35 · Mark Pincus, John Coogan
[00:58:35] S6: I would, not to be you know, re completely carbon copy, but I would say I'd say don't don't become a product founder. Mhmm. Don't do it if you want to make money. Don't go be a product founder if you think this is the best path to be rich and successful because I end the book by saying, how ambitious are you? And everyone says, I'm an 11 on a 10 scale. But then the question is, well, flip side of that coin is, what are you willing to sacrifice to get to that place? Would you toil in obscurity for 10 in order to have an 80% chance of the greatest home run of your life, or would you take of an 80% chance of a first base hit in one to two years? And most people would take the latter, and that's that's why they stay in their jobs or careers, or that's why even once we go found a company, I think we make all these compromises to derisk it. Yeah. [00:59:48] S1: Is that the correct question to ask to assess someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80% chance of a home run-in 10 versus 20% chance of base hit or something like that? Or sorry, vice versa. I that. 80% chance. Those are good odds. But, or are there other questions that you can dig into when you're talking to a founder to actually assess their level of ambition?
01:00:16 · Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[01:00:16] S6: I think you can pretty quickly, you guys have seen this too, get a sense of what's motivating somebody and why they're doing this. And I think that the best founders have a passion for this that goes beyond this one business or opportunity, and they need that because it's probably going to fail. And so I think that there's a question like, why are some founders repeating success and some have one big success? And I think it is your commitment and willpower. We've talked about founder mode, and there's all these moments where I think as a founder, we we have to have real courage, but it's not courage to go against the world. It's usually courage to go against our own team, our own investors because we've promised them things. We've built expectations with them, and now we have to tell them we are wrong. Yeah. And you come in on Monday, you're like, I just saw another product the competitor had last week, and what we're doing is totally wrong. And people have complained working with Mark is like third grade soccer. Every Monday, he wants to chase another ball. And they're not wrong a lot of the time because I'm trying to be intellectually honest, I can burn people out that way. But it's because I'm more committed to winning than I am kind of harmony or even So [01:01:47] S0: keeping this team with [01:01:50] S6: I think that's more of the thread that I look for is do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than being liked or respected.
01:01:50 · Mark Pincus, Jordi Hays
[01:01:50] S6: I think that's more of the thread that I look for is do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than being liked or respected. [01:02:04] S0: Yeah. It's so interesting because you have I've been in that mode too where third grade soccer strategy where and I think that comes from fundamental knowing that what you're working on is there's something wrong with the idea, At least in the early days for me because like with with with with our with the podcast early on even when we literally had like a 100 viewers, I didn't have that I didn't have that like third grade soccer strategy. It was just like this is a good product and I know because there's people I trust that are not lying to me and they say like this is great, keep doing it. And so like we had the blinders on but I've been in that mode and in hindsight where you're just kind of like, oh, let's try this other variation of this thing or let's, you know, we need to go in a totally different direction and that was it it it comes off as scattered, but if you're able to admit it's it's more like you need to be intellectually honest with yourself and your team that you're scattered because there's something that's fundamentally off with the approach. Right.
01:03:08 · Mark Pincus, John Coogan
[01:03:08] S6: Right. You knew that you liked this product. That you I mean, I think and and feedback loops you got from people around you, like, felt good about it and they liked it. You're like, okay. If it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patient's question. That's different than you kind of feel in the pit of your stomach like it's just not that good. And I think a lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building, and then when we finally see it, it's usually never as good in code as it was in our mind. And what do you do? I mean, that's happened to me so often in games that, like, this will be so cool, and then we build it, and we're like, ah. Or we see a competitor who has that, and I want to send them a thank you note, because I'm like, thank you for building my bad idea for me. I'm definitely not going to do that now. But when you it's kind of like love, you know, finding your partner. When I think when you do find the person, you're not asking is this right? You're not asking other people do you what do you think of her, you know? [01:04:13] S1: Totally. You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house. Everyone should write a book. Was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it, Was it appropriate to have it on that list? What was that like? [01:04:27] S6: Well, this is the second company I took public. I had a company called support.com that [01:04:31] S1: That's right.
01:04:32 · Mark Pincus
[01:04:32] S6: I took public Yeah. In 2000 on the last day of the IPO window. Wow. Because it it was was enterprise software. Yeah. Our VCs had no interest in the company until Sure. The consumer fell apart. We had 170,000,000 bookings. We were able to go public. Yeah. I I think it's a false dream. Mean, I I and and I think I even felt it a little bit then, but I for sure by the time I got to Zynga, I didn't wanna go public. We were forced to go public. We were incredibly profitable. We had over $1,000,000,000 on our balance sheet when we went public, but we were forced because of the SEC rules, which Obama changed with the Startup Act. And there's all this pressure because people want your stock, and they're finding ways to buy it through side letters, and then that's exposing you. There's all kinds of things. We're seeing it happen now with Anthropic, and you write really, really mean letters and policies scaring them and saying, like Anthropic has, that we're not going to recognize your stock if it wasn't issued to you. But in the end, you still the SEC is going to see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. So anyway, we were forced to go public. So was Facebook. So was LinkedIn. These other classic companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you that there's anything that's gonna help your company about going public, I think nine times out of 10, they're lying to you. Now, SpaceX and these large cap AI companies, they want legitimately need access to capital markets, and so they are optimizing for that. If you don't have that need for capital market access, there is no benefit. It's only bad. In fact, you have so many employees who leave because they say, yeah, I always wanted to be at a company that went public. It was on my bucket list. Goodbye. So you give them this liquidity. You give them this thing on their resume. And so now they're gone. Your culture changes. Ours did. And now, Michael Dell once told me before he took his company private and then public again that the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with his employees because he said they get their views from stock chat rooms and what their family is reading and and not from Michael Dell. And so it's no. There's there's it gives you, like, five other jobs as a CEO that you don't need.
01:07:13 · Mark Pincus, John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Luca Ferrari
You should be focused on your product, customer product team, not investor, IPO, media. [01:07:20] S1: Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is Life at the Speed of Play. It's available everywhere books are sold. [01:07:27] S0: Pick up the the launch and let's do this again soon. We we I have a Yeah. We're getting [01:07:32] S1: you all over the place. [01:07:33] S6: Yeah. There's so many more topics We'd love to get into. [01:07:36] S4: Would be great. [01:07:37] S6: Yeah. I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing, which There [01:07:42] S0: we go. Yeah. We didn't even get to Snapchat. [01:07:45] S6: Yeah. Didn't get to Snapchat. That's a whole show. [01:07:47] S0: Yeah. That's a whole show. Let's do it soon. [01:07:49] S6: Come back at one together. We can debate like whether this whole journey into AR goggles is the best thing. [01:07:59] S0: Shareholders love the specs. Shareholders really love the specs. [01:08:04] S1: We'll get to the thanks [01:08:06] S0: for No, mean, wait until we see how many sell. Think, I you know, I'm I'm pricing in I'm pricing in 20 pairs. 20 pairs. But I think it could there's a chance that it surprises to It the [01:08:18] S1: could. It could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come out Have with a great [01:08:22] S0: rest of [01:08:22] S1: the Great [01:08:23] S0: to see you, Mark. [01:08:23] S1: We'll talk to soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.