Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder
You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework.
I almost wanna turn this to my whiteboards.
Awesome, great.
This is like showing us nudes for My First Million. This is like exactly what we like.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never look back.
So, all right, you've done everything. You built a $10 billion company. You're, I think, a seed investor in Facebook or early investor in Facebook. One thing you haven't done is sitting still. I'm looking at your biography and your timeline. It seems like you start a company, it either sells or fails, and 6 months later you have a new company. And you've done that like 8 times, it feels like. Do you ever sit still?
I'm working on sitting still. My partner, Hillary, we said she's like a tree and I'm like a hummingbird. And so I'm trying to be more like, like a redwood tree.
Why is that? Why not just embrace your nature of just being this extremely generative, creative guy? Who cares? Why be the tree? Be the bird.
Well, I think it's good to have a balance. So I'm trying to, I'm not trying to sit still from a creative business work perspective, but in home life, I think it's more, it's good balance. You know, I've added like morning practice with breathing and meditation. So I definitely have extreme ADD and so, but I, but I do better when I focus. But they both work really well together. You know, my daughter Carmen, has dyslexia and ADD, and we tried Adderall and some of those things, and she liked it first. And then I was like, wait, your brain is beautiful the way it is. I don't wanna normalize your brain and standardize it. Let's figure out what works best for your brain, you know? So it's a, I'm a little bit like that with myself of just saying the way I work, the, I call my investment and incubator Work-play ventures, because I love this kind of triangulation between work, play, and usefulness to the world. And that's why this book took so long and was difficult, because it took me a long time to find the, the fun kind of narrative and voice for the book.
One of the cool parts is that you, you're very transparent about money, and that was pretty cool. I think you were in your late 20s or so when you sold Freeloader. I think you said you made like $2 or $3 million. You sold it for $38 million. You walked away, I think with $3 or $5. You can correct me if I'm wrong.
$5 after taxes.
$5 after taxes.
And I had to pay short-term gains 'cause it was so fast.
It was like a 10-month or something like that acquisition.
7 months.
Yeah. Which is crazy. And then you wrote a $38,000 check to Facebook. I think you said that that would be worth $6 billion now. How often are you doing the math as to how much that would be worth had you not sold?
Is that part of your morning meditation? You calculate what 9 million shares of Facebook is worth
today? I, it's amazing. I, I say in the book that it is so true in this life. Like some of the patterns that I recognize is if you pick the right body of water, it, you don't have to pick the right boat. But if you pick the wrong body of water, the best boat isn't gonna help you. And it's just been so true. And the internet obviously was the right body of water. Now it's like, it's like the whole thing. You can't even call it a body of water. And, you know, AI is like that now. And there's so many instances where I sold something that I was early and it became, it would've become worth a lot. I mean, but even in selling, My first company, Freeloader, you know, we said no to Yahoo. They had, I think, 35 employees. They'd been public like 6 weeks. They were worth $800 million. We would've had 5% of the company. I would've had 1.5%. I remember all these numbers for sure. But I, I wrote on the back of an envelope, like, if I got fired in year 1, which deal would be better if I got fired in year 2? I knew I'd get fired. And so I just was trying to figure out, well, at what point, how long would I have to make it before the Yahoo deal is better? You know, and I thought I'd have to make it at least like 2 to 3 years. And that seemed unlikely. So, but I was wrong. Even 1 year would have been amazing. And,
and that check, was that 10? So that was 10% of your net worth you put into Facebook seed round. Is that right? Is that math right?
No, no, no, no. $38,000. I— Oh, $38,000.
Sorry, I was thinking $500,000.
No, I, the, there's nothing brilliant about my Facebook investment. And I get kind of bugged when I see people on their investment resumes put that they were, you know, a seed in or early in, there were only 3 seed investors in Facebook. It was me, Reid, and Peter Thiel. But you would've, anyone listening to this would've made the same investment that I did if they could've. You know, it's probably more impressive that I was in a place that, you know, Zuckerberg and Sean Parker walked into my office than that I, you know, decided to invest.
So tell the story of how that happened, because I feel like Peter Thiel gets a lot of recognition for that. And even Reid kind of, I think, introduced or facilitated the meeting. I feel like you're not included in that story as much. So as a historian of Silicon Valley, I want to know what was going on then. So can you take us back? How did that investment happen? What was the— what was going on? I think Sean Parker was your intern at one point. Yeah. a teenager.
Yeah, Sean has this amazing nose for viral consumer hits, and, and he found Freeloader really early and wrote me this whole long email and said he was a Unix programmer and he'd come work for free for the summer. He was, I think he was 16. And I said, sure. And he came and he was awesome. I don't know if he actually knew how to program Unix or not. I still haven't actually ever gone back and asked him. But, but he, you know, he was a force even then. And, and then he started Napster with the other Sean Fanning and emailed me about Napster and just said, we turn on these couple servers, this music sharing, and it's— every server is full. We need more money and we need $100,000. And I just mailed them a check for $100,000 because Again, that was just a no-brainer. You always send that check. But, you know, and Napster could have been gigantic. And I think that was the beginning of the whole social media, you know, wave and revolution, but just a bunch of years, a few years earlier. And then— Hey,
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And Reid and I had met while he was at PayPal around politics, and then We both kind of came back to consumer internet in 2002. There's a small number of people. We both wrote the first checks into Friendster, which we just thought was like a useful experiment. And then it started to blow up in February of '03, like a month after it launched. And I guess it was in '04 that Sean walked Zuckerberg into my office at Tribe and said, you gotta see this. I just joined this company. And, and I'd heard about the Facebook, you know, I'd heard they were in a couple of schools. He said, we have a waitlist for all the rest of the schools or that want to be, want us to launch. And, you know, but we launch a school, it sounded just like Napster, but he is like, we launch a school, we get 80% the first week, the next week we get the other 20%. And, Zuckerberg was just sitting here. This— he really looked like he was like 15 or 16. I think he was 19. And he was in like basketball shorts, you know, Hawaiian flip-flops, had his feet up on my table and gave me a card that said, you know, I'm CEO, bitch. And, and it's just— he was just from another world. He was just so unapologetic. And it just didn't matter because his metrics were amazing. Like, between 60 and 80% of his users logged on every day or just stayed logged on. He had nailed trust. You know, every single person, when I looked at their profile, had their cell phone, and at the time it connected to their computer. They had this product called Wirehog, I think, that would, was like Napster, that would upload every file and music and things from your computer. And, and I was, I was failing so miserably with Tribe. That—
Tribe was before Facebook. It was, it was one of the first 3 social networks. And, and I like to say that part of the deep, painful scars and learning that went into Zynga and went into this book, and I'm hoping to save other founders from doing, because it's, it really is like a friend who's just in a bad relationship and you're like, He's just not that into you. Like, stop it. Like, just have some dignity. Like, you could go back and shake me when I was doing Tribe and say, Mark, you're— there's so much like in this. Stop just sticking heroically to this one idea that's too complicated, got trust wrong, and, and it's not working. And there were probably 10 social networks that launched in that era, and 8 were successful. Like, you know, Bebo was around that time, you know, Michael Birch, he was, he sold for a lot of money to AOL, as you know, Tagged, later MySpace. And I managed to fail with Tribe, like, 'cause I just stuck to one idea when, when everything was working. And so by the time Zuckerberg and Sean walked in my office, I knew enough to invest. I should have copied them. I mean, I should have said, okay, they've nailed trust. I don't necessarily have to do the .edu, although it was brilliant and I could have done it. But I think like so many founders, I was stuck in this pride and, and, and didn't do, you know, Peter Thiel would call that a moral arbitrage, right? That we don't feel good about that, right? But someone's gonna copy it and, and did and will. And, and now that's— Yeah. you know, unapologetically part of Zuckerberg's playbook. And we see them coming out with their own Calshi or, you know, and that's, it's just the efficiency of the market and the internet that somebody is going to do it. And it's actually how we get more innovation because if they just exactly copied it, it will probably fail. But if they did proven better new, like I write about In the book, they might get to something that that's an innovation.
Hey, when he when a young guy like that does what he did, you know he's got that audacious business card. He's got his feet on your desk or whatever. Are you turned off by that? You're like this cocky, arrogant prick, or are you like I love this chutzpah? This is awesome.
You're both. You're everything at once, and you have some deep self-loathing too, because you're like ah. You know, remember, like, I was not a first-time founder at this point. I, I had some swagger. Like, I had my first 2 companies were very big successes, and now I was on my third one, and it seems ordained, you know? And social network's working, and it's not— mine isn't working. It, it was, it was like a sinking speedboat. Like, we had huge virality, no retention, or, very, very limited retention. And you're like, he, he's got, he's holding, you know, if you're playing poker, he's holding the nuts. Like he's got the cards. Right. So he can be arrogant, you know, and your frontal brain, hopefully your executive function is working enough to overcome your ego and emotions and say, dude, you, you have to invest in this if you can, because he's got the winning hand and you, you've been playing this game, you know, Enough to know this is the winning hand.
What was the moment that you thought, oh, this guy's going to be like generational? This isn't like a, oh, a short-term viral app. This is— this guy could be one of the greats.
That came later as he went. It went from just this fun kind of— he had lightning in a bottle, this rocket ship. He was having fun hiring all his friends and all living in a house together. I remember it was at like the D conference, Kara Swisher's conference. He was there. Maybe it was the first time he was speaking. I can't remember. I don't know if it was the time they kind of famously— I think it was later. The sweat time. Yeah, I don't— this is— I don't think this is the sweat con, but I, I went up to his room with him for some reason. I was always trying to like have impromptu product meetings with him. So I was in his room, I think he was gonna speak. He, he had forgotten, I think, that I had invested or that was part of it and said, oh right, you, you own stock. What'd you put in? And he did the math and I think maybe I owned like half a percent of the company. And he was like, wow. He's like, that's amazing. He's like, that's, that's gonna be huge or something. You know, he was almost like in the third person, not saying it as— Mm-hmm. Zuck, the founder, the CEO, but he was just like almost like a friend and peer. And then it— he morphed like by the month and he had such a sense that this was destined to be this generational company. And I found he had that pretty— maybe it was around the time that he brought Sheryl in. But I think anytime that we had issues, like we were getting in their way, like by 2010 when they were trying to roll out credits and Zynga was starting to be a very big part of their platform, we were, we were like 80% or of the ecosystem, app ecosystem. We were like this really overgrown teenager. And, you know, they were trying to explain why we needed to voluntarily sign up for their credits because everyone would follow. And it was like he wasn't explaining it in just business terms. He was explaining it more in a way that like—
Mafia terms.
No, not even, there was a little mafia. And when, you know, they said, they said, you're not leaning in, you know? And I started, they, they had language that everyone repeat in the company and You know, I started to kind of hear lean in, you know, at the time as, as, so they wanted Zynga to voluntarily lean in for credits, even though credits was, it would, it wasn't just a 30% tax on our revenues. It was, it was so primitive the way they built it that we were losing 50% of transactions. And it, it would've been kind of elective surgery to like chop off our legs if, None of the other developers in the ecosystem were doing it. But they said, you know, he said, Cheryl worked in the Treasury Department and she can explain to you why this makes so much sense economically for our ecosystem. But it was, my point is the way that he was talking about things were like, don't you get that this is like in the way of the destiny and the fate of this company? So you can't stand in the way because this is fate. You're in the way of fate.
It sounds like a, like, have you ever read about like some of the conquerors? Like, have you ever read like about Napoleon or any of these folks? Like Napoleon has this quote, or I'm paraphrasing, where he was like, someone was like, what's your, what's your heritage? They want to know like where he came from. He's like, oh, I come from the people who conquer worlds. Like most people say Irish or whatever. And he was like, I come from the
winner's side.
Yeah. Like what you're describing is very similar. Where it was like a sense of destiny. And that's, that's very rare and intoxicating.
It's an interesting question that's not related only to Zuck, right? Like, I think one of the cool things that you've been in the game for so long and you've been early into a bunch of the right, what'd you call it, the right oceans or whatever, bodies of water. But I wonder, do you, can you pattern match now when somebody is sort of has, has that, that extra gear or that X factor or whatever it is? Or do you think it was a lot more of luck and there was 1,000 other people just like them? that just didn't happen to catch a winning, winning train ride? Like, I guess, what's your conclusion?
I talk about this in the book, that there is pattern matching around lightning in a bottle, and it's every metric and anecdote comes back to this. The reason why we don't pattern match that is because we usually haven't seen it. And, and this is where B+ is the enemy of an A. If you have to ask somebody, Do you think this is lightning in a bottle? It ain't lightning in a bottle. You know, when you've got it, you don't have to ask anybody. It's like true love. I mean, it's like, I hope you guys, you know, have experienced that kind of love that you didn't have to ask anybody else if they thought this was the one. And there's so many things. I mean, Napster didn't have to ask anyone. Friendster didn't have to ask. And it's Friendster was like, I thought it was the most unlikely thing when we funded it. But then I was sitting at a blackjack table at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas, and there were these 2 girls from, they were like kind of maybe post-college from Ohio, and sitting next to me as one finds themself in Vegas. And one turned to the other and said, oh, can you, I think she said, can you Friendster me? Or this is a month after it launched. And she said, you know, can you— it was invite only. And she said, can you invite me to Friendster? And my head, like, spun around. I was like, what did you just say? Friendster? And that's these kind of shocking moments. And so it can be one anecdote like that. It could be— I mean, the first time I played Restaurant City, which was for our competitor, Playfish, I was like, holy fuck, I was so addicted to that game. In fact, I just tweeted back and forth with a guy who was the product manager on it. Just huge respect. I mean, I was so addicted to the game. I just think there are patterns that you can just see. There are metrics like every time you see 60% DAU to MAU, just invest. That was Facebook. That was, Friendster, when, when 60% of the people who, you know, tried this come back every day, then you get that kind of engagement. That's just lightning in a bottle.
What about for personalities?
I can't say that there is one pattern, but there are a lot of similarities. But there's, there is a certain swagger that I see. It's, it's not even a personality, it's more of an energy that they have. When, when someone's got the nuts, like when they have it, there's a way that they don't give any fucks if you care that is deeply authentic. Now you can fake it like we saw in the show Silicon Valley. People can try to be a derivative fake of that, and that might work for a little while. But there's things like, uh, I've invested in the last few rounds in this private company that has an online— the biggest online bank in Europe called Revolut. Okay. I've never met the founder. I'm deeply in admiration of him, but I started admiring him from afar just because I saw every 6 months they'd do another round and beat the projections they'd given us 6 months earlier. That's what we were doing at Zynga. And when you see that, you also just invest without asking what the price is. That's— this is not investment advice. I'm sorry. This is what I've done. You know, when, when I see a company that's just beating its own numbers, and yes, in the public markets there used to be Cisco trying to manage us with— they very carefully manage, you know, beat and raise. That we've started to pattern recognize is not real. But when it's real and you're like, they give you numbers that sound like hockey stick and then they beat those, just invest.
Who else have you seen that with? It's pretty cool to hear that. So Revolut, which we don't, we don't use, it's European.
Anthropic. I did the same. I stupidly skipped the first 2 rounds. I wouldn't say it's even that stupid. You know, I skipped the $5 billion valuation and the $18. And it was 'cause at the time nobody believed there was gonna be room for a second LLM, and I worried they wouldn't be able to raise enough capital to compete. Then Amazon led that third round at like $20 billion, and then it changed everything 'cause they had clear access to capital. Then the next round that I saw, I think was $180 billion, and I just invested. I was like, Okay, I was wrong. I'm just going to invest. I don't— not going to worry about the fact that I could have invested like 10x ago.
And how do you, how do you think about upside here? Like, I invested when it was at whatever, $800 billion or something crazy, and I'm almost laughing at myself like, oh yeah, let me just— yeah, $800 billion. There's clear upside from here. But then you sort of have to break your brain and be like, if these work, how big are these going to be? How do you think about the case for how big these big AI companies are gonna be?
My pattern that I've learned in the last couple of gigantic platform shifts in the internet is that whatever we think, we will underestimate how big and profound and impactful it's gonna be. I don't think anyone even believed really 10 years ago that we would have multi-trillion-dollar companies today. I remember when all these companies were worth $300 billion. And that seemed like the cap. Microsoft, Facebook or Meta, Tencent and the company Alibaba. And I would have theoretically believed they could 10x, but I wouldn't have— I wouldn't believe— I wouldn't have bet my money on it.
Yeah. Do you still struggle with that? Like, just under— like, we all know this pattern. We all know this pattern. Like, for example, I like track and field and I always think, oh, this record is unbreakable. And obviously every record, every record gets broken or there's always a new freak. Same with companies. There's always a new freak. So even though I know that, it's still shocking when you see it and it's still like, I can't believe that.
You just have to get comfortable with this, this kind of emotional, intellectual dissonance and separation. And yeah, it's, it's just, it is hard to grasp, like on the one hand, but then, you know, Yeah, if basically this AI kind of centralized computing becomes part of the stack of the way everything gets done, it just, it makes sense that it'll 10x. So I believe these companies will get to at least $10 trillion, and that means they'll probably get to like $20 or $30 trillion. And so, and it, I'm not to, I'm not saying they won't crash before then and there won't be despair. You know, who knows if in Q— a lot of people are betting that in Q1 of next year, you know, this, these infrastructure bets aren't going to re-up. But that's what they bet this year. And that's why, you know, the memory stocks have been on this wild ride and it's exciting.
Do you play the stock market? Do you, do you just like kind of the game of investing, whether it's angel, it's stock market? You pretty active everywhere with your portfolio?
I do like it. And I, I am like more active probably than I should be.
Can you give us an understanding of what your portfolio looks like as a pie?
Sure. It's— well, I'd say, I'd say 50% is probably in privates of some kind.
Does that include the— is that the markup?
That's probably with, I mean, some markup. And then 50% is liquid. And I've been managing my liquid portfolio for about 8 years. I got out of all the hedge funds and different kinds of funds, and I just decided that they were protecting me from some amount of volatility. And that if I could withstand the volatility, I'd rather have control. And, and it just, it wasn't obvious. I actually, I mean, I looked in the previous 10 years, I had averaged 2.2% annual returns on my whole liquid portfolio with wealth managers and funds and everything. So I massively underperformed the market.
Thanks, experts.
Yeah. Oh, thanks experts for keeping me safe. Safe and low. You know, it was very consistent. 2.2 though. They nailed that 2.2 every year. No volatility. And I just, I stopped any fixed income 'cause I just, I just believe that the governments of the world have no choice but to print money. And so I, I, I really like macro. Like I've connected with Peter Thiel on macro investing for like 25 or 30 years. And so he's better than me, but similar, you know,
Can you explain what does that mean? I don't know. I don't— I only buy index funds. I don't know anything.
Well, it's sort of like, you know, Peter Thiel has this talk on YouTube when I don't know, it's like 20 years ago and he's basically describing Bitcoin before Bitcoin and he's describing like the macro problem of fiat currencies and printing and all this stuff. And it's like, if you understood that, then it's no surprise when something like Bitcoin shows up. Give us an example of some of your ideas. What were the big ideas that you got excited about, whether they're right or wrong?
Last year, I found myself in late February, like almost fully invested in equities with my liquid portfolio. I was very bullish. I was very bullish on what Trump would mean for tech and the economy. And then I started looking at the, how bad the dislocations were gonna be from the tariffs. And I was like, okay, my read on Trump is he's somewhere between, he's a good poker player and he's gonna bluff. He's going to have some cards, but bluff. But he's going to have to keep making his hand stronger. So he can't— if people don't come to the table right away, he's going to have to show them some cards and do some damage. So I was like, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and the markets are going to overreact. So I put most of my portfolio in gold. And then around April, when these deals started coming in, these tariff deals, and the market wasn't coming back and giving much credit, I was like, okay, Trump is gonna like land this plane before the end of the year. And so then I moved hugely back into the market, and it's the most volatility and change, you know, I've ever— and this is not meant to be a brag because I've had bad years, but, but I was up like 35% on my whole liquid portfolio last year. because of these trades, because of gold and because of going in and out of the market. This year, not nearly as good. I've gotten— I'm a huge long-term believer in Snapchat and I've been crushed. So this year I've been crushed in Snapchat, crushed in Bitcoin.
Trading is stressful. Why are you even trading in the first place? Is it just, just because you love it?
That's why I said I shouldn't be. I mean, I should be in some place where I'm kind of set it and forget it. I enjoy it. And sometimes it feels like because there is no fund manager, there's some things I need to do just to be responsible. For instance, this AI infrastructure trade, I don't— it's a belief trade right now. Like, I don't know whether or not all these hyperscalers are going to re-up in Q1 of next year or take a pause. And I love these companies, and I love the trade almost too much because it looks generational that you could buy these companies at PEG ratios that are like 0.3 or 0.25, where Nvidia, Micron, so many of these companies are trading— their trade, their PE rate is a fraction of their growth rate. That's called the PEG ratio. So on the one hand, that looks generational, but it's because every— the market is worried that the buying, the CapEx rate isn't going to keep up with this. And so I collared all of it just because I don't want to worry about it. But that made me be like a day trader because I had to put all these collars on like 10 or 15 different positions. But now I can set it and forget it because they're like down 15, up 50 for the next year. Okay, I, I don't have to worry about it.
One thing I really like just listening to you is that I like that you are kind of unabashedly willing to just have fun and, like you said, blur the lines between work and play. I actually want to read you this. I think you'll, you'll appreciate this. I screenshotted this from Blake Mycoskie, who started TOMS Shoes. He put this on the wall of every office he's had. He said, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To him, he always appears to be doing both.
I— yeah, I love that. I really do believe that there's like a singularity of ideation and building, which is that we all will feel like Elon, you know, that we're all— I kind of— that's why I started the book saying that we're so close to this future point where we'll all live like Elon and we'll just put our intention in the world and won't need to go through all of the painful steps of raising venture capital and hiring lawyers and all of the beatdown of life. And we'll just turn our idea into something in days that other people are using. And we're, in some ways we're there already, but I think at a business creation level, I think I think that's the very near future and it's awesome.
You have this cowboy gunslinger attitude that I love. I admire it. I would not say that's how I roll. And I'm— but I'm— and I'm envious of you.
It's like when I see a guy with great style and fashion, it's like, I appreciate it. Couldn't be more different. But I appreciate the way that
you— the way that you view life. It's not exactly how I do things, and I'm envious of you for it. Are there downsides to this sort of like, like you have this very stereotypical Silicon Valley energy that I love. Do you think that you feel stress the same as the normal person?
I don't think there is like a constant state of Mark, you know, like I'm not like, I love, what's the name of the guy, the music guy who wrote the creation, the creativity book from Hollywood?
Rick Rubin. Like, I wish I was like more like— I admire Rick Rubin, right? He's so zen. I'm not, I'm not, uh, not that level. Um, and here's what's so weird, Sam, maybe you guys can relate to this. And, and I guess it is funny to hear that I'm kind of stereotypical Silicon Valley because I, I've, I spent so much of my career feeling like such an outsider to Silicon Valley culture. That I'm like, okay, I don't know what that means now to be in the middle of the whole thing. I'll have to think about that. But this whole idea of work-life balance relates to this because I find that when people say like, how are you doing? Are you stressed or relaxed? I say, I'm not stressed enough. I miss the level of intensity that I was, the storm I was in the middle of at Zynga. And because it was such, it was such a high to be in this creative loop that I could be working with amazing product teams and, and making these huge leaps every week and come up with ideas, get them out, see users love it, see metrics move, see our financials move weekly. That's a high that I miss. And when I'm in like the abyss, which is what I call anytime in between those, I have a different kind of stress and anxiety. It's, it's not like my Oura Ring is happy. And now the most stress it shows is, is around my family, my 5 kids. And I'm like, I want it, I want my work stress in some way to, to trump my family stress. And it's not, it's too, it's too calm. And I want to crowd out the time for investing or anything else. I want to be in the middle of this, like, just creative storm, you know? And, and I'm not. And so that's where I feel kind of antsy. It's like, I think it's like the cavemen, like we were designed to get restless and that makes us go out and hunt, you know?
I definitely resonate with that. And when you had the Zynga thriller, you know, in some ways you can always be chasing that feeling again, right? Because it's such a, entrepreneurial thrill ride that you caught. You caught one of those waves and you were surfing it. And you may, you may be out there paddling in the ocean for, for another decade. You may never get another wave like that, but you, you want it and you, you found yourself riding it.
And it's, and it's a bad addiction. I, in some ways my life would be so much easier if I didn't have that addiction because I could just go be a venture capitalist full-time or I don't know, a professor or something.
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I did a podcast with Garry Tan and we started brainstorming like this. About can we close our eyes and imagine 2 years from now where the tokens that we use today are free? There might be an overall spend on tokens that's higher, but the per-token spend per kind of unit of intelligence is going to— what we look at today will probably be close to free. It'll be like water. And then I think we already passed the singularity and, you know, I, or I, sorry, but I don't know if I can say the singularity, but I'd say we already passed AGI, but the way it was defined. And so if you could have a human on the, that was available 24/7 live for anything you wanted, I think most of the time we would take that if, if they were available and knew the context. And so, so I get back to like, you know, that's why I kind of showed my, the front of my iPhone in the book. I don't know if you can see it there.
Yeah.
And I said, this is what makes me so optimistic about the consumer future because, you
know, I— Your Nanit one was missing there. In the book you had Nanit.
Oh yeah. Well, I, now my, my, you know, she's 18 months. I don't need the Nanit. Well, now they all sleep with me, so I, I don't even need the, the camera, but But what I'd say is like half of that screen is empty and the other half of it is generic apps. And maybe we won't even have the screen, right? So maybe I'm even dating myself with that. This may not age well, but either way, we will still do that digital life stack of those functions. We'll still wanna know about the weather. We're still gonna wanna look up your podcast, calendar, photos, whatever. And if there was a live human agent that was managing all that all the time, 24/7, I think we would use it if it was free. And I think freemium will come back because I think we would use it free. I do believe I'm an AI optimist. I also believe that jobs are going to skyrocket, not be— not go away. And I think that we're going to be pulled into these services and then we are going to want to get to a human sometimes. Like, take travel. I think we could have an amazing travel agent, but when your flight was canceled and you're trying to get home, you know, from London and it's July 4th and you're racing to like rebook the next flight, I think in that moment you'd probably pay $50 or $100 to have a human jump on, book it, get it right, trusted. Those are the zones that on some level kind of turn me on. And then the biggest thing I talk about in the book is this social cocktail party. Reid said he is about people, people, and people, and I'm with him. I think what we care about most across all these services is the social. And I think we're moving from consumptive to generative. I think that what the dopamine hit that we're gonna get, and we get already from being generative, is so many times bigger than the dopamine we get from consumptive entertainment. And we feel bad about ourselves. I got off Instagram. It was like a bad drug. It was giving me very little value. Now, X is my thing, and I love X. But now these Reels, sometimes they do such a good job of looping into others, and my daughter will come in and be like, Dad, what are you doing? I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just, I don't know, I'm watching Matthew McConaughey, and he's awesome, talking about July 4th. So how can I not watch this? And then they're stringing me into somebody else, but it wasn't a good use of my time, and I, I don't feel good. I think that with AI, we are going to literally make music. You know, I think that we are going to look at Midjourney, the magic of Midjourney. I could make you guys believe I'm a good, like, home designer or logo designer just using Midjourney. It makes me more creative than I really am.
So the— I like the proven better new bit from the book. I mean, that's the one that's like one of the biggest pieces of the book. Can you kind of like close your eyes and put yourself in the position of like a 25 or 30-year-old, a young person, you know, just like Mark was when he started Freeloader. You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework of what you're going to do to figure out what you're going to work on in the next couple of weeks.
I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards.
Awesome. Great, great, great, great. This is fantastic.
Okay.
Just—
this is like showing us nudes for My First Million. This is like exactly what we like.
Okay. Whiteboard number 1 is, what are we passionate about? Doesn't matter. Do not worry. Give zero fucks about business or anything. Just, I mean, I'm passionate about surfing, being a dad. I am passionate about cocktail parties, connecting people. We call this swerging people together, like merging people. I love connecting disparate people and they form like interesting— I introduced 2 friends and they made the movie The Dissident. Like, that turns me on. I just love to do that. So here's your passion board. So then, then we want to write like, what is a real business? Let's not forget about real businesses. What, what is on the internet or what are industries, they might be mature, that are, that are making a lot of money? Like, you know, like that guy, uh, who started the peptide company. Okay. Peptides. They're making a lot of money. Um, but then you could put like, you know, online dating. you know, jobs, video games. Like, it doesn't matter. Just what are just things that are addressable, that are real businesses? Okay? And then on your third board, you kind of Frankenstein these things and you say, well, okay, if I connected these boards, Okay, uh, you know, I don't know, being a dad plus jobs or dating, you know.
You're looking for the intersection of proven business with things you give a shit about.
We're not at even the proven better new part yet, which is you, you come up with any mashup idea, okay, that kind of turns you on. And it could be like you're into agents. or you're into Clawbot or what? You know, I'll give you like an example. Here's, here's a real life example for me. Okay? I invested in Raya and I found them because I was single. They were 60% DAUs to MAUs.
It's, it's human-curated online dating. Okay, so you have to apply. It's like the really high-end social club that has facilities.
Like Soho House?
Like Soho House.
Thanks. So it's like Soho House in a way. So it's curated. You have to have an Instagram account and they have committees in each market. And
just famous, hot, rich, cool people only.
That's the reputation. Okay.
Okay.
It has grown beyond that. What it really is, is I like to say that, that online dating feels like a 1 out of 10 experience and Raya feels like a 3 out of 10. Like, it's, it's still not great. I mean, I, I don't want to diss it because I, I'm an investor. I think we're one of the biggest, uh, equity investors, and I think Raya is amazing. But the difference from the 1 to the 3 is that I found with just using these online dating apps, there was the same odds of second date if I went on the date or didn't go on the date. So it was like, 0%. So I was like, why don't I just not go? Because I'm saving myself so much time and agony. And with Raya, it was not a waste of time. I had second dates and things, and it just wasn't curated enough. Okay, so the point is, the insight from that, that is human curation. So then the mashup is, can we apply that same thing And it's a lead business. You're, you're paying for lead generation. Well, could we apply that to anything else? Could we apply that to— I had an idea to create like a luxe BNB. Like, could we do human-curated listings? Or what about human-curated Uber? Like, could we have a high-end Uber where the, the black cars actually are black? They're not just colored black.
But that's actually, Sean, what you're talking about the other day with Jack Steiner.
Yeah, I don't know if you— Mark, have you ever heard of Jack's Dining Room? No. He's this, he's this Instagram kid who goes around the world. He's like, I'm at this place in Italy with the best gelato. And there's like a, you know, amazing visual hook for Instagram where there's like this crazy gelato thing that he's about to try. He tries it and he just, he's trying to find the best foods of different genres in the best places around the world. And when I met him, I told him, I said, look, you're trying to cut these brand deals. Like, why don't Like, you should create the new Yelp. Yeah. Because Yelp is this completely generic platform with everything. But if I trust you and I have trust as a service or curation as a service, human curation as a service, I would just, if I go to New York and I want the best ramen, I would trust Jack over Yelp.
Wait, so let's, let's freeze frame on that. Okay? And now I'm like Professor Pinkus. I did, I created a class at Stanford around this, 2 classes, and the students still didn't do that great. So it tells me. Either my framework's not perfect or I'm not the best teacher. But let's, let's freeze frame on that. Okay, so let's do proven, better, new on Yelp. So we say, okay, well, proven is let's not fuck with anything about the way that Yelp displays listings, rates listings. Let's, let's do a legal copy of Yelp. It's— we're not going to change it. We're going to freeze and isolate and assume that Yelp has taken the time over the years to, to make that what the world wants most. Okay, so we copy that pixel for pixel. I mean, we copy their onboarding of a new user, everything. We copy it. Then we say, do we have anything that's better? Meaning 10 out of 10 users would say, fuck yes, that's what I want, not Yelp. We probably don't have that. Okay. Better is actually really hard to get to. What we think is better is new. So we probably are just proven and then some new ideas. I think our new idea here is human curated, and probably can we human curate it first and get to, can we take some slice, some verdict, some blade in a city? So we take, you know, Florence barbershops or, you know, Florence, maybe better, is like coffee shops in Florence. We're going to go do that ourselves and then put it side by side and test in some way and see whether people like ours better or not. Like, there used to be tablet hotels, which was like a better version, cooler design hotels. Um, is that better or not? This is kind of the Brian Chesky way. Do it by hand first. If people don't like it better, you do not pass go. There's no reason to even try to build this in software. If they do, then we can start to use AI and say, is there a way to use AI agents to automate this? But that's a very, very secondary. The first is, can we, can we get to a clearly better product experience? Right. That's the hard part. That's the lightning in the bottle, not the AI. And then what I would tell Mark at 23 or 25 to do is just force yourself to do everything in AI right now. Force yourself to code this. I've tried vibe coding. I personally find Cowork plus Claude Code easier, or I get to more real things for myself. But force yourself to use it and see how far you can go. creating agents as employees and other things. And then, and then do some, like, hire some, in addition, hire some really cheap people who can just do some of this stuff by hand. You know, I would avoid founding a company around it. I would avoid hiring expensive engineers or people before I've connected all the dots.
Hey, you have this interesting kind of dichotomy about you, which is You seem like you're all about like going big and building these huge viral things that get big fast. But at the same time in your book, I think you said, I think one of the titles is like Fuck Big or something like that. Scale. Scale. And it's like that you're like, it doesn't matter how many people you're going to get, you have to nail the product. And that's sort of what you're talking about right now. But also, I know that you're big on goal setting. You have this— I forget what you call this. Do you call it— I have it written down here.
Book of Life.
Book of Life. Yeah. Which I want you— you have to explain that. That's pretty cool. But you have this like cool thing of like goal setting. So when you're ideating new companies, one of the things that kills ideas amongst successful entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs is asking like, well, how big can this really get? And like, and like, that's always the challenge. People always ask that question. And like you said earlier, and we all know this to be true, you never really know. And whatever things can get big oftentimes shock you. No one really knows entirely. So do you set goals early on and how do you deal with that thing in your head or with entrepreneurs you work with? Of like this constant like question of, well, how big can this get?
Yeah, yeah. It's so hard. And, and, and part of this book, A Life Practice, and part of this painful journey is killing our ego and, and our ego wanting— our, our ego is where the hope comes from, that we, we fall in love with the idea, we fall in love with the potential of it. And that works against us because we've gotta get to a very, very small, small use case that really works before we can do anything else. And I'm guilty of this too, and we tend to skip it and, and we get so excited about the bigger macro, the bigger idea, the bigger body of water, and we get so committed to this. And it's part of the danger of AI and vibe coding that We can build something in 3 months instead of a year or 2. And so we do, and we skip testing it, and we don't set real objectives for ourself, like absolute objectives and goals that we hold ourself accountable to. And the next thing you know, you're just kind of in this B+ relationship and, and you don't love it. And all these things are paradoxes. On the one hand, I start the book talking about this book of life practice that I've been doing since 1994, of really trying to have a conversation with yourself over time and writing in this book for one period of time every year about the same things so that you can go back and see, like, did you— what were your hopes and dreams, and have you done anything about them? And the real point that's come to me over all these years is not do you achieve these goals, but are you attuning to these goals and are you in alignment? Are you living in alignment with your goals? That I've found is more important to my wellbeing and happiness than achieving. So if my goal for 20 years has been to launch .earth and create my version of the metaverse, which is different than Zuck's version. Okay, cool. It's okay that I haven't done it, but have I gone for it or have I just talked about it? And that's, I say these ideas and things haunt us and over time weigh on us, 'cause it's like, oh, I've had this idea, but why haven't I ever done it? Or I've always wished I could do this. And the point of the Book of Life is let's stop time. Let's stop time right now. now and let's go to an absolute place and have a real honest conversation with ourselves and say, Sam, are you serious about this desire or are you just fucking around? And if you're serious about it, well, what's wrong with you? You're capable, you're a free human. And why in the last year have you— let's be honest, you haven't done shit about Mark, every year you say you want to learn guitar. You know you could do it, but you don't. So why don't we just stop putting that down as a goal because you're not serious about it? Let's— I'm not gonna like beat myself up, or I'm not gonna beat, you know, Mark 2025 up. And Mark 2025 did go for it and launch .earth, and the version I launched wasn't right, and I pulled the plug on it. I'm good with that. You know, like, it doesn't have to win for me to feel like I'm living a full life, I have to at least know I went for it. And that's, that's the point of the Book of Life.
When, when did you start doing it?
I started doing it in 1994, and I started the book off talking about this, that I had made a series of terrible career decisions, and I was being pushed out of this kind of fledgling venture capital firm, and There was nowhere to go to. Like, it wasn't like a next job. And so I'd kind of, kind of messed up my resume. I had nothing to lose when I started a year later, started my first company. But in 1994, I went to temple. I hadn't been to temple for the Jewish High Holidays, Jewish New Year's, for since I was a kid. Someone invited me. I was in D.C. And I sat there, didn't understand what anyone was saying or doing, and I just wrote in a notebook about how shitty my life was and all the hopes and dreams that I hadn't pursued. And the thing that I came back to I hated most about myself that represented just how little control I had over my life was that I smoked cigarettes. And I was— part of my book of life practice is what can we do this year that would make this a seminal year in our life? Like, What could the 3 of us do that you would remember this year for the rest of your life? And thank you, 'cause so many of our years, and I can tell you at age 60 that there are years I can't write anything down for.
Most years are like that. I feel
it's sad to not have something seminal, not one thing that's memorable about that year. And so I was like, okay, at least if I quit smoking, if I do a lifetime quit, I'll remember this year and I think I'll be happy later that I did it. So I'm partnering with my future self. It's important enough, but it's, it's easy and in my control. And for me, that was, that was my path to changing my life.
Hey, are you still doing like, you know, I, you, you said it's sad that you don't have like a seminal year or you don't have this thing. And like, you know, Sean and I both have young kids. You have young kids too. I don't know how old your oldest is, but you have at least one young kid. I'm in the phase now of my life where I feel like a little bit treading water, and that's okay. Like, I'm like, I don't think that's sad. Like, you know, a kid being born is seminal, but I didn't achieve anything. It's not like I did that. No, it counts, but I'm enjoying it. Are you still achieving great stuff and are you still a dog even after you've had kids?
Yes, but, but you also have to be realistic because now you've you've committed to be in service of raising these great humans. And that feels great too. And I think the best thing I've ever done in life is be a dad. And I think the greatest achievement in my life is my 5 kids. So every year that I've had a kid, that's been the seminal thing that year. And to your first question, Yes, you can still achieve. It's just different than some of your friends that made different decisions and you got to stop comparing. But you can. I built Zynga while raising, you know, Carmen, Georgia, Wyatt, my third kid.
Hey, what was your schedule then to accommodate them? Taking a company public while still trying to be— it sounds like you've mentioned being a father many times. It sounds like that's super important to you. How did you balance the schedule?
If you treat the things in your life like these are non-movable rocks, everything else becomes the river that moves around it. And it turns out that it's great modeling for your company to show that you are prioritizing your family. And like, if you ever walked into Zynga, you saw kids and dogs everywhere. And so people loved it. We worked really hard and we played hard and we familied hard. And we integrated our kids and our pets. You know, we brought them to work or we brought work to home. So the way I did is my friend and coach Bing Gordon, he said, the most important thing is that you're there for the first and last 15 minutes of their day, and they're always gonna remember that. And I made that like my religion. I was like, I'm never gonna miss—
Sacred, yeah.
The first or last 15 minutes of their day. I'm never gonna miss breakfast. breakfast with them, hopefully not dinner, but I'll always do bedtime, bath and bedtime. And, and I did.
It's so funny. So many of the things you say, uh, are echoed by other guests, but they came up with on their, in their own way with their own words. But it's just, you know, we'd have to be dummies at this point, either listening to this podcast or doing this podcast to not pick up on some of these. You know, Ryan Smith, who did Qualtrics and he owns The Jazz now. When I, we, I went out and visited him for the podcast and hung out at his house and stuff. And He goes, hey, let me just— he's like, I just got to do one thing. It's going to take me 3 minutes. And I was like, that's a weird number. I've never heard anyone say, like, you know, you're going to— he's not going to the bathroom. He's got a task to do that's going to take 3 minutes. What's— and he basically said, I have these 3 3-minute intervals, like 3-minute moments. I just make sure I'm fully present with my kids. Yeah. And it's basically right before I drop, you know, dropping them off at school. Like, you know, I'm not like half here, half in my mind somewhere else. Like, I'm fully there. 3 minutes right when they get home and 3 minutes right before bed. He goes, those are the most important 9 minutes of the day. He goes, you could be a busy guy, but you always got 9 minutes. And if you could be fully, fully present, um, he's like, it's not like he's only doing 9 minutes, but he's just make sure that's sacred. Yes.
Like my kids know, like my 15-year-olds know I will always answer when they call. Like I'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and I might be like, guys, I gotta take this. So they just know they can always reach dad. And there's like a priority that they get, you know, they feel that. And some of this stuff carries over, I think, to like management principles. Like, my policy at Zynga was I will always read and respond to your email, to everyone in the company. We got to, I don't know, 3,500, 4,000 employees globally, and it was a lot. But I said, I'm always gonna read and respond to your email. Mm-hmm. And, and now I kind of try to, I come close to pretty much do that on, on X, that anyone listening, if they go to my X @MarkPink, I'll, I'll pretty much reply to everybody. I, I probably don't hit it 100% of the time, but I'm probably like 95% of the time. And so there's, there's an availability that we can prioritize that's important in life. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm on that.
Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe 7 or 8 businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? Uh, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC. Can I ask you a question? You know, I, I'm a framework guy, so when you, whenever you have these frameworks, I love it. At the same time, some of my friends who are much better entrepreneurs than me don't use any of these frameworks. They just sort of operate on pure raw instinct and sort of following their nose. Did you start Zynga by doing all this stuff, mapping out your passions and then cross-referencing it with proven models or, you know, existing business models? Or did you just— now you think about it this way, or did you create your biggest hits doing this?
Like most people. This was all going on, but it wasn't written down. So I didn't just set out to show that I could make a poker app on the Facebook. Like, I was 41, you know, I think my friends, peers thought I had no dignity then. It was, this was not like impressive. I mean, I did it because I had, I, my ego had been so beaten down at Tribe that I had to do something small that worked. I just like, I need to do something that worked. But I wasn't going to just make, like, at the time, the obvious apps to make were these wall apps and these throw a drink, these pokes. I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to. That's what was working. Okay? Poker was not working. Games were not working on the Facebook ecosystem. I did it because I saw this ocean. I saw 2 oceans, you know, 2 bodies of water, social networking. and video games. So I was thinking, okay, if this works, it opens a little crack into mass market casual gaming. And I had this belief. One of the things I talk about in the book that I just fucking love, and I will encourage your listeners to consider, this is available to all of us all the time. Find a mature market, that's over, that's done, that's dead, that's been played out. Online dating, you know, eBay with listings, or analog businesses that are not attractive. They're almost not investible. Like VCs won't like them. They're, they're red oceans. They're not growth markets. Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it and it has a proven behavior in it. And that's video gaming. By the way, here's a gift. Here's an Easter egg. Take video gaming. In 2007, It was a $23 billion industry. It was barely growing. There was no— it wasn't a top 10 behavior on the consumer web. And it was stupid to go into. People know it was not fundable. Okay, here we are 19 years later. It's a $283 billion industry that's not fundable. Okay? It's not growing. It's mature. You'd have a really tough time getting a VC to fund it. Perfect place to try to do something innovative. Because if you can find a new dimension to this that sparks people, you, you don't have to prove that anyone's going to do it or wants it or is going to spend money on it. It's unlimited, right? And that was search when Google showed up. So I do love that. And I was thinking like that when I started Zynga because the year or two before I was trying to buy CNET. They were a public company. And I said, I need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming. I need to solve distribution. Consumer was not investible because of distribution. Today, consumer is not investible because of distribution. It's a perfect parallel. The new thing then was social networking. The new thing today is AI and agents. This is like a mirror, you know, in time. So we are living today in 2007. Go for it. Consumer's not investible. Do consumer.
You've made these bold claims multiple times, and I love that. You've like— you did it with investing. You said like, I believe this. You have a point of view, which I like. And I think people who have points of view where they're confident, they're either stupid or they're like well-read and educated, and that has shaped it. their point of view, and that's why they're confident. You seem in that category. Do you have any good, like, honeypots of information that you consume on a regular basis that aren't well known that you could fill us in on? Like people you follow on Twitter, people you follow on Substack, books, newspapers, anything that shapes how you think?
Yeah. Yeah, there's— they're really wide-ranging. and, and disparate. I am grav— I gravitate towards people that have, you know, non-mainstream, more contrarian views. I love everything Peter Thiel says. Like, it's like catnip for me. I just heard him talk and he's, he's saying that we've lived in this 50 years of stagnation, even though the economy, GDP, stock market's up so much. When we think about how people live and how our parents, the gap in how our parents live versus their parents, we didn't see that gap again from our parents to us. And now the next generation, like the, the, the kids of the '90s and the early 2000s, they don't look at their life and opportunity. You know, if, if our parents were in the 19— or my parents, you know, in the 1960s and '70s, their parents were in the 1930s and '40s. And you think about that difference and it's just, it was the middle class was formed and so much. And so Peter's kind of coming at this thing from the, the same problem, but the opposite side of like the Democratic Socialists and the far left progressive Democrats. And he's saying the only solution is growth. We've got to grow the economy and grow the opportunity base for the middle class and for people in order to save capitalism and democracy. And I thought, I hadn't thought about it in that way because I think of the last 50 years as unbelievable growth in the worldwide standards of living and in technology and, you know, stock markets and all these things. But I thought that was really brilliant insight that's got me thinking. But I'd say that who I follow, I love Pirate Wires, you know, Mike Solano. And there's, there's so many insights that Dave had early that were not mainstream, you know, that have changed my thinking.
Do you read a lot of books? What genre of books do you like?
I have a lot of trouble reading books. I do books on tape. I, I'll tell you that I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm walking or driving, but I, I get a lot, and I, I connect with a lot of friends around social political issues first, where we have, you know, non-mainstream views. I mean, like, I came out for Trump, you know, a few days before the election. That was not a mainstream or popular thing in my community to do. But I guess I, I pay a lot of attention to people that break through in any way in consumer. That's probably something that I pay more attention to. And I think it was announced like 2 weeks ago or something. I invest in this company FOMO. That's what I find. The resume for me in consumer is traction. I have no idea who or why. I mean, but when I cold mailed Shane at Polymarket on Twitter when they broke through, So, you know, I, I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer because it's so broken and it's so rare. So, you know, I think those are good leads. And I do— I get a lot of macro and stock investment ideas on X.
Have you outperformed the index over the last 10 years, you think?
Last year I definitely did, but But no, I can't say. I don't. I got to look at the last ten years. I don't know if I've outperformed the index. I probably I haven't this year.
We've had more fun and memories, and that's what counts.
You beat you probably beat the two. You beat two percent maybe.
I'm I'm way behind. I I think this year I'm up like four and a half percent. Not include I was it. I I got a big distribution of SpaceX. I don't include that in my returns because. That was a private investment, you know, so not including SpaceX, I think I'm up like 4 and change. And I think that the market's up probably like, I don't know, 3 times, 2 or 3 times that. So I'm not— you don't want to follow me this year.
One thing I really like about you is you're very— so you're insightful. That's great. The second thing is I like some of the kind of life wisdom, like the Book of Life practice and having an honest conversation with yourself. I think ultimately that's actually the most useful thing that any of us could go do. And then the other thing I like is that you are— you're not one of these people who makes everyone feel bad because you're so disciplined. I like that you're a little not disciplined and you do some stuff you shouldn't do, or you're doing things for other reasons than just like what's purely utilitarian and optimal. And, and I like that because a lot of times people come on this podcast and I'm like, I should be doing this, should be— we should all over ourselves.
You're like this. I don't like this strange amalgamation of like Investor, punk rock consumer, good dad. Like, there's— it's a very rare— you have this very weird—
That's why I was like so misunderstood by the media. You know, when, when Reid Hoffman said to me, Mark, what's your narrative? What, what's your 3 bullets? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't have one. He said, well, either you make that up or they're going to for you. And I think you said before we started that that when Zynga was big, you saw me as this villain. I think that I'm authentic and nuanced, and people will meet me in person or hear me talk, and they'll say, wow, I really connected with you. I really like you. And I'm like, thank you. But it feels like this backhanded compliment because they really mean like—
Thought I'd hate you.
Yeah. What I Googled about you was so bad. When I first started dating my partner, Hillary, I said, just do both of us a favor. Just don't Google me because you're not going to like anything you read?
Because I'm trying to understand why people hated you. I'm trying to, like, not hated you, but my villain. But, like, did you wear a lot of black? I don't know. Like, what, what, what did you feel like?
I don't even think I found my black t-shirt yet. I, no, I, it's, I, I was telling you this before that all I cared about was winning. All I cared about, and winning was in the eyes of, like, a teenage girl or a middle-aged woman, you know, who wanted to play one of our games and They weren't gonna read this. They're not reading the Wall Street Journal. I hired a PR firm to keep us outta the press. And when we were in the press, to dampen down the story. 'Cause I just, we had figured something out with user pay and I didn't wanna like go announce it to the world. And we were just trying to win as many sprints as we could before inviting a lot of competition and venture and every, we were buying a company every month. You know, a lot of the companies we bought, you know, no one else was bidding on them.
You bought the company that became FarmVille, right?
Well, not really. I, the real story is that I couldn't get anyone in Zynga to build FarmVille 'cause they thought it wasn't cool. They wanted to build like CoasterVille, Cafe World, and nobody in video gaming wanted to make a farm simulation game. That was not, there was nothing less cool.
Why did you want to make it?
I wasn't from video gaming. I wanted— I had a farm fantasy. I wanted to create Pinkus Valley Ranch and, you know, have our vegetables served at Chez Panisse, you know. So I had that fantasy, and I have 4 sisters, and I feel like I really connect with middle-aged women. I'm like, I don't want twitch, you know, fast-moving games. I want something I don't have to pay any attention to. I don't have to pay any attention to a farm, you know. I just, I wanted that game and I thought that would be the game that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play. Bing won't admit it, but he tried to convince me not to build it, even from a business standpoint. He was like, farm simulations never do well, Mark. And, and I, I finally bought this little failed Flash gaming company because they had 4 Flash engineers. And then I put them and like 4 or 5 other people in an alcove outside my office and checked in with them every day. And we built FarmVille together in 6 weeks.
Did it come out the gate hot? What was day 1, day 2?
You know, we were gonna buy this company that made Farm Town, and the guy was, to be honest, kind of a jerk. And he had the right to be a jerk. He was, he was winning. I think he doubled the price he wanted from like $40 million to $80 million. And he had the right, but we were building our own version, and we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game. So ours was not proven better new, it was proven better less. So our crops were better than his, our art and math were better, and we, we had more polish, but that was it. And we took out the stranger danger part. He had ways to meet other community members, and we just thought our users didn't want that. So we turned it on. I said on a Friday, I had this tough call with him. I said, you know, I don't think this is gonna work. We're, we're not gonna buy you. And, and our game, our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go. And so then on Sunday we turned on FarmVille and it was one of those lightning in a bottle things that for some reason so many things with Zynga just worked. And which isn't great to hear 'cause that, how do you repeat that? But We turned on FarmVille and I think it did like 171,000 installs the first day with no marketing. It was just viral. It just was viral. And then we were doing like a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing. And, you know, we passed FarmTown within like 3 or 4 weeks. They were at like 4 million DAUs.
What was the peak, the absolute peak of FarmVille? What was it doing?
I think it peaked at like 30 or 32 million DAUs. And at its peak, I think like 15 or 20% of people on Facebook were using it or had used it.
And what did it make in terms of revenue at that game?
FarmVille 2 came out with a lot more lessons and mechanics and made more revenues. You know, I know FarmVille 2 did over a billion in revenues. No, no one at that time thought a video game, you know, definitely not a casual video game, could do over a billion in revenues. And I remember trying to explain that to Fidelity. I'm like, that's gonna be a normal thing. Like 3 million a day, baby. That's gonna be the new benchmark for a good game. But you had a question I really liked that was like the beginning of this whole thread. So I hired this PR firm 'cause I said, I don't want to have my fur coat moment. I don't want to be on the COVID of Fortune. And the fur coat moment came from that movie American Gangster. Yeah. When he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur coat, he's on the front page of the New York Times and everything goes downhill from there. Like, I don't want to be on the front page of anything.
And the police are like, this young Black guy wearing a fur coat in the front row, this— he must be something. Yeah. What's his situation?
I was the equivalent of that. This 41-year-old retired guy that's not supposed to be doing anything important. That's when people were writing articles saying, can you back a founder under, you know, over 30 in consumer? And so I just didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual and consumer wasn't supposed to be working. And so our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors. I said, you, I'm gonna tell you a price. You decide if you wanna invest afterwards, I'll show you our financials. And if you don't like it, you can get out. But if, if they're not better than you think, which obviously made people even wanna invest more when you say that, you know.
Wait, what was your, what was your first 5 years revenue and profit?
Oh my gosh. So in year 3, you're doing $450 million in free cash flow. Is that what you just said?
That might have been year 4. Yeah. I mean, we started in mid-July of '07, so '07 wasn't like a full year. You know, we did like maybe $1.5 million in '07.
Of cash flow or revenue?
Revenue. Revenue. I mean, we were cash flowing. Maybe I did more than that revenue because by October, November, we were making like $200,000 a month in cash flow. We in '08, we did like $38 million in revenues and we probably made like, I don't know, $12 or $15 million in cash flow. But, but we were, we were putting all that money, we were putting it into big data and then data centers. And then we were raising more and more money 'cause I didn't want to ever slow down. But, but my point is, I let our story be told by our competitors and by press I didn't talk to. And I'm kind of nuanced, and Zynga was nuanced. And so it, I let the story go out that we were making all our money from advertising, but it was really user pay. And I was fine with that. I didn't want to, Say, no, you're wrong. And then Michael Arrington wrote for TechCrunch a whole series called Scamville. They said they must be making all their money from these really scammy ads they're showing. And they were no different than the ads on Google. But we also were not, all of our money was user pay. And I didn't wanna come out and say, no, you idiot, we're making money from our whales. Yeah. You know, and, and then Arrington, who I'm friends with, I'm an investor in his fund now, He used CityVille. He played CityVille. He spent $550 in the game. And then he said, I'm so sorry, I was wrong. I get it why adults would spend money in your games now. Because remember, there was no in-app purchase yet. And so all of the adults were like, there's no way adults are paying money for art. But we had, you know, a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in FarmVille. And this was her hobby. And maybe her husband was spending more than that, you know, to go fishing and skiing and hunting. This was her hobby. And so we reframed this as we are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has. And this is a small amount to spend on a hobby. Whereas, you know, for a video game, it was a lot.
Right.
And I did not do myself any favors. I did not go on press tours. I didn't talk to investors. I said, I'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees. I'm not gonna talk to anybody else ever. My kids, my players, my employees. And so my, everyone else told the story and it was, and, and we fired a lot of people and they were out telling our story. 'Cause I had a meritocracy, a force curve. We forced you to rate 10% of your team as a low performer every quarter. And if you were 2 quarters in a row, you're fired without question or exception.
Wow. That's— you also have— I have one other theory for that, which is you have the Nickelback problem. Like, if you ever heard of like a Veblen good, it's like a good where the demand goes up the more the price goes up. There's like the Nickelback problem is basically everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's like an easy— it's an easy thing to look down on. You look cool for looking down on it, but yet somehow they'll sell millions of records. You know, nobody knows them, but somehow they're selling millions and millions of records. Like, it was never cool to say, I love FarmVille. Uh, yeah, I play, I love to play FarmVille. And, but, but somehow everybody's playing, but nobody wanted to say it was cool. So you, you had a little bit of a problem there.
Well, the video game, video game industry hated me. I was like the Darth Vader, so it didn't help either.
Exactly.
They said, you're not real games. We're never gonna give you an award or invite you to GDC. I was like, that's cool. They, none of my users go to GDC.
There's this article. I'm looking at old articles of you. There's one from 2011 and it says, Old Mark Pincus Had a Farm. And it's a picture of you. You look like a motorcycle guy, like with your boots up, like overlooking the city. Like you're— you had— you had that swag that you talked about with Zuck. I mean, you had swag and you looked pretty cool and you kind of had like a, fuck you, I'm going to win, like smile on your face. And I think that's kind of cool. But also that will be— that will rub some people the wrong way.
Yeah. And there was a great tweet that I love by this guy yesterday. He, he has some company called like Tiny Co or something.
Yeah. Andrew Wilkinson. That's our, that's our good friend.
I, I loved his tweet and he referenced The Courage to Be Disliked and he said, he said it was a huge turning point for him when he stopped trying to be liked and he stopped trying to be like Warren Buffett and worry about his reputation, basically his resume. I'm like, yes, that's it. That's my career, and that's what I advise people. I'm like, burn your resume. Don't look for respect from your peers. I say, if you're truly ambitious, do not look for respect from the people around you, 'cause you will not get it if you're doing things differently than them, 'cause they don't like that. I mean, you're supposed to like stick to this one mold, and if you do something different, just like you were saying, Sam, and it works, It makes them question themselves. So they don't— they kind of don't want to see you succeed. Do it. It's like, it's like, but I paid all these dues and I don't want you to make it without paying the same dues because I'm in a job I hate. You're supposed to be in a job you hate, or else I didn't have to do this.
A lot of people made fun of Marc Andreessen because he had that thing where he says like, no one successful is introspective, which I thought was— I disagree with him. I think that's kind of silly. That was a very introspective thing of him to say. But you are, you are an example of someone who I think you live life fairly intentional and fairly introspective and trying to like live like a full good life while also you have this like swag about you, but also bull in the china shop, like this like really cool dichotomy that I think is like very admirable and really exciting.
Yeah, you got like the California woo-woo and then Zynga and your stuff is so, was so metrics driven. You were like the most metrics driven company. of anyone. If I ever wanted to hire somebody who I knew would be like super metrics-driven on the product side, Zynga was the, the perfect pool to go hire from because you guys had like a Navy SEAL training for, for PMs. It was unbelievable.
We still do it, I'm happy to say. I do want to say it was just what you're saying, Sam, that it felt a little like funny and bad to come out with my book like pretty much the same week that Andreessen and the All-In guys, they all started saying How it's a waste of time to be introspective, and
hey, shout out your book, man. Can you show it? Show your show your book and shout it out.
Oh, okay. I I do have one copy. Life at the speed of life at the speed of play. There was something on the all in where they're talking about how I forget the word they they said contemplation is is a total rumination waste of time.
This is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things. That's just a really stupid way.
Or it's right for them. I mean, it's I don't think there is.
But that's not what they do. I just saw a thing about. Chamath say, talk, be retroactive looking at his time doing SPACs?
Oh yes, yes. Well, Chamath is, is a lot of things, but he has no problem whatsoever contradicting himself. I mean, I heard them all talk about how AI was going to put everyone out of work, and now they're proudly saying, like, I think just yesterday I saw something from them saying, that's bullshit. Look, the facts don't support it. AI is not putting anyone out of work. I'm like, but you guys were the ones saying it. And I kind of love that they don't care. They'll just contradict themselves, you know, a few months later, and they don't— they're not self-referential. So in that sense, there's a freedom to it. I'm not tied to what I said 3 months ago. I'm, I'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view. And
unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I, I do think there's A mix of all of it. I think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is useful tool used in the right way. And sometimes you should just fucking go do stuff.
All right, well, we should leave it at that.
You're awesome, man. You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it.
I really like talking to you guys.
We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back. All
right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast, because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q&A sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.