korrents

korrents · The Knowledge Project

FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products

Mark Pincus · 1h 09m · youtube.com ↗

16 korrents from this recording

1h
Mark Pincus did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

  1. 0:00:21 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Great consumer products work because they answer a human instinct or need that was already being felt but was unexpressed and unmet.

    Their wordsI think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They they speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling and it's been unexpressed or unmet. When we first experience that, there's something magical to it that it could be an unlock. And lots of times it's it's where we're most cynical that we're ready for the most magic.
    Interesting
  2. 12 min later

  3. 0:12:32 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A person should run their own life strategically, choosing each year by what their future self would thank them for doing.

    Their wordsI think that a practice like the book of life, what it's done for me and I think it could do for a lot of people is just be strategic about your life. Like be thoughtful about like I like say what would your future self thank you for doing this year. We can be strategic, hold ourselves accountable and and force ourselves to make some tougher decisions.
    Interesting
  4. 2 min later

  5. 0:14:17 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Founders who fail early tend to attach themselves to that failure and start being defined by it, and the line between success and failure on a first company is very fine.

    Their wordsI I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it
    Interesting
  6. 1 min later

  7. 0:15:07 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A founder has to run on what if everything goes right; starting from what if everything goes wrong is playing defense and losing before the start.

    Their wordsAnd I don't know how you're going to get yourself there, but you've got to be in this place that you're thinking, you're also thinking, "What if everything goes right? What does right look like? How am I ready for everything going right?" If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defense and you've lost before you're even out of the gates.
    Interesting
  8. 11 min later

  9. 0:25:48 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Users vote with their clicks, and roughly half of them are lost at every click a product asks for.

    Their wordsThey vote with their clicks. You lose at least half your users every click. Every time you say click here, half people don't click. And you lose 80% when you say download this. At least that's probably 90 or more. 90% or more in the app store.
    Interesting
  10. 4 min later

  11. 0:29:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Every founder falls into a structureless period after a company ends, and it is a dark place that seems to offer freedom before it starts to feel permanent.

    Their wordsThe way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.
    Interesting
  12. 5 min later

  13. 0:35:16 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    The markets worth entering are the ones everybody treats as mature and finished, because they usually have not started yet.

    Their wordsWell, I love these markets and they're all around us where we think they're mature and over and they haven't even started yet. And that was search before Google. You know, Google was the 56th search engine. It was a mature, slow growth business. Google made us reimagine what search could be in our lives and obviously turned it into a trillion dollar company value.
    Interesting
  14. 3 min later

  15. 0:38:32 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A product monetised through what users pay for their own engagement beats one monetised by advertising, because ads work by sending the user away.

    Their wordsWe made this something useful for adults and we had this user pay model that could monetize your engagement instead of trying to show you an ad and getting you to leave the game to go somewhere else. It actually the more engaged you were, the more likely you were to, you know, spend money.
    Interesting
  16. 2 min later

  17. 0:40:44 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A founder who does not know their own goal dies by a thousand compromises and ends up running a company they do not want to work at.

    Their wordsknow your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. Because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's company we don't want to work at.
    Interesting
  18. 15 min later

  19. 0:55:17 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A founder should take half the valuation if it buys all of the control, because the right to be wrong in your own way is what founding was for.

    Their wordsyou've gone through so much to be here. You owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct. You owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself. It's your right to be wrong. You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control. And it means you have the right to do it your way.
    Interesting
  20. 4 min later

  21. 0:58:52 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A company is not a democracy: every voice should be heard and then one person decides, and the decision should not be the popular one.

    Their wordsIt's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.
    Interesting
  22. 3 min later

  23. 1:01:48 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A company owes its builders a moral contract: if they take the hill, leadership must work just as hard to unlock the value of what they built.

    Their wordsIn the same way we owe our you we have a responsibility to our users we have a responsibility to our engineers or our builders people who are in the factory building and so I said there there should be a moral contract if you're going to take that hill I'm going to show you that I am going to work just as hard to unlock value out of the work you did
    Interesting
  24. 1 min later

  25. 1:02:39 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Keeping ineffective people is a debt owed to the effective ones, and promoting anyone whose merit is not obvious to everybody else erodes the culture.

    Their wordsI think that you owe it to in that moral contract to your good employees to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.
    Interesting
  26. 1 min later

  27. 1:03:45 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    One-on-one meetings create politics and waste a chief executive's time, and complaints about colleagues should be redirected to the colleague instead.

    Their wordsSo I I don't do one-on- ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one ones.
    Interesting
  28. 2 min later

  29. 1:05:43 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Leaders are trained fastest by an apprentice who shadows every meeting, which is an unscalable way of scaling an organisation.

    Their wordsit's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.
    Interesting
  30. 2 min later

  31. 1:08:00 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Anything on the internet that can be free will be free and anything that can have less friction will, which is why voice will replace much of typing and reading.

    Their wordsAnything that can be free on the internet will be free. Anything that can be less clicks, less friction will be less friction. I think voice is one of those places.
    Interesting