Mark Pincus
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends, and before that of Freeloader, Support.com and Tribe.net.
Mark Pincus did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordswe have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 1st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I like to say we we don't we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 2nd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 3rd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsin the Peter Teal sense it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product you you became a founder an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 4th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsif you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you and if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 5th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsBut if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 6th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordswe feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day. And we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're like angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 7th of 22 in this recording
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startupshumilityproduct management
Their wordsif if we're if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough humble enough place
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 8th of 22 in this recording
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startupsproduct managementventure capital
Their wordsit almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 9th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsthere's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 10th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsMinimum viable. that the viable is the the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right?
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 11th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsthe way we should be using AI is as a testing machine, a failure machine, and a way to vibe code, cloud code, but but build build the, you know, the the lowest possible cycled version of your product that you can get signal back on.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 12th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically this is true. They have the highest day 365 retention.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 13th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real, there's, right, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right?
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 14th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social we are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and and Tik Tok, but I believe it's it's lost the adrenaline.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 15th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. And you're you're full of hope.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 16th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsthere there's a one question we got to back up and really explore which is is AI a new platform and I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 17th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsDistribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply and and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, you know, that's hope strategy, you know, not a belief strategy.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 18th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I believe the best product CEOs are in the minutia of the details. you know, all the stories about Steve Jobs. I was so impressed when I heard that he insisted on picking out the carpeting in the conference rooms, you know, and and I tried to have that same mentality of micromanaging the really small pixel level details that matter.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 19th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsif if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 20th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsmy kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 21st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsit's to build an internet treasure which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world.
↗The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)youtube.com 22nd of 22 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 1st of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 2nd of 16 in this recording
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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
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 3rd of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 4th of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 5th of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 6th of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 7th of 16 in this recording
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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.
↗FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Productsyoutube.com 8th of 16 in this recording