Mark Pincus

@mark-pincus · 38 positions · On ppll ↗

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.

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What Mark Pincus says most about

startups 11

Distribution has to be part of the product and proven from the beginning; building and hoping people come is a hope strategy, not a belief strategy.
The taboo against copying is a moral one, which is exactly what makes copying an arbitrage available to founders with less ego invested.

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management 6

The number one job of a CEO is to be right — being in the right body of water matters more than having the right boat.
The best product CEOs stay in the minutiae: micromanaging pixel-level details is not a failure of leadership but the job itself.

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product management 5

AI should be used as a failure machine that tests many ideas cheaply, not as a way to build one idea faster.
The genuinely new idea in a product will probably fail; its job is to give people a reason to try the product at all.

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ambition 3

The greatest thing a product maker can build is an internet treasure — a service people cannot remember life before or imagine life without.
Ambition should be measured in the eyes of your customer rather than your peers, which means being willing to take the best ideas wherever you find them.

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venture capital 2

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.
A first-time founder has an advantage over a repeat winner, because past success makes it too easy to raise money and hire against a big vision before there is product-market fit.

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