Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)
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If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. Your instincts are right, 95% of the time your ideas are wrong, 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea. How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following? If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying. It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur, because you wanted to go be an innovator. But you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville. You're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers. Define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer. Building a consumer social app, very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. We have beyond a latent demand for social, it's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. Today, we're all hanging out on our cloud, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy. Today, my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history. Over a dozen, both within Zynga and before Zynga. In over the past five years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks, and it is so good, and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that today the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this, and after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas. Why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you. Why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also what he's learned about raising kids, he's got five, and so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to lennies newsletter subscribers with fat and bringing you Mark Pincus. Mark, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. I've been a big listener and I'm excited to finally be on. I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book that's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play.
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