Episode

The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)

Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, explains his "proven, better, new" product framework, developed at Zynga, for testing ideas against instincts that are usually right even when the resulting ideas are usually wrong. He discusses why less ambition often produces bigger hits, "killing hope before hope kills you," using AI to fail fast and cheaply, retention as Zynga's core metric, and his parenting philosophy of teaching critical thinking over conventional achievement.