Mark Pincus: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed called Proven, Better, New. And the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea, it's such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas. Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book, we called it Proven, Better, New. But then I was like, "Oh, that's too dry a name." And I love this concept of life at the speed of play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt of the book. But Proven, Better, New is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts 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, your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of Proven, Better, New takes that philosophy and says, "Okay, what do we do with that?" Okay, let's isolate your innovation zone, let's isolate that thing you have in your gut, and let's just test many, many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason." I mean, at Zynga, we'd see new game launches. Sid Meiers, the godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer, he came out with, I think, a social Civilization on Facebook and we thought, "Oh, God, here comes the ultimate game designer." And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said it's dead on arrival because his FTUE, his first time user experience was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design. Even Sid Meiers tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today.…

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