Mark Pincus: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. As you're talking, I'm just thinking what are all the best products and are they all just kind of one word ... Are they copies and evolutions of existing products or how many are just completely brand new? And I'm looking around like the iPhone, there's phones before and they kind of took the elements of what was great, made them awesome. My Owala, I don't know, water bottle, there was water bottles that worked and then they added things to make it better. Chrome, I don't know. I'm just looking around. It's so interesting how once you start to think about it through this lens, most products are better versions of things that existed before. A. Nd then I'm thinking about as a product team, what do you often do? You go, look at the competitors, look at all their flows, here's what they're doing, here's what's working, look at all these great ideas, and then you build on that. So I think it's easy to get turned off to this idea of the word copy, but as you think about it, this is mostly how products end up getting built anyway. Well, there's so much on this that we could literally spend the whole podcast on it, which I'd be fine with too, or do a whole episode just on this because so much comes up for me. On the one hand, I think about Nikita, who I think you've had on. And I love his story on TBH. It's a perfect example of he found something proven in someone else's product. That was my first company, Freeloader. What I found was in the Netscape browser and in the Internet Explorer browser, they had buried in there a feature of offline browsing. And my entire product was offline browsing. But they had it as this buried power user feature and I saw the genius in that for that moment because bandwidth was so slow that I was like, "Oh, we can make an entire product just around that one feature. " Nikita saw his perfect product buried inside an Arabic only version of his product and he said, "Oh my God, they nailed it." So I think when we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product, but they have the wrong idea around it, that's gold. And then to your question of is every product derivative? Is every product from Proven, Better, New? My answer is no. And I talked about this a little bit in the book and in my course, but the question is at the outset for all of us, which path do you want to be on? And I argue that if you go down this path of just innovate, start with a blank whiteboard, don't look at any other products, that is kind of Rovio getting to Angry Birds. They made 45 games. Every single game was totally different, not, as far as I could tell, learning from the previous failures or the market and their 45th shot on goal was Angry Birds and it was a hit and it was innovative. But the odds, that's wildcat drilling and do you want to have those odds? Or do you want to do what OMGPOP did, which is very similar story but opposite path, which was OMGPOP created the hit game Draw Something and Zynga bought them. They were the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 days in 2012. But OMGPOP was on their last dollar. They had tried something totally innovative. No one ever seen or tried it before, it failed completely. And now they were ruthlessly, desperately in need of a hit and now they did Proven, Better, New perfectly. They said, "We're going to take this proven game and do everything about it as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile." And they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words With Friends and they made a massive hit. Hell yeah. I love this idea of moral arbitrage, that's such a ... Thinking about this-…

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