Mark Pincus: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. So there's so many fun threads that kind of connect to all this. And you have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. One is be less ambitious. Talk about why that's a really good lens to actually build more ambitious products. I'm in the middle of relearning that lesson myself right now. And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this and one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it might ... Usually the starting point for these products is embarrassingly small. So many of these massive hit products or franchises started with such humble- Started with such humble non-ambitious places and The Facebook was just an app to check out girls and guys at Harvard. And the irony for me is I've found that my career has gone in these waves and maybe some of your other founders have had this experience too, that I've started in a very humble place of, "I just want to get to anything, any product market fit", had bigger success than I imagined I would have in my first two companies, Freeloader and Support.com. They both started with very small, humble premise. And then afterwards felt like now I can do anything. And I know Elon is the exception to the rule. Part of it is I think he can raise magical unlimited amounts of capital, which helps, but then he does not start in humble places at all. But for the rest of us mortals, I'd say that we tend to after success feel the need to do something bigger the next time. That's human instinct and we want to be more ambitious. And so when I got to Tribe and I saw social networking and LinkedIn was just starting and I saw how big the opportunity was, I tried to do everything with Tribe. It was really ambitious and I didn't pick one use case. And there was multiple inside Tribe that worked. The tribes, the idea of these urban tribes worked. People loved it, but it was too ambitious and so we failed. And then I was so humbled and I was in this abyss we can talk about for so long and I was so just desperate to get out of that abyss that by the time I got to Zynga, I did something that was embarrassingly small. I mean, to be 41, multi-time successful founder that could go do something important in the world and what did I do? I made a Facebook app like a poker game, not even a Facebook app, I mean a poker game. It was people thought I had no dignity. I mean people were like, "Mark, there's so much you could do in the world." But I'd say my ambition came down to a 1000 ft altitude, not a 100,000 ft. And that was the key to that being successful. And I see this with, it's just so hard. I see it with so many product founders and it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn't care about your resume. That's the good news for everyone watching. Everyone has the same chance and in a lot of ways if you're in a more humble place, you have a better opportunity. So the paradox is the more ambitious you are that the more humble you should be in the smaller place you should be willing to start.…

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