Mark Pincus: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. There's one question we got to back up and really explore, which is AI a new platform? And I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology. We have a new kind of portal to that in GPT or whatever chat we use, AI chat, but it's not in my mind a platform. A platform in the traditional sense of it was a hardware platform. Well, it's definitely not a hardware platform at the consumer side yet. People are trying to explore that, but it is not yet. And then it became at least an interface platform, whether it was a Windows interface or a browser interface or a social network that opened up. And in the case of mobile, it was both hardware and an interface. We're not at that point yet. I believe we will get there. I don't know how I have ideas, but we're not there yet. And it's important to acknowledge that and say we're still in the mobile and web era. We still use a browser. And even though we're in this chat app, it is not a platform for other apps and experiences and developers. It could be. I hope it becomes one, but it's not yet. And we're kind of like halfway to a platform. We are in a point of discovery. New technologies that break through at the consumer level unlock discovery. That's really important. Discovery means when we first got our phones, we were installing new apps all the time. Now we don't ever install new apps. The average app installs per user per month is zero. So it's really important to think about that, that not only are we not in discovery, but even when we are, it doesn't stick. There was something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. So your odds are bad. Okay. So it's not an ideal moment to be ... You can't launch consumer right now with high confidence. And that's just something that we have to acknowledge and it makes consumer and consumer categories like social and games almost not investible. They're still getting investment, but it's very hard. It's much easier to be prosumer or enterprise now, but for good reason because we're seeing those companies scale revenue ARRs very quickly. So I do think it's a great time to be working on consumer ideas. And you asked about distribution. Distribution is just so crucial and core to any consumer, any business idea, but any consumer idea, and it can't be an afterthought. It's not, I'm going to build the best mousetrap and they're going to come. Distribution has to be part of your product and part of baked into the strategy deeply and proven from the beginning. And if you're just building this product and hoping they will come, hoping it'll spread virally or word of mouth, that's hope strategy, not a belief strategy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't keep experimenting and now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because it'll be a hundred times more noise. rimenting and now is a great time to experiment. And in fact, it'll be a hundred times more expensive to try to get the same things in the market in a year because it'll be a hundred times more noise. And once there is distribution, there'll be a flood of competition. But when distribution is this broken, it is even more core to your product and your strategy. And I think we're seeing many more successful companies that find a prosumer approach, they go after their power users, their whales, the people who care enough to find it, care enough to spend money on it upfront to sustain a business long before we can get out to consumer. There is a great idea that Garry Tan had that I'll repeat here because I loved it so much this week, that if we get in the mindset of basically intelligence on tap, free tokens and if we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, that will basically be free in a year or two, that the token supply is going to go up so much. Our demand will too, but if today we start building, re-imagining consumer services based on free tokens, I think that's such an interesting innovation zone and it could sound like a dot-com business plan when I remember ordering pig ears from my dog, Zynga, and wanting to send thank you notes to the VCs because they were cheaper than at Petco. That's not a good business plan. So giving away tokens at a loss isn't a good business plan, but it might be in a phenomenal business because what the dotcom thing had wrong was the price of pig ears wasn't going to come down or delivery wasn't going to come down, but the price of tokens will. And so I think that's another kind of Easter egg of an insight that I'm intrigued by and I think founders are going to do something really interesting with it because games don't work, freemium games and freemium apps that have to go and hit the AI that even if you wanted to spend on it, you're hitting token limits. So getting around that today might unlock really interesting innovation. And also just another Easter egg thought on the social cocktail party. I love the idea of the agent being in the middle on brokering our social relationships and getting back to that lead gen, dating, jobs, general listings. But I love the idea that the agent has our context and knows my context and your context and we have this membrane, I call it the social membrane, this intelligent membrane of trust and it gets smarter and smarter at knowing when to change dynamically change that trust or change that attention level that it's going to take from us like a great chief of staff and it could share less information with both of us than it knows. It could be you're in Marin and I'm like, "Lenny, let's hang out." You're like, "Mark, I'd love that." So okay, let's have our social secretaries work on that. There's going to be an asymmetry in your interest and my interest in any given weekend and hanging out and how do we broker that without hurting one of our feelings or going into ... There's some really interesting spaces that the AI and the agent can broker between us in ways that start to give us both productivity.…

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