Evidence receipt / commitment
Published · transcript-backedMark Pincus: commitment
14 Jun 2026 Lenny's Podcast The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)
“And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Mark Pincus
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- commitment
- Recorded
- 14 Jun 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…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. So the point of Proven, Better, New is to say, "Let's take all the proven off the table." If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras, fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on, the icon. Maybe just the way a camera works. Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally. And with hopefully some taste we can get into great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations and better is something that 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, "Fuck yeah." 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new. What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new and so better could be it's now free, there's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, is better and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polished and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, Words With Friends, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must have been something better and novel about it, but it had such a polish for mobile was the better. And the new, what's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? In the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just ... It was attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that which you'd think, "Of course I want ..." You might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes, and we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do Proven, Better, New right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. I like to think if you do Proven, Better, New right, it's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark 2003 and '4 and say, "Dude, you don't even realize how right you are. One of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once," and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. , you don't even realize how right you are. One of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once," and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. I'm not going to tell you which, I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you, "There's something, there's another answer in this that you could pursue that'd be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your Tribes idea, that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company industry listings." So there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working, our D30 retention was terrible. We were a sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. If you're doing Proven, Better New, you're also looking around you for what are you finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test? And I would have massively changed my odds of success.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.