Mark Pincus: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. So it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work. And we are taught in school, copying is cheating. So there's a lot of good reasons why we've built this kind of moral resistance to copying. But that also makes that opportunity in some ways more available for people who have less ego involved. And I like to say, and I said this to my product makers at Zynga, if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. And if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers, you're trying to win the hearts and minds of nurses in Indiana, like for Farmville, you're going to define innovation differently and you're not going to worry about whether ... You're going to take the best ideas wherever you can find them if they are in service of giving her an experience that she loves more. So if all you did was copy, there's no reason for her to choose your product, right? But if you took something that she loves and you make it one inch better, she might love that more than if you showed her something she's never seen before and didn't wake up knowing that she wanted. And I think that the art of this is you do it in a way that she doesn't even realize it. Because I think consumer taste also resists just a copy. I think that if movies, TV shows, books, if they feel too derivative and they're not adding something important and new, then it could go against our consumer taste. But the best product makers, and I love referencing someone like Craig Newmark and Craigslist, who took two years to add photos to Craigslist listings. And he lived in my neighborhood and he was friends with my dog, Zynga, more than he was friends with me. He was a little awkward socially and he connected more with the dog and I tried to be friends with him through the dog. So he would sit and talk to me and he was working on ... I was like, "What are you working on?" He said, "I've been working for two years on adding photos to listings." I'm like, "What do you mean two years?" He's like, "Well, I really want to make sure that people like it and that the photos come up in the right ways." I don't know. I honestly don't even understand what he did for two years. But if you're driving across San Francisco to buy someone's couch, why isn't that better? In his mind, it was new. And I'm like, "That's a world-class product maker because what he gets is that his ..." We feel this sense of ownership of products that we rely on every day and we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition and we don't want to think about these things. ry day and we're angry when they change. Even if they change for the better, we're angry because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition and we don't want to think about these things. And what if by adding photos to his listings, he moved where the text was and what if you rifle through listings and now the text is below the fold? And a junior product maker might make the whole thing a picture and not realize that what people liked most was being able to see the text real quick and they were trying to compare prices on the couch they already knew that ... I don't know. 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.…

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