Zynga

“I had passed on investing in Twitter and I passed on investing in Zingo, which are two of my very good friends.”

“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”

“In any one-thirty-day period, 56% of poker players would visit our website.”

“And so I really had committed to Zynga, passed a month later based on the price that was set. A big mistake.”

“I started off by saying to investors, let me tell you the top 10 reasons you're not going to want to back us. And if you still want to talk after that, we will, but then we won't waste time. And 95% of investors thanked me and said, I don't want to meet.”

“I refused to share anything about our financials until kind of very, very late in the process, and I just said, you'll have surprise and delight at our financials, but I don't want you to invest because of them.”

“The company bought our headquarters, and Bing has been a big proponent of that, and every time that we were making the purchase, the economics were not obvious.”

“One of the ingredients that I think was really key to making Zynga successful in the early days was alignment. And we had such powerful alignment between the investors, first the CEO and founder vision, and not just vision for the product or company, but the v…”

“Fred Wilson is kind of the crown prince of New York venture capital and a great blogger. He was extremely helpful in the early days of Zynga, even though he was mostly dialed in. He's just such a crisp, sharp thinker.”

“Sitting on the sidelines, armchair quarterbacking, as we say in America, and I was like, I want to go play the game, and so the only way to do it here is to just go to a startup, and so I went to a small gaming company called Playdom, and we were second to Zyn…”

“I think I told Mark Pincus no to invest in Zynga at, like, 50 K out of one million pre.”

“So we built a board and it was actually hundreds and hundreds of hours of engineering time. And we had launched this thing and five percent of DAU used it.”

“The worst habit I would say is we burnt out so many fucking channels. And what I mean by that is Facebook in the early days opened up notifications for the first time for developers. So you could, as a developer, just send literally hundreds of push notificati…”

“That would have been hours of engineering work would have saved us hundreds of hours of engineering time. We could have deployed on, on something else.”

“For us, it was Words with Friends, which was the product I've worked at for about four years, my term in Singa, and our users were not me, mostly not me. They were 50 to 60 year old women in the Midwest or somewhere in America, and they were looking to use thi…”

“So when I was at Zynga, we did them weekly because it was just a weekly product cadence. I mean, gaming is Gaming is brutal, right? It is a daily, weekly business. And you only have so much of a shelf life. So for gaming, that was the right cadence. For Reddit…”

“The idea that took us out of the mess was actually from an individual contributor. It was not for me. It was not for product manager. It was from an engineer and a designer who came up with it and brainstormed meeting.”

“Zynga at that time was basically this, School for product management. And of course, some bad habits as well, which took a while to shake off.”

“I read a statistic somewhere that there was more tractors being sold in a day on Farmville than anywhere else in the world combined.”

“And that element of understanding the psychology behind that actually made me interview at Zynga, and this was in 2000 10, and back then I was told the culture at Zynga was not very good. I had classmates from HBS who were working there, so I ended up not taki…”