The Ledger, every show

“In four years, I can't think of how many more I could have tried, and that lesson was burned into me, and I think so much of success today is starting with a winning instinct, but then testing more good ideas, In a week than the rest of the industry does.”

“I would argue it is not yet a platform at a consumer level.”

“And I think, and also think just once the unlock happens for consumer agentic AI, what's that gonna be? That's the metaverse, right? When we have Avatars that are roaming the world while we're not there and networking and finding us dates and jobs and new ways…”

“The thing I got wrong with Tribe was trust. So, so first of all, the thing that I built a social network before Facebook and I managed to fail, and I just got the trust component wrong, that for people to put themselves on the web, they first had to feel this …”

“I don't think Reed or I Ever imagined how, I know none of us ever imagined how big this, Peter Thiel, all of us, we all sold our stock in Facebook, so we voted with our shares, you know, none of us could have ever described how big this all got.”

“I'm surprised that the product hasn't evolved faster because What I want is to just have my AI listening in on this conversation now with us and just have it be a smart other person at the table.”

“There's a funny thing about, I call it true signal, but, or heat, you know, about the right product, the lightning in the bottle moment. When you have it, you know it. And when you don't know. What I mean is, you don't know it's not. You know positively when y…”

“Great product makers, you know, they're collecting winnings, not making bets. And so, you know, long before you launch that it's a hit or that this, that your users are going to love this. You don't look to see if they like it.”

“I have a book coauthor and a publisher and a chief of staff, and they all kept coming back to Mark. Don't go there. Elon's controversial, and you shouldn't just call him Elon.”

“There is just this weird inversion of service that, that so often I think lots of times the service we want is, we just, is to not, not have to, like, not have to be, I hate to say it, but not have to be nice to a human, like not have to sit there and smile an…”

“B plus is the enemy of an A. B plus often, if we stick with the B plus, is taking up space. It's distracting us from unlocking the A, and to fail or to call the ball that that idea isn't that good, it in itself is really powerful”

“I believe last year there was 40,000, 40,000 games launched in the App Store, and zero percent of them sustained a top 25 position.”

“I put up all the original money for Napster because Sean Parker worked for me as an intern when he was 16.”

“This belief that the LLMs are gonna eat up every possible business, I just, I don't think is true. It's, I mean, cursor flies in the face of that.”

“Sid Meyers, like, the, you know, godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer, he came out with, I think, a social civilization on Facebook, and we thought, oh god, here comes, like, the ultimate game designer, and 10 minutes after the game c…”

“Slack was a great example because I think Slack might've just been proven and better and no new. And that's even better.”

“I err on the side of transparency and honesty and, you know, being authentic to a fault. And I burn out people in that process. And I did it Zynga and I have since because It, you know, people will say the negative critique I'm working with me is, oh, working …”

“I think AI is being used more to build one idea in three months than a hundred ideas, you know, in a day.”

“I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it”

“I, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw That when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a -35.”

“There's a one question we got to back up and really explore, which is, 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 i…”

“You know, there was something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero, you know, became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50.”

“They're differentiating themselves right now on coding and there's real value and they're, that's an amazing business, but they're not differentiating themselves very much at the consumer level.”

“With us, you know, we saw it on Facebook, you know, they, the two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music. Cause it was really painful with IP rights and games because they didn't want to like hire artists. But everything else they did abso…”

“But I've found that if a product speaks to you, or at least, this is my experience, if this product speaks to me, and it makes it on the front of my iPhone, I think it has a billion dollar stick value.”

“When you have heat around the product, everything says heat, and you just know it. It's part of what I call true signal, right? It's, when you have true signal, we all know it. You don't need anyone to tell you, and when you don't have true signal, you need lo…”

“And eventually, Fred Wilson Fun to me, but terrible terms, like, fifteen million pre, and, but I love Fred, and he negotiated a hard deal, because he could, but, and the funniest thing is, I never used the dollar I raised the whole time at Zynga.”

“The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience, and not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented, and many companies did die in it. Most. There's only two companies that…”

“They gave it on Friday, and they said, you have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're gonna take down your apps, which was their right and that could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because, you know, at this…”

“But I do think that voice will be the biggest thing that'll feel obvious, that we wasted so much time typing and texting and reading, and I think we're going to turn on our ears and our voices a lot more.”

“70% of the labor spend is for outside contractors, so I'm curious how far they can push that, because they might not have to go through all the legal labor side to cut. I think it's 1.2 trillion total spent on labor, and so, 70% of that, eight hundred billion …”

“We're, we have a new way of doing politics after this election, that there's only authentic, like, only long form, and you, you're gonna have, you're, even the Democrats aren't gonna be able to field a candidate that isn't the full color”

“I had some conversations. I was definitely intrigued and interested, and I was ready to take, like, the shittiest, like, least prestigious, and kind of potentially some, like, pretty polarizing position for at least six months move my family to D.C.,”

“My take is dating apps are a one out of 10 experience, and Rai is a three out of 10, so I say it sucks three times less, and it's because there's a human curation level”

“And I've been working with these AI hackers on an app, not promoting here, it's not even available, called Based or Biased, and They used him to tune the app, the model for high bias, low base, because he flips, he's, he deleted his pro-Trump, I mean, his anti…”

“Reid and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them, or even Friendster, that they would have blocked the whole industry, so we bought them. We paid 750 K, which was a lot then, and we were accused of being patent trolls, a…”

“Everyone wants a job at Meta or Google, and that's the get rich quick place, and it's, I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore, and they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management. So those jobs have …”

“Sometimes you can get a focus group of one that's more powerful than the rest of your data, and that one was probably it.”

“What really matters to your customer is that they have an amazing experience. They don't give a how it got there. You're at your favorite hamburger joint. You want a great fresh burger. And if you find out that the owner of the company was there back there mak…”

“In this AI era, we are just hurtling towards living our lives at the speed of play. And I think that that's more and more accessible to all of us, that this idea that we don't, you don't have to quit your job to try out, build an idea that you've been thinking…”

“New is your novel idea that will probably be the reason why people will try this product, and it will probably also fail.”

“And I think we're in this weird paradox with AI that I would have thought by now that people would be all over the place with these testing machines and they'd be Building prototypes in a day and testing and they're not, and it's not what I see because you can…”

“I think that what's going to be the big unlock for games is the more that we put the real world, you know, real humans, real social in our games, because basically games should be a good use of your time there. It's this big of industry and it's total waste of…”

“If you want to build great products, you can't avoid management. You can't avoid having a board or investors, and so You just got to dive into the whole enchilada and you should think kind of full stack from first principles of customers and products and codin…”

“And so we would look at granola, let's say, is probably the most successful AI note taker product.”

“You probably don't have a whole lot of consumer companies coming through right now.”

“New is like the novel idea that will get someone interested in your product... It might get someone to try our product, but that feature might die. The feature might actually get trial. It's like, they call it the back of the box. Like what got you to buy the …”

“The only point of All of these management tools is to get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. That's it. First lesson is be in the room. It's like, be in the room as much as you can, if you are the best player in that position, and then re…”