The Ledger, every show

“At one point, Airbnb, when they were launching experiences had, their original idea was that you'd have, like, Michael Minna come cook in your home, and all these amazing experiences, and I said to Brian Chesky, you know, I don't want Michael Minna, with all d…”

“I mean, we download an average of zero new apps a month.”

“I just recently co-founded an enterprise AI company called Hivemind. Again, I was trying to pursue What I call the social membrane and just thinking, like, how will we do social networking in an AI agentic world? And I teamed up with Reid Hoffman and with a re…”

“Hopefully your mission It doesn't ever change, and your vision maybe rarely changes, and your strategy changes as often as it needs to, and your tactics probably change every day in order to win, and that's, that amount of variation is just a lot higher before…”

“So Reed and I put up all the original money for Friendster as like a science experiment. We didn't think it would work.”

“And then I met with Josh Koppelman, and they had this deal at first round that they would give any second time founder, a 250 K bridge note with a ten million dollar cap, sight unseen.”

“We have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right. 95% of the time, your ideas ar…”

“Better is usually very small increments and innovations, and better is something that 10 out of 10 of your existing The existing users of that product would say, fuck yeah. 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new, right?”

“You, we have to be precise. We have to think at the pixel level of this experience proven is on this platform for this audience, for this experience. And you can look to what's been proven before. As great sources of new ideas, but it's not, if it's not on thi…”

“There's, 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 like angry, because we go through life faster because of pattern recognition, and we don't wanna think a…”

“When we can see something that is proven already in someone else's product, but they have, you know, the wrong idea around it, that's gold.”

“Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience, it's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data and …”

“We started selling keys to people for you and a friend, and we ended up selling nineteen million dollars worth of keys to get early access to, you know, the new expansion pack.”

“We built a metric called ASN, and it stood for what we measured, what was your active social network? So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player? Meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back. You gifted them and they gift…”

“I pulled the plug on it after four years in, and twenty-five million dollars in just this one version of it”

“You know, the average App installs per user per month is zero.”

“The people in the trenches are usually closest to the data, closest to probably the right answer, but they're also usually furthest from making the decision, and that's what I call the expert witness syndrome, because you're called to the stand by the adults, …”

“And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos.”

“It's to build an internet treasure, which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe As product makers, that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world.”

“I think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling and it's been unexpressed or unmet.”

“We've gotta be in a mental state where we're playing offense and not defense, and I don't know how you're gonna get yourself there, but you've gotta be in this place that you're thinking, you're also thinking, what if everything goes right? What does right loo…”

“Sean Parker worked for me at Freeloader when he was 16, amazingly, and sent me an email when he started Napster with Sean Fanning, and I was the first check into Napster, because he said, we have, like, two servers, and they're full, and we need money for more…”

“The problem is that I see with so many products and founders is that they're losing for the wrong reason. So they're losing because they didn't just stick to their one, isolate their one area of innovation. They tried to reinvent every single part of their pro…”

“You lose at least half your users every click. Every time you say click here, half people don't click. And you lose 80% when you say download this. At least. It's probably 90 or more. 90% or more in the app store.”

“I think that the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon. The ultimate vibe coding is life of the speed of play, and it's that you get to have an idea and bring it to life in some way for almost no capital. And get to instanti…”

“I think that, that my all-in has always been underestimated, so we'll get to, like, when I, life when I started Zynga, but the VCs didn't believe, like, I'd already been successful and made all this money, and they just were like, this is a lifestyle thing. I …”

“We were cashflow positive right away. I've never had that before. I put up 350 K to start the company”

“Know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises, because what I had done my whole career, and most of us do, is compromise to get that next You're an engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you're impressed with their firm name…”

“And because of V and the team, and committing to this failure machine, this testing machine first, game did a hundred and eighty million in revenues, did a hundred million in contribution, so it did more dollars in contribution than they were projecting it wou…”

“You know, and Supercell made five hundred million in profit the next year”

“If I give people way more responsibility than they think they deserve, they're going to be a little scared, and they're gonna feel some adrenaline, and they're gonna probably really like their job. And not like it because of the title, or the money, or the acc…”

“Anything that can be free on the internet will be free. Anything that can be less clicks, less friction, will be less friction.”

“They hated me and my company so much that they burned a mark mannequin on stage”

“Reed said to me early on, you need to pick what the easy narrative is, or the press is going to make it up for you.”

“I think the first social media investment I made was Napster. I sent the first check, the first 100,000 dollars.”

“Yeah, Reed and I put up the first money for Friendster. And then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook. The first on Twitter, so.”

“The people running both the staff there and the people on the board have stated on their website that their policy is managed retreat.”

“I've been loading up on Alibaba, a couple Chinese names.”

“He was interested and my friend was interested in saying, okay, can you put up a couple people a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film this? And I thought about it. I even had him go meet with Reed and didn't move quickly. And then he went dark …”

“Yes, I made it my policy early on to respond to every single email from every employee and every customer, and I have pretty much to this day been true to it.”

“I think as a rule of thumb, if you're a good entrepreneur, you can assume that your instincts are right 95% of the time, and your ideas might be right 25% of the time.”

“The insight we had from that was that the number one thing stopping people from ever going and getting a new PC was this fear of moving their software and the idea of having to reinstall their kids' games and everything else.”

“Out of that, for me, came this mentality that I brought into Zynga of, I'm not wedded to any idea. Whether it's mine, yours, someone else's, I'll try anything, and I'll kill anything, and I'll kill it quickly.”

“At the time, game companies would build an entire game and take even two years and 15, twenty million dollars before they even know if anyone wanted it, and we could come out with it on the web, maybe only spend four weeks.”

“Reid Hoffman and I got excited about that. We both kind of at the same time discovered Friendster and put up the original money for Friendster, and both started our own networks, LinkedIn and Tribe.”

“The distribution is there bigger than ever, but there are not easy proven paths that people can follow”

“The more successful you get, the more risk averse everyone gets”

“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.”