The Ledger, every show

“And I had a handshake with Ilka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for four hundred million in cash.”

“The more that FDR style Trump and people get popular support, it's going to become a more and more isolating, lonely place in two years to still be Like, you know, California, Gavin, everyone's saying, don't worry, we're gonna protect you against these people.…”

“Now I got involved with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin early, and then I thought I was Too early, and maybe it wasn't going to happen, and now I'm completely drinking the Kool-Aid, and I'm completely enthralled by just the potential of cryptocurrencies to get us…”

“I think that the metaverse is starting to happen and I think it's going to happen and it's going to be As big as Zuck thought, and it's just not going to happen inside of an immersive game goggle that is painful and hot to wear on your head, even if the form f…”

“I think these two to five trillion dollar companies are going to be 10 to 20 trillion dollar companies or more.”

“They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile, and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends, and they made a massive hit.”

“If we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, you know, that will basically be free in a year or two, that, that, that, that token, you know, supply is going to go up so much.”

“We had a stand-up call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're gonna do today. And I go through name by name and say, okay, did you get that done? Can everyo…”

“And Jonathan Abrams was I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close. In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day. He feels like tribe. He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”

“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”

“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”

“But I love what they're doing, and I just say that my own opinion, and this is not knowing anything I think that it's going to, I think it's going to over deliver not to set expectations, they don't want that, but I think it's going to be more aggressive and o…”

“Between Peter and Reed they've been friends for life, and they had a falling, deep falling out over all 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 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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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”

“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 …”

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

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

“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 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…”

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

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

“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 …”

“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”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“He worked for me as an intern when he was 16.”

“I was there at the tech conference when this team from MIT was demoing their touch screen and they did it on a gigantic whiteboard and Steve jobs was obsessed with it. They had a whiteboard and they had a table with it. And I watched him, and he spent the whol…”

“At one point, TCI was going to buy a third of Prodigy. It was The biggest online provider at the time, and it was terrible... And AOL had just gone public and was worth a hundred and ten million. Prodigy, this deal was to pay four hundred million for a third o…”

“And Farmville was the first time that we hit this, like, mass market consumer tipping point where lots of people knew about Mafia Wars, but with Farmville, we hit this density on the social network and the feed with Facebook that something I think, like, 20% o…”

“It's a website that lets people create meme coins. I think they create like 20,000 a day through this.”