Zynga

“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 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…”

“The way I ran the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone, everyone's voice to be heard, and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef.”

“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…”

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

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

“My philosophy, which may sound anti-innovation, but it's actually in service of innovation, is all new fails. Until it finally doesn't. And at Zynga today, the mantra inside the company is still all new fails. If you assume all new fails, you probably won't be…”

“Before you have the right to do better and new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”