The Exchanges

Q You had a falling out with your dad, and that seemed to be one of the pivotal early moments in your life. What happened?

A My dad, we all kind of played a role in his movie, and he loved being in a fraternity in college, and was like, defining for him, and he wanted me to do that. I wasn't into fraternity, and they weren't into me either. It was like, mutual. And, and I initially went to this Big 10 school, University of Michigan, and I was just not in the right place in any way. And I just was not, On lots of fronts, becoming the kind of man that my dad wanted me to be. He wanted me to be just like him. This got more and more tense, and our family was on a sailboat, uh, in the Caribbean, in the Virgin Islands, and we were bare boating, so it was just us crewing, and my, we had grown up sailing, and my dad was the worst sailboat captain ever. I mean, just famously, like, epically bad captain. Like, we would get stuck On a sandbar, because he didn't read the tides right, you know. We were in this harbor in, uh, this island, Virgin Gorda, and the keel got stuck, and we always had something go wrong, and the boat was going in circles and headed eventually for this, like, rock barrier, and I got in the dinghy, and I turned on the engine and grabbed the rope, and I pulled the boat Into the slip and save the day. And my dad was furious, and he said, you could have killed us all, and there could only be one captain, and, you know, I think he was also a little humiliated, and that escalated to this bigger …

AI assessment note: “I've decided to take you out of college to finish raising you, and I said”

Q I know you're all thinking electrolytes are for athletes, but you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it, and it tastes great. Stay sharp in the afternoon and grab a free eight-count sample pack with any purchase at drinkelement.com slash TKP. That's drinkelement.com slash TKP. You had a near-death experience with Facebook and Zynga. Can you walk me through what happened there and how you navigated that?

A 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. Um, there's only two companies that ever actually survived out of it, it was Spotify and Zynga. Um, and I'd say my experience in building Zynga, and the reason I kept raising money, even though we were profitable, was I felt like I was on a five-story high unicycle, and I kept adding another story. And it was like, whoa, it's gonna be really far if we fall now. And we didn't have any stable, there was not a stable platform. We didn't have a stable agreement between the companies. They could and would Change their platform all the time, and some low-level product manager who wants to promote events would deprecate the whole left rail of their homepage where all the apps were. Like, they'd be behind a more button, and you're like, oh my god, nobody can find us anymore, you know, or it would just always be moving. They had to move fast and break things. Most of what they broke was all of their app ecosystem. I would walk their hallways Every week, trying to convince them that games and apps were this great business for them, and they didn't believe it. They didn't think that was what their platform was for, and then eventually they did, and it wasn't even …

AI assessment note: “The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience”

Q Plus, it's your identity, right? You're a founder. You're running this company. You're, you have-

A My dad used to call this in between successes. He's like, you're not unemployed, you're in between successes. And, but for us as founders, it's so hard, this abyss is this usually dark place, because at first it feels great. Maybe freedom, oh my god, I've been working so hard, and now I can just sleep in, and I can, now I can do all the things I've wanted to do and couldn't. And about a week or two later, maybe a month later, it starts to dawn on you that I may never find gainful employment again. I mean, gainful meaning something I want to do. I'm not gonna ever go work for anyone else, so I'm not employable anyway. So, I don't know if I'll ever come out of this abyss. I've been in this abyss sometimes for multiple years, and it doesn't mean you're not working on projects and things, but you haven't found your thing. You haven't found the thing that And it's maybe not the level of, you know, you're not working on something with as much passion and conviction as the thing that you built that worked, or went public, or didn't work, but you loved it, and you don't know if you'll ever find that again.

AI assessment note: “for us as founders, it's so hard, this abyss is this usually dark place”

Q Competitive, like, tipping the board over if you lose?

A Almost, like, My dad was very playful and into games, and so much so that, uh, he first did this, and then we all did. We'd start to change the rules if we thought the games weren't made right. The best one was in Scrabble. It kind of sucks that there's this luck of the draw on your letters, and my dad made this rule that you could take a letter from your, your little tray, thank you, and Change it out with letter on the board as long as it still made a word, right? So you could put an O for an A, and then you had to reuse that letter in the same turn, and so my dad sometimes would take a half an hour for a turn and all these intricate things, but it made it more, you had more, I like to talk about what's the dimensionality, you know, to games, and it added a whole dimension.

AI assessment note: “Almost, like, My dad was very playful and into games”

Q So you are in the abyss, and you come out of it, and you have, I mean, by all objective standards, all this money and success, and you want to go do it again. Why did you do that with Singa?

A Part of what I deeply realized in that abyss, as founders, we may or may not be faced with having to answer our why. So, my why I got to is like, what I can offer the world is building products that move people, and, and I'm going to be the most happy doing that, and I don't know if I'll ever get to do it again, but I'm going to try to get there, and I, I was looking for this way to get back to building again, um, even though Tribe was an abject failure, and I got there, um, With this little poker game, and it was really fun, and it started to take off in ways right away, and it was one of these, like, lightning in a bottle things that it just worked, and everything about it worked. But also, I think, I think I've gone through this, like, success beat down, success beat down, and I think I had to be so beat down with Tribe to be so unambitious, To start Zynga.

AI assessment note: “what I can offer the world is building products that move people”

Q Do you think these periods, like this abyss, is necessary for what comes next in life?

A I'd like to think it's not, because they're long and painful, and I'd love to just have a short break and then dive into the next thing and have it work, but I don't know, I personally don't know how to avoid it. 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 instantiate your idea. Maybe not with billions of capital. And so, I do think that there are going to be more and more outs from this abyss, and it's gonna be easier in a lot of ways. But I think the abyss is for sure there for me, and I think it will be for most founders. And so, all we can do is embrace it and have more process. That's where my book of life is helpful. I find finding lots of small things to work on that are maybe going to unlock the passion thing. I, I got to Zynga. I was in the abyss, and I was, I had just side projects that, one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling. I was doing them all wrong. I was not intense. I have a terrible work ethic until I don't.

AI assessment note: “I'd like to think it's not... but I think the abyss is for sure there”

Q What would you say, like, when I talk to people who work in organizations, a lot of them hate their bosses. Do you think that comes from unclear objectives, or where do you think that comes from?

A So many places. I don't really believe in management, but I believe in these, that we can have some principles or hacks or things we do that Are kind of in place of having to manage. I don't like, I say every day I manage the day of work. And I think no one should really have to manage, or feel managed. But, two things I'll say. Early on, when I was building my second company, support.com, I, I didn't know how to scale past, we were 35 people. I wrote, I put a sticky note on the wall, I wrote everyone's names, and I said, by the end of the week, write down what you're CEO of, and it should be something everyone else understands and believes is important. I said, everyone's gonna be a CEO. Everyone here needs to own something that, that matters. And that way we all know what you're doing, and we can all get more done. And it really worked, and people liked it. So I learned this idea, like, oh, 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 accolades, but actually Be challenged. And so I learned that people like that. That was one lesson that I carried on. And at Zynga, we had this, ah, value on the wall, be a CEO, own outcomes. The other thing I learned early on about the …

AI assessment note: “The other thing I learned early on about the way engineers hate their jobs”

Q Do you think one of the byproducts of that is the politics start to take over internally too?

A So many things, yeah, that lead to politics, and one lesson I learned that really, I, I hate management, so I, I don't do one-on-ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on-ones, because he created politics, and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one-on-ones, and the whole point in style and politics in a company is as long as you're consistent, Everyone shapes around it, and they don't care. They're like, oh, Mark doesn't do one-on-ones. Don't take it personally. So I was like, I'm never doing one-on-ones. And if anyone did finally get my ear and complain about someone else, you stop, you call the other person, and you say, hey, Shane's complaining about you. I think you should come up and talk to him. And you walk away. And then everyone knows there's no politics.

AI assessment note: “So many things, yeah, that lead to politics”

Q You said the fastest way to get to a winning idea is to sort of build a failure machine. So how do you determine whether your ideas are winning or not, and course correct? Because you might have the right instinct, but, like, how do we touch reality and get feedback from the world?

A I got to failure machines through a lot of failure. Painful, slow failure. I'd say, when I, when I came back to Zynga as CEO for the second time, and I had to move fast To make this turnaround happen. I was going to start my fight with our core franchises, and the CEO before me had bet on all these new games, and this whole slate of games looked like it was gonna fail, and our franchises had been neglected, and I said, I'm gonna go back to Words with Friends. People love that. I want them to fall in love with that game again. The game, when I came back, was projected to do Uh, to drop from a hundred and twenty million in revenues to seventy-nine million in revenues, um, in the next 12 months. And everyone was saying, let's pull resources off, let's send the game to our team in India to shutter it. And I said, no, we're gonna, this is the beginning of the turnaround, we're going to turn around this game, and then the whole company. So I started meeting with that team every week. We started going through their App reviews and ratings. It's amazing how dumb this shit is, but the ratings had fallen to, like, the mid threes from the high fours, so we would read the ratings. I started and ended every meeting with, what will our players thank us for? And the team thought that was, like, an unfair question. Eventually, we put a neon sign in the lobby that said, what will our players th…

AI assessment note: “We started going through their App reviews and ratings.”