Pincus: Supercell made $500M profit the year after Zynga passed
Mark Pincus · You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful | FarmVille Creator · Jun 2, 2026 · at 58:17
Zynga founder Mark Pincus reflects on the financial aftermath of Zynga's board rejecting a $400 million acquisition of Supercell.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You know, and Supercell made five hundred million in profit the next year”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mark Pincus
Pincus: Founders should abandon the MVP trap for rapid top-of-funnel testing
“Too many teams Waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”
Pincus: Zynga had a $400M handshake deal to acquire Supercell
“And I had a handshake with Ilka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for four hundred million in cash.”
Pincus: Leaders owe it to top performers to fire ineffective employees
“I think that you owe it to, in that moral contract to your good employees, to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.”
Pincus: Founders' instincts are usually right, but their ideas are wrong
“We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right, and our ideas are usually wrong.”
Pincus: Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams doesn't speak to me to this day
“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…”
Pincus: Zynga's operating mantra is that 'all new fails'
“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…”