Pincus: Feud between Peter Thiel and Sequoia killed early Zynga financing
Mark Pincus · You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful | FarmVille Creator · Jun 2, 2026 · at 41:24
Zynga founder Mark Pincus describes the early fundraising struggles of Zynga and a conflict between Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel.
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“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 gonna fund, I want five million. He's like, I'll fund it, and I said, great, and then I went, and I had this meeting with Sequoia, and it was a really funny meeting, because I was asking for twenty million pre, and we were doing 200,000 a month in free cash flow, and they said, how do you justify that valuation, which at the time was a lot, and I said, if you care about this valuation, this isn't the right deal for you, because this is either gonna be a multi-billion dollar company or nothing, and it just won't matter, and now everyone thinks that way, call options, but I was like, if you're worried about whether it's 15 pre or 20 pre, Don't play, because you're looking for an outcome that you're never gonna see. We're never selling this company for two hundred million. It's either, like, zero or multi-billion. And they liked that, but then there was this fight between them and Peter, and then they both ended up not investing.”
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