The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: Companies should be run as democratic dictatorships with one decision-maker
“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.”
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…”
Mark Pincus: Product builders must master proven solutions before innovating
“Before you have the right to do better and new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven.”
Pincus: Feud between Peter Thiel and Sequoia killed early Zynga financing
“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…”
Pincus: Only Zynga and Spotify survived Facebook's app ecosystem
“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…”
Pincus: Zynga never spent a dollar of venture capital raised
“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.”
Pincus: Zynga drove 20% of Facebook page views and 10% of revenue at IPO
“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…”
Pincus: Founders who compromise build companies they no longer want to run
“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…”
Pincus: Founders fail by trying to reinvent every part of a product
“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…”
Pincus: Seeded Zynga With $350K and Hit Immediate Cashflow Positivity
“We were cashflow positive right away. I've never had that before. I put up 350 K to start the company”
Pincus: Supercell made $500M profit the year after Zynga passed
“You know, and Supercell made five hundred million in profit the next year”
Pincus: VCs doubted Zynga would be serious due to his age and wealth
“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 …”
Zynga's Words with Friends turnaround generated $180M revenue, $100M contribution margin
“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…”
Pincus: Roughly 20% of Facebook users played FarmVille at its peak
“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…”