The Exchanges

Q the book, you literally started the book with Elon. He's very hype in the news cycle right now with the SpaceX IPO. He didn't need more press. He didn't need my help. He didn't need more press, but you started the book with him. Why do you think Elon is so emblematic at the speed of play? And then also, like, what was the process of putting that in first?

A Well, the process was It just made sense to me. It just, every time I came back to Like, what did, I wanted to get across the essence of life at the speed of play of this concept. Why did I put those words together? And why is that, why does that resonate so much for me? And I thought if I want people to picture it, I'd like people to picture the kinds of crazy things that Elon can go do that none of us can do and crazy from one hand, like putting fart mode in his car, which No responsible corporation would ever allow a founder to do, um, to serious things like, you know, deciding he wanted to create a tunnel boring company while he was stuck in traffic in LA, and we all have those thoughts, those moments. I don't know about fart mode, but some version of it, and None of us can actually do anything about it. Or if we do, we have to like devote our lives to that one thing. Like if you want to create a tunneling company, you know, maybe, maybe you or I could, but it wouldn't just be a tweet, right? We would have to like do our homework and go and research that industry and possibility and create a business plan and blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that are not fun. And he's just having fun. You can tell watching him. So that's, That was the, the first part of your question, why I wanted to start with that. And then process wise, it actually wasn't easy because I don't live …

AI assessment note: “why I wanted to start with that. And then process wise, it actually wasn't easy”

Q time and time again, and there is a humbling moment that occurs with this. Your idea has existed before, And maybe it's the execution, maybe it's the timing, but there is something to that. And so how do you advise companies, founders, how have you done this in the past of pushing through ideas and experimentation and just trying more and then just getting rid of the old ones fast?

A Well, it's a perfect lead-in to my framework, Proven Better New. I like to say that we should be like scientists with white lab coats, and there's so many paradoxes in this that we want to follow our passions and emotions, and we want to go innovate, and then I'm telling you, okay, to be really successful at that, you have to be dispassionate about your ideas, you need to feel no attachment or connection to your ideas, have a white lab coat, and just Do science experiments, right? Which doesn't sound fun. So these are paradoxes that pull in different directions, but I also think that they keep us in bounds. And I think that if you can use a framework like proven better new or invent your own or steal it and make it better, I think you will massively increase your odds of success and you will decrease the odds at least that you waste so much time on B pluses that And so what I'd say is this. The idea of proven better new is you have this instinct, and you have an idea. Ok, great. Let's now deconstruct what it is that you want to do. And I use games, they're a perfect example because there's so many mechanics that make up a game, but that's the same as features or the pixels that make up this exact experience. I Try to get people to do as an exercise is to say, okay, let's really look at what it is you're trying to do and look out in the world first at where has someone done this…

AI assessment note: “Well, it's a perfect lead-in to my framework, Proven Better New.”

Q Good. Good. Okay. Well then as we close out one last question, what is your hottest take about AI right now?

A Hmm. Well, it's nuanced. I'm an AI maximalist, and, and I'd say this, when we lived through the dot-com bubble in 2099, 2000, none of us thought it made sense. We all thought that it had, like, lost touch with fundamentals. These companies were dumb, they had no business plans, and we were like, this is gonna end badly. That's not happening now. For better or worse, I'd say all my smartest friends believe, and we're seeing, we're seeing AI deliver. It's not dark fiber. These GPUs are burning hot, and people are getting real value out of it, so I'm an AI maximalist. I think, I think these, the LLM companies are phenomenal, and I'm an I'm bullish. I'm an investor in NVIDIA, a bunch of the AI companies. And I think on a public market point of view, I love the trade because they're at a peg ratio below a one. And when do we get that? The, the memory chip, the memory companies, I mean, I own those. I just think you just have to believe that this is going to keep playing out and clearly investors You know, the market doesn't believe it. That's why they're trading below their peg. I think it is going to play out. I just think it's on a level that we have tough, a tough time imagining. I think there's so many companies now that are building real legit businesses, getting to huge ARRs. I think consumer AI still feels uninvestable. There's no obvious distribution. There's been, like, two…

AI assessment note: “I'm an AI maximalist... It's not dark fiber. These GPUs are burning hot”

Q Just to be clear, you did this extremely well at Zynga. Can you explain some of the cohorts and what you did with each game? Like they had crazy record setting retention and growth.

A Sure. What we figured out trying to survive in this, in a lot of ways, this app ecosystem, these app ecosystems that evolved on MySpace and Facebook, And the other social networks were a precursor to what mobile is today. So there was an app economy, and you were trying to live and survive on someone else's platform as just an app, and it was fleeting. And what all our competitors at the time, like Max Leftchin, who was on United Slide, they were the big dogs on these social networking services, and they had huge virality, and games weren't viral. Ok, and in fact, I remember Dave Morin sat down with me before they launched their app platform. He and I had coffee in Coal Valley, and he said, Mark, anything but games, they're just not viral, and there's so many viral things people are launching on our platform, pokes and wall apps, and, but I want to see you succeed, just don't do games. I was like, well, I, I had a feeling based on my failure of tribe that everyone's hanging out at this cocktail party with nothing to do. So I had this instinct that people wanted something more fun to do while they were having their social networking. And then I put this idea of, you know, a variant of a social game. Um, what I quickly realized was games were not viral. We couldn't keep up with the virality of these apps that we're doing. They were doing hundreds of thousands of installs a day, b…

AI assessment note: “So we built every game against this retention idea, and we used the social loops”

Q Before we leave this chapter of the book, there's one section that I brought up earlier as well, and you were like, oh, this happens with every cycle, and that was don't be a fake CEO. And I was saying it seems like there's a lot of fake CEOs right now, but could you distill what that means?

A Yes. I would say there probably are a lot of fake CEOs. I also think We have more real CEOs, real, what I call real close to the metal, like product CEOs. I think with every cycle we get more of both, but I, and I think when we hit, I'm not saying that I don't believe AI is a bubble, but I think that we, when the financing spigot gets turned on, we do get bubbly thing. There are lots of bubbles, meaning Lots of times that we see things getting funded that shouldn't, or things getting funded at much higher valuations than they should, and we always live in, in the age of nuance. We're just not very good at spotting the nuance, and so it gets really hard. And this is what happened in the first bubble, by the way. You know, the first dot-com bubble, it always starts with something real, and there was eBay, and eBay was a phenomenal business, and it was massively profitable, and growing, and went public, and that made investors believe in the dot-com boom, and then we got pets.com, you know, then we got spa.com, then we got stupid ass, like, dot com, dot coms, right, and we got amazon.com, right, which wasn't stupid, but was seen as stupid, so So it's just so hard to be discerning in the middle of these things, and again, now we have amazing, amazing, breathtaking businesses, right, that are getting to hundred million ARRs faster than we've ever seen in history, and that also creat…

AI assessment note: “The idea of a fake CEO Bing and I started saying it to each other”

Q So one of my favorite parts is when you're deciphering between ideas versus instincts. Could you lay out that framework and maybe some examples?

A Yeah, and that's, so I created this course at Stanford Business School on product management. It's still running after 10 years. There was only two really core points that I wanted to get across in the class, and even then, it was like, I found out how hard it was to be a teacher, because I was only like mildly successful, because they didn't always get it at the end of the course. One, I believe the most foundational thing we need to get good at as Founders, product founders, is separating our winning instincts from our losing ideas. Um, that was the core point, that's the core point of the whole book, and then on top of that, I have this framework, Proven Better New, which is so important, we originally titled the book Proven Better New. I was like, that's gonna be the thing, but, but I was like, that misses the gestalt of life at the speed of play. So, this idea of instincts versus ideas that I'm still working on, I think you're working on it in the way you described launching Sorcery, is that, just like I gave you the example with the hotel, that we tune into this thing, whether it's looking at, like, your emotions, the kind of emotion you get back on Twitter, and there's like an X and a Y to that, like, I got 4000 likes for this, but then, oh, I got comments, and the comments are really heated, You know, good and bad, or it's really hit a vein. So it's like, we're looking …

AI assessment note: “this idea of instincts versus ideas that I'm still working on”