Opinion
Pincus: Consumer AI feels uninvestable due to lack of distribution
“I think consumer AI still feels uninvestable. There's no obvious distribution. There's been, like, two companies that make sense, like Sumo and Midjourney. There's, like, this prosumer place, but I think that the whole environment is amazing, but I also think …”
Insight
Unsure founders have definitely not achieved true product-market fit
“When it really is it, you just know, but when it's not quite it, you walk around unsure if it's it. And if you're asking like, is this it? Could it be it? It's definitely not it.”
Insight
AI is not a new consumer platform like web or mobile
“AI itself isn't a new platform. So when you think about new platforms like that used to be new mobile game councils, but you know, the web and the web in a browser was a new platform and mobile was a new platform. We all move into a place of discovery where we…”
Opinion
Pincus: Active CEOs Lecturing on Culture Signals a 'Fake CEO'
“When I hear people giving talks about culture, especially when they're currently a CEO, my fake CEO meter goes up, my alarm bells go off, because I'm like, okay, if you're out lecturing about culture to people, I kind of doubt that you're actually doing things…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
Pincus: Multi-trillion tech companies will reach $10T to $20T valuations
“I think these two to five trillion dollar companies are going to be 10 to 20 trillion dollar companies or more.”
Disclosure
Pincus: Team warned him against writing about Elon Musk
“I have a book coauthor and a publisher and a chief of staff, and they all kept coming back to Mark. Don't go there. Elon's controversial, and you shouldn't just call him Elon.”
Insight
Pincus: Desirable modern service often means avoiding forced interactions with humans
“There is just this weird inversion of service that, that so often I think lots of times the service we want is, we just, is to not, not have to, like, not have to be, I hate to say it, but not have to be nice to a human, like not have to sit there and smile an…”
Insight
Pincus: Sticking with 'B-plus' ideas prevents founders from finding 'A' ideas
“B plus is the enemy of an A. B plus often, if we stick with the B plus, is taking up space. It's distracting us from unlocking the A, and to fail or to call the ball that that idea isn't that good, it in itself is really powerful”
Assertion Partly supported
Zero percent of 40,000 recent App Store games sustained top 25 rankings
“I believe last year there was 40,000, 40,000 games launched in the App Store, and zero percent of them sustained a top 25 position.”
Disclosure
Pincus originally funded Napster because Sean Parker interned for him
“I put up all the original money for Napster because Sean Parker worked for me as an intern when he was 16.”
Opinion
Pincus: LLMs will not capture every application software business
“This belief that the LLMs are gonna eat up every possible business, I just, I don't think is true. It's, I mean, cursor flies in the face of that.”
Disclosure
Pincus: Advised Brian Chesky against celebrity chef Airbnb Experiences
“At one point, Airbnb, when they were launching experiences had, their original idea was that you'd have, like, Michael Minna come cook in your home, and all these amazing experiences, and I said to Brian Chesky, you know, I don't want Michael Minna, with all d…”
Assertion Partly supported
Pincus: Smartphone users download an average of zero new apps monthly
“I mean, we download an average of zero new apps a month.”
Disclosure
Pincus: Co-founded enterprise AI startup Hivemind with Reid Hoffman and Ratankar Das
“I just recently co-founded an enterprise AI company called Hivemind. Again, I was trying to pursue What I call the social membrane and just thinking, like, how will we do social networking in an AI agentic world? And I teamed up with Reid Hoffman and with a re…”
Insight
Pincus: Mission never changes, strategy adapts as needed, tactics change daily pre-PMF
“Hopefully your mission It doesn't ever change, and your vision maybe rarely changes, and your strategy changes as often as it needs to, and your tactics probably change every day in order to win, and that's, that amount of variation is just a lot higher before…”
Disclosure
Pincus and Reid Hoffman provided all original funding for Friendster
“So Reed and I put up all the original money for Friendster as like a science experiment. We didn't think it would work.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Pincus: First Round Offered Repeat Founders $250k Notes Sight Unseen
“And then I met with Josh Koppelman, and they had this deal at first round that they would give any second time founder, a 250 K bridge note with a ten million dollar cap, sight unseen.”
Mark Pincus