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We're gonna stay in technology and how it continues to transform himid the AI backdrop, and it takes us to someone who's been innovating and disrupting as well, and remembers all too well the boom and bust and changing landscape of the dot com era. He's best known as the founder and CEO of Zinga, the social games company that iPod in twenty eleven, but he's built and invested in so much more and through every iteration of the Internet, the nineties boom and bust, the social media boom of
Web two point zero, and now the AI era. Carol. He's also a prolific investor.
He is. Indeed, he's invested you'll know these names, folks, Napster, SpaceX, and he had he held on to his shares. His thirty eight thousand dollars seat investment in Facebook now Meta for about half a percentage of the company would be worth many, many billions of dollars right now. Smart investment.
I would say, we're talking about Mark Pinkas he's got a new book out and we know all this thanks to the new book. It's called Life at the speed of play, launch products, people love. Mark Pinkus joins us here in the Blue and Interactive Broker's Studio. Welcome, Welcome, How are you. Congrats on the book.
Thanks, thanks, by the way, I really am happy about the memory stocks.
What's why?
Well, for diving right into the AI trade, let's not mess around. I'd say that that it's it's a pretty simple trade at this point.
It's a belief.
And either you believe that the AI infrastructure investment is going to pay off and keep playing out, in which case all of these companies are generationally undervalued and it's a generational buying opportunity.
If you're getting a PEG ratio of.
Point three you know or less, or you think that it's not going to play out, and then you should stay away from all of it.
So well, I'm a believer.
It's funny because we just spoke with you with Ted Oakley. He manages money for Oxbow Advisors, and he sent us a bunch of stocks, and missing from there we're names and memory names. He does own some tech, but he said the memory got too expensive. And he said, I've been doing this for decade, many decades. I remember the nineteen nineties we sold Intel, and I watched Intel stocko up for the next twelve months before then it went down.
So he understands these cycles. Are we in one of those cyclical moments right now?
Well, we'll know in the future, but it'll be it's only cyclical if this, if these AI growth rates and numbers don't play out, If they play out, I think he would even agree that they're still undervalued.
You know, Mark, one of the things that we're thinking, we want to get into the book and talk about the you know, life at the speed of play and what it all means.
But we are curious.
You have been in Silicon Valley for all of the iterations of the mettle no no season, like a great wine. Like That's how I think it. Love talking with people who have seen cycles right and can sometimes figure out the silly from the stuff that really matters. How do you like, how do we make sense? Like we see the money going in, We see the circular financing that makes us a little uncomfortable. We see the narrative around AI changing. I get it, disruption, this is what happened.
But help us understand, like is this a boom cycle with no bust? Or is there going to be a breaking point at some point or for only maybe for.
Some it's the I have the perfect answer.
You wouldn't be talking to us.
I would have held my metastoptik.
You did, okay, you did, okay? How do you think some of this?
I built a boring enterprise software company in the middle of the dot com boom. You know, it was called support dot Com, but it was actually an early SaaS company. We went public on the last day of the IPO window. I'd say that then versus now. My peers and I thought it.
Didn't make any sense.
During the dot com bubble, we thought it was crazy what we saw going on around us. And now my peers, my smartest friends, think this makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's it was dark fiber then and now it's like hot GPUs.
I mean it's actually being used.
It was betting on a whole consumer that that didn't show.
Up or didn't show up yet.
And now the the investment the infrastructure is going to enterprises who are bottom line oriented. And you know, then it was eyeballs and now it's arr you know, it's it's actual revenue. So it's definitely not the same. I think what we do have is extreme volatility. And I think that the volatility comes from where it's hard to
remember this level of growth market. And when there's this level of growth like we've seen just this week and today, when there is a negative data point or even absence of more positives, it starts to be run for the hills and doom and bubble. And then when we see like microns numbers and guidance, all of a sudden, everyone's bullish again, and we're going to keep seeing that.
It's my take.
One thing that you write about in the book repeatedly is that you know, when you get into your whole background Wharton, Harvard Business School, going and working for some investors, that our household names of the Bloomberg audience, I mean Steve Ratner, John Malone, I mean, these are legends. You are constantly saying you don't know how to code, you don't know how to write code, yet you built all
these companies. What struck me about reading that was that that kind of doesn't matter now in a way that it mattered when you were building all these companies. You write about, how has the idea of like open Ayes, Codex or Claude code from an How does that completely change the game moving forward?
Well, if you.
Pull the camera back and even think more broadly, like, how has the game of startups just changed? And how has this another step function changed? In each chapter, the amount of capital that you needed to get going has gone down, you know, not up. When I was starting my first company, I had to recruit these government mainframe programmers, have them learn C plus plus and HTML, and I needed a fair amount of money to convince them to quit their jobs.
And each my subsequent companies.
Today, you know you don't need that, right, You don't need as much capital. You don't need to go and necessarily recruit a whole team of the world's best engineers.
It's being democratized today.
Really there, it's more possible than ever for somebody with an amazing idea who's willing to move on it now to really get somewhere in a far more capital efficient way.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we also said that in the pandemic of people just being able to start things while they were home. I am curious about the speed of play because that is on your book. Talk to us about that and the importance of it.
Sure, so there was a lot of debate with my co author Carly, my amazing editor Hollis.
On the title to the book.
It was originally called proven Better New, which we can get into. But that's that's kind of some of the core value in the book, and I eventually said, you know, it's just that's not the whole gist of the book. It's life at the speed of play. And that's because it's both. It's both the place that we are moving
into in this AI era. It's it's really I like, I start the book by saying that that this is Elon is the one person who's already been living his life at this b of play, and I definitely think he's having more fun than the rest of us.
Okay, he's also working harder.
I want to push back on this because Caroly and I talked about this.
He doesn't always look like he's having fun.
Yeah, he really. I mean, I think he's been really public about having this tortured existence and how difficult it is to be Elon Musk and the challenges that he struggled with personally, I think more so than professionally. Do you actually think he's having more fun than the rest of us?
I do.
He's got an amazing sense of humor. He's every time I see him, he's joking, laughing. I was with him at a friend's house one night and it wasn't long after he had bought Twitter, and it was basically like an hour of the best stand up comedy I've ever seen. I mean, he the way he talked about his experience of coming in to Twitter and how insane the company was was just was just really funny. So so my point of view, I mean, whether he's having more fun,
who knows. I think that that what I what we can see, you know, I said, maybe he's the one who solved the simulation. What we can see is that he can almost tweet something into existence that he said, there, this traffic in la is terrible. There should be a boring tunneling company. And then a few months later and a few billion dollars raised, there was. And my point is, to some degree, we all are on the brink of
living a part of that. And the reason I called this life lets Speed of Play is that to me, what the book is really about is a product mindset, and and I think that every so many of us have an idea we don't know how to pursue it, or we are pursuing an idea, but the odds of success are too low, too many, too many founders are feeling for the wrong reasons.
So a good idea is a good idea, but that that's not enough necessarily to run with something and build something that lasts for longer or has some significant impact. Correct.
Yeah, and it might be that you have a good idea, but it's behind some like obvious mistakes that you're making. That the more junior product maker or a founder is and the less experienced they are, the more likely they are to do too much new to just reinvent everything.
Steve Jobs talked about this.
So the point of the book is I like to think that this book is like a cheat code that you can whatever it is you're doing, you can change your odds of success and getting to a hit. It's the book I wish I had early in my career.
Just as for founders, like, who do you think about? It? Sounds like it is for people who have an idea or want to run with something, right.
This book is every one of your listeners right now probably has some instinct. They have some sense it's either a speci of an idea or a sense that something could be better, And the book is the point of the book is that they should What is when you think what should they do with that instinct? Very few of them will act on it and turn that into a product or a company, and then their odds of success will be solow because they're going to take one shot on goal and it's probably going to miss well.
I like how you write about that in the book because you use the idea of Uber as an example in the book. You had the idea for Uber in two thousand and two. I did SMS dispatching to a cab. You're not Travis Kalanik. He did not start Uber. No, so you make this argument that I think a lot of people everybody has these ideas.
I had that idea. Yeah, because you had.
That idea, it doesn't mean you actually create the company. Why was Travis able to do it? But Mark Pinkus, who was in Silicon Valley in two thousand and two, wasn't able to do it.
I can't tell you why Travis was, but I can tell you why I wasn't.
I didn't.
First of all, I looked at the world as it existed, not as it could exist the way that Travis did. And by the way, in two thousand and two, there wasn't a mobile, you know, smartphone then, and I thought about it in these conventional ways.
Oh, I'm going.
To deliver your order to the taxi broker, who will call a cab. I didn't ever think Travis's idea of the gig economy. I'm going to let anybody become a driver and have a driver within a minute of you.
That was that was brilliance. But but I had.
An instinct, an instinct that we should be able to order a phone through order a taxi through our phone. And you know the importance The point I'm trying to get people to focus on the book is that if you assume your instincts are right, you know, ninety five percent of the time, and your idea is right at best twenty five percent of the time, what would you do with that information? You know, it's like a time machine.
You write about these instinct veins deep sources of insight about human needs and behavior that can spawn multiple product ideas, even whole new industries. Is that what AI is right now, like what we're doing, is that what that is or.
Is that beyond an instinct vein?
I mean, AAI is is a fundamental shift in in computing. I mean the way that the Internet was, and so so I wouldn't.
Apples to apples. Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. You know. One of the things that I find also is some of the things you talk about, like leadership, you talk about micromanagement is beautiful. And I think about how many times when you think about leaders that it's like, don't micromanage people? Yeah, right now, think about it, Like you bring in you know, you know, experts or consultants and they're like, don't micromanager people? Why is it so important?
Why is it so important that you do do that? You do micromanage?
Yeah, because the point I'm trying to make here is that at the end of the day, what matters most is your customer experience, not how you delivered it.
And so the point to me.
Is deliver the best possible customer experience any way that you get there. And if it's through micromanager, if you can guarantee the quality, if you can guarantee the delivery because you micromanaged, then by all means do that. I'm like, I don't care that McDonald's served fifteen million burgers today. That doesn't make mine any better if I want the kernel cooking mine, you know, individually.
Well, that's a major theme in the book is sort of throwing out this idea of the minimum minimal viable product. Yeah, I'm not going to repeat what the chapter's called.
Because no, we're FCC regulated here, but we're family. Well, that chapter you can say, was the MVP trap. Okay, other chapters no.
Okay, maybe, yeah, great, there it is why we've been sold this idea though, of iterating and Silicon Valley sort of throw something, you know, see if what sticks, and iterates on that over and over again. Why wasn't that ever right for you?
Well, the original concept that Eric Reese had of minimum viable product and moving fast and being in the market is a great concept.
It's just that we now we don't.
The point I make is that we no longer have time to go wait, the learning.
Is too slow.
If we build a minimum viable product, there's hope in the word viable that this might be your launch product, and then you're going to invest more in that product than you should. And I like to say, just build it wrong before you build it right, just build to learn. Be whatever gets you signal from your customer the fastest is and and in the age of AI, we can prototype something or test something so much faster, but it's dangerous.
What I'm seeing with AI is less that people are using AI to test and learn faster, but more build faster. And so if I can build something now in three months instead of three years, that's so alluring that I might go do that. But I don't have three months to learn.
I'm wrong. Does that makes sense?
I don't know that makes sense.
So the viable word is tricky.
Well, I think you had also shared in the book the example of Twitch and building. You know, the founder of Twitch, their team was was changing their product every two or three days at that point. Yeah, they were twitchy, and that was that ended up being a good thing for them. Yeah they got immediate feedback.
Yeah, well they I don't even know if it was getting any customer feedback.
The feedback was just from themselves.
It was I don't like this product idea anymore, let's switch. So that's also important. And I guess part of what makes this so hard to be a founder.
To be a CEO is that we're supposed to.
Express confidence when we don't personally feel confidence, right, And so, how do you come in on Monday and what if you just what have you learned something in the past week that just said this product isn't quite right or it's finally part built and you're like, I'm just not that into it. Do you come to your team on Monday and say, guys, I know I got you to work nights and weekends for this, but I don't think
this is right anymore. Or do you say, well, I don't want to demotivate my team and so I'm just going to continue on this path for this whole product cycle.
Or I can't.
I'm afraid to tell my investors who backed me that I was wrong. Right, And so questions, are you more committed to the intellectual honesty or to harmony?
I would say intellectual honesty.
People would not I most people would not active.
I know, but it's like, I don't know. At some point you need to be doing that. Hey, we're talking with Mark Pinkus, founder of Zinga. He's got a new book out. It is entitled titled Life at the Speed of Play. Launch Products that people love? Are there products I mean, the product cycle is it getting shooters or longer, especially when it comes to technology, because I feel like there are things that people are so into and then they move on to the next thing, and there's so much out there.
From a consumer standpoint.
Well, I say in the book that I think there's a metric that I don't know anyone but me who focuses on it and my former teams day three sixty five retention. So if one hundred people were using your product today, you know, or a year ago today, how many would still be using it today? And it's such a hard thing to build against because we don't have a year to wait, right, But.
You never would have made your own That maybe works from a product perspective of building a company, but from a venture capital perspective, that doesn't work. You write about what attracted you to Mark Zuckerberg when he was a teenager still was that they were able to sign up, you know, school's twenty percent on the first day, the next eighty percent the next week. Like that happened instantly.
Yes, yes, I didn't know. But it turns out that this is necessary but not necessarily complete and sufficient. Is that that if you have sixty percent engagement, sixty percent of your users show up every day, which has been true to this day. With Facebook, the likelihood that you have high day three sixty five retention is highly correlated. It may not be the case, but it's highly highly correlated.
Did you know the minute you spoke with him that this was just something remarkable?
Meaning Facebook?
Yes?
Yes, and and by the way, so would you both of you.
So people who point to the fact that they invested, you know, early on in Facebook, these companies as a sign that they're a great investors, it does not necessarily mean that they are a great.
You know that their judgment is.
So great because we all would have said, yes, their access is very impressive.
You know that they had and you didn't have. So But here's what's so painful.
If you think about it, that story is less like kudos to Mark that he invested, and it's more like, like, Mark, how is it?
Like?
Think about this?
How is it that in two thousand and four when I met him, I was doing Tribe. I was doing one of the first social networks right before I started, before he did. How did I manage to fail? It's an act of willpower that I failed It wasn't just Facebook. There was eight or nine social networks.
There was bebo.
Tagged, MySpace, Friends, Friends, Sir, which I invested in. They all worked. I had to pick one idea that didn't work and stoically heroically stick with it no matter what.
I don't care.
But we are with Mark Pinkus, he's the founder of Zinga. He's the author of the new book it's out this week, Life at the Speed of Play, launch products, people love. I want to pick up with a headline that we just heard from Amy just now. It's coming from the New York Times about how open ai is leaning toward waiting until next year for its IPO. Rob Copeland and Mike Isaac writing this over at The New York Times, saying that they're holding off on their initial public offering
until next year. Three people involved in the company's deliberations said it punctuates an uncertain future for fast rising AI giants. That's again coming from the New York Times. Mark, you're an investor in open Ai. You understand also what it's like to take a company public. You did that with several companies in different periods of your professional.
Everything sometimes right, sure, yes, like the last day of the dot Com IPO.
And yeah, just you your thoughts on on open ai and its path to becoming a public company.
I I'd say, I the one hand, I'm not sure how much the timing matters other than if it changes their access to capital. So I don't think they can afford to get, you know, significantly behind in the you know, capital and.
Build out race.
But it's not clear that you know, you have to necessarily go public these days, and if you look at the the sizes of investments. So I think open Ai is just an amazing kind of generational company. And I think people who count them out and say this is all anthropic are short sighted. And I think that open Ai has to.
Catch up on the coding side.
I think we'll see that happen with Codex, and they haven't. They have a clear advantage on the consumer side, which I think is currently being under weighted. I think people wrongly think this is all just about coding and enterprise, and I just think that is where the action is right now, That's where the most revenue growth is right now. But there's no question to me that consumer, the consumer side of AI will be just as big, if not bigger. So I know.
CO two put out a report.
Calling it a six trillion dollar market, and I thought it was interesting that they they capped consumer at five hundred billion consumer AI out of six trillion.
That doesn't make sense to you.
Two trillion just for the engineering, the coding side. No, that doesn't make any sense to me. That's not the way we've seen the internet play out.
You seem to be someone who can think super big about things like how should we be thinking about AI and how it changes our world as consumers? Like how is it going to at home, at work, at play? How is it going to change or world? Or is it just another amped up way of communicating online? I don't know what is it? How do you think about it?
It's not a way to communicate online yet because it's still oddly a single player experience. Right, we're not in the AI, we're not in the GPTs and the chats together. But if you break your question down, I think, first if you think, you know, how will it impact our jobs in the job market, I think we're very very quickly transitioning from a knowledge worker economy to something else we don't have a name for, but it's going to be,
you know, a prompt worker. It's going to be about being generative, and we're going to be whatever our job is, it's.
Going to be very quickly.
I mean, it's probably changed a lot for you guys, and right the amount that we have to rely on the AI, but the amount of leverage we get and the amount that it's it's moving from a value on knowledge to a value on questions and curiosity.
But you also have to have knowledge to ask a smart question, for sure, right Like, and we're learning too, and we talk about this a lot that I forget who the one of the interviews we recently had that like, a really good question with AI is going to be several paragraphs long, right like, if you really want to get a smart, useful information.
You guys both impressively read my book and you have great questions, and I think if you'd relied on the AI, you know, and I'll say, even writing the book, I had this love hate relationship with AI that if first it's magical and you're like, oh my god, it can take this long talk it is gave and condense it or can or editing is so painful wordsmithing, and then you start reading it, and it's getting it starts to
get homogenized. Yeah, and it's like it starts to feel soulless, and it's like, where do my voice go in this? And I even try to style a guide and I'm like, I want you sound like my voice, and eventually is like, I don't want you to change my words unless you absolutely have to. And then eventually I said, you know what, it's really helpful for some things. It's part of a process to take a long talk track and condense it
to make it more organized. But I started to really kind of like a vinyl record, appreciate the imperfections of how I talk and say, you know what, that's my voice, and that's how you know it is me?
Right?
You know. A major theme in the book is making decisions that your future self will respect. You have this framework the Book of Life, which is I think a really important way to set up the book. I want to talk about that just in the last couple of minutes we have in the context of you being so public in twenty twenty four coming out and saying, after so many years and so many millions of dollars donating to democrats, I am now coming out in support of
President Trump. I was surprised, I think a lot of people to see you do that. How did your book of life framework and your idea of like looking back at that decision inform that decision at the time.
It's it's such a good question, you know. It's it's definitely not something I signed up for in my book of life. However, it's it is important to me. Intellectual honesty is important to me, and being willing to take
an unpopular stand. And and I feel like, if if I can't do that, if I'm so scared because of groupthink and the consequences of being taking a very unpopular position in my you know, a lot of my communities than who can And and it was actually my daughter Georgia I. I didn't decide until the Sunday before the
election that I was going to vote for Trump. I decided I was definitely not going to vote for Kamala, and I had lost faith in the Democrats and the mainstream media establishment that that I stopped trusting in that whole process. But I was also being very transparent in public on Twitter. I started I wrote a post in the Free Press saying not that I support Trump, but that Biden at that time in late July of twenty four felt even riskier than Trump was, and that alone started a chip storm.
If I can say that word, it's out there. Okay, so too late to pick back to.
But Georgia came to me on a Sunday before the election. She said, Dad, you know you're going to vote for
Trump at this point. And I said, yeah, I think you're probably right that then you have to tweet that because you've been so open and transparent, and I said, yeah, you're right, And so then I wrote a whole post I think the most viral post I've ever put up, because I think it was it was oddly a touchstone for a lot of people because I was kind of like, this that big Democratic donor and breaking ranks, you know, was and I'm kind of like, it's funny to call it,
but I'm kind of like part of the like rank and file Silicon Valley founders, and so it was I think a little scary to some of the establishment to see this crumbling. And and I put the post out and I put my reasons out, and it was on the front page of the New York Post like the next day.
I didn't think it would be news, and.
You know, and it really really it was much louder than I anticipated. And but I was like, you know, what if if I'm gonna do it, I'm I'm I'm not gonna. It's silly that we should have to hide our political views because we're tagged with an identity. And I'll just say this, I'm not on any team. And I said that throughout. I said, I'm not on team Democrats, I'm not on team Maga. It sounds cheesy. I'm team America.
I'm team my family community. And in this environment where we just saw three pretty extreme left democratic socialists win in New York, I don't know that any of us can really say we're identified with one party, because who the party is is really shifting. I'm a Chicago liberal. That's I've always been that. I'm you know, socially liberal. I want people to have their own rights and freedoms, and I'm fiscally and economically conservative.
I want to see a responsible government.
I think I'm stating some obvious things here that eighty percent of people one hundred, I don't know ninety percent of people agree with and so for that to then define me as being right, you know, far right, and to hear journalists, I need to get a I couldn't find a far right founder in San Francisco.
Can I interview you? And I'm like, you want me? I'm far right?
I'm like, I'm still here, nothing's changed, so yeah, yeah, it's so it's And the partner with my future self is I I.
Even though it.
Was painful and there was some dislocations and I did lose a couple of dear friendships over it, I am happy that Mark twenty twenty four. No, I'm happy Mark twenty twenty four took a stand.
God. I feel like that's a perfect place to wrap. We don't really want to wrap. We hope you will come back.
This is really fun and I was not expecting you guys to have read my whole book and have all of these really insightful questions.
So I hope you guys.
Follow the the you know, the format in my book. I hope that you take an idea, prosecute it, and as a side hustle, you build a huge business and then this becomes your hobby.
I love it. I love it. You give us a lot to think about, and I have to tell you. We still have a bunch of questions like I mean it, please come back, I love I love it. Mark Pinkas, founder of Zing, of course, founder of several companies, but his new book is Life at the Speed of Play, launch products people love. There's a lot in here and a lot of great stories.