Mark Pincus is the creator behind Farmville and Words with Friends. He built Zynga into one of the biggest gaming companies in the world and helped shape the early era of social products on the internet.

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In this conversation, he breaks down how to spot winning ideas early, why most startups build the wrong thing, and why you should always copy what’s proven.

He shares lessons from building Zynga, missing the opportunity behind social networking before Facebook took off, navigating platform risk during Zynga’s explosive growth, and rebuilding his life when he thought everything was lost.

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1. “Know your goal, or suffer a death by a thousand compromises.”
2. “Great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They speak to some human instinct or need that we’ve been feeling and it’s been unexpressed or unmet.”
3. “Some people have tact and others tell the truth.”
4. “I just started writing in a notebook about why my life sucked so badly.”
5. “Are there small things and big things that are in my control that I could go do now that I will thank myself for doing later?”
6. “If we’re starting with what if everything goes wrong, you’re playing defense and you’ve lost before you’re even out of the gates.”
7. “Our instincts are almost always right and our ideas are usually wrong.”
8. “All new fails. It doesn’t mean you don’t do new. Of course not. It means you take a different approach to new, which is you can’t try one new idea because it’s going to fail. You can’t try one new version of your new idea. You have to try many, many variants of each new idea and many new ideas and look in much smaller atomic units of innovation for new.”
9. “If you want to be a great product maker, you need to commit to a career of deconstructing and just anytime a new product comes out, be a student of yourself in that experience and what is it that feels great or doesn’t?”
10.  ”You owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct. You owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself. It’s your right to be wrong. You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny.”
11. “Too many teams waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don’t have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”​

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