Mark Pincus
Founder of Zynga and Workplay Ventures, Mark Pincus is a serial internet entrepreneur and investor known for pioneering social gaming, investing in major technology companies, and authoring Life at the Speed of Play, a product-building framework for entrepreneurs and innovators.
Copy Proven Mechanics Before Testing New Product Ideas
Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus tells Reid Hoffman on Masters of Scale that founders should be more disciplined about copying what already works before adding anything new. His “Proven, Better, New” framework argues that product teams should isolate risk: replicate proven mechanics, make only improvements users would immediately recognize, and treat novelty as a hypothesis likely to change or fail. Pincus applies the same logic to AI, where cheaper building may make founders more attached to weak ideas rather than better at killing them.
Winning Products Copy Proven Behavior and Isolate What Is Actually New
Mark Pincus, the Zynga founder behind FarmVille and Words With Friends, argues that founders are usually right about the human need they sense and wrong about the first product they build around it. In a conversation with Shane Parrish, Pincus lays out a product doctrine built around copying what is already proven, isolating the genuinely new risk, and testing for “heat” before teams spend months building respectable products nobody wants.