You know, Mark, you don't need much introduction, but you know, we got to work
together a million years ago. You were, you were founder of Zynga, but repeat,
founder before that. And you know, have done a bunch of really interesting things.
Since you incubated a bunch of companies, invested in a bunch of companies,
you continue to be really passionate about helping founders. So thanks for
coming. What does foundermo mean to you? Who are you as a founder and how
did that manifest in your companies? It used to be that
you as a founder that were like the employee
of the venture capitalists and that was normal.
That was life in Silicon Valley. And at my first few
companies and so long before this term,
founder mode came about, which I love. Like a lot of founders, I had a
chip on my shoulder because I'd had these painful experiences
where you have VCs who are smart, but they
come into your board meeting, if you're lucky, once a month, once a quarter.
Either way, there's no way what you're
doing is moving so fast, sometimes by the day or the week, and there's
just no way that they can be fully informed unless you take
it on as a second full time job to keep your board completely
up to speed on the issues. And so they come in lacking the data
and information that you have, but they want to make big
decisions on strategy. And so what ends
up happening on most boards, unfortunately, is that you're
managing your board and you're trying to guide them to
wherever you want. And it's scary if your board gets into
just an open ended strategy debate with you where they may
come out in a different place, especially if you are trying to
do something risky and unpopular, which is probably what you're going to have to do
a lot of. Because maybe Andreessen came in believing
that you were going to be this consumer, you know,
the next GPT for, you know, elder nursing,
health care, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out you realize
like that dog isn't going to hunt, that hill's not takeable.
And then what do you do? You get this bad pit in your stomach and
you've got a team, you're supposed to look confident and you have this team behind
you and investors and they're kind of paying you to be confident.
Boards don't like it when the CEO comes in and says, you know,
that this whole thing we've been doing, it's just not going
to work. They're like, oh, okay, so what's
the plan? You're like, well, we need some time. I'M not sure what the.
Like, if you're being totally honest, you're like, I don't know what the plan is
and there's a real question that you're probably, you're going to
face this like it's. I'm not saying it's 100% likely. Let's just say it's probably
80%. And the question is,
have you aligned your investors, your board,
your team that this is going to be a really bumpy,
scary fucking nutso ride?
How ambitious are you and how willing are you to go
through periods of being disliked or even sometimes you're
gonna win the war but lose every battle
on the way to get there? And I've been there so long story on
founder mode. But for me, before I had control,
I had a company support.com, really boring enterprise
software help desk automation software, but valuable.
And we went public with one of the only two companies who go
public then of the dot com because we were a real company and we
sold. We were doing 170 million in subscription
software. It wasn't called SaaS yet. But after we went public we.
I saw the writing on the wall that inside the firewall all
Internet purchases were over. After the dotcom crash, CIOs were licking
wounds. They were not going to go to their CEO and spend spend millions
on something with.com in the name and they weren't going to spend money on anything
inside the firewall. So anyway, I said that business is
going away completely. We need to invent a new
version of our business which is outside the firewall. And I realized
that cable companies and Internet service providers had this big
opportunity but we didn't have the right product for it. So my investors
had no interest in the company until we were one of the only ones in
their portfolio that could go public. And then all of a sudden they're like,
oh, this is interesting. This could be worth billions. You're 31,
you've never run a public company. We need a real CEO. And then so it's
like be careful what you wish for. They got interested and then they forced me
to hire a real CEO who was a bad micromanager
who had no understanding of product or sales. But,
but she had gray hair and she had been at hp.
It's weird, I'm never in the right spot because now gray hair is not good
and I've got it. So it's always the opposite.
I had to get this company on this other path
and I negotiated this deal for 25 million that was a
quarterly subscription deal because I knew
I was going to get pushed out. But I knew they also couldn't say
no to this and it forced them to build a product anyway. My point about
Founder Mode is after the pain of that experience and realizing
I had to leave my own company for it to make
it, by the time I got to Zynga, I said, I'm going to
build a house I want to live in. And I want to encourage you to
think about what's a house you want to live in, every aspect of
it. We talk about culture, but what does that even mean? You need to
make sure that you're hiring people in that
you're hiring investors in that are aligned with this
mission and the kind of company you want to create. And you need a fail
safe button in case that doesn't work. Control.
And I always say the only term that matters in your term sheet is
control. Like, I would take half the valuation for
control because at the end of the day, like, it's what lets
you make sure that this is going to be the company you want
and the direction you want and you're not going to have to leave it.
And oddly, I still had to leave Zynga even though I had control.
I fired myself twice.
But then the only reason I really was able to come back with
Marcus Siegel, who's here, and save the company from ruin
was because I had this control
mechanism in place. And even with control, once you're
public, all bets are off and you really kind of need board consensus.
But anyway, the net of it is Founder mode is
an awesome thing. Don't listen to the information
or all these adults that say, oh, founder mode
is an excuse to be a jerk. And it's actually an excuse for
bad entrepreneurs to have too much control. Because no
one's a bad entrepreneur. If someone's giving you money, they're voting for you.
So they might as well be all in with you.
Like, if you're giving money to this
founder but you're at some point not gonna trust them,
when at any point in the journey,
your money's gone anyway. You've spoken before at Speedrun and it's been
extremely value about truesignal and how that sort of like, is the
only source of conviction that, you know, kind of really, really matters. Can you talk
a little bit about what TrueSignal is and how to sort of fuel conviction so
that you can make the best use of your control? Sure. So I'm trying to
get a book done on all this and My editor,
I've been working on this for like three years. I've talked about it here for
like three years. And my editor finally like gave me like
June, drop dead. She's like, you have to deliver us the book by June.
Which I'm glad she's putting a gun in my head. But it's called Life at
the Speed of Play and it's my PM Bible. We used to call the
PM Bible. So I'm trying to have my whole stack in it. And it starts
with, I think everything we're doing starts with this one fundamental
concept that we have to separate our winning instincts
from our losing ideas. You're here probably because there's some instinct
that you feel in your gut. It might be a gigantic one about
the AI wave. It might be something much more specific
that relates to the product that you're trying to build. Don't stick to your one
idea. Assume all new fails. Write that on the wall.
All new fails. That's your time machine. All new fails.
If all new worked, we'd be using new shit all the time. But how often
do you change what's on the front of your iPhone? How often do the top
10 or 25 apps change? They haven't changed in eight years. Cause all
new fails, a million new apps a year, they all fail.
If you can change your odds instead of one
shot on goal, you could take four instead of. And also
say I'll get to True Signal but burn this idea of mvp,
minimum viable product. That is the death zone.
Okay, I'm sorry. It was a great idea for a while
and now it's not going to serve us anymore. MVP is
it terrible concept if you think about it. Because it's going
to take you too long to fail and it will fail. How many of
us want to use a minimum viable product? When I can use a maximum launchable
product, why would I take the minimum viable product? We got to get to minimum
viable idea state. You should fail 1,000
times a week. We should be build failure machines.
We have a chance to to get to an A and get
to traction. Especially right now when people are moving into a state of discovery
again. But it's not going to happen. You don't want to bet on random chance.
So True Signal is perfection and
we know it when we see it. You know when you hear maybe
a song that resonates for you, I see it with my
2 year old that certain songs, you know,
Circle, Unbroken, he's got True Signal on that song. When you use
a product, look at Yourself in the third person and think,
what is my experience? Is it resonating? Or am I forcing myself to because it's,
you know, my job or whatever. When something really speaks
to you, become a student of that, because that's true
signal. And when it's not true signal, that's when you're struggling with,
oh, this clicked five times better than this. And these metrics
look good. Or this one worked more like that. You come up with a million
excuses to fail and to be a victim. And I'll
just say this leads into the core of
my approach to product making, which is not inspiring.
Proven. Better. New. And this was the core of
what we did at Zynga. It was our religion. And I invite you
to. To make a version of this,
your religion. Take this. Take whatever I've
created, others have created. Nikita, I think, talks to
you guys. He has brilliant things around. He just put something out that I sent
to my whole team that I loved. Steal from everywhere all the best ideas and
then come up with your own version of it. Don't rote follow anyone's but mine
with proven better. New is to start with whatever
category you're going in de risk it. So start with what is proven.
Proven means 10 out of 10 of the existing users of
that product like that and say, fuck yeah. And you like
that. You, your team, everyone's like, yeah, that works.
That weather app, whatever it is,
capture that. And you don't have the right to change.
Proven. Like change it legally. Don't copy the art,
but you should copy every other pixel
of that experience. And you do not have the right to change. Proven you are
not good enough to change. Proven you have not taken enough time to change.
Proven it is an art that we do not completely understand.
Better means 10 out of
10 of the current users say, fuck yeah. What you think is better, that's called
new. That's not better. When you say it's better, that's cause you're fucking naive.
Grow up. Grow up. And this is Katie
is gonna give this back to me. I need to fucking grow up too.
I'm guilty of this. We all are. Cause we get emotional. We fall in love
with our own ideas. So we need something to hold us accountable.
Zynga Poker. Proven.
Copied. Every other poker game out there just picked one.
Indecipherable. The difference didn't change a thing. Same color
table. Felt everything. Better. No download. That was it.
Who wants. Do you want to download with some weird malware thing on your
computer or no download. Turns out you Lose half your users every time
you click download. So don't even need to ask.
I know that's better. New was pictures of real people
and often your friends. That new worked. I got
lucky. It worked on my first time. That is lightning in a bottle. You can't
ever plan for that. We just got to look through the user's eyes and not
our peers. This isn't about getting respect around this little bubble here
that doesn't fucking matter. This is about people
in Chicago and Indiana and this is
about normal real life humans,
not us. Like really this resonating and they
don't care if you copied that doesn't
matter to. They don't care how innovative it is. All they care
about is does it feel better? And they can't even tell you why. Think of
a product like Slack. I thought it was brilliant because there was nothing new in
it. It was just more cuddly interface. I think they said
Namaste when you signed in.
That's awesome. But the innovation just often
comes in littler bits like with Words with
Friends with some of our games. So anyway and I'm not saying don't innovate
because you're going to have to. And that's how we find a vein. Especially when
it feels like a red ocean. When distribution feels so
impossible. We need something that sounds and feels
really novel to get people interested. Many of the founders here are
hiring their first employees, building out the initial core teams.
What have you learned about building teams and what advice would you give to the
founders about their first hires? The whole idea that your first
20 people or 30 people or whatever the number
is, you have to go really carefully because that's
going to be your founding team
and that's going to be that. Every one of those has to
be best in class or however you think about. I think that's
a myth also. That doesn't serve us. And I personally think
that you need to tune for speed and realize that it's so
hard to know up front who is going to be the great people.
Like I had had a couple of companies. One went public, one was sold.
I was not a first time founder. I still couldn't get a
Josh or a Marcus and I didn't have the time to
try to get them. I fished in the bottom of the app store
like I not my team, me. I sat there and I'm
not the App Store. The Facebook app directory, soon after they were launched I
found people had good looking Flash and apps and
games that went nowhere and I just kept Messaging them. And this kid,
Justin waldron, who was 18, living on his mom's couch.
Oops. Living on his mom's couch in Connecticut. Just found him,
hired him by the hour. He worked for me for
I don't know, four or five, six months before I even met him. Everyone was
like in different countries, virtual. I had stand up calls
for like two hours and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet and I
was like, you know, blah de blah in Pakistan. What were you supposed to do
yesterday? Did you do it? And that was. And that was the company.
You would have laughed. It was so inefficient, so ragtag.
I used hiring as an interview practice. I mean that was my interview
funnel. Anyone who said they knew php, we hired them and
then we kept like half or less that actually could do php.
And that was how I hired people. But you know what, I got people fast.
And I found these gems in the rough. Like JW
ended up being like a savant. He was.
You know, to get an 18 year old who is a gamer in your
company early on turns out to be just game
changing. But how would I have ever found and hired a jw? I wouldn't
have. They were doing me a bit of a favor by joining me. At the
point that they did. They had lots of other options and
I'm glad they joined but early on you just,
you can't wait. And so I would tell you don't be
too careful and you could try use hiring as
an interview practice. Things you'll only hear here please.
Let's give Mark a huge round of applause.
You know I used to to be neighbors with Craig from Craigslist.
He introduced. Took him two years to introduce
photos with listings. Who the fuck doesn't want to see a picture of the couch
that you're driving across town to buy? This is another especially looking around the
room. This is another real like foot and mouth opportunity. I'm good at that.
But hey, we live in a new world now where we're allowed to like mostly
say what we want, right? There's only a few chuckles. Mark and Jackals.
This is good. I'll give you your contact info to everyone so they can complain
when they made the wrong hires.