My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today and LA Times Best-Seller! I think you’ll find it useful.

Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He’s a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play.

You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

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Key Learnings

Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them.

“You throw to where you swing. You don’t swing to where you throw.” His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You’ll miss. You’ll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you’re serious and puts the ball where it belongs.

You play to get better. You don’t play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game?

Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious.

Don’t contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga’s chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: “No jerks allowed.” She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too.

You’ll have periods out of alignment. That’s okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can’t swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you’re aligned with the philosophy.

Bill Campbell’s two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors.

A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically.

The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they’re a ten out of ten on ambition. 

Mark’s test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you’re doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back?

Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That’s why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga.

Mark isn’t all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. “When the fish are running, we’re up all night throwing nets until they’re done running, not until we’re tired.”

The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning.

Your kids don’t follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. “How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They’re not listening to what Dad says. They’re following what Dad does.”

Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That’s Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked.

There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don’t have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents.

Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he’d ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle. 

He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that’s the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. “Creatively, that’s freedom.”

Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you’ve felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users’ hands every week, it ruins you. You can’t be happy with less.

Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice.

The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them.

King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo’s entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he’d run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them.

Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he’d run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had.

Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, “Yeah, I’m buying. What else you got?”

We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn’t what’s the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It’s: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here?

The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn’t a journal. It’s a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes.

Partner with your future self. “What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?”

It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. “I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?” A year later he quit his job and did something bigger.

Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don’t believe in the goal.

When Mark is at his lowest, he’s humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he’s winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn’t humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in.

Mark’s champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he’s built a product people find real meaning in.

Reflection Questions

  • If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now? 
  • What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO?
  • What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it?

More Learning

#688: Dr. Henry Cloud – Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go

#689: Eric Ries – Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great

#687: Jim Collins – What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck

Episode Chapters

00:00 Meet Mark Pincus

01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches

02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People

04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player

07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell

09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak

13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders

14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids

20:55 How Mark Defines Success 

23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle

29:45 Why High Achievers Can’t Retire

32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter

34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow

35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex

38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45

41:39 The Book of Life

45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest

46:48 The Champagne Question

48:40 EOPC