The Quest for True Signal: How Zynga Spotted Mobile
48:04 Share

I don't really even believe in minimum viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time you do not have the time to build your product and fail and do IT again.

I ve always felt I was the worst employee ever. I got fired a live in one where another every job I ve hugging. I'm not a good employee.

I was in dc. I had to hire these kids out of real state broker firms and give them a tional textbooks. And I SAT down next to them. And we tried to learn we were clicking view source. We want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year.

You might recognize the name mark pink, us, but I can almost guarantee you recognize the game farm fill. Mark pink is is, of course, the founder and long time C E. O of zinger, known for its massive global franchise games, including those household names like ARM bell and words with brands.

Singer was also at the forefront of the transition to mobile and these large platforms like facebook for distribution. And if you need any reminder of how big I got resolved in twenty twenty two to game publisher, take two for a wapping twelve point seven billion dollars. Mark, of course, is also founded several other companies, including support of com and tried networks.

And today he said, some john partner on the asic extension games team who have previously worked at singa and meta about how to prepare for major tech waves, and specifically, what quote true signal to pay attention to. Mark also candidly covers so many other topics, including how to give yourself permission to be too early, whether he things we're still getting the metaverse broken resume. s.

And his stake on a silicon valley standard minimum viable products or M V P. S. This is a really fun conversation for people both inside and outside the games industry, and IT comes directly from our asic cy games accelerator speed run, which is going through its second cohorn right now and will have more details about how you can potentially attend our demoted and merge.

All right, enjoy. Oh, and by the way, this was one of many more sessions recorded during our exclusive multiple k games fund accelerator, but we call speed run. And the good news in fact, the great news is that we just announced speed run three point out, which is coming to loss Angeles. So if you're founder or have thought about funding your company or quite Frankly, just know someone that should found a company at the intersection of games and technology, 没 sure to tell them about speed run， three point out can learn more at a extended out com flash speed run, or you can find the link in our life.

As a reminder.

the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any asic cy fund. Please note that a six scenes year in a zophernes may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this park cast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a extended outcome slash disclosure.

IT was in his best known for facebook and eventually mobile. But actually I started well before that. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that.

sir. I'm not well known, Polly, for good reason for starting one of the first three social networks called trip down that which failed, which is kind of an amazing feet to actually fail as one of first social networks when everything worked. But that did altering lead to singer.

And I say that where singer came from was after tribe in these times, like right now, and this time when there was amazing growth around web to and social networking. You start to feel this kind of weird formal because why haven't I figured that out? And so I went into what I call this abyss, where you're just kind of like, I know I want to do something.

I want to be innovating on new consumer product ideas, but there's no obvious place. And I actually spent a long time trying to buy seen net because I thought, if I own seen net, I have this captive audience. And I spent all this time with bankers and private equity people, and it's you're not much Better jobs.

S, their jobs are so boring. And so while that was happening, facebook was opening their API. And I said, oh, that's free. I don't even have to buy. And when they have a captive audience, they had seventy billion to a years.

And I had this instinct from tribe that what people really wanted to do at this social cocktail party was play games together. And I thought games was amazing business, which you may not even be aware of today. But in two thousand and seven, when I started games with a mature and even declining business, the whole game industry was twenty billion dollars.

That was mainly council gaming. And there was maybe like a billion dollars of PC gaming and zero web. IT wasn't a top ten activity, but IT was big.

So I thought I was kind of like search before a google. That search was a big but mature business and then google reimagined IT. And one thing you're probably all aware of so much today is the distribution is kind of the hardest part of the equation in gaming.

And there was no distribution, there was no way to market games to a mouse market audience. And so all games were made for a very hard core audience. And then with facebook, there was finally a distribution channel. So that's how I got to do IT. So one of the .

really interesting things that is, suddenly this opportunity came along and IT worked. So maybe a compound and questions like, one, how do you, as a founder, prepare for these like big waves? And then second is, how do you sort of to know when something is working?

Well, I serve badly, but I serve for so long that IT actually is a perfect analog because they saw this last year. But when you're surfing, all you can do is try to be where you think they'll be. waves.

Surfing is almost a chess game where you're trying to figure out the tides, the weather, the swell. What are other surfers thinking of? IT is this kind of interesting three chess game. And everyone's looking at surf line. They're the same data you have.

So you trying to figure out, like, is this the day that i'm going to go to ocean beach and that won't round me and no other surfers will be there? I'll have this epic day. There's a lot of that around startups, and there's a lot of heroin way. There's a lot of being too early and wrong and then trying to decide to stay here and see if there's a way or not.

And one thing that my friend read hofman said to me a couple months ago, and I think he's one of the smartest thinkers and earliest thinkers around AI, is he said, you need to focus on the easiest unself problem that will have the biggest impact, which is really hard. Like how do you come up with an easy problem that no one else to solve that has a big impact. And what I keep thinking is that what were all china do is get to what I called true signal.

So not what's getting a lot of VC funding or whatever else is doing or what's popular right now. But if it's a consumer focused opportunity, like how do I know that this is something that a lot of consumers and people would like if they just had IT in front of and IT hard? Because you've gotta learn over time and to calibrate, like which data should you listen to that has choose signal and which has false say. Now I could talk for a long, long time, and I think it's the public as science to pursue by itself.

This is one of the hardest, I think, for the gaming industry. Founders are making often times experiences, and they have sometimes present as either working or not working. But really, there's so much more under the surface.

Yeah I mean, I have so much to unpack there. And the core for me when you think about this true signal concept is that I like to say that we have these winning instincts, and you are partly being here today, can probably already trust the instinct that that you have been right. But then we put these losing ideas on top of our winning instincts.

And I had this instinct in two thousand, three for a bunch of things. But one was that we should build that, order a taxi through our phone. And so I registered email taxi that come and did a whole business plan around IT.

And I thought, this is an awful plan. I'm going to have to work with the taxi companies. I could get a million rides a month at a dollar ride. There's a lot of work to get to a twelve million dollar business and dealing with these awful taxi companies. So I had this instinct, but my idea was completely wrong.

And IT never occurred to me that years later, uber would figure out to let anyone be a driver and do this magical up that we all take for grand enough. So that's just an example of that. But in the gaming industry, that happens all the time or even right now with A I, we can get an instinct.

I don't know about you guys, but I see something that's true signal right now with my friends and family, the way that they are using ChatGPT, the way that I have to literally stop my daughter from doing your homework on IT because she's not going to learn that you might learn the new still SHE needs, but you won't learn skills she's supposed to be doing in school right now. And even watching my partner, she's on mid journey for hours doing room designs and imagining so to me, that's true signal and I look like, okay, there's something for sure that's happening that if that we're easier and more available, I think everyone would be using this all the time. So like, okay, that's true signal.

I don't know the right ideas to put on top of that, but that feels like a wave to me. And well, i'll say where I i've gotten true signal wrong is when I was talking a year ago about blockchain gaming, I think so many people took the wrong signals in that and would be carefully is a true signal of White. Because what we didn't see in blockchain gaming or blockchain was true signal of consumer adoption, right? What we saw day trading and gambling, that's a real thing that people into.

But the adopt something didn't happen. And a lot of the game companies were thinking, well, everyone is going na want to own assets. They were half right. I think what we kind of know now is we saw true signal in blockchain gaming around monodist ation.

So I do believe that people see more value in owning the money they spend in a game, having the potential that they could trade and sell that to somebody later. And being gorden always said, if you have a marketplace in the game, you double value of the assets the people buy. So that's real.

So I think we should hang on to that true signal for monodist ation, but not adoption. So eventually, I think all these things get put together and we have a new reason that people want to play games that they find really fun and emergent and new. And then there's blocks, chain assets and you monetize you. You have all kinds of new whales. Make sense.

make sense. So you talked some about lessons from the web three wave. Obviously, we're big believer s that generate I is this new oncoming wave. And so you talked about some things that you ve seen, some signal you've seen if you're founded today and you see this wave coming.

what would you do about IT the coaching i've been giving myself for the last eighteen months and it's reminder of so many hard lessons that we got. A singer is give yourself permission to be too early because I feel like that's what we all need to write down and say to ourselves right now. And what I mean by that is it's OK to be too early and you're going to be too early now.

It's tough. Like you look at when went into mobile, our biggest problem is we are way too early and too aggressive. That was the problems that you had everywhere.

But we went big into mobile. We said, this is gonna be our way off a facebook. And motivation, every reason in the world to love mobile is singer. We had an eight hundred person division, but we returning dollars into pennies.

And so we got to a point that on an ambitious person like josh OK, do I want to work on the next mobile game that might get to fifty thousand a day, or I can work on this web game is not that interesting, but it's going to do five hundred thousand day. We got all our best people dove in the mobile, and then they all left mobile early. And we couldn't get really good teams to keep working on mobile.

So today, with A I I just think we've gotta keep trying things and it's moving so fast and realized that what you're doing today might be obsolete in three months or six months. There might be a new release, but hopefully you're learning building skills, building team and you're in the right place. So there might be little waves coming that are crashing over you on the head and and you know like, shit, i'm in the wrong place.

You're still in the right place. I would have the kind of staying power and fortitude think about the macro. And except that at least everything i've done, worked done the last eighteen months or three years has been wrong and it's been the wrong ideas.

And i'm OK about IT because I feel so stronger that this macro and by the way, I still believe that what we're going on up getting is going to somehow be the metaverse. And that's a really unpopular thing to say today. Even zuker doesn't really talk about metaverse and maybe he'll change the name back from Better than something else.

If you think about the definition, al of metaverse is being blurring the lines between analog and digital. I like to say that we're had to towards life at the speed of play. So to me, the north star that I think about that I think all this comes together around is imagine like we can type of tweet too quickly, easily, were happy that there's an hour to edit or deleted.

I am at least because and darren, who works with me, will now Kevin will take that awful, take that down. It's missile. It's embarrassing. But I can put up a tweet and and actually has real world impact. And so I think of the metaverse is being making the virtual real.

We started that with farm will in a little way, and that really had a gentle and I think that's an important part of gaming, but an important part of just what we're doing, digital. You could put up a tweet and something real comes out of that to me, that's powerful. And that's why I think elon so into twitter as like the biggest is his metaverse.

It's this big game that has real world impact. And I think that's the beginning of this thread that we're on with A I I think that we're going to get to a place that you're going to type in something and it's going to turn into a whole business or store or maybe a lot of your company with services an hour later. That's something real to me. That's life to dispute of play, and that's the metaverse. So that's the bigger thing that I keep thinking we're headed towards.

We can spend a lot of time in the medi verse instead. I mean, I just a little bit you've now gotten to sort of see the evolution of consumer tech in lots of ways, and you've also gotten to work with lots of amazing founders. What are the three lines on what makes for a successful founder, given that everything else changes, nothing is static? How do you founders prepare themselves? And what are the attributes of really great founders?

I keep thinking of founder from a consumer standpoint. So you have to take over the grand all, but I found a bunch china with brian chess ki, and he's kind of molded in the poll gram school of like first start with something that you could use. He gets to his own true signal, and he does such a good job of building things in a non scalable way.

Even now, i'm so impressed with his commitment to getting to an a, not to b plus. I say, don't let A B plus be the enemy of an a. So I see him say it's not ready, is not good enough, and do things by hand. You may not even have noticed, but airbnb has something I think called experiences. I got involved and I were named IT trips.

It's done really well, but I took him years and years to make this experience product because he would set up by hand a dinner that Michael mina would prepare for you and the most interesting person would come as again and you'd be like, i'm not that excited about IT. Like I personally, Michael meda seems great, but I don't want him to come to my house and cook dinner because IT feels like an obligation. Like I have to find all over IT and be impressed.

And I just want good food fast. I'll go to his restaurant if I want his food. So I wouldn't have gotten experience either, but I was like, brand, what I would like is when I rent a surf house in mali, i'd like some wax surfboards already there.

I'd like a local to patala with me, so I don't get angry, thinking eyes from other locals. And like, that's cool. So we think this in terms of that company.

So he's on the best job of that. I think read of man. I work on a lot of things with so many lessons I get from read as a founder.

He's so strategic. And what i've gotten as a lesson, that's a hard one i'm trying to learn now from read is read doesn't pursue something until he has a CEO for IT. And actually, this is how I did a singer, right? So I couldn't do IT.

Also, I had to get a CEO. I want to be a gm and owner of something before I could fund IT. And I have too much for a tendency as a founder to just want to be the CEO that myself, but then IT doesn't move without me. And so I think there is this lesson that once you're trying to get a lot done of being really good at turning people around you into CEO, letting them be ceos, getting on their way.

maybe is a follow on that. A lot of the founders here, they got other cofounder ers. They're gonna be hiring their first teams here shortly. Any advice for the founders here on out of how to find amazing people to work with? Because I think I had a really good track record of being a collection of amazing talent.

Yeah, I think these are some pretty different ideas or principles that i've used around people that mayor may not resonate with you guys right now. But I think you have to be realistic about where you are and who you can get. I was a multi I time successful founder.

I couldn't even get a investors or any investors to start with. Like what I was doing just sounded so flaky and just facebook apps. Do you have any respect for yourself? Is that really what you're doing? And I like to start rubbing sticks together.

I don't start with a big amount of money and stuff. I don't build that. It's here.

You want to come work from mark on this project. He's funded this with three hundred and fifty k and this little office owns no eight. Eight people want to do that.

There is no job security. We're doing this little facebook APP. So everything i've done is started out feeling flaky.

And no matter what my track record is, even now i'm trying to recruit people, I get what I can get. And i'm just realistic about IT when I start my first company. But you know what, you can find these diamonds and a rough.

There's this kid. Jw, just in modern, I found him by fishing through failed facebook apps with ten users. And I would send messages out when I love your APP.

Can we talk? I was the only message he got that month. He melt right back, and I heard him for fifty, sixty box an hour.

He was living on his mom's couch and connected. He was eighteen, self taught. IT was six months for a medicine person.

This was not someone who a lot of people were after, but he was passionate about games. And he became, like this, his super successful in his own right today as a cofounder. So you can get these broken resumes.

Non resumes, I would say, don't over optimize in the beginning on people. I mean, this is, I don't know, this is good to tweet. This is you can, but this is not what you probably, here I went, waste a lot of time.

I get the best you can and move the fuck on. And i'm also not good at interviewing. My interview process was hiring.

I was just hire everyone who is willing and keep the good ones. I'm like that's what I did. I was just trying to move that unlike PHP cool, you're hired.

That's all afraid PHP. Apparently I don't know shit about coding. So also for me to hire counters, all I knew was which code worked.

And like this one seems like a great engineer because there are works. So but I moved fast and I actually was shocked. I didn't know who would be great and and I found really great people that way.

And then we were a lot more successful than josh came a lot later. So josh was obviously in a player I got later. But once we got traction and we were more successful, I start being able to get Better and Better people.

And I eventually did get these amazing city and great people. But anyway, it's always hard to get great people. And I would tune more to who's excited about what you're doing and willing to dive in. And then if they're no good, don't keep up.

amazing. One other thing that I wanted touch on for my time is in is you did this great job of we have this company value everyone as A C, E O. Be your own C, E.

O. And that is not easy to do at a small company and at a big company. How did you come up with that? And how did you go?

I've always felt that way because I was the worst employee ever. I got fired, asked to leave in one where another, every job ever hacks. I'm not a good employee.

I've learned i'm only a good team player if i'm running the team. And that a lot of you, I was what I call all the expert witness. Every job was in. I was closest to the answer in the data, further from the decision, and the adults would make the decisions and then tell me IT. And then I had to make IT work.

And I was super frustrated and half engaged, disengage and said, I want to find people like me who feel this frustration, and then I want to give them enough rope to hang himself. And some will hang themselves that others won't. And what I learned was I got so much more done, and so much Better things done by turning people in the eos.

IT only works if you hire people who want to be a CEO. IT doesn't work to take people who are passive and not in some being and people you're a CEO and the like, they just sit there and do nothing. What I start to learn over time is that people who are really ambitious aren't actually focused right now on the pay and the equity in the money and self.

That, of course, matters. But there actually really focused on being in a position of much greater responsibility that anyone else will give them. And you can hire people and give them a lot of responsibility so much that IT scares them.

In a way, I can believe that they just asked me to do this and get more out of them. And it's a really good management hacked because I am not good at management people and i'm too impatient to learn how to be a good manager. I don't do one on ones, but if you get people that can be ceos, you don't theoretically ally have to spend the time magine them, but you can be a fake CEO.

You can't say your CEO and they're not really they are have to have a real here. They're taking some real responsibility, real degrees of freedom. okay.

One last follow for me. And then I think we'll try to open IT up something that we think is really important and that you sort of wistfully hard on is when you're try to right away, you just going to move fast. You got to iterate, you're not going to know all the things.

And so you might as well fuck up a few times, learn from me. And if you can do that fast than everyone else, you. So maybe talk a little bit about that because we think we're the onset of lots of interesting opportunities. So how would you set of approach that?

So i'll be in my book when IT comes out someday by core philosophies made a product management is a and IT took me so many years of being so inefficient and stubbing before I got to think, let's assume at the outset that your idea is just wrong and it's like a time machine because what if you could come back from two years in the future or you're on a shorter time for from here, maybe it's six months or one year and say the thing you're working on was the right wave, but your idea just was wrong.

I just wasn't quite right. What would you do with that information today? Would you just heroically still go with this one idea because you're committed and you've got funding and i'm doing A B to b game tall, what if from the future you came back and said, you know what, that thing your building actually was the shit.

But the time you can take you to sell that into some game companies are too dumb to know it's ever useful. You never got there. But the thing you're building, if you just unleash that to consumers, they were going to just go bananas and love IT.

Would you do something differently? So I know everyone talks about pivots. Pivots are too slow, take too long.

And people talk about MVP building the minimum viable product. I don't really even believe in minim viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state. We don't have the time you do not have the time to build your product and and do that again, you may be out of money and time by them.

So how can you move faster than that? That's too slow for what we today in the world of AI, we need to get to minimum viable idea state, and you need to separate what that ideas from the underline instinct ts that you are pursuing and say, even before you start that one idea, you and your team, me to come up, what are your ten other variants? That idea, what's someone else in your space doing? Are you spending as much time looking at their ideas that relate your instincts as your own? You probably should be spending brain cycles fifty to sixty percent of your time looking at whatever also around you is doing and trying to see why they're wrong or why they are kind of almost right.

And then half the time on your own. And then when you're on your own, can you come up with a faster process? When I started with singer, IT was kind of shooting fish in a barrel.

Because we are competing against the E. S. These game company is suspect two years putting out a game to learn from. And we said we want to take as many shots on goal in a week as the industry does in a year. That was our montreal.

How do we learn as many shots on that go in one week as the industry in a year? And now with hyper casual, they move faster than that. Even I loved your ideas at rushed in his zone, where he is trying to build a whole kind of new way to liver.

J, I, for game companies to build out three d assets and animations. right? Unstable to fusion, god help you. Because so much of the first part of what you're doing is already proved in and done by other people.

The hard part for him is how does he build the proof in pieces that everyone else is already doing also? And how do you do that quickly and cheaply and not waste any time on that? Because already done, you need to legally copy everything you see who's on the best figured, how to copy what they've done, so you can get to the edge, right? And the edge is what's Better and what's new.

And Better is not what you think is Better. That's the first place we get IT wrong. What you think is Better is actually new.

Better is nine or ten out of ten of your target customers say fuck Better is half the Price, right? Better is everyone says Better. Like when we put out singa poker, IT was proven and Better and a little new.

And the Better was there was no download. IT was a poker game that had no software download. Ten out of ten people would say yes to know downland.

And they did. Because one thing you learning consumer is every time there's a click, you lose half your audience. So two clicks and you've lost seventy five percent of people. So we had no download ad that was Better.

Only new thing we had was you could see your real friends at the table, but we also had to build a poker game that everyone else in the world had built. So we said, how do we move quickly and just copy the best version of that we can and kind of make that not be a thing that we time and money. So you have to move fast and learn and fail fast on that idea state and what we're all after with true signals conviction.

And another thing you learn from a brian chess ki is the best product makers are not making bets. That is bullshit. This whole MVP, this whole lean start up thing that we've learned about pursuit for twenty years, there is something in that that is selling us a false prophet.

Y Steve jobs didn't put out die phone to see if anyone liked IT. He already fucked and knew, right, if you are on his team, you were smiling like a chesser cat, you fuck and knew this was gonna the shit. You weren't going to see out iphone that that was not an MVP product, right?

When I chesty puts out new versions of airbnb s products, he already knows that it's gonna well. And so what I had encourage you guys to try to get to his conviction that your idea state is right enough that you believe in IT. If you really believe in IT, then SHE is gonna believe to not hope that it's right.

That's different. That's false conviction, but real conviction because you found a way to prove to yourself that this idea is right, and it's just as powerful to know that idea is not right. You don't have conviction.

And the real question, if you don't have conviction, is how ambitious are you? And I ask founders all the time, are you really ambitious? Because I consider myself really ambitious, and so i'm willing to be in this the best for years. And i've had tons of products that were b pluses that I could have put out. And I have not released a single product because I haven't got a conviction on anything yet.

amazing. okay. Should we take some questions from the audience? What's the best game ever?

The best game? Well, good question. Obviously, that's questions for who i've taken shit over the years as I am not a committed hard core gamer. There's very few games that hold my attention. And what i'll say is the only game that I play right now every day and it's on the front of my iphone is chest dot com.

And it's not that i'm great at chest either, but I kind of has value in the real world to me because I run into IT sometimes embarrassing moments like this weekend, my god son, I think he might be like eight now or nine and he now beats me in chess and it's really humbling and i'll be like i've been studying this opening. The queens gambit is not just a show and I start doing IT is oh, you're going to the queens gamed, okay? No, that's probably not the right first move.

But anyway, chess comes only one of the dig. When I think of what's the best game, I think its games that can get to this shakespeare vel that they can transcend just the kind of core addiction loop. I guess I would have to say the game that I admire most and wish that I build is minecraft for, I guess, obvious reasons.

But it's amazing that what not built the core of IT is still kind of relevant today and is still something that my kids want to come back to. And it's still probably kind of one of the most reference games. So i'd have see micro mention the water getting towards in victims, also mention that like my best decision, what test you like the first thing on this time, we evaluate what you're doing.

Oh, good question. I'd encourage you guys at least do this exercise, try to write down. Here's what we think today is actually really powerful for intellectual honesty because I don't know about you, but I get an arguments with my team all the time about what we agree or believed or assumed even three months ago.

But I would encourage you write down, what is the instinct that you are following? What are the signs that instinct is right or will be right and then separate? What is the idea variant that you are doing? So russia has an instinct that I agree with, that there will be this general AI moment around three d objects for games and other things.

I share that instinct. I don't know that I have great signal yet around IT other than IT seems cool to me. So when do you reevaluate?

I think that you ideas and execution they are pursuing can change a lot, maybe monthly, maybe every sprint. Your strategy probably shouldn't change more than quarterly unless you're like really running out of time. And hopefully your vision and the instinct you're following doesn't change. But you saying what would shake that hopefully that there's such a big kind of land master headed for that you feel a personal conviction about for what it's work.

Mark, in all my years of working with you, i've never seen you change your fundamental instinct. When you have an instinct, IT stays. And then it's just about, do you believe that you can execute on that exact instinct at that moment? And sometimes it's microform and sometimes there are microform you can control. And that's kind .

of the decision that you've made. Yeah I think padding myself fear on the back and also accepting that I can be humble to you've got to calibrate yourself and say, how good have my instance been over time and I have found that any time i've got ta deep instinct in my whole career, it's always been right and maybe itself serving. And you can read you're thinks it's brought enough.

You can be right. Every time I had these deep instincts they've been right. And usually we ve been IT wrong as they've been just much bigger than what I imagine, and maybe they showed up in a different form.

So part of us you ve got to figure out, like how good are you at your instincts topic? I think it's away potentially still not me, but from the applications you mentioned, creation was in I want and creators businesses. So while very fascinating of how you think IT matches to play with you, the adoption casual, casual fiction over the.

The first consumer adoption, I think, that were in this moment now that I call presumers. I don't know that i've called that. I I google inside that mark and rison said this a bunch of years ago.

I'll give him credit, but I think we're in this interesting consumer moment where it's like people are using this in this hobby's way there. Industry people are interested and seeing people around me that I wasn't expecting become kind of power users. I would like to say my partner or this other woman who's a friend of us who's not that technical, SHE figured he could do her whole job.

And ChatGPT and SHE moved to aspen. She's doing her job in half hour a day at most. Then SHE have had ChatGPT write a proposal for her company about how they could use chat P. T to do job. So but what i'm not seeing that much of right now is where it's really fundamental to what people are doing, where it's really interesting and fun.

And i've heard there's an atlantic article actually that said it's a toy and they need their farms the moment which I found so many ironies in that like you're none to I was a game. But i'm curious where this adoption get to happen. I guess the thread that i'm found the true signal for me is the magic in this general experience.

And I think what we have to isolate is what is IT that makes IT so magical. And this weekend watched my daughters and my partner use IT think about redesigning rooms using accommodate a mid journey and dolly. So they were annoyed because like, well, there's like one time that I looked like my room, and then the rest, the dimensions are off, and that made the ceilings high.

And so there was something magical, but I also was something missing. And what I am interested like, how do we capture the magic ice, like the magic of IT of this general thing, and then stick that into things that are proving him? Okay, I like to call Frank and stinking, just mash the ship up.

Just put on one White board. Here are the most addictive game mechanics that are out there today. Match three, use special blitz.

And then put on another thing, what is the most magical thing about general AI? On another board, what is that? That I can isolate the people, get most blown away and turned on by. And then on another board, what are the best social mechanics?

What is IT that works today and works in the past that is the most proven for social, and then come up with a lot of ideas, like how do I match this all up together? So what does that look like to have match three mechanic plus general AI plus social, and keep doing that? And then don't build IT, then use some general eye product to build what I call ripon atic.

A rip matic is what we use to is singer, which is how do I get to that experience so that I can put IT in front of the audience and they understand enough that they get with the experiences without building IT. So we will do in powerpoint intl, you can do a Better Green captures and step, but to create a ripon matic. And first say yourself, like is there's something there is interesting and then you search showing other people.

I think that's what we're going to get to. I think that the breakthrough moment is going to be for me as less the copilot is, less that the A I could create the art for you or the code for you. And it's more how do we add a new dimension to this consumer experience that people say being with A O M F G, I can't believe that I just did the game.

But the game is probably a game. We've already played its poker. It's match three, probably not a game or game macaca. The worlds never seem before. And I also don't know as much as I wish or true. My friends and family aren't dreaming of being gamed makers or creators would be careful that we don't just drink that cool aid and say, oh my god, what if there was a road blocks that everybody could make games? I was not sure that I don't see true signal that they all want to make games, but I do see true signals about something really magical in the general experience, but is a lot less than making a game.

Yeah, well, the interesting thing is that game is now a very loaded concept. But member, the first social gams came out. There was a game technically, but actually the real game was in the community where all the adi threads were going on, or the gills where there were lots of chatter. And so that ended up being where the engagement was. And so and maybe it's not that everyone wants to be an advances game maker, but certainly I think people like creating cocktail parties and cocktail parties have a little bit structure and this has been the faces of yours .

for a very long time yeah, that I would say the social side, there's two threads and social that I had built deeping things on, that I would just tell you, could trust this more stars. One is really simple and stupid that I reminded game teams of his single all the time. But for some reason, everyone sits on IT.

They're not it's community. Since the beginning of the web, there's a lot of lonely people looking for community and they find IT there. And community is trying to find a home always.

And nobody there's read IT the most part, nobody really aspire to create a home for community. And if you give a single chats in anything you build for community to happen, IT will just happen. IT just captures that.

Like rain capture you a little bit of a place for a pool. IT happens. And one thing we found single was community always, always delivered like a mafia wars. There was a hit list, and people would pay more, more money to put themselves at the top of the hit list, put a baLance in their own head because they thought IT was cool and they be popular. And so they were trying find this community.

The other thread that's been true since I put the original money for napster, you have heard a napster, but and I put the region money for friendster and facebook. One of those is is a homo o brag and other two or not. And this thread of the cocktail party is also a north star is still out there.

People want the perfect cocktail party on the web, and they don't have IT. And IT happens for a while. recently.

I was instagram for a long run, like the last eight or ten years. I believe that the instagram cocktail party is almost over. I mean, I just doesn't feel like IT anymore to me.

And I think snapped chat still is the cocktail party for Younger people. But I think for the mass market, I think that cocktail party doesn't exist in an obvious place anymore. And I think that you could try to build the next instagram if I look a lot different, but you also could build that in a game and create that.

And I encourage you if you go out out to try to deconstruct, you know, what makes the best cocktail party the best cocktail party? Like what is IT for you try to throw great cocktail parties. I try to the IT sounds dominant, obvious.

But I do think that the cocktail party is still just available. I love you have thought on the, you should see different space. So for example, just robots or now even bodies platform, which also spin the Better things requires sure we have to.

When you say ug c in games, I think that that the whole games industry is on this kind of slow, bumpy path towards ug c. And I do think that people love the opportunities for you to see. I guess I think that robots will keep robots will do their own general stuff in IT and fort.

I will I do think, and I can't say I have great true signal for this. This is just a deep and sing to nine. I do believe that we're going to get to something different eventually.

I don't think I think we're going to look back. I don't think i'm saying anything contrarian really here, but I think we can look back on the fourth nights and the road locks is as a of our time as the world gardens. I think we're going to look back on the iphone APP store as the world garden, obviously, is they like IT that way.

But I do think that we're gonna a get to a new version of the web. And that's why I called daughter daughter because I thought eventually, we'll just have these tods and consumers will know to type in this one and that we'll get a full dimensional interactive experience. And I think it'll be generated and it'll be extensible and it'll be an interOperable.

And in my vision is it'll be like age min, you'll see an experience, your lake, you'll right click on IT, you'll drag and drop IT into something else. I can't separate how much is I want the world to be like that verses that I have a deep and think they just I can't say that it's coming from a true signal that everyone's asking for this and wants this today, we weren't asking for the iphone either. So the whole phone experience, nobody, no one was like all I wish I could just have this touch screen, which we didn't know about IT or doing load apps and things.

I mean, I know it's obvious today, but so I do believe that we're onna get to a totally new paradigm for computing. I don't know that i'll happen specifically from a ug c point. The way we think about IT today, I don't know that it's kind.

I know people like that if I was like tiktok and anybody could just make games that doesn't resonate for me and for my kids or real gamers. They are not wishing for that. But I have this feeling that if this all existed, and they could drag and drop things and just make a store, and also that store could be real and sell real shit that they would do IT without thinking about IT.

And I think I don't think it's onna happen inside of rocks and inside the iphone is probably going to have and first on PC and where in some way and have some breakthrough moments and then have to make IT to mobile, maybe to android first. And I wish I had a Better sense of my head about what that's going to look like, because i've been trying to build this for, I know, fifteen years and getting nowhere. So you guys have Better idea than me. I want to hear IT .

right on the note. mark. Thank you free time.

We really appreciate that. Thank you for all of you. I was doing in.

If you like this episode, if you meet IT this far, help us for the show, share with a friend. Or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at break this podcast dot com, slash a society. You candidly producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking to avoid. And so if you did like this episode, if you like any of our episodes, so please let us know. I'll see you next time.