Zynga’s Mark Pincus says social networking is still an unsolved problem
Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
Entrepreneur Mark Pincus is unquestionably best known for founding and running Zynga.
Its products—https://www.fastcompany.com/1579052/facebook-still-looking-its-iconic-game-farmville-halo-facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">especially FarmVille—fueled the social gaming craze that took over the internet early in the previous decade.
But Pincus, who https://www.wired.com/1997/05/freeloader-pushed-over-the-edge/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hatched his first company in 1995, was already an old hand at startups by the time Zynga came along in 2007.
Once you get to the businesses he’s invested in, which include Napster, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Snap, SpaceX, https://www.fastcompany.com/91450658/joby-air-taxi-airport-transit" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Joby, and https://www.fastcompany.com/91359060/aurora-hits-self-driving-trucking-milestone-road-ahead-still-bumpy" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aurora, his career starts to look like a history of the tech industry over the past few decades.
And yet Pincus’s book, https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!, published in June, is not a self-serving tribute to his own prescience.
It devotes copious space to a social network he cofounded in 2003, Tribe.net, which—in case you weren’t aware—didn’t do as well as Facebook.
Intended to be a cross between Napster, Friendster, and Craigslist, it isn’t even well-remembered by the standards of failed early social networks.
Pincus has never stopped thinking about why Tribe didn’t make it.
Above all, he blames his own inflexible attachment to the concept in its original form.
It’s a common misstep by founders, he argues: “We get so narrowly focused on the one product and one idea and trying to make that work that we lose perspective.
And that was me building Tribe.”
Even Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker demoing TheFacebook to him in early 2004 didn’t lead him to reshape his own social network into something equally primed to take off.
On the plus side, he was impressed enough to invest $38,000 in their company, good for a 0.5% ownership stake.
That produced a nice https://www.cnbc.com/2012/08/15/these-investors-sold-stock-in-facebook-ipo.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">windfall when Facebook went public, though he notes in his book that his shares would have been worth billions if he’d held on to them.
Pincus calls the period after Tribe fizzled “an abyss.” It gave him “all this time to reflect on why I’d failed, and it was painful.” But that introspection helped him steer Zynga to greater success. (Though it may have been a while since you last thought of the company, its https://www.fastcompany.com/90711758/zynga-stock-price-take-two-interactive-deal" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2022 acquisition by Take-Two Interactive for $12.7 billion remains the second-biggest deal in the history of video games.) His reflections also became core to a Stanford Graduate School of Business course on product management he co-created and taught.
Now, with his book, Pincus’s goal is to make the insights he’s gained accessible to everyone, from people far outside the Silicon Valley ecosystem to those already plugged in to resources such as the tech accelerator https://www.fastcompany.com/91050643/can-y-combinator-maintain-its-outsider-pose-now-that-its-the-ultimate-silicon-valley-insiders-network" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Y Combinator. “I’m hopeful that it can give a bunch of useful frameworks that people can apply to change their odds of success,” he says.
Life at the Speed of Play is full of hard-fought lessons—not just from Pincus but also from his influential friends, such as Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky.
Many are clearly eternal verities.
But most date from the days before https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence" title="AI">AI became the tech industry’s principal obsession.
Which led me to wonder whether the technology has rendered any of them as obsolete as observations from a buggy-whip manufacturer might have been after horseless carriages caught on.
Pincus says AI hasn’t steamrolled over any of his convictions, dating all the way back to when he concluded Tribe had been too complacent about trying new things.
Instead, he contends, the time-tested rules of entrepreneurship are “massively magnified and accelerated by AI. Like this idea of testing more ideas in a week than your industry tests in a year.
AI gives you a way to do that now.”
Still, with tech companies https://www.fastcompany.com/91594345/tech-layoffs-list-august-2026-apple-tiktok-linkedin-slash-jobs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">laying off employees by the thousands and many CEOs https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">irrationally exuberant over the possibility of replacing pesky human talent with compliant algorithms, the present moment does not feel like the boom times that gave us Zynga.
Back https://time.com/65918/farmville-mobile/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in the day, its https://officesnapshots.com/2012/03/06/inside-zyngas-gigantic-gaming-headquarters/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">San Francisco headquarters was one of the most sprawling, Xanadu-esque tech workplaces I’d ever seen, stuffed to the rafters with engineers, artists, and other employees devoted to creating ever-more-ambitious slates of games. (The company has since decamped to more modest digs down the peninsula.)
If AI had been a factor when Zynga was in hypergrowth mode, would the company have been a profoundly different place?
Pincus’s quick answer: Yes, but not a less resource-intensive one.
“We were constantly feeling under-resourced against the social gaming opportunity,” he explains. “We were criticized for being so many people at every point in time.
But I saw the opportunity was so big.
I wanted to make the biggest macro bet, and I wanted to be overfunded.
That’s why we bought like https://www.engadget.com/2010-12-02-zynga-buys-newtoy-studio-rebranded-as-zynga-with-friends.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">one company a month, because we couldn’t keep up with it.”
Instead of allowing Zynga to do more with less, he concludes, AI would have let it make an even bigger bet. “We just would have moved so much faster,” he says. “I don’t know that we would have been any less people.
I think we just would have had a 25 times bigger footprint.”
Fast-forward to today.
Pincus has been messing around with AI projects of his own.
An alumnus of Wharton and Harvard Business School, he describes himself as “not technical” and “an average dumb user” or maybe “a little above average, but not by that much.” But he’s always enjoyed tinkering with new technologies and set out to vibe-code himself an AI assistant.
It didn’t go well.
Dabbling with Anthropic’s https://www.fastcompany.com/91502017/anthropic-most-innovative-companies-2026" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claude Code overwhelmed him with the arcana involved in storing code in a GitHub repository and deploying it to a live site. https://www.fastcompany.com/91495393/claude-cowork-ai-hype-and-its-real-impact-on-white-collar-work" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claude Cowork—a less nerdy set of tools—proved more his speed.
Eventually, he was able to cobble together a first-person shooter game “that completely runs and is good.” He’s also been brainstorming ideas using products such as the image generator Midjourney, working on projects with his family, and outsourcing some coding to collaborators who are more nerdy than he is.
Pincus is still noodling on insights into human needs he identified early in his career, which he calls “instinct veins.” One, “the cocktail party,” relates to our desire to make connections.
That’s what led him to start Tribe and Zynga and to invest in Facebook and Twitter.
And yet when he talks about the cocktail party now, he describes it as an unsolved problem, or at least one that needs to be solved all over again in new ways.
AI might be the key to its next chapter.
“Social networking will for sure be reinvented,” he says. “There’s no question but how.
It’s become entertainment and distraction, and it’s lost the original value, which was utility.” Even today, years after Tribe came and went, the opportunity it represented looks like the future to him.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken.
If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can https://www.fastcompany.com/section/plugged-in" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning.
I love hearing from you: Ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters.
I’m also on https://bsky.app/profile/harrymccracken.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bluesky, https://mastodon.social/@harrymccracken" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mastodon, and https://www.threads.net/@technologizer" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Threads, and you can https://flipboard.com/@harrymccracken/fast-company-plugged-in-7d9srg7gz?from=share&utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=curator_share" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
More top tech stories from Fast Company
https://www.fastcompany.com/91587899/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-personal-superintelligence" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Mark Zuckerberg is buying Meta a seat at the AI table.
Does he know what to do with it?
After the metaverse bust, Zuckerberg is spending billions to reinvent Meta as an AI giant.
First, he’ll have to translate his vision of “personal superintelligence” into products people actually want. https://www.fastcompany.com/91587899/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-personal-superintelligence" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →
https://www.fastcompany.com/91594185/samsung-fold8-perfect-foldable-phone-will-never-exist" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The perfect foldable phone will never exist
Foldable phones are all about trade-offs.
Samsung’s new Fold8 just has some different ones. https://www.fastcompany.com/91594185/samsung-fold8-perfect-foldable-phone-will-never-exist" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →
https://www.fastcompany.com/91596512/why-the-departure-of-openais-data-center-chief-is-not-a-good-look" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Why the departure of OpenAI’s data center chief is not a good look
Chris Malone reportedly headed for the exit last week, following 12 other senior executives this year. https://www.fastcompany.com/91596512/why-the-departure-of-openais-data-center-chief-is-not-a-good-look" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →
https://www.fastcompany.com/91582746/to-rein-in-wonton-ai-spending-we-need-ai-nutrition-labels-ai-tokens-technology-spending" rel="noopener" target="_blank">To rein in wanton AI spending, we need AI ‘nutrition labels’
Just as a shopper weighs calories against nutrients, employees could weigh a prompt’s cost against what it delivers. https://www.fastcompany.com/91582746/to-rein-in-wonton-ai-spending-we-need-ai-nutrition-labels-ai-tokens-technology-spending" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →
https://www.fastcompany.com/91594921/your-smartwatch-could-soon-be-obsolete" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Your smartwatch could soon be obsolete
Apple, Samsung, and Google are winding down updates for several popular models.
Here’s what owners need to know. https://www.fastcompany.com/91594921/your-smartwatch-could-soon-be-obsolete" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →
https://www.fastcompany.com/91596812/ok-go-addictive-new-app-say-the-same-thing" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Ok Go’s addictive new app might be the next Wordle
Say the Same Thing will test how well you know your friends’ minds. https://www.fastcompany.com/91596812/ok-go-addictive-new-app-say-the-same-thing" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Read More →