Check out the conversation on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Introduction (1:50)
Aakash: If you’ve been working in tech for any period of time, you know Mark Pincus. He is the founder of Zynga. Billions of people have literally played his games. And if you’ve been around San Francisco like me, Zynga has been one of the institutions of the city. I walked by the Zynga building every day for years myself, and I’ve always looked up to Mark.
He is a legend in the product space. He just published Life at the Speed of Play, and the subtitle of the book is literally “launch products people love.” There couldn’t be a better billionaire to have on this product podcast. Mark has thought very deeply about how you build really successful products, and he has a bunch of hot takes that we’re going to cover today.
We’re even going to go to the whiteboard so you can learn his Proven Better New framework, which is a framework I personally use when I’m thinking about building products. So I’m on the edge of my seat to get a personal masterclass. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I do. Mark, thanks for being here.
Mark: Yeah, I love hearing that you use Proven Better New. Frameworks get a bad rap. But what a good framework like Proven Better New does is help you in your actual work. It’s not just something you put in a document to send to an executive. It tactically shows you how to work better.
Why copying is okay (3:24)
Aakash: We’ll cover that in just a second. I want to start with one of your most controversial ideas, which is that you’ve said copying is okay. It’s a form of moral arbitrage, and that’s going to make a lot of people angry. So walk us through this. Why is this even a defensible position?
Mark: I think the actual question is, why are we even debating it? Because that’s what we’re all doing all the time.
There’s a certain taste and sensibility here. There’s some line you cross where it’s no longer “inspired by” and it’s copying. We feel that as consumers. We’re like, wait, this movie is a copy of that one? And we don’t like plagiarizing, because that’s cheating, right? So there are some paradoxes that have been deeply instilled in us.
Yet at the same time, we kind of know that all music, all movies, all stories, all games, everything is a derivative work. Every artist has built on the shoulders of other artists.
There’s a whole philosophy we could get into on, at what point is it copying? At what point does it cross a legal line, where you’re illegally taking someone else’s work? But then there’s a moral line and a taste line. And where it really comes down to taste is who does the magic trick better.
Steve Jobs was a master of copying, and he had a deep appreciation for it. There’s a quote that I think was from Picasso, but people credit Steve Jobs: good artists copy, great artists steal, or something like that.
Bill Gates was not as good at the magic trick as Steve Jobs. So it looked like Bill Gates was just copying Apple. But they were both copying from Xerox PARC’s work, and then they were copying each other. Mark Zuckerberg is arguably not that good at copying, because when you see Threads and a lot of his products, they look like blatant copies.
So to me, the magic trick is just this: can you learn from other people’s proven success and emulate it perfectly, but have it feel new to people? That’s why I call it a magic trick.
Trust your instinct, doubt your idea (6:06)
Aakash: And I think that’s intimately tied to the Proven Better New framework. I’d say maybe only 10% of my audience really understands the framework. So can you give us the 101? We have the whiteboard here. Maybe you can even draw it out for us.
Mark: First of all, when we get into Proven Better New, there are a couple of underlying philosophies.
One is my mantra as an entrepreneur for the last 30 years: trust your instinct. Your instinct is more right than you know. I like to say your instinct is right 95% of the time, and assume your idea is probably wrong, either very wrong or a little wrong.
So if your instinct is right 95% of the time and your idea is right 25% of the time, what do you do with that?
What I mean is, we all have instincts. Right now, for example, we’re feeling an instinct around products like Instinct or Muse. We’ve all talked about AI assistants for the last two years. We all assumed everyone in the world was building one, and yet none came out. Now, all of a sudden, two have come out.
At an instinct level, they feel to me like the Clawdbot craze from earlier in the year, about nine months ago. That felt like the beginning. The gun went off for agents. Everyone said you need to go buy your own Mac Studio, set this up and give it access to your WhatsApp. A lot of us tried it and scratched our heads, and some people were living their lives off it. It was an early shot across the bow. I think it formed some instinct and informed us about how this agentic future might work at a consumer level. But then it faded a little bit.
Now Instinct AI and Muse have come out, and they feel more consumer-ready, because you don’t have to do all those things. It’s dumbed down. It’s accessible. It’s doing the same thing, and that’s the big thing they’re doing well at an instinct level. They’re moving beyond just being better than Google.
Okay, I can get an answer faster on GPT than I could on Google. If you think of this progression, and I’ll get back to Proven Better New in a second, search in the beginning was Lycos and Ask Jeeves and all these crappy search engines where you had to click into the second page of links to find what you were looking for. Links took a long time to load. When Google came out, the first three links got you what you wanted, and it happened in nanoseconds. That felt magical.
GPT comes out and it feels like a magical leap, because you don’t have to click on a link. It just reads for you and gives you the answer. That felt magical too.
But then you get to this agent thing, where it’s able to take actions for you, and that feels magical again. It’s not just giving me an answer. It’s booking me the table or buying me the thing on Amazon or whatever.
So at an instinct level, you’re like, yeah, I think I’m going to do that in the future. Will it be this product? I don’t know. The idea that Instinct AI is doing this through your text messages might be wrong. I think there are some trust questions. Do you really want to give some random AI chat company, run by a 23-year-old somewhere, access to your life and your credit cards? How do you know it’s not going to get hacked?
And then you’re like, well, maybe I trust Meta more with Muse, because they have more to lose. But is Muse right? I don’t know.
So I think both of them are clearly onto something at an instinct level. We can all tell and feel that. But at an idea level, I don’t know the use cases. I’m still searching for the use cases in my head, and we can get into that.
How to compete with Instinct using Proven Better New (13:16)
Mark: Anyway, those are the underpinnings of Proven Better New. So where does Proven Better New come in? I was going to talk about this later in your pod, but we’ll go right to it.
Say we want to go after that space, which a lot of people are probably thinking about. Can I create a competitor to Muse or Instinct?
We can use Proven Better New to say, okay, what have these products proven so far? And can I get to the pixel level of that experience? What have they proven, and where is my idea?
So say I want to make a narrower Instinct. It’s just a family assistant. Am I going to very carefully copy every single thing Instinct has done, from their onboarding to how they work in text, and then just isolate my new idea? My new idea is that mine is going to be multiplayer, so your whole family can be on the chat. And mine is more trustworthy. Maybe mine is more narrowly use-case focused.
But I don’t want to fail for the wrong reasons. If I don’t copy everything Instinct or Muse did, and I say, I don’t know, I’m going to put mine in WhatsApp, not iMessage, or I’m going to make mine an app, I’m just like Instinct, but I’m an app, then I’m probably going to fail for the wrong reasons. I’m never going to get to my hypothesis.
One more recent example I’ll throw out at you is this product, Retro. I don’t know if you saw this, but it’s from some of the early team from Instagram. They said, okay, Instagram’s no longer just the beauty of social networking, so we’re going to make something that’s more purely like the early Instagram.
That might be a good shot on goal, right? But I didn’t make it past their onboarding. It was so many clicks and so many questions that it felt dead on arrival. Now, I don’t know that. But at my taste level, I’m like, who are they copying? My brain goes to, where’s the proven in this? They might be applying Proven Better New the wrong way, which a lot of people do.
That’s why I want to get into a very clear definition of it. They might say, well, proven is Instagram. Ding, you lose. That’s too broad. You can’t say proven is the overall concept.
So maybe it’s worth stepping back for a minute to go through Zynga Poker, and why it’s a perfect Proven Better New.
Proven Better New on the whiteboard (15:58)
Mark: Yeah, I can put it on the board.
Aakash: That’s a really good canonical example. Let’s see if it’s a little simpler to understand for people who don’t know.
Mark: So let’s get into the concept. Someone pointed out that if you get the audio version of my book, or I guess the Kindle version, you don’t get all of my whiteboard pictures, which I drew myself by hand.
So let’s say what was proven, what was better and what was new. And I want to make sure I define Proven Better New before I jump in.
Proven is down to the pixel level of the experience, click to click. You pick whatever experience is close to yours, either your exact one or close to it, that was proven for this audience on this platform. Anything that’s proven, you’re going to legally copy. The better a product maker you are, the better you are at copying. The worse a product maker you are, the more you change things. Steve Jobs was amazing at it.
Better is what 10 out of 10 existing users would say “fuck yes, I want that” to. Not what you think is better. This is where people do it wrong. What you think is better is called new. What they all think is better is better.
So better is more micro-level innovation. It’s more polish. It might be no download. It might be free. It might be fewer clicks or a better onboarding experience. It’s something the people who use this care about. But every one of them says it’s better. Okay, so that’s very clear.
New is your novel idea. It’s your innovation zone. New is what you’re most excited about. Great. But what we want to do is isolate that new zone, so that you don’t fail for the wrong reasons. Because if you have a shitty onboarding experience, you fail.
Another story: Sid Meier’s team came out with a social Civilization on Facebook, and EA came out with a social SimCity. In both cases, we were terrified at Zynga. We thought we were dead. Within five minutes of the launch of their products, Zynga PMs sent their deconstructs around the company and predicted dead on arrival, because the onboarding experience was so bad. Brilliant game designers want you to go through long tutorials to see all their brilliance.
In the case of Facebook games, and most casual games, you’ve got to be at the good stuff in three clicks, not three minutes. You’ve got to get the proven right. Your new is great. I’m sure there was amazing new from Sid Meier’s team or from social SimCity. But no one ever sees it if they don’t get past the onboarding and the proven stuff.
Zynga Poker through Proven Better New (19:05)
Mark: In the case of Zynga Poker, I was so humbled after my failure with Tribe.net. Tribe was one of the first social networks. There were 10 launched. Eight succeeded on some level, two completely failed, and Tribe was one of the two failures. After that, I was so humbled that I set my sights very narrow to start, with Zynga Poker.
So what was proven? Poker. I copied the leading poker games. I mean the table, the UX, the sounds the chips made, the colors of the chips. You could not tell my table from any other leading poker game, by design. There was no differentiation.
What was better? Really clear. No download. Why? We weren’t playing for real money, so we didn’t care about security. All the other ones had a download because they cared about security. You probably know this: you lose at least 80% of your users when you say download. There’s a 90% drop-off in the App Store. And no download is also better for a casual audience that doesn’t care that much about poker.
What was new? Real people with real identities, through the Facebook graph and the MySpace graph. Sometimes you would join your friends at a table. It turned out to be 25% of the time.
Aakash: One quick question on no download, though. Does that not fail the 10 out of 10 criteria? One or two out of 10 might want the security of a download for payments.
Mark: Nobody wants a download, even if you want to play for real money. If you were offered the choice, do you want to click and download it, or no download? People are voting with their feet, with their clicks, every day. The 80 or 90% drop-off is all you need to know. No download is going to win up front. You’re going to get people in, and your day-one retention or even day-30 retention improves, because you’re not losing 90% at the top of the funnel.
In this case, we were going after a really, really casual adult audience who weren’t going and playing real-money gambling poker games. For them, 10 out of 10 would take the no download.
And then our new. This is just the way life fucks with you. We’ve got to be dispassionate. Even though we’re so passionate about building products, we have to be dispassionate about this one product instantiation and be ready to kill it. I like to say you’re in the lab with a white lab coat. We’re product scientists. I was not attached to this.
And of course it worked. My new worked. My mantra, which they still say inside of Zynga today, is “all new fails.” If you start with the expectation that all new fails, you won’t be disappointed, and you won’t go the other way and stay too long with a failing idea.
The other point about “all new fails” is that when we see new make it, we need to have a reverence for it. There’s a sacredness to that. So under-tune against the hope and the potential of new. Over-tune toward what works, which is, again, proven. A new thing that works becomes a new proven thing. The fact that Instinct and Muse are at least blowing up initially means you should pay a lot of attention to that. Pay more attention to new that’s working out there than to your own new.
So that was Zynga Poker.
Where the best new comes from (23:09)
Aakash: So how do we determine the right new to go after? How did you identify real people and friends?
Mark: That comes from your instinct. And the best new has been proven somewhere else.
Say today I’m trying to find different vectors to compete against Instinct AI. I’d ask, well, what have they proven? I think they’ve proven that text messaging is a better place to bring a new viral AI service to lots of consumers. There’s so much less friction.
They’ve also proven that you can get into the text-message channel, which is the highest-engagement channel. That’s powerful. It’s way more powerful than notifications, which we all turn off and ignore. Now, that might get ruined as people start putting things in it, but we’ve given them permission to text us. That’s a very powerful, exclusive, rare place to be.
We have to be humble and curious. I don’t have a fucking better. I don’t have a 10 out of 10 use case. I don’t know anything. I have no ideas today that I could say 10 out of 10 Instinct users would call better than Instinct.
So if I was doing Proven Better New on them, I’d say what’s proven at this point is SMS as a channel and as delivery. I’d say an LLM, or an agent, as an assistant. There are a lot of things. I think they’ve proven the idea of putting little web-app links inside the thread, like the way they create a vault for you. But I don’t have a better. That’s where I can’t let my ego get involved.
Then new, to answer your question. What about tbh and Gas, or Honesty Box, those early viral apps on Facebook and MySpace? Could I do something for high school and college kids that is a new version of that, but LLM-based and agent-based and in your SMS? I don’t know. It will probably fail. But I try to look at things that have been proven in the past. That’s how I start to build an instinct.
I know that those apps have done well at the beginning of every social platform, at least. This isn’t necessarily a social platform. But look for use cases that resonate with you and have resonated somewhere before, that you can test.
If I was doing Proven Better New here, I might not even build the infrastructure. I might just send text messages to my friends and family saying, hey, do you want to join me on this new service?
I had an idea two years ago to create a social secretary in text that’s LLM- and agent-based. I’d be like, hey Aakash, do you want to hang out more and be better friends? If so, talk to my social secretary. It asks you to connect your Google Calendar and surfaces places that you and Mark could hang out. That would be proven and new. No better.
Why Proven Better New only works as a religion (27:12)
Aakash: What I’m sensing is that this process is extremely hard, especially the new. One of the examples you wrote about in the book is how Supercell did great with almost no new at all when they copied FarmVille onto mobile. So maybe we can create another row here and analyze what they did without any new, because that seems like the hardest part.
Mark: Yeah. And one of the points I really want to make sure people hear is that, similar to OKRs, you can use these tools the wrong way and then indict the tool or the tool’s inventor. So many companies have implemented OKRs so badly that they’ve become a Dilbert comic. Proven Better New could be the next Dilbert comic, for sure.
So there are a few things to remind people of if you’re going to do Proven Better New.
Number one, it only works if it’s your religion. You have to go really, really deep. If you and I are building a product together, we’ve got to be challenging each other. Aakash, that’s not proven. You’re calling that proven? That’s not proven. And you’re like, Mark, that’s not better. We’ve got to keep pushing each other and hold ourselves accountable to whether we’re really using it correctly.
The Retro team could say, well, proven is Instagram. No. You’re not taking what’s proven about, first of all, the onboarding experience of a new mobile social app today. What is the best one today? Instagram today doesn’t look like the Retro you’re building. So you’re saying it’s not proven today. It was proven 15 years ago. Okay, so it’s a new idea. That’s okay. But let’s be intellectually honest about what we’re doing. It’s got to be a religion, and you’ve got to be intellectually honest.
The platform-cycle paradox and Hay Day (28:36)
Mark: Number two, you’ve got to be aware of the context. Where are we in this platform cycle? That gets to Supercell with Hay Day, or Zynga with FarmVille.
Here’s the other paradox that messes with our brains. The earlier we are in a platform shift, the beginning of the internet, the beginning of mobile, the beginning of AI, the less new you should pursue.
The platform is the new thing. AI is the new thing. An AI weather app? You want it. It’s not an app you’ve never used in your life. In my not-so-humble opinion, a lot of people are being too clever right now. At the beginning of a platform cycle, people are in discovery mode. They’re like, oh really, there’s an AI weather app? Tell me more. An AI camera? Tell me more. An AI Craigslist? It’s the thing you’ve always been doing, now with AI inside.
Now, if you were trying to build a mobile game today and not thinking about AI at all, you’re mature in a cycle, late in a cycle, like we kind of are with mobile. For anything other than AI, you’re trying to find a vein. You need a lot of new.
So this changes, and it goes to extremes. At the very beginning, when Supercell did Hay Day, it was 0% new. There was no new. Hay Day was FarmVille 2.
Aakash: Better was copy.
Mark: It was basically a copy. If you put the two side by side, you almost couldn’t tell the difference. It was beautiful, and I mean this with admiration. I have so much admiration for Ilkka and that team. They are master product makers. They’ve integrated the best of game design and the best of being brilliant product makers, not just game designers.
If you held Hay Day and FarmVille 2 next to each other, you almost couldn’t tell the difference. They had the same half-circle driveway that we had. They had the white mailbox, the house with the picket fence, the blue pickup truck.
What did they do better? It was built for mobile. We brought out FarmVille for mobile, and it was not built for mobile. What did that mean? They loaded faster. They had shorter crop cycle times. They had touch. Was touch new or better? You could make a case either way. They optimized for the touchscreen. The reason I’d say better is that I think they nailed it so well that 10 out of 10 people would rather touch their iPad screen than not.
Aakash: Than use a cursor.
Mark: You could have said new, but I’d say no new. So that was the right place to be at the beginning of the mobile cycle.
If you were trying to compete with Hay Day today, you couldn’t say, oh, it’s Hay Day, available on mobile. People would say, I already have Hay Day on mobile. There’s nothing better. You’d just be proven, and no one’s looking for a new farm simulation game today. You’d need a lot of new. You’d be like, it’s AI, it’s agentic, you’re controlling robots on real farms. To get people’s attention today, it’s hard. You’re trying to find a vein.
Don’t be too clever for the moment (32:26)
Aakash: So how do you figure out what type of product you should be building? Since we’re at the beginning of the AI cycle, should you be building a product with a lot more new or a lot less new?
Mark: A lot less new. That’s my argument, and I apologize to people who want to be in deep innovation right now, because I’m pouring cold water on that.
But in my not-so-humble opinion, right now… I was just with this brilliant class of students at Harvard Business School on Monday, and I was at Union Square Ventures’ annual portfolio gathering on Tuesday. Such smart people. But a lot of people are being too clever for the moment. Now is not the time to come up with an idea the world has never seen or thought of before.
There were two brilliant women at Harvard Business School working on an idea for perfumes, scents that help you sleep better. I was like, guys, that would have been a great idea five years ago, or a great idea in five years, in my opinion. Too clever for right now.
Then at Union Square, I ran into the founders of Fomo, who I invested in this spring. They’re doing an idea that is not new at all, and I told them this. I meant it from a place of admiration.
They built a social crypto trading app. In the last two rounds of the internet, people built social trading apps where I can follow your trades, and they did reasonably well in each of those periods. What Fomo is doing is a more accessible crypto trading app. It’s easier to use than Robinhood and easier to use than Coinbase. What they’re clearly better at is that they have every single crypto and memecoin, where the others have 10. So if you’re a degen trader, you want that. The social part is still a little bit of new. But their idea was going to work even if the new didn’t work, and they’re crushing it. They just hit $500 million in run rate.
Aakash: Whoa.
Mark: Yeah. And they’re not being too clever for the moment. Are they riding the AI wave? Not directly.
I’m also an investor in a company called Paraform. I almost didn’t invest, because I thought, they’re a recruiter marketplace, and there are lots of those. They get paid a percentage on success. But they’ve used AI to do all kinds of smarter things and get a lot of leverage, and they’re crushing it. I think they just hit $150 million in run rate.
So my point is just that right now there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. And I have this problem too. We just want to be too clever. We just love the new. We’ve got to be a little more disciplined right now and look at where we can be better because of AI. In this moment, there are opportunities to be better, and people are in discovery mode. You don’t have to dive into extreme new.
What FarmVille copied and what it cut (35:59)
Aakash: How do you figure out what you shouldn’t copy?
Mark: When we were making FarmVille, which we built in six weeks, we copied most of what was in Farm Town, legally. And Farm Town copied MyFarm and copied YoVille.
Farm Town took MyFarm, which was the first farm simulation game. It was like an Etch A Sketch. You could move the whole board around, you could click anywhere and you could put crops anywhere. It felt almost like Minecraft, and Minecraft was launching around the same time. Then Farm Town took the YoVille avatar, literally took our avatar, and dropped it into MyFarm. And that was Farm Town.
We very carefully benchmarked and copied gifting from Farm Town. Gifting was brilliant, and it created a whole new level of virality and social. They were also the first ones to put a lot of friction around the neighbor mechanic.
Playfish invented the neighbor mechanic. Having strong competitors, really smart people copying you and going past you, builds markets. So if you’re ambitious, you want smart people to copy you. Playfish built Restaurant City, and they were the first to have the friend bar. Anyone else you knew who was playing, you saw there, and it was brilliant.
Farm Town created the neighbor bar. It would show you who you knew was playing the game, and then you had to send them a request to be your neighbor, and they had to accept it. It was a two-way opt-in.
You’d say, why would you do that? That creates friction. But it created another level of engagement, virality and gifting. The neighbor request meant that if you started playing the game and maybe forgot about it, you’d get neighbor requests from me and five other friends, and that reminded you to come back. This will sound really little, but it’s not, because you want social density. You want to see that all of your friends are doing this right now. And it did that.
We copied those things. Those were brilliant. But they had one feature, a marketplace in a town square where you could go and meet anyone else in the game, trade with them and neighbor with them. We cut that. We didn’t copy it, because we thought it was stranger danger, and we thought it wasn’t in the ethos of what our audience, mainly middle-aged adult women on Facebook, wanted.
So there is a level of taste. But for the most part, if you are copying something that works, you want to default to copying everything they’ve done as your base case. We’re trying to be in the lab with white lab coats. If we’re copying Instinct and doing Proven Better New, even if Instinct did something that looks illogical and dumb to you, I’d say copy it for your base case. Then you can try a variation that you believe is better. But it’s probably new. If we had not done the neighbor bar and called that better, it would actually have been a new thing, and it would have made our product less viral.
Aakash: So part of figuring out what not to copy is having a very specific target user in mind, like middle-aged women on Facebook.
Mark: Yes. And being that user yourself is the best. It’s very tough to have empathy and build a great product, at least for consumers, if you’re not part of the audience. It’s like you’re crawling around in the dark and you come upon something, and you’re like, I think that’s a plant. It feels like a plant. It might not be a plant. Whereas if I can go, oh yeah, that’s me, I know I don’t like this, that’s so much easier and faster.
Testing 100 ideas instead of shipping one (39:55)
Aakash: While we’re on the topic of zero to one, an adjacent thing you’ve talked about is this idea of shipping 100 ideas a day.
Mark: Testing.
Aakash: Testing 100 ideas a day instead of shipping one. So walk us through that. What is that idea, and how does it help us build zero-to-one products?
Mark: It’s part of the paradox we’re in with AI. I just ran into Eric Ries, and we got into a terrific debate about this.
Basically, in this moment, we can build a “quote unquote” MVP in three months instead of maybe a year. So we’re so tempted to do that.
Aakash: Or what feels like three minutes, right?
Mark: Well, at least a working version in three minutes. But the problem is that it’s causing us to skip steps, and we’re failing too slowly. We don’t have time to wait three months to test the top of the funnel. I’m not saying don’t build incredibly quickly. But there’s a temptation to skip the top of the funnel and just go to the whole product.
I said to him, the problem with MVP is the word viable. Once we say viable, we’re full of hope, and we think, this could be my launch product. So it’s not done yet. In consumer, but even in enterprise, we have to find a way to start at the top of the funnel and test our early assumptions before we commit to building the product.
I’m shocked that at this point there isn’t a good product where I can just say to an AI agent… And maybe I should try it with Instinct or with Muse. But this is where the agentic thing isn’t far enough yet.
Why can’t I just say to my agent, hey, I’d like to do a Proven Better New and come up with something to compete with Instinct. I have these vectors. One vector is a family assistant. Can you come back to me tomorrow and test a whole bunch of names and concepts? Come up with a whole bunch, tell me if you need my help to brainstorm them, and then go create web ads, because mobile may not let me run ads without something in the App Store. And come back with any winning variant, in absolute and relative terms.
There was a great X post from the founder of Pocket FM. I can’t believe he shared all this, but he said their magic number was this: once they got to a 2.25% click-through rate on their ads in any country, they could grow to $10 million in ARR in three months. I was like, wow, that’s beautiful.
So if I want to do Proven Better New on Pocket FM… No AI-generated content is copyrighted, so I could literally take Pocket FM’s own content. I could vibe code something at least good enough to be the website behind an ad. And I could say, go into France, Italy and Saudi and try Proven Better New against Pocket FM. See if you can get a 2.25% click-through rate, and come back tomorrow with it. And if you do, then maybe I should build it.
We’re living in a moment where this kind of growth hacking at the top of the funnel is possible. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. Who knows if you can go compete with them. But the point is, there’s all kinds of really valuable information that could help us build conviction that an idea has legs. And I don’t really see anybody doing it. If you are doing it, I want to know. Go to @markpinc on X and let me know.
And if your product can do this… There was one, I think called Icon, that said it did this, and we tested it, and it didn’t.
Why consumer AI is investable now (43:58)
Aakash: Talking about consumer, you said it isn’t investable right now, but that’s the reason to build it. Can you break that down?
Mark: Well, when I said it wasn’t investable, that was in June. Now we’re in September, and we have Instinct at a $10 billion valuation. It’s feeling a lot more investable today than it felt in June.
There isn’t clear distribution. There aren’t clear distribution hacks. But every month that goes by, more of America and more of the world is discovering AI.
We have to remember that in Silicon Valley. My family in Chicago is just getting on the AI train, and they’re as much falling in fear with AI as falling in love with it. Both are happening. To me, Chicago is a very early indicator of mass-market America. We forget that the rest of the country is not living and breathing AI every day the way we are.
I went through this with the internet. I remember in 1996 trying to convince my friends they would want email. And I remember in 1999 convincing them they would want the web and not AOL. I have these wake-up moments where I realize, don’t assume everyone else is living your digital life. We can get through our day just fine without AI.
So we’ve got to be aware of where we are in the market, and at the same time, we’ve got to really pay attention to what’s going on out there.
Anyway, I think consumer is more investable. I think now is a terrific time to be working on consumer ideas, because the floodgates of VC funding aren’t open yet. We’re not seeing hit after hit after hit. At that point it might be too late. But I feel like there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, because I don’t have new AI-enabled versions of all the apps on my phone. I don’t have a new AI weather app, or AI camera, or AI calendar or any of that. So it’s a good moment.
Proven Better New for hot sauce (46:08)
Aakash: So that’s consumer tech. What about broader consumer? You have a hot sauce called Hot Pinc, I believe.
Mark: I’ve had an idea, an instinct, for a hot sauce. And I do have a thousand bottles of it, because my friends made me a prototype.
Aakash: Whoa. And you’ve talked about maybe an olive oil or something like that. So how does this work for things you don’t code?
Mark: Proven Better New is actually perfect for a hot sauce.
To me, the proven, at least at a product level, at a taste level, is a sauce called Caribbean hot sauce. Every time I put it on the table with five other hot sauces, everyone comes back to it. I can just see that everybody I give this hot sauce to loves it.
So copy the formula. Now, it’s a lot harder than I thought to copy the formula, because you actually need to go and find the right chilies. You can’t just go to a lab and say, use the same vinegar and the same pepper. It just doesn’t taste the same. Getting to their exact formula, that taste, is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’ve tried twice in a lab.
And that’s just the taste. Then there’s proven on the consumer marketing, the distribution and all the other things, and that’s just an instinct for me. I don’t have proven on that. I haven’t gone deep enough on whether there’s a proven path to come out with a new hot sauce brand, get awareness and get it on shelves.
So that’s really just a hobby for me. I don’t have any obvious better, and I don’t even really have any obvious new.
Aakash: Is there even new in a category like that?
Mark: Well, I think there could be new. You could have a taste that does better, or a package that does better, or direct-to-consumer marketing, or a different pricing model. People keep coming out with new tequilas, right? They seem to be able to come out with new tequilas every five years or so that break through. So there is some Proven Better New that is working in those categories.
The 2006 think weekend (48:45)
Aakash: I have you here in person, so I have to ask you about a story you’ve mentioned a couple of times in different conversations, which is this think weekend you had. I believe Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel were there. These are names that are legends. Sean Parker was there. But I’ve never really heard the full story. What happened there? What did you guys do?
Mark: Well, nobody was a legend then.
Aakash: Oh, okay.
Mark: Not really. This was in March of 2006. I had these friends like Peter and Reid, and at that time we really liked geeking out and talking about more intellectual topics.
Peter and I have always talked about macroeconomics. I love the way his brain works. He can go from big macroeconomics, like geopolitics, all the way down to micro-level things, like a product or how to invest in startups given what’s going on in the world. He processes data amazingly. And Reid and I love talking about politics and the internet. We all love talking about the internet.
There was no channel for us to have the conversations we wanted to have. You go to conferences and they’re boring, or you’re supposed to sit and listen to a speaker when we want to talk to each other. Or you sit next to each other at someone’s dinner party or cocktail party, and we want to go deep on something. We don’t want to make small talk.
So the point of the think weekend was, what if we just bring together the 30 or 35 smartest people we know, and there’s no small talk? No one’s going to ask you about your family. We’re only going to talk about really big topics the whole time, and we’re all going to talk. If someone presents, it’s to be the catalyst for a conversation.
We did it in Aspen in March. I got classrooms at the Aspen Institute, and it was like an unconference. I had a ranch down valley from Aspen, and half the people stayed at my ranch, including Zuck and Sean.
It was 2006, so the Facebook was about two years old. Zuck was staying up all night drinking Diet Cokes, eating M&Ms and working. Peter did a brilliant presentation for all of us on the housing bubble, which he was two years too early on.
And it was the only time I did it. Some smart hedge fund people were there too, and everyone said, let’s do this every year. And I was like, nah. I didn’t want it to become a conference. None of us had an agenda. No one was trying to network. No one was trying to sell anything to anyone or get anything. And that’s what made it great. It was just 35 people who came together by choice to be in these conversations. That’s why I called it a think weekend.
Aakash: Insane. I can’t believe it happened. Could something like that happen today? Should people be thinking about bringing their network together?
Mark: Yes, for sure. And it doesn’t have to be Peter Thiel. You have your own Peter Thiel, your own really, really smart thinkers around you, and they have different superpowers.
It’s great to just bring them all together and host it. Make it a kind of unconference, not too big. I asked people to come and make deeper presentations to the group on topics where they had superpowers, and then we’d have a conversation and a debate about that, or whatever topics you wish you could go deep on. It’s like the dinner party you want to have. What are the topics you want to go deep on, and who do you want to do it with?
Aakash: And so it’s not putting up a whiteboard of Proven Better New and talking about the next product you’re going to build.
Mark: No. It’s not trying to start a company or something. I might present my Proven Better New, present the points in my book, and then have a debate. A lot of people could say, Mark, I don’t believe at all that this is a good framework. They could give me counterfactuals. Mark, you never would have created Angry Birds. Or you never would have created, I don’t know, Instinct. Maybe there wasn’t enough to copy. How was that Proven Better New?
That’s a great debate, because frameworks are a lens to look at. You never want to be dogmatic. You want to have counterfactuals. You want to say, here’s where this isn’t useful to you, and here’s where you’re going to miss things.
Where to find Mark (53:24)
Aakash: I can’t think of a better way to end it, guys. That’s where the framework takes you. As far as I know, this is the deepest content on YouTube on Proven Better New that Mark has done. If people want to find you online, where should they go?
Mark: My only social network is X. Go to @markpinc and post something to me.
Aakash: All right, everyone. I think that was the deepest dive Mark has ever done on Proven Better New. I hope you got as much out of the episode as I did. His new book is pretty awesome. If you’ve watched this far, comment “I watched till the end” below. I’ll reach out to 10 of you, and we’ll get you a copy of his book so you can learn more from Mark.
And if you want more content like this, make sure you’re subscribed to the channel, and we’ll see you in the next episode.