11 ms·

Mark Pincus, Zynga’s Founder, Returns as C.E.O

90 points by downandout 12y ago

rhaker 12y ago
Wow. I wish Mr. Pincus all the best and hope he can pull off a Steve Jobs - esque "job" and revive a company from the clutches of death. It is quite possible that he can try to do something really innovative and pivot to a complete new direction. He certainly has the funds to do something big, given he was an early investor in facebook.
- aikah 12y ago
  Pincus is no Jobs. He "pumped and dumped" Zynga, he'll be out of Zynga in less than a year. But I'm sure he'll make a lot of money off Zynga in the mean time ,like he did before.
  - harryh 12y ago
    I'll bet you $250 he's still CEO on April 8, 2016.
    - enraged_camel 12y ago
      http://longbets.org http://longbets.org Go ahead and put your money where your mouth is. :)
      - harryh 12y ago
        Unfortunately it looks like longbets have to be at least 2 years. I routinely make wagers like this and always pay up if I lose (though my opponents sometimes welch). I'm super easy to find on the internet.
    - billiam 12y ago
      Nice try, Pincus :)
chatmasta 12y ago
I've always found the story of Zynga to be entertaining and fun to watch. Mark Pincus is a refreshingly down-to-earth leader. He takes a lot of shit, and his company is the butt of a lot of jokes (probably doesn't help having a huge office right next to caltrain as a constant reminder). Despite this, Pincus always has a smile on his face and an air of confidence to him. I respect this. Pincus is a hustler. He built Zynga from the ground up, leveraged it into massive investment, but unfortunately was a little too early to the mobile gaming party. Zynga got screwed because it depended on facebook platform, and new apps emerged that did not. Supercell showed how to profit from mobile gaming and avoid platform lock-in. iOS and Android also dominated Facebook platform so any game depending on Facebook lost to competitors who built around iOS/Android. The early moves of Pincus were very impressive, and if he can replicate that execution, I bet he can also bring Zynga through a strong recovery. I respect his confidence and leadership. Seems like a cool dude.
- alaskamiller 12y ago
  Funny, when Zynga first grew it was remarked as being dominant because of the tight Facebook partnership. When Zynga and FB broke up it's now pointed that it's because Zynga got to the dance too early. The greater context is that all these coin-op arcade companies fizzle, leading all the way from Atari down. What happened to Rovio? To King? Likely the same ending for Riot to Supercell. You get 2 to 3 years, maybe 5 tops, then you get replaced. The real game is figuring out how to grab as much cash off the table without looking as cynical and jaded and greedy as you really are.
- davycro 12y ago
  > The early moves of Pincus were very impressive His early moves were deplorable. He cloned-- pixel by pixel-- emerging games built by small developers, then seeded them with traffic from other Zynga games.
  - golergka 12y ago
    Everyone did. Developers he stole from stole it from someone else, the whole social game space was a clone war. But Zynga was consistently succesful in it. Do you remember the tower-breaking game on Kongregate and iOS that Angry Birds cloned? Or Backyard Monsters that was the original Clash of Clans?
srehnborg 12y ago
My hope that this finally signals Zynga's pivot back into the gambling world.
chollida1 12y ago
Down from 2.90 to 2.60 after hours on the news. I wish them well but I think it will be a tough road ahead. I worked for a company called Corel in early 2000. We had some really great people but the biggest drag on us was the fact that in the late 90s Corel released some really shitty versions of their software. it was tough to come back from that and I fear this is the same issue that Zynga faces. Once you've obtained a negative image in peoples minds its very tough to change that perception. Looking back on what Zynga did, it looks like early apple. They had a first mover advantage in a growing market, and just couldn't make the transition from their earliest products to new streams of revenue very efficiently. So I guess this places them in a position close to the late 80s apple. In my opinion Zynga has 2 big issues: 1) What does Zynga do now that Facebook has cut off their main driver for viral growth 2) How do they get back the large group of people who have been introduced to casual gaming and then left after their first year.
sirbetsalot 12y ago
No one respects a thief.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- keyle 12y ago
  This is the kind of comment that is really unnecessary. You could at least tell your side of the story, how you came to that conclusion and why.
Animats 12y ago
Pincus to a U.C. Berkeley business school audience in 2009: "I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues right fucking now. Like, I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to—just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. [laughs]"[1][2] [1] http://www.vimeo.com/3738428 http://www.vimeo.com/3738428 [2] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/how-zynga-went-from-social-gaming-powerhouse-to-has-been/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/how-zynga-went-from-... Newer Zynga employees, this is your new boss. Is this someone you want to work for?
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Isn't this the very literal definition of hustling, before the startup crowd decided they could rehabilitate the word to bring it in line with what football coaches mean when they say it?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I'm having a hard time parsing this comment. It is one of the two important definitions of hustling ("making money quickly with short cons"), the other being the thing football coaches are talking about. And the distinction is important, because the football coach definition is a virtue, and the Pincus definition isn't.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Yeah. "We need to hustle" means "we need to work a little bit harder". "I got hustled" means "I got tricked". Not sure what OP is talking about. There's literally two different definitions.
    - mbesto 12y ago
      Quite synonymous with the word hacking as well. My feelings are equally synonymous. Especially with those who implore "growth hacking" techniques that otherwise are not very virtuous. Where do you draw the line?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- tptacek 12y ago
  This comment page is dominated by substantive negative comments. Negativity isn't against the guidelines, nor is bias. The problem is insubstantial negative comments. For the comments you believe to be insubstantial: write a substantial comment pointing out why. Or use the downvote button.
- nrb 12y ago
  Positive lessons to be learned from an objective analysis Pincus and Zynga: - Do not mislead, abuse, or harmfully exploit your customers as Zynga did in the early days through tricking them into installing malware or pressuring them into abusing their social connections for in-game currency. - Do not make exact replicas of competing products and leverage your popularity, financial situation, and legal team to crush them. - When your company somehow manages to survive despite the previous points, do not claw back the stock options that the people who built your company earned fair and square. Follow those three points and you just might survive long enough to be the next lucky mobile game startup that Zynga decides to clone verbatim!
  - cwyers 12y ago
    I am reasonably sure those are the reasons why Zynga hasn't gone out of business already, not the reasons they're struggling.
comrade1 12y ago
This man is cancer. The fact that he is back at Zynga shows just how far they've fallen. They've lost all of their good execs - people from ea, from google, etc and now it's just the dregs. And the bung hole plug has finally returned, but after the keg has drained. edit: sorry, but I thought about it some more and Zynga is probably hopeless without someone aggressive like Pincus at the helm. However, I don't think he's going to be able to hire anyone good after the disaster of the last few years. They'll have to start over. He can hire some new talented people. Rebuild their marketing team, hire some good engineers, and then when they're on the verge of making it big fire them all and take their options while hiring big names from bay area companies...
jarsin 12y ago
Zynga shares dropped 10% on this news.
DigitalSea 12y ago
You know you're going through hard times when your future business plan involves bringing back Mark Pincus. This guy is the cancer of the business world. The shady tactics that Mark used to get Zynga to the stage where it was once at the top of the gaming world before it crashed and burned would make even the most rogue leaders blush.
ElectricFeel 12y ago
Is anyone else reminded of 3M by this? Also, Apple had Steve Jobs leave, company founder, then Jobs returned & Apple was swell. Similar situation. Maybe it's the grandpa in me but I feel like one gets a sense of that 'CEO feeling' at any company.. that is is why they're called the CEO.
interesting_att 12y ago
I am surprised Don Mattrick would be let go, especially since most of the projects he oversaw have not been released yet. But given that we're dealing with Mark Pincus, the founder famous for wanting control, I guess this was expected. To those who are unaware, Mattrick was primarily let go for his failure with Zynga Poker. The updated version killed user engagement so badly, the game may never recover. Zynga Poker is one of the company's most interesting assets, given that online gambling will be legalized in the next few years. Mattrick represented a shift in Zynga: instead of low-brow clones of competitors, Zynga would focus on high-polish triple AAA games. It was a daring strategy, since Zynga's reputation single handedly scared away many amazing game designers. You can copy a farming game easily and get decent results if you have a team of data analysts. It is quite difficult to copy a great hardcore RTS and get good results. Zynga spent 500 million USD to buy NaturalMotion, an excellent game developer in this space. They spent a ton of money on their slots game, acquiring valuable IP licenses + great slot designers. They spent a ton of money getting the Tiger Woods license. Etc etc. Pincus has never shown the ability to manage high quality game designers. He has only showed the ability to manage MBA-types, who aren't considered the most creative of the bunch. Mattrick would have been a better leader in this vertical. Any midcore/hardcore gamer would rather want the XBOX CEO over Pincus. What does this signal for Zynga's future? 1) All of Mattrick's high-polish products are now under the leadership of someone who isn't as geared towards this vertical. 2) Increased importance for social casino and real money gambling for the company- The fact that this is the main reason why Mattrick got fired highlights Pincus' goal of dominating real money gambling. #1 is a negative signal, #2 is a positive signal. I'd agree with the rest of the market and say this is a net-loss for Zynga.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  I take this as another example of a pivot that never made sense. It's like Mc Donalds trying to sell high end food under their brand. Why not start a separate daughter company for that? In most industries this is a common practise, it seems like Gaming still has to learn that.
- rhizome 12y ago
  I seem to remember seeing this someplace before, where an executive on the upslope is fired and the new guy gets the credit for good new projects soon to release.
hellbanner 12y ago
Facebook games are an intriguing phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker -- the creator received death threats when he took the game offline
JonFish85 12y ago
Good, I hope the man goes down with his ship and loses every dollar he's made off of the company. These in-app-purchase types of games are bad, but Zynga is one of the worst. These games don't strive to solve any problem, and in fact don't strive to make anyone's lives better. They essentially run an extortion game: "pay us to scratch the itch we give you." And god forbid they get access to the gambling markets, because suddenly they will descend like vultures onto a group of people who lack the self control to spend their money. They don't strive to make people happy; explicitly they make the most money when people are nervous that they might lose the hours/days/weeks of "work" they put into whatever this app is. They strip-mine people's souls for cash. I hope Zynga, King, et al. nothing but the worst. I don't like them, I don't like their leadership, I don't like their investors and I don't like the employees that work knowingly taking advantage of people (psychology majors who actively exploit people's base instincts for the explicit purpose of extracting money with no positive side effects). Their games are the online equivalent of an emotionally abusive boyfriend or a drug dealer. They draw you in under the auspices of fun & cheeriness, but it quickly devolves into a quagmire of dependency. As a quick disclaimer, I've never worked for a game company, never mind any of the one's I've mentioned. I think Pincus is a scumbag businessman for many reasons, some of which I listed here and some of the reasons that others have listed (i.e. stock take back, spyware bundling, game stealing, pump & dump (I know it's not the textbook term for it)).
- swamp40 12y ago
  The worst one I ever saw was an iPad app with a cute and cuddly baby that you had to take care of every few hours. If you stopped playing the game for a while, the baby wound up in the ICU, with tubes and a mask hooked up to it. And the only way to get the baby out of the hospital was to pay money. It made my kids cry. I was so mad I banished any game made by that company. Pathetic.
  - im3w1l 12y ago
    What was the name of the game?
- M8 12y ago

90 points by downandout 12y ago

Wow. I wish Mr. Pincus all the best and hope he can pull off a Steve Jobs - esque "job" and revive a company from the clutches of death. It is quite possible that he can try to do something really innovative and pivot to a complete new direction. He certainly has the funds to do something big, given he was an early investor in facebook.

aikah 12y ago
Pincus is no Jobs. He "pumped and dumped" Zynga, he'll be out of Zynga in less than a year. But I'm sure he'll make a lot of money off Zynga in the mean time ,like he did before.
- harryh 12y ago
  I'll bet you $250 he's still CEO on April 8, 2016.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    http://longbets.org http://longbets.org Go ahead and put your money where your mouth is. :)
    - harryh 12y ago
      Unfortunately it looks like longbets have to be at least 2 years. I routinely make wagers like this and always pay up if I lose (though my opponents sometimes welch). I'm super easy to find on the internet.
  - billiam 12y ago
    Nice try, Pincus :)

chatmasta 12y ago

I've always found the story of Zynga to be entertaining and fun to watch. Mark Pincus is a refreshingly down-to-earth leader. He takes a lot of shit, and his company is the butt of a lot of jokes (probably doesn't help having a huge office right next to caltrain as a constant reminder). Despite this, Pincus always has a smile on his face and an air of confidence to him. I respect this. Pincus is a hustler. He built Zynga from the ground up, leveraged it into massive investment, but unfortunately was a little too early to the mobile gaming party. Zynga got screwed because it depended on facebook platform, and new apps emerged that did not. Supercell showed how to profit from mobile gaming and avoid platform lock-in. iOS and Android also dominated Facebook platform so any game depending on Facebook lost to competitors who built around iOS/Android. The early moves of Pincus were very impressive, and if he can replicate that execution, I bet he can also bring Zynga through a strong recovery. I respect his confidence and leadership. Seems like a cool dude.

alaskamiller 12y ago
Funny, when Zynga first grew it was remarked as being dominant because of the tight Facebook partnership. When Zynga and FB broke up it's now pointed that it's because Zynga got to the dance too early. The greater context is that all these coin-op arcade companies fizzle, leading all the way from Atari down. What happened to Rovio? To King? Likely the same ending for Riot to Supercell. You get 2 to 3 years, maybe 5 tops, then you get replaced. The real game is figuring out how to grab as much cash off the table without looking as cynical and jaded and greedy as you really are.
davycro 12y ago
> The early moves of Pincus were very impressive His early moves were deplorable. He cloned-- pixel by pixel-- emerging games built by small developers, then seeded them with traffic from other Zynga games.
- golergka 12y ago
  Everyone did. Developers he stole from stole it from someone else, the whole social game space was a clone war. But Zynga was consistently succesful in it. Do you remember the tower-breaking game on Kongregate and iOS that Angry Birds cloned? Or Backyard Monsters that was the original Clash of Clans?

srehnborg 12y ago

My hope that this finally signals Zynga's pivot back into the gambling world.

chollida1 12y ago

Down from 2.90 to 2.60 after hours on the news. I wish them well but I think it will be a tough road ahead. I worked for a company called Corel in early 2000. We had some really great people but the biggest drag on us was the fact that in the late 90s Corel released some really shitty versions of their software. it was tough to come back from that and I fear this is the same issue that Zynga faces. Once you've obtained a negative image in peoples minds its very tough to change that perception. Looking back on what Zynga did, it looks like early apple. They had a first mover advantage in a growing market, and just couldn't make the transition from their earliest products to new streams of revenue very efficiently. So I guess this places them in a position close to the late 80s apple. In my opinion Zynga has 2 big issues: 1) What does Zynga do now that Facebook has cut off their main driver for viral growth 2) How do they get back the large group of people who have been introduced to casual gaming and then left after their first year.

sirbetsalot 12y ago

No one respects a thief.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
keyle 12y ago
This is the kind of comment that is really unnecessary. You could at least tell your side of the story, how you came to that conclusion and why.

Animats 12y ago

Pincus to a U.C. Berkeley business school audience in 2009: "I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues right fucking now. Like, I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to—just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. [laughs]"[1][2] [1] http://www.vimeo.com/3738428 http://www.vimeo.com/3738428 [2] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/how-zynga-went-from-social-gaming-powerhouse-to-has-been/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/how-zynga-went-from-... Newer Zynga employees, this is your new boss. Is this someone you want to work for?

pavel_lishin 12y ago
Isn't this the very literal definition of hustling, before the startup crowd decided they could rehabilitate the word to bring it in line with what football coaches mean when they say it?
- tptacek 12y ago
  I'm having a hard time parsing this comment. It is one of the two important definitions of hustling ("making money quickly with short cons"), the other being the thing football coaches are talking about. And the distinction is important, because the football coach definition is a virtue, and the Pincus definition isn't.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Yeah. "We need to hustle" means "we need to work a little bit harder". "I got hustled" means "I got tricked". Not sure what OP is talking about. There's literally two different definitions.
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Quite synonymous with the word hacking as well. My feelings are equally synonymous. Especially with those who implore "growth hacking" techniques that otherwise are not very virtuous. Where do you draw the line?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 12y ago
This comment page is dominated by substantive negative comments. Negativity isn't against the guidelines, nor is bias. The problem is insubstantial negative comments. For the comments you believe to be insubstantial: write a substantial comment pointing out why. Or use the downvote button.
nrb 12y ago
Positive lessons to be learned from an objective analysis Pincus and Zynga: - Do not mislead, abuse, or harmfully exploit your customers as Zynga did in the early days through tricking them into installing malware or pressuring them into abusing their social connections for in-game currency. - Do not make exact replicas of competing products and leverage your popularity, financial situation, and legal team to crush them. - When your company somehow manages to survive despite the previous points, do not claw back the stock options that the people who built your company earned fair and square. Follow those three points and you just might survive long enough to be the next lucky mobile game startup that Zynga decides to clone verbatim!
- cwyers 12y ago
  I am reasonably sure those are the reasons why Zynga hasn't gone out of business already, not the reasons they're struggling.

comrade1 12y ago

This man is cancer. The fact that he is back at Zynga shows just how far they've fallen. They've lost all of their good execs - people from ea, from google, etc and now it's just the dregs. And the bung hole plug has finally returned, but after the keg has drained. edit: sorry, but I thought about it some more and Zynga is probably hopeless without someone aggressive like Pincus at the helm. However, I don't think he's going to be able to hire anyone good after the disaster of the last few years. They'll have to start over. He can hire some new talented people. Rebuild their marketing team, hire some good engineers, and then when they're on the verge of making it big fire them all and take their options while hiring big names from bay area companies...

jarsin 12y ago

Zynga shares dropped 10% on this news.

DigitalSea 12y ago

You know you're going through hard times when your future business plan involves bringing back Mark Pincus. This guy is the cancer of the business world. The shady tactics that Mark used to get Zynga to the stage where it was once at the top of the gaming world before it crashed and burned would make even the most rogue leaders blush.

ElectricFeel 12y ago

Is anyone else reminded of 3M by this? Also, Apple had Steve Jobs leave, company founder, then Jobs returned & Apple was swell. Similar situation. Maybe it's the grandpa in me but I feel like one gets a sense of that 'CEO feeling' at any company.. that is is why they're called the CEO.

interesting_att 12y ago

I am surprised Don Mattrick would be let go, especially since most of the projects he oversaw have not been released yet. But given that we're dealing with Mark Pincus, the founder famous for wanting control, I guess this was expected. To those who are unaware, Mattrick was primarily let go for his failure with Zynga Poker. The updated version killed user engagement so badly, the game may never recover. Zynga Poker is one of the company's most interesting assets, given that online gambling will be legalized in the next few years. Mattrick represented a shift in Zynga: instead of low-brow clones of competitors, Zynga would focus on high-polish triple AAA games. It was a daring strategy, since Zynga's reputation single handedly scared away many amazing game designers. You can copy a farming game easily and get decent results if you have a team of data analysts. It is quite difficult to copy a great hardcore RTS and get good results. Zynga spent 500 million USD to buy NaturalMotion, an excellent game developer in this space. They spent a ton of money on their slots game, acquiring valuable IP licenses + great slot designers. They spent a ton of money getting the Tiger Woods license. Etc etc. Pincus has never shown the ability to manage high quality game designers. He has only showed the ability to manage MBA-types, who aren't considered the most creative of the bunch. Mattrick would have been a better leader in this vertical. Any midcore/hardcore gamer would rather want the XBOX CEO over Pincus. What does this signal for Zynga's future? 1) All of Mattrick's high-polish products are now under the leadership of someone who isn't as geared towards this vertical. 2) Increased importance for social casino and real money gambling for the company- The fact that this is the main reason why Mattrick got fired highlights Pincus' goal of dominating real money gambling. #1 is a negative signal, #2 is a positive signal. I'd agree with the rest of the market and say this is a net-loss for Zynga.

m_mueller 12y ago
I take this as another example of a pivot that never made sense. It's like Mc Donalds trying to sell high end food under their brand. Why not start a separate daughter company for that? In most industries this is a common practise, it seems like Gaming still has to learn that.
rhizome 12y ago
I seem to remember seeing this someplace before, where an executive on the upslope is fired and the new guy gets the credit for good new projects soon to release.

hellbanner 12y ago

Facebook games are an intriguing phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker -- the creator received death threats when he took the game offline

JonFish85 12y ago

Good, I hope the man goes down with his ship and loses every dollar he's made off of the company. These in-app-purchase types of games are bad, but Zynga is one of the worst. These games don't strive to solve any problem, and in fact don't strive to make anyone's lives better. They essentially run an extortion game: "pay us to scratch the itch we give you." And god forbid they get access to the gambling markets, because suddenly they will descend like vultures onto a group of people who lack the self control to spend their money. They don't strive to make people happy; explicitly they make the most money when people are nervous that they might lose the hours/days/weeks of "work" they put into whatever this app is. They strip-mine people's souls for cash. I hope Zynga, King, et al. nothing but the worst. I don't like them, I don't like their leadership, I don't like their investors and I don't like the employees that work knowingly taking advantage of people (psychology majors who actively exploit people's base instincts for the explicit purpose of extracting money with no positive side effects). Their games are the online equivalent of an emotionally abusive boyfriend or a drug dealer. They draw you in under the auspices of fun & cheeriness, but it quickly devolves into a quagmire of dependency. As a quick disclaimer, I've never worked for a game company, never mind any of the one's I've mentioned. I think Pincus is a scumbag businessman for many reasons, some of which I listed here and some of the reasons that others have listed (i.e. stock take back, spyware bundling, game stealing, pump & dump (I know it's not the textbook term for it)).

swamp40 12y ago
The worst one I ever saw was an iPad app with a cute and cuddly baby that you had to take care of every few hours. If you stopped playing the game for a while, the baby wound up in the ICU, with tubes and a mask hooked up to it. And the only way to get the baby out of the hospital was to pay money. It made my kids cry. I was so mad I banished any game made by that company. Pathetic.
- im3w1l 12y ago
  What was the name of the game?
M8 12y ago