Who they are
Mark Pincus founded Zynga and rode the first great wave of social gaming on Facebook's platform — FarmVille, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars. Famously coined the phrase "minimum viable product" in its modern pragmatic form and is associated with fast, ruthless iteration cycles tied to tight metric loops. Zynga's rise and fall is also a textbook case in platform-dependency risk: when Facebook changed its rules, Zynga's advantage evaporated.
Core Ideas
- Metric-driven product development — instrument everything, iterate weekly
- Platform dependency as existential risk
- The virality loop as a product design primitive
Related
- Mark Zuckerberg — the platform that made, and then unmade, Zynga
- Marc Andreessen — early a16z portfolio connection