 Ah, this is a really cool stage. It's awesome to have you, Mark, over here. Like, I know that you got a fever last night, so thank you for making it to the stage in any case. How are you feeling? I will say that at about three or four a.m., I thought there's no way I'm gonna be speaking at Slush today, so I'm just happy to be here. And it's a real honor to get to participate in this and it is amazing that there's a conference of 20,000 people in Northern Europe at maybe the worst time of year. I guess you're proud of that. And that you all, we all share this passion together for entrepreneurship and I think you should all give yourself a round of applause for being here today. No, thank you for coming to Helsinki. And it's your first time in Helsinki, right? Yes. Excellent. Welcome. Maybe next time I'll visit in summer. But it's an awesome honor to have you here because Finland, where we are currently, is known for its mobile games. And you guys with Zynga were the ones that started kind of the social gaming revolution on Facebook, where we see hundreds of companies across the Nordics working on like different platforms from Facebook to mobile. But let's start with actually that. So you guys started Zynga in 2007. So like, how did it get started? What led to the founding of Zynga? What was kind of the thought in your head that led to you guys actually starting working on the company? Well, it may be hard for us all to remember today that in 2007, gaming was, the games industry was mature and declining. The web game industry was really pretty terrible. I mean, it was not considered a good business. And as an entrepreneur, I think for so many of us, it's great to pursue an industry that is mature with the insight that maybe this industry hasn't even started its real growth phase yet. And you think about Google was like the 56th search engine. And similarly, there was no, the gaming industry was really focused on serving a much more hardcore market and the opportunity that we saw was to bring games to a mass market of easy adults. So like everyone can play games in a way. And the idea that the kernel of the vision for us and for social gaming was to say, what if gaming could be part of this cocktail party? What if gaming, what if social gaming could be its own social medium for people? And even if they weren't hardcore gamers, they could actually use games as a way to connect with people in their lives. Yeah, so in a way like people were already on Facebook, but they were not doing things like games together. So your first game with Zynga was actually a poker game. So like your background that you've done like a different startups in the past you're a serial entrepreneur, you did a social network before that. So how did you got like, you were one of the first people to actually start working on Facebook games. So what happened? Well, first of all, it's kind of funny that I started one of the first social networks that I'm pretty sure nobody here has ever heard of called tribe.net. And it was pretty amazing to manage to fail as a social network when that it was just a new concept and people would get an email saying you have a friend request or whatever and they'd actually open the email and do it and I still managed to fail with tribe. And the big insight that I got that I brought to what I did with Zynga was that as entrepreneurs we are on this journey to try to isolate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. And with tribe I stubbornly stuck to one instinct and one idea and never tried anything new. And I was determined with Zynga to really not be attached to any one idea but to say how do I get a lot of shots on goal and pursue a lot of different angles against this social gaming. And the first was poker and luckily it worked. The only innovation was we had this realization that people were hanging out on Facebook and I realized from tribe that people just wanted to hang out there. They wanted to connect and there wasn't an easy way to connect but by giving them a poker game it was like an always on bar. And so people really responded to that and resonated. And then we started to try a lot more games and the irony is most of those games failed and we hit a point where we were supporting like 10 games and poker was just one of them and we had to kind of retrench and say wait, let's make this one game much better at the expense of the rest. And we actually killed most of the other games and we really focused in on how do we go vertically deep and how do we make this into more of a franchise and a forever service. And that poker game is still one of the top games 10 or 11 years later. And it's just a reminder that consumers want us, they don't want to try lots of new things. They don't want to move from app to app. They want the one thing they're in to get better and better. Yeah. And like when Facebook opened its API you were just one of many developers that are kind of thinking about doing games on Facebook. And yet like Zingna today is worth of three billion and it's a publicly listed company and most of the other players were not able to grow such a big company or ultimately failed. Like what was it about you guys from the start that allowed you to actually build one of the winning companies? I've thought about that. I think that the prevailing wisdom in startups and product making by 2007 in the Valley and probably everywhere else was this idea of fail fast. And I think John Doar was famous for saying it. And the problem with building this MVP minimum viable product and then trying to fail or succeed in a binary way was that you were building products in a vacuum. And the idea that we got to very early on with Zingna was instead of focusing on this fail state we needed to be in a learned state and we needed to quickly have a game out with a live audience and then iterate. And we had such an advantage versus the game industry because at that time and it's a little bit like that again today the game industry might spend two years making a game before they brought it to an audience we might spend four to six weeks. And so the number of engineering days that you've wasted is much less. So at the end of the day you're thinking how do I maximize the amount of engineering days I'm spending on things that my customers really want. And we were probably testing a hundred different ideas a week and the game industry was probably testing for a year. Yeah. And that takes us to an interesting topic like you've been characterized as a product maker as an entrepreneur. That's kind of what kind of an entrepreneur you want to be. So when you're building a company like it starts very much without data with creativity and ideas. And then it leads to actually getting data and improving things that you're building based on that. So how do you actually balance between this creativity and getting to scale and building this big company where you can't be as attached to all the things anymore. Well there's a lot of answers to that. It's a tension that we all face. We hopefully we all face it as our companies do really well. And there's this question of should I as a CEO if we got here because I had some good instincts and abilities around making products that people like now all of a sudden as you're scaling we're spending our time on things that we're not necessarily great at and we're not making our products better but we're spending time on scale. And I hit a point where I had been spending all this time on scaling and not on products and I just said fuck scale. And I said what I want to do is make sure all that matters and people say that micro management is this terrible thing. I think micro management is a beautiful thing in the eyes of our customers. So if we're at McDonald's or a single restaurant we want to have a perfect experience every time and we don't care how many people they're serving today we just care that our experience is great. And similarly when we're making products we've got to care at the pixel level. We've got to really care about quality and it's very hard to do that when we're spending our time in management meetings and not product meetings. So in a way even though you were scaling as a company you tried to stay very close to the products and very close to the customers not kind of get carried away and leave this kind of business world and fundraising on all these things so stay very true to the customer. Yeah and I think that the best consumer product CEOs have their hands deeply in the details and the current CEO of Zynga who's awesome, happy to say, he's deep in the details and that makes me feel a lot better. So let's talk about games. So one thing that's very harsh about the gaming industry is that it's a very creative industry. Like if you're not creating new things and going forward at some point you will run out of people playing your games so you constantly have to recreate yourself. So how do you actually think about new gaming concepts and you're trying to evaluate a new product idea that whether this is going to be something successful or not? Do you have any methodology or philosophy how you think about this? Well, there's a lot of answers to that again. So the first answer is we came upon this idea that we wanted to run a game as a live service and we wanted to treat it as a franchise and we wanted to grow our audience and our business by growing these franchises not by going horizontal and creating more games and features but vertical. And a mantra inside our company was this idea of bold beats and a bold beat is a positive disruption in the consumer experience. It's some, it can be dumb in Farmville an engineer spent a half a day making the animals move and all of a sudden the players started to imagine these new dimensions of gameplay and my friend Bing said, you know, it's an idea that might make people want to play for three more months. So I think that it's really important that we focus on what the consumer wants and not try to force them to go a lot more. And I guess this is one like a trap for most product people that you want to make everything better and you want to create something new for the world but I guess like people mostly they don't want everything better and everything new. So how do you have some sort of a way that you actually think about this when you were making games with Zynga? Yes, thank you for reminding me of that, Mickey. So I taught this class on product making at Stanford Business School and the core concept that we really use the framework at Zynga and I think you can use this concept not just in thinking about game making and I know that we're kind of in the capital of game making in the world in Helsinki and I'm happy to say Zynga has a studio here now. But is this idea of proven better new? And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple he said the problem with the company was that they were trying to make every feature 10% better and the whole product was getting 50% worse. And we have to put our egos aside as product makers and realize it's so hard to make a product or a feature better and it takes so much polish the way we can de-risk our new company, our new product is by saying how do we isolate the new idea, the innovation you wanna test from the ideas you're not testing and to take those are proven and Mickey was at Supercell. I was so impressed when I saw Heyday, I thought they did such an amazing job of taking the innovations that we had built at Farmville too and on the web and taking that to mobile and you said backstage that they had this one idea of hey, what if on an iPad the main gameplay is a swipe? Yeah, they're looking like this when people play it would look like this. So tap, tap to swipe. It sounds like a small idea but it turned out to be a huge idea that was the germ that we get seed of an entire company. In a way like having something new or making something significantly better but that should be like only a couple of things maybe 20% of the thing and then having 70, 80% more of a proven concept. The irony of this that we kind of sometimes forget is if you can make a new product that has no new idea in it but the only thing that's new is hey, there's never been a farming game that's easy to use on mobile and we're gonna have no new ideas other than that. That's awesome because we already know people like farm games. Let's not try to barrage them with a whole bunch of other new ideas at the same time because people don't love new ideas. Talking about ideas, like looking at Zynga you have an amazing portfolio of games that over a billion people have played globally like coming from Farmwill and Mafia Wars to draw something, words with friends, so forth. So where do you actually get ideas like both as an individual and as a company because you constantly have to be creating new concepts and creating new creative ideas? Well, I kind of have two answers to that. The first is I love to see mashups. I used to call it Frankensteining the game and saying, what would happen if we had location check-in and dating and farming? Like let's throw those all together and see if that's cool or bad. And so I think constantly trying to mash up a lot of things that you're seeing, like oh, Pokemon Go, that's cool but what would it be like if Pokemon Go met married Farmville or words with friends? So the first point is that we want to try these mashups but the second point that I don't know about you guys but it's on my mind a lot today is we need an environment that makes it really easy to take our ideas and quickly test them and it feels like it's getting hard on mobile. It feels much harder than we had on Facebook web and I'm wondering what's next and how are we going to get to this open environment on mobile that lets us iterate on our ideas with live audiences again very quickly. Do you see like when you started seeing that cocktail party was Facebook? Like what are the cocktail parties you're looking at today that you think might be kind of the next big platforms where games will thrive? Yeah, so Facebook served as this amazing cocktail party and it allowed us to drop games and apps in in a way that enhanced that experience instead of needing people to come to that. On mobile today, we're excited about, I'm excited about Facebook Messenger opening up and allowing HTML based games and we're doing a lot there and we can move quickly. We're wondering if Snapchat's going to open up but I feel like as developers, we shouldn't just wait for these platforms to open up and I'm curious, I'm inspired by what we're seeing in crypto technologies and the public blockchain and the way that there's a whole ecosystem that is now working together that feels very open the way the internet felt open in 1994 and I'm wondering if there's a metaphor that we can take to mobile that we can stop all working on our own and start being interconnected. So more like a community of companies learning from each other and building games and having a gamer community instead of everyone building their own thing on the app store. Yeah, something like that. Talking about inspiration, so we're talking backstage about your favorite book. So could you actually tell a bit more about that because I think that's a very interesting topic? Well, at this point I think it's nothing new but I've been inspired for years now by Ready Player One. Has everyone here read that book? Has anyone heard about Ready Player One? Less than I thought. It's going to be an amazing movie I think, Steven Spielberg's making, it'll probably do really well. I tried to buy the movie rights, that didn't work. But Ready Player One, I think did a better job of pointing to this near future and what these virtual world experiences might be like. And I've had an idea that I'll throw out to all of you and maybe you'll do something with it. I've had an idea that I blogged about 12 or 15 years ago called DotEarth. And I thought, what if there was something that was like Minecraft meets Second Life? But it was an open platform where there was software that anyone can go use. Any entrepreneur or developer could add a server to DotEarth. You could add a whole virtual world. It could be DotSpace. There might be a common data transfer protocol so that the consumers could bring their avatars and virtual goods and currencies from game to game and all be interconnected. So that was completely inspired. I blogged about before there was Ready Player One and then Ready Player One kind of put even more focus on it. So in a way like having a game where you're playing as an avatar with other people but you can be playing World of Warcraft or something completely different inside the same world. And that's something that like, do you want to be a part of building that? Are you seeing someone building that right now today or are you still waiting for that to happen? You know, there's another related idea that I'll throw out to all of you that I'm wondering about a lot. I feel like our experience on this phone and I wanted to get a picture of all of you but I don't know if this will really work. I'm gonna do it while I talk. Yeah, it kinda works. Sorry. The experience on the phone. Yeah, thank you. I'm losing it. I'm wondering if we are on the verge of a new metaphor for how do we browse our mobile experience because this feels like Windows 95 and it used to be packaged software and now there's an app store which is awesome but there is no metaphor for us as consumers. We open this and we have to stare at it and say which app will I use? And the browser is just one area. What if Google Maps became a new browsable surface and Canvas page and ecosystem? What if we as developers could offer apps that our users could instantiate on Google Map? What if you might find words of friends? You might navigate your Google Map by social. You might be interested in where our friends are interesting people around here and what are they doing? Oh, I wanna connect with them around a game that they're playing or Pokemon Go, AR. I think we need that as consumers and we definitely need it as app developers. We need this new metaphor. So in a way we're using Alta Vista when Google is still to come but we think that there's not gonna be anything like after this. Yeah and I'll say my, what makes me so optimistic is at every one of these moments, and I'm dating myself but going back since the beginning of the internet whether it was AOL or Yahoo, we think it's over. We think it's all been played out and we wish we had had the idea for Facebook or whatever I did, I failed. And then you have this realization with history that the growth hasn't even started yet. And so we have, I think you can have this instinct to know that there's so much more ahead of us and there's so much more that this experience could really deliver and we're really waiting for the next platform to open that up. But I'm hopeful that maybe it's not housed in a single company and where I'm inspired by, again by what I'm seeing with cryptocurrencies is I'm curious whether there's a new model that might get to this kind of post capitalism, post investor moment where there could be a much more pure alignment between us as makers and our users where we're just trying to create more happy super fans and we're not necessarily trying to siphon off energy and profits to send back to an investor. So the users and the consumers would own the companies instead of like someone owning the company, the company making users for products and at the same time trying to make profit. So direct ownership of a company. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if people here know Blue Bottle Coffee, they were just acquired by Nestle, which is an amazing outcome for them and their investors, but it's not obvious why Blue Bottle's product is going to be better now that they're owned by Nestle. I'm curious if it was a couple years from now could they have floated a Blue Bottle coin where all they had to do is try to make more happy super fans of Blue Bottle and that was all that they were focused on and accountable for. So no more exits to investors, exits to, or not exits, but continuing the story with users. Our customers aren't really looking for an exit. You know, if you love a product, you hope it's there forever. Yeah, and we'll continue on those topics in the Founder's Studio. So thank you very much, Mark, for being here in Helsinki, being on stage, even though you're sick, and we'll continue in the Founder's Studio. Thanks, Mickey.