Tips from a KPCB-backed entrepreneurial cover boy
Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, and Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, dropped by Stanford to present a the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series. Mark just got back from a press tour resulting in cover stories in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Business Week and in the fashion section of the New York Times. Web 3.0—believe it.
Above: Mark Pincus (left), Bing Gordon (right) speak at Stanford, dropping multiple S-bombs
Mark’s running Zynga with 50M users a month and a 600-person org trying to grow by 800 in 6 months. His talk came as stream-of-consciousness tools and tips, occasionally moderated by Bing. At the end of the hour, boy, did I want to just be around him—and I wasn’t alone as a sizable crowd followed him and Bing onto the Zynga recruiting mixer.
Tips from Mark and Bing:
- Set your goals early to know what you want, and don’t want.
- Employees need to believe you give them a crazy amount of responsibility
- Biggest test of a CEO is making something happen when you’re not in the room
- Don’t give up control. Once you do, you might as well go home
- Be a product manager, product managers are mini-CEOs
- Is an organization a meritocracy? If status and age are uniformly correlated—run!
- Test for a good idea: make it compelling in 5 words
- Web 3.0 reinvent the Internet a third time. People will pay for value. The Internet will not be funded by cruise line ads
For the whole story, check out Mark and Bing via podcast at ecorner.stanford.edu.
Love it. I follow Mark’s blog pretty religiously.
My favorite: Be a product manager, product managers are mini-CEOs.
While I may have personal bias, I have found it to be true. It is this function that is ultimately accountable for figuring out what to do (and when to do it) in a way that best serves the business, market and customer.
Thanks Mohit, wow, I didn’t realize Mark Pincus had a blog. …surprisingly little traffic on it: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s20markpinc. I guess all his fans are busy harvesting.