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Tips from a KPCB-backed entrepreneurial cover boy

10.30.2009 · Posted in News and FYI, Stanford MBA

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.

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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.

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2 Responses to “Tips from a KPCB-backed entrepreneurial cover boy”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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