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.
