Behind Mark Pincus's Bid to Save Zynga | Hacker News Reader

Behind Mark Pincus's Bid to Save Zynga

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33 pointstomkit44 comments

I'm having a great deal of difficulty trying to scrounge up a shred of sympathy for Mr. Pincus. A man who has made vast sums of money running an unethical company unethically, who has screwed over users and employees at every turn, is now suffering his comeuppance. Tragic.

His employees on the other hand, bound as they are by golden handcuffs and seeing their stocks plummet, are far more deserving of our sympathy and good will. I'm far more willing to extend my understanding to those caught in the machine than to he who operates it.

Hopefully, Zynga will soon be a footnote in history, Pincus will retire with whatever he stashed away from the IPO, and his employees will find gainful employment doing something less shady and banal.

Egos like that, sadly, don't retire.

"...Zynga has consistently reported losses since going public, however; news of the CEO dumping his stock is a blow to the company's image. Of all the insiders involved in the deal, Pincus made the most money, netting around $200 million from the sale."

I don't see how he's suffering any kind of comeuppance.

It's amazing how far humans have progressed in 150 years isn't it? A century ago you had a right to complain about working conditions if, for example, you lost a limb in a meat factory. In the 1880s 1 in 7 steel workers would die while at work each year. Industrialists were considered "exploiting" the workers when they paid them $1 a day, hardly a liveable wage, and young children worked for even less.

Contrast that with what we consider "unethical" today about a company that makes cartoon games on a computer screen, which the user can step away from at any time. The employees are top-notch talent that could easily find employment elsewhere if they get tired of their in-house chef's meals.

I think the point is that a games company should be something that's actually very difficult to run unethically, yet somehow they managed it.

Are you kidding me? The games industry is practically founded on the broken backs of unethical labour practices. It's been a massive challenge, especially for the largest players, to change that.

Games jobs often have long hours and shitty pay, but at least you know what to expect going in. Based on the press coverage of Zynga it's almost like they are trying to mistreat people as a matter of course.

Pincus is getting excoriated in the trade press for his aggressive tactics, his Bagdad Bob enthusiasm, and his macho indifference to common sense and good taste.

What about Kleiner Perkins? What about Bing Gordon? Why, when a turd like Zynga goes up like a rocket and comes down as hard, don't the VCs encouraging a CEO like Pincus get hammered twice as hard? Aren't they supposed to function as gatekeepers, as elder statesmen of startups? Isn't it basically their job to sort the wheat from the chaff in exactly this situation?

Their job is to get as high ROI as they can, everything else they might claim is hyperbole. Zynga, Groupon, Facebook - hype, pump, and dump.

Greater Fools[1] expect loftier ideals. Let us be the Jesters who dream of a better tomorrow. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool

There are not many people in the world who can take an idea and generate $billions with it. Even if they crash, you don't just throw those people under the bus. You can debate whether or not they conform to some specific ideals of success, but I'd hardly call him "chaff."

You make fair points, but what I'm really questioning is why Pincus alone seems to bear the brunt of the backlash against him and Zynga, when he was enthusiastically enabled by a variety of investors. Why aren't they receiving the same criticism for failing to perform? Why aren't they receiving more, given that Pincus has only his own experience, while it's the basic job of the VCs to look at a hundred Pincus's and choose the three worth betting on?

> why Pincus alone seems to bear the brunt of the backlash against him and Zynga

Because that is how Zynga was presented to the world - as Pincus' company where he runs everything. Pincus and Zynga can't be separated, he is the public face and persona of the company.

It was the same with Jobs and Apple, and is the same with Zuck and Facebook. With success the founder is praised, but the downside of making a single founder the focal point is that when things go wrong they are completely associated with the faults of that single person.

to avoid the paywall ...

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...

Thank you!

as a bookmarklet:

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The following two things trouble me:

1) Employee morale is low. One problem cited is that they are unsure about the direction of the company.

2) The attempted fix to the moral problem was with an options grant.

The article goes on to talk about the quibble around who got what options, but this is all a tempest in a teapot. If the very people who make your products, who are the engine of your company, do not understand how you are going to continue to remain in business, then stock grants are, literally, worthless. You cannot get rich off a company that makes no revenue. I'm appalled that this was Pincus' (or whoever acted in his stead's) idea. You could actually, I don't know, TALK to your employees, elevate their ideas, and produce something of value. Hell, you could even talk to your customers and discover what they like, to try and help you drive some innovation.

> 2) The attempted fix to the moral problem was with an options grant.

Because we're talking about Zynga, I found that typo oddly appropriate.

I wonder if he had tears in his eyes when cashed out?

Tears of joy...

Actually, an employee threw a stock option at his eye...

One of Zyngas big problems is that they can only really continue to make these same types of game. They could try and make better games that more people would consider fun but I doubt that will really push their valuation back up. They only really got so overinflated taking advantage of psychology and addiction and pushing low quality but high return offers at their players.

Please change the link to use damian2000's Google referral link.

Mr. Pincus also filled his calendar with product meetings, something he had previously scaled back on. And he switched his main phone from a BlackBerry to iPhone, the device preferred by Zynga's users.

I don't think anyone was under the impression that Pincus was personally invested in any of his company's products, but I think this is still a telling anecdote, similar to cultural problems most recently corrected by Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, for example.

Is it really worth saving?

No. they shouldn't have IPO'd, their products are mind draining, they shouldn't even be a company. This whole thing is a big mess.

Funny thing is a lot of the baby boomers said the same thing about Mario Brothers.

To the extent that anyone said the same thing about Nintendo, which I assume is what your intent was, they were wrong and Nintendo had the sales and profits to refute such a claim.

In my opinion the trouble with Zynga is that it's a game company which doesn't make games, it makes loops of engagement tricks culminating with calls-to-action for buying virtual widgets. And then make those people who play their games look like idiots by spamming their friends. The kind of people who were engaged by this were the lowest common denominator of the gaming market, but have either become too sophisticated or too jaded for Zynga's tactics. Additionally, Facebook is choking Zynga's main channel, I'm guessing because aforementioned tactics were so pervasive and repugnant that they were ruining the Facebook UX.

Given the above speculation, Zynga would have to either try to double/triple/quadruple down on monetizing cheap engagement loops, or try making and selling real games that deliver actual value (insofar as any game delivers value).

Unfortunately, I think they're damned either way.

Making things that are actually fun is hard, and selling them is harder. Even if they succeed, they'll have a brutal transition period while they learn new skills and build a new market.

But the alternative looks no better. As you say, the well of credulous idiots is running dry. I haven't done any user tests lately, but a year ago our subjects were incredibly suspicious of any Facebook auth dialog. If you asked them why, it was clear that everybody had been burned, and Facebook had become too important a social context to end up looking like a fool.

The only upside I see is that we have a good reminder that that "you can fool some of the people all of the time" is not actually a good entrepreneurial strategy. Even if a hype bubble does get you to IPO.

Except Nintendo's primary revenue stream was not derived from ripping off other people's hard work, and slapping on their own artwork and calling it their own.

Nintendo created/creates a novel hardware platform, enabling other people to deliver great and compelling entertainment.

Have you ever listened to John Siracusa's Hypercritical Podcast when he remises about Nintendo, Nintendo hardware, and Nintendo games?

I do not expect anyone ever has, or ever will, wax on enthusiastically about any of the addictive little feedback loops that Zynga has sucked people into engaging. None of my friends who work there are particularly proud about the company they work for.

Zynga is one of the few (non toxin/polluting) companies in the world that I can't wait to see walk off the stage. The sooner the better.

While I agree with your analysis, I would add that the sheer entrepreneurial will and effort required to take Zynga from zero to IPO is incredible. Yes, a lot of stars had to line up in just the right way, but let's not discount the motivation of a person like Pincus, no matter how misdirected we think it is.

For that reason, I would not consider it a foregone conclusion that Zynga will disappear. To the extent that a rise-from-the-ashes is fueled by grit and determination, he has what it takes to do it. Despite the stock option clawback efforts, I don't buy the story that he's a soulless leech. He's still in it to win.

I agree with you pretty much on everything you're saying here. I haven't met Pincus, or spoken with him, so it's unclear to me whether he saw the intervening period of Zynga's "Let's get everyone hooked on addictive little feedback games, and let's speed up our product delivery (and justify our massive valuation) by rebranding other people's games" as anything more than a step to something truly great.

But, I can't judge Zynga on what, or who, Pincus might be, I can only judge them on their actions and behavior.

Who knows, maybe Zynga will go down in flames, but Pincus arises from the ashes to go off and do great things elsewewhere...

Which podcast episode are you referring to? I am curious to listen to it.

He's had some amazing ones. Here's a good selection.

First, start out with Blue Ocean. If you are a geek, and you love hardware/video games/nintendo, this is a classic episode that speaks to you in so many ways. It's not so overly technical that our eyes glaze over, but it's narrated by someone who is one of us, and is entertaining, and deeply deeply loves his topic (and Nintendo).

Episodes:

Blue Ocean - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/48

Bristling with Controls - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/71

Pinching the Harmonica - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/49

Maximum Deflection in all Directions - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/50

I'm not a gamers as much as I used to be, but Siracusa brings back the wonder of it all. Seriously the one podcast I look eagerly forward to every week.

Except that each iteration of the MB franchise actually added changes to gameplay.

Certainly it is for the people that own it.

I hate that someone linked this in an article in the hopes that we would pay for the whole thing, by the way thanks for linking the full article in the comments whoever did that.

Those of us with a subscription to the WSJ can't always remember that not all of the articles are available to non-subscribers.

So stop posting wsj articles full stop then.

If you Google the title for the article and click through from Google, you see the entire article- no membership required.

I would never, in a million years, work for this guy. I just have to wonder, is it possible to short sell stock options?

Is anyone going long on Zynga and picking up some stock for $2 a share?

is there any reason they haven't ditched facebook and focused on games for mobile phones?

they have recently launched some of their online games on mobile. I am sure that is a strategy going forward.

The best way for Mark Pincus to save Zynga?

Quit.

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