Mark Pincus Steps Down From All Operational Roles at Zynga

In the worst case scenario it appears that Pincus and the board saw the writing on the wall that their earnings would (and did) drop after the ipo. Rather than make drastic changes or pursue new strategies rather than farmville clones (which, to be fair, while profitable, apparently have a shelf-life of around 5 years, after which the audience got tired of them and left), they decided to focus on avoiding a bad story. Their priority became stopping a google chef story from happening at the same time their earnings failed to meet expectations.

That still doesn't explain it, however. Google chef and microsoft secretarey becoming millionares is a story. Sub-par engineer/business analyst/game designer becomes millionare after ipo is not. Looking at the small number of people affected and assuming they didn't clawback much more than half the stock, there's no way they got much more than 50m back.

Then the only explanation becomes that they REALLY wanted to give the stock to attract new talent. "Come work for stock we clawed back from the last guy who already vested" is the least appealing job offer I've heard of that doesn't involve poisonous snakes.

Then the only explanation becomes that they were vindictive and did not want someone to profit a lot when they thought they contributed a little and in reality probably did a medium-quality job. Looking at some rants on quora, it seems like they spend a lot of money on a lot of unnecessary things and are just looking to scapegoat at this point.

I still don't really understand, though, and that bothers me.

I've seen the inner workings of a few situations (not Mark's though) - all I can say, as a general statement, is that one person is rarely responsible for all a company's problems (especially a company as large as Zynga). It is easy to pin something on a CEO, but you also have to realize that a CEO typically reports to VCs and VCs report to the bottom line on their portfolios. In turn, only a few people report to the CEO and there can be a lot of mismanagement that is out of the CEO's governance.

Again, this is a general statement - I can't say anything more about Mark's situation without having been there.

Well, now I guess he has all the money he needs and does not have to report to anyone - whatever he does next should be the true judge of character :)

The smart folks have realized that going public is where the money is at. And you don't need to produce value to go public, you just need to get Wall St. to be your evangelist and convince ignorant investors that your company's shares will be worth more than their IPO price at some uncertain point in the future. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Yes indeed, its the same old "Penny Stock" scheme that common folk fall for (see: Wolf of Wall St.). This well oiled money printing machine evolved out of the Dot Com boom, wherein it existed in a functional but crude state. It has since been perfected.

So, what is a start-up? Is it a vehicle to solve a problem? Or a marketing-based ponzi scheme designed to pump and dump stock after stock in IPOs, making the "investors" unfathomably wealthy at the expense of common folk through zero-sum wealth transfers?

This is the real question Sam Altman and PG have to answer. Because it seems to me for every Elon Musk, there are hundreds of Mark Pincus clones, just itching to ride the next wave all the way to the bank.

- Cut the employees from 2k to like 500 (That's just a guess. I don't know enough about their structure to say a real number)

- Milk their Facebook hits (and keep the staff to do so)

- License my IP (Farmville, Mafia Wars, Draw Something) to any PC, console or mobile developer that will not embarrass me.

- Take a few longshot bets on FTP PC or Mobile games. Not too many so I can stay focused, and not too expensive so I can keep trying.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/nsa-world-of-warcra...