701: Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga) - Why We All Need a Coach, Maintaining High Standards, The Book of Life, Aggressive Ambition, and Why Your Instincts Are Almost Always Right

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - Ryan Hawk

In this episode of The Learning Leader Show, Ryan Hawk interviews Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga and serial entrepreneur, about the transformative power of coaching,

Key takeaways

• Coaching acts as a 'cheat code' for personal and professional growth, accelerating learning through expert guidance.
• Committing to proper technique over immediate results—like serving where you swing in tennis—builds sustainable excellence.

Main topics

• The value of coaching in personal and professional development
• Building a culture of long-term excellence over short-term wins

Notable quotes

"You don't play to win. You play to get better."

"Throw to where you swing, not swing to where you throw."

Conclusion

Mark Pincus demonstrates that sustained success comes not from raw talent or relentless hustle alone, but from

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, Mark Pincus, founded Zynga. in 2007 and built it into a $12.7 billion social gaming empire. He is a serial founder who sold his first company in seven months for 38 million bucks. He made an early seed investment in Facebook and he's been teaching product development at Stanford for years. His new book is called Life at the Speed of Play. During our conversation, we discuss what Mark learned from his tennis coach that ended up helping him build a culture that wins over the long term, a big focus on long-term winning. And then his, quote, book of life practice, what it is, where it started, why he does it, and how you can do it too. And then we got really personal, talking about how being obsessed with excellence and having high standards can impact us as parents and the potential issue that creates. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Pincus. I was talking to your team to prep for this, and we were going back and forth on ideas. And one of the quotes I love is, I'm one of the most coached people in the world. So you've hired a surfing coach, tennis coach, chess coach, life coach. You've hired a legendary Bill Campbell to coach you from a business perspective. I'm sure there are many other areas where you get coaches. Talk to me about how much you value coaching and being coached. In Speaker 1 (2:06) a lot of ways, coaches are like, cheat codes. You know, it's like you spend so many hours trying to do better in a game. I mean, some of us. And then finally you go on YouTube and you look for the cheat codes and the hacks because you just are so frustrated. I think in life, it's also like that. One of the times that I was in what I call the abyss, I said, okay, I have too much time in my hands. Like I'm squandering it. What can I do with my time? And I said, I'm just going to see how good a tennis player I can be. And I'm just going to go as far as I can go. And I started training with a real coach five or six days a week. And I had a goal. I wrote down in my book of life that I was going to win a USTA match. And oddly, I mean, this is not a good way to hit a goal. But just before I started Zynga, I won a match. I went to a USGA tournament and I won, but only because my opponent didn't show up. So I technically won. Then I went on to the next round where I couldn't even get my racket on some of the balls that the person served to me. So I'll take that one. But I learned in committing to something, I mean, just in this case of tennis, I got so many lessons that helped me in life and helped me in leadership. And I can't remember if I get to them and my coach Jorge, who probably will one day be listening to this in the book. But one of them that Jorge said to me was to teach me to serve. He said, Mark, here's how you learn to serve. He said, you throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw. Because in order to get your best serve in tennis, you need to have the natural movement of your body. And that is your natural swing. Okay. So you go up over your head and you just come across your body and it feels good, like golf. And he said, once your brain knows that you're going to commit to that swing, it'll throw the ball in the wrong place and you hit it out of the court, you miss it, you look stupid. But eventually your brain is like, holy shit, he's serious about this. The only way we're going to do this is if I put the ball in front of that swing. Okay, this will sound like wise mark going into all this detail, but... What I learned from that, from committing to proper strokes, was that you play to get better, you don't play to win. And there's so many lessons in that. You don't play to do anything you can just to win this point or this match. The question's, what am I doing that is making me better in the next game? And how do I kill my ego and get my ego out of the way of me actually being humble and curious and learning? And then... That principle of throw to where you swing, don't swing to where you throw came back at Zynga because we said, okay, you get these people who are such an amazing engineer. They're so good at something that you contort as an organization or a culture. And you say, well, they're such a valuable individual contributor that we will deal with the fact that. anyone who works for them quits or that they're bad for our culture. And Colleen McCreary, who taught me so much and was our chief people officer, said, no, you can't do that as an organization. And she was right. When the organization sees you not willing to bend and contort just to win that one point, they start to build a muscle and a confidence too. Speaker 2 (5:51) It feels like, yeah, these coaches, a commonality among them is a willingness to commit to the long game instead of just winning this one point or, okay, we have this high performer who's going to crush it, even though they may be bad for our culture or not treat people with the type of respect that we want here, but they won that deal. They'll probably win the next one. And instead, you're playing the longer game instead of just winning the short game. Is that accurate? Speaker 1 (6:17) Yeah, 100%. And you might go through periods where you're out of alignment with that because you have someone in a position and it's crucial and you can't switch them out tomorrow and that's okay. What really matters is that you are aligned with that philosophy. And Colleen had a sign on her wall that said, no jerks allowed. And she actually vetoed an acquisition we were going to do because She thought that the founder and CEO was toxic and it was going to be harmful. So they're tough decisions. And some of those hard decisions where you say no to a person or opportunity does come back to define you positively. I've Speaker 2 (7:03) read a lot about Bill Campbell. What's one or two things that you've taken from his coaching? Speaker 1 (7:07) I'd say that that guy lived and breathed and preached founder mode before Chesky. and others so beautifully put a name on it. He swore a lot. He brought so much heart. He had such a big heart. He was such a big hugger. And really what I'd say the number one thing that I got from him, I'd say two things. He sat in and listened to some of my management meetings and whatever, and he would talk to me afterwards and he would just cut right through it all. And the number one thing was like this commitment to absolute honesty, you know, to what I call intellectual honesty and just calling bullshit bullshit or more colorful language. So the first was, are you as a leader going to be committed to these deep truths beyond all other things? Are you going to say them to your team and people even when it hurts? And then the second thing that goes with the first was courage. The most courageous thing a leader has to do often is standing up against their own team, their own board, their own investors. And he just espoused that. He just, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, if I could say that on this. He'd be like, Mark, your team is all over the place. Like, you need to reel them in. Like, it's too much democracy in that room. I like to say that I think a well-run company is like a democratic dictatorship. He leaned heavily on the dictatorship part and unapologetically. I think he wanted the people he coached to be more grounded, more heartfelt, and more unapologetic, including to the press. Because at the point that he was coaching me, it was just before we went public and I was just getting skewered. in the press for being a harsh environment and culture. And I think he was pained how much I was kind of apologizing for it. Speaker 2 (9:16) I read this a while ago, so maybe things have changed. I'm curious to get your feedback on it. This is a 2013, so this is 13 years ago, profile. They cited you as being fearsome and a control freak. And one analyst described you as a reputation that he is driven to the point of a madman. Now, I kind of admire that. Like, that feels to me like you're obsessed and you want to get after it and you have high standards. And I think that's what it takes a lot of the times to micromanage things like crazy. Speaker 2 (9:49) Again, over the course of 700 of these in 11 years that I've been doing it, I've found that to be a commonality of obsession with excellence, of getting after it, of having high standards and not being afraid to voice that and hold yourself certainly to that standard as well as others. Are you still that guy that you were when you were described that way in 2013? Speaker 1 (10:11) Well, I like to say the more things change, the more they stay the same. And as we get older, you know, hopefully. we become more of ourselves. I would say, hopefully I have a little less of the harsh edges. I don't feel as much chip on the shoulder to poke VCs in the eye as I did. But I think with that passion does come a fierceness and a depth of commitment. And I think we do lead by example. And I think that when our teams, and I also think, look, the world and the culture has changed since then. And during that period, if you were called a micromanager, that was a bad thing. And now Elon has maybe given all of us a little more permission to be micromanagers in this era. There's also a movement against, you know, middle management and some real positives. But I'm that person. And I'd say probably like so many of the founders listening. I find that I'm so often underestimated in the world. And even when I was starting Zynga, VCs who knew me for years, VCs who had backed me before said, Mark, you're 41. You've made all this money. I just don't get it. I just don't believe you're going to be really in this and committed. And, you know, you're not going to work as hard as a 20-something person. You know, you're having a family now. And they were wrong, it turns out. That's part of why we become founders because nobody else believes in us as much as we do. But every time I find the investors come up with some reason why this is a little too good to be true and you're out of fashion in some way. And it's funny that when I was in my 20s, that was not in fashion. You know, you were supposed to have gray hair. So you just got to like go for it and then. the world reshapes around you and they're like, oh shit, you're too fierce. Like they went from, oh, I think you're too soft. I think you're a retired guy. And I also will tell you, I'm the first one to own that I have actually a lazy on-ramp to curiosity, okay? If I unpack that, this is not a humble brag. I have lots of different interests and... I am not one of these people who has work ethic with no reason. So I won't just sit in an office. I won't just go do meetings just because I'm trying to like turn over every stone. I like to do a lot of different projects and I'm looking for signal in a lot of different places and I'm processing it all, but I don't go all in. You know, it's like in poker, I'm just willing to just be boring. You know, chess too. It turns out I have a chess coach now. My chess coach is like, You want to beat a player who's rated much higher than you? You want to annoy the shit out of them? Just play boring and conservative and let them make a mistake. And I started doing that and I started winning. You know, he was right. And so I just think that some people just have work ethic and they're just going to like work no matter what. And I'm not one of those people. I'm not all in until I am. And then when I'm all in, people are shocked. It's