We just listened to the recent Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar hosting “serial entrepreneur and Zynga founder Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon, longtime Electronic Arts creative mind and investor on behalf of KPCB, provide a very laid-back and desultory conversation. Topics touched upon include successful CEOs, building sustainable companies, mentorship, and the consumer pay-driven Web 3.0.” That is Pincus at left posing for a Farmville PR shot. {More on Farmville below}
This is a disjointed conversation between two very smart and competent startup guys — well worthwhile for you budding entrepreneurs out there.
More, Jessica Shambora wrote this short brief on Zynga. Excerpts:
(…) Social games are free online applications accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you’ve spent any time on either site you’re probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Caf World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector’s most talked-about companies these days.
Behind the buzz: Annual revenue at the two-year-old firm is likely to surpass $100 million this year, prompting speculation that the company — backed by the likes of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and PayPal cofounder-turned-investor Peter Thiel — will soon go public. The software company also has managed to do something that other hot online brands such as Twitter and Facebook have not: Zynga has found a way to make social networking profitable.
(…)
Once hooked, Pincus says, players spend real money on virtual goods to help them advance to higher levels — thereby enriching Zynga. And although playing requires only short spurts of time, the game never ends, as Zynga’s designers keep adding levels so that players come back for more.
Pincus was interviewed by Charlie Rose — that must be like the imperial seal of importance.
Techcrunch has some of Mark’s bullets from the Web 2.0 Summit. Excerpt:
Pincus believes that Web 3.0 is the App Economy. That is to say, it will be a web in which people use various apps to share things. And there will be money behind this thanks to direct payments, and social goods.
Of its 50 million daily users,, 20 million are using Farmville, Zynga’s most popular game about yes, farming. Pincus announced on stage that they had made $830,000 in just two weeks selling a certain kind potato seed (a virtual good), and that they donated half of that to school children in Haiti. That money will feed 500 of them for a year, he says.
There have been various reports around the web in recent months that Zynga is already making nine figures in revenues thanks largely to these social goods.
Below find some live notes (paraphrased)
- Social gaming started in May 2007, when Facebook opened its API for its Platform
- They don’t get enough credit today for how revolutionary that was. 100 million users at the time.
- Our first game July 2007, social poker game.
- 50 million daily active users as of yesterday (across Zynga games)
- Web 1.0 was discovery of the web and links
- Web 2.0 was the Google, both search and AdSense
- Web 3 is the App Economy
- The currency of this realm is what users want to talk about and like, “social breadcrumbsâ€
- Monetization in Web 3 is users paying for stuff directly, a great idea.
- Farmville 20 million active users alone.
- 800,000 virtual tractors sold
- Users finding services through apps
- Users will pay for things in the future, it’s already up to $6 billion economy
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