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Good morning. Zynga founder Mark Pincus made social gaming a global habit. Now he\u2019s sharing his learnings\u2014and has a lot to say about why AI won\u2019t save you. Zynga reached more than a billion users with hits like FarmVille before being acquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2022. Now Pincus has written a book called Life at the Speed of Play that\u2019s both a memoir and a guide to creating products that people want. These are hard-won lessons.<\/p>\n
I spoke with Pincus years ago when he was struggling as the hard-driving, metrics-obsessed culture he\u2019d built was spiraling amid rapid growth, a volatile IPO, and poor management decisions. He was, by his own admission, a bad boss who had to learn leadership lessons on the job. But he\u2019s also a successful serial entrepreneur who has built popular products and empowered others to do the same. <\/p>\n
I spoke to him recently about his advice for creating and popularizing products in an AI era. Some observations:<\/p>\n
Science before art: \u201cThere is an art and a science to product making. The best leaders really have mastered the science, and then they do the art. Picasso spent the first part of his career tracing \u2026 until me and our teams have mastered what\u2019s proven, we haven\u2019t earned the right to do something new. When great companies launch their products, they\u2019re collecting winnings, they\u2019re not making bets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The impact of AI: \u201cWhat we find quickly is that AI gets us to a B\u2011plus in seconds. Not only does it never get us to an A, it distracts us.\u00a0 You don\u2019t know what an A looks like if you\u2019ve never really owned it. You have to learn how to do it first to know what A looks like \u2026 but I\u2019m an extreme AI optimist; we haven\u2019t gotten to the new economies that are going to be created by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grow your talent: \u201cAt Zynga, I found that we had to grow our own product makers. People we hired from outside were smart, but they\u2019d been taught things in a way that were not useful. They weren\u2019t fast enough, or it wasn\u2019t the right kind of speed. Our whole ethos was test more ideas in a week than the industry tests in a year. I picked this one room and called it my teaching hospital. We were trying, ideating, inventing in the space of a game.<\/p>\n
Demand \u2018bold beats\u2019: \u201cIt\u2019s something we made up to convince our teams to innovate and try to grow futures. We said, every quarter you have to do a bold beat, which is a positive disruption in the consumer experience that, if it\u2019s successful, lights up Twitter or the blogosphere or TikTok\u2014and moves some real metrics by 10% or more. Whether you\u2019re running American Express or a startup, you\u2019re trying to figure out: how do we launch really bold ideas this week?\u00a0Not three years from now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com<\/p>\n
Top leadership news<\/p>\n
Corporate AI plans face an accountability gap<\/p>\n
A Pearl Meyer survey found that only 34% of C-suite executives say it is consistently clear who owns AI decision-making, even as companies pour money into adoption. The report warns that AI ambitions are running ahead of companies’ ability to manage them, amid the growing threat of employee burnout and unclear outcomes. \u201cAmbition for AI outcomes is currently outpacing the leadership structure needed to deliver on them,\u201d the Pearl Meyer study states.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Amazon plans major drone-delivery expansion<\/p>\n
Amazon plans to expand drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by year-end, reaching tens of millions of customers. The move would represent a sixfold increase in its drone network footprint, and gives new momentum to Amazon’s air delivery plans after over a decade of setbacks. Amazon says it’s already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, though that’s still a small fraction of the roughly 20 million packages it delivers every day.<\/p>\n
Who’s getting tariff refunds?<\/p>\n
Amazon, Target, Nike, Ford, and FedEx are among the companies benefiting from U.S. tariff refunds, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump did not have the authority to impose many of his import taxes. Some firms, such as FedEx and UPS, are passing along the refunds to their customers; others, like Walmart, say they will instead use the refunds to lower prices.<\/p>\n
The markets<\/p>\n
S&P 500 futures are down 0.1% this morning. The last session closed 1.2% higher. South Korea\u2019s KOSPI is up 5.9%, Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 rose 1.4%, while Hong Kong\u2019s Hang Seng Index rose 0.8%. India\u2019s NIFTY 50 is currently up 0.6%, while the STOXX Europe 600 is down 0.1% in early trading. Bitcoin surges to $71,600.<\/p>\n
Around the watercooler<\/p>\n
Bitcoin posts surprise rally as currency nears $70,000 for the first time since June by Camila Grigera Na\u00f3n<\/p>\n
Geopolitical risk needs to move away from the \u2018after-dinner speaker\u2019: Eurasia Group and Rio Tinto\u2019s Dominic Barton by Nicholas Gordon<\/p>\n
National debt crosses $40 trillion and think tank warns: \u2018The level of fiscal mismanagement is tragic by Eleanor Pringle<\/p>\n
The AI boom made San Francisco so crowded even \u2018tech bros\u2019 making six figures are left scrounging for homes and apartments by Joshua Hong<\/p>\n
Moderna\u2019s and Merck\u2019s personalized mRNA vaccine shows real promise against deadly skin cancer melanoma in late stage trial and sends stocks soaring by Catherina Gioino<\/p>\n
Today’s edition of CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Nicholas Gordon, and Lee Clifford.<\/p>\n
#Zynga #founder #Mark #Pincus #Bplus #wont<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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