Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga
Mark Pincus is not your typical Silicon Valley figurehead. As the founder of Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, CityVille, and Words with Friends, he quietly built one of the most improbable success stories of the internet age, reaching over a billion users in just four years. He was selling virtual goods to everyday people before in-app purchases became an $85 billion industry. In short, the man has form. This book is his attempt to bottle that experience into something genuinely useful. It's part memoir, part methodology, and entirely his own voice. Pincus structures the book around what he calls 'Mark-isms', a collection of counterintuitive principles drawn from decades of building, failing, and rebuilding. Hire people with broken CVs. Protect investors from themselves. Prioritise quality over growth, even when scaling seems like the obvious move. These aren't hollow mantras. Each one carries the weight of hard-won experience behind it. His central idea, that 'all new fails', sounds defeatist at first, but the logic quickly reveals itself as a practical framework for moving fast, testing often, and not mistaking early momentum for lasting success. For anyone navigating the current AI-driven product landscape, where speed of iteration genuinely separates winners from the rest, this book arrives at a useful moment. It reads with wit and a refreshing lack of corporate polish, making it accessible to first-time founders and seasoned product managers alike. Think of it as a street-smart companion to the business school reading list.
- Author: Mark Pincus
- Publisher: Harper Business
- Genre: Entrepreneurship
- ISBN: 978-0063352582
- Pages: 285 pages