The Traveler

In the first part of the book, Pincus introduces us to certain useful word-images, talking about “Internet treasures” and “abysses” illustrating eras of development. Here’s one of his descriptions of the latter:

“One thing most founders share is the experience of being in the Abyss,” he writes. “For most of us, this place before and after our start-ups, or even jobs we have loved, is open-ended and dark. It’s unstructured. The world doesn’t care whether we get out of bed in the morning. We lose purpose and don’t know whether, how, or when we will ever reemerge.”

Sounds familiar, right? But then he counts the role of this interim in the grand journey:

“The Abyss also has value that we’re unaware of when we’re in this state, however. Once we get over our anxiety about being in the Abyss, it becomes an opportunity to explore our curiosities. Giving ourselves permission to pursue things that are not obviously useful or productive is critical. These explorations help us tune into our instincts, hone our ideas, and develop our taste.”

There’s more from this section of the book, too, including the concept of the “forever franchise” and the “imagination chessboard” that drives introspection on angles. Angles of work, angles of innovation.

Pincus also introduces us to his Book of Life, a specific type of journal that has helped him to navigate a world that moves at blistering speed. He talks about a “time machine” made mostly of documentation and introspection, where the intrepid human can become, so to speak, unglued in time, and look at moments subjectively, in a relative way.

“My Book of Life hasn’t just kept me accountable to personal goals;” Pincus notes. “It has also kept me connected to the deeper ‘why’ behind my work. Without this regular practice, it would be too easy to get distracted and lose sight of these convictions. For example, I’m a pretty good investor, but I will never be an amazing one. I don’t care to become one and, honestly, can’t see what difference it would ever make if I were. That’s not my ‘why.’ … a Book of Life is like a compass that helps you come back to your North Star— what will matter to you over your entire life, not just today, or even this year.”

Through this lens, Pincus brings us through parts of his life, those moments, like the launch of his first company, Freeloader, in 1994, and in subsequent times when his focus included work on eVOTLs and other transport technologies. And, of course, at Zynga.

I thought this was useful:

“I think of my Book of Life as a time machine that can take me backward and forward in my own life, and help me make better decisions,” he writes. “I write notes to my past self in the margins— and many to my future self as well. It’s a life-long dialogue. The practice of coming back to today can be a powerful tool to help motivate us to go after moonshot ideas, but also to reset priorities and make hard decisions like killing marginal projects. This practice builds a hunger to disrupt my own patterns.”

Notwithstanding the recommendation to “kill your babies,” at least the marginal ones, there’s a lot in here to chew on. Pincus also includes helpful visuals showing how the Book of Life works, and applies the concepts to the work world, where he contends that falling in love with your own ideas is “the death of consumer startups,” and urging innovators to follow the true signal and “stay close to the metal.” And he shows the reader how to make bolognese, in aid of establishing that, in some ways, product research is a matter of “taste.”

The MVP of Business

There’s another part of the book where Pincus adds a couple of interesting terms to the conventional Minimum Viable Product metric – namely, Minimum Idea State, and Maximum Launch Product.

“Over the past 20 years, we’ve all been sold this concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as the way the best teams build and launch products,” Pincus writes. “The problem with this concept is that we no longer have the time to deliver on ‘viable.’ My friend Eric Ries, who turned MVP into a religion with his book The Lean Startup, defines ‘viable’ as: ‘real users can utilize your product for real-world behaviors.”

He elaborates:

“The real goal of the MIS is to get to our Maximum Launch Product. We want to find true signal with real users, so that we have the conviction to overinvest in the product.”

With those ideas in hand, Pincus turns to another construct of his business philosophy called Proven Better New.

“The process of defining, testing, and launching new products can feel chaotic,” he writes. “How do we decide where to innovate and how to build conviction? How do we increase the odds of a hit and decrease the time to get to ‘right’? In building Zynga, I had to be right to survive— so I developed Proven Better New. It’s a simple framework that I’ve spent my career trying to master. It became a religion inside Zynga and has also spread to many of my fellow product makers.”

Here’s more:

“Proven Better New offers a systematic approach to generating winning products faster. The core value is in isolating truly new ideas and then testing them rapidly to get accurate customer feedback. When used well, this framework helps us build conviction much faster by getting to our Minimum Idea State with greater intellectual discipline. Because this framework protects us from our urge to make everything better, we avoid wasted cycles and false signals.”

He also speaks to a kind of “moral arbitrage” that people might go through in applying some of this:

“We all want to be respected by our peers, so our egos hold us back from copying,” he writes, “as does our lack of experience as product makers. Copying what works goes against every instinct that we have as product makers: We want to innovate! The idea of copying other people’s work can feel distasteful, wrong, unfair, and not something we’d take pride in.”

But following in established grooves, Pincus suggests, can be useful.

Here’s where AI comes in:

“AI is an amazing tool to get us leverage in implementing Proven Better New,” Pincus writes. “We had a lot of fun uploading this chapter to ChatGPT and asking it to deliver a Proven Better New analysis of several hit products to explain their success— and then to help us generate several strong shots on goal. AI has already become a crucial and magical tool for product making, but so far, it can’t replace what we humans add: creativity, empathy, and taste.”

There’s that word, taste, again.

A Way Forward

Another area that Pincus goes into at length is the practice of “roadmapping,” or the study of bringing direction to your fledgling enterprise, with something he calls “bold beats” as an ingredient in the business cookbook.

“Bold Beats should be quick to build, test, and kill, and have isolated impact on your product,” he writes. “When successful, Bold Beats should lead to major changes in your metrics. Think of them as controlled adrenaline shots for your product roadmap.”

Then there are also “blue sheets,” a documentation process for change, where Pincus takes on the idea of building buy-in, explaining what happened when he introduced the blue sheets concept to a team:

“At first, teams fought the change,” he writes. “They acted as if I were a CEO out of the Dilbert comic, forcing them to be corporate rather than fast. They kept two sets of roadmaps: one they worked from and one to ‘communicate up to Mark.’ This lasted for around three months. I was starting to question my decision, too. But then, one week, a team found a viral breakthrough, which everyone else saw and copied immediately because we all shared one analytics and reporting system. Once they saw another team nail something and immediately put it to work themselves, the game changed. This was what turned the Blue Sheets into a competitive advantage. It enabled us to adapt and optimize improvements between and across teams.”

Pincus urges us to “build a teaching hospital,” metaphorically, to measure with OKRs and “chase audacious goals.” He talks about making your own metrics, with examples like average revenue per user or ARPU, Active social network or ASN, and net promoter score or NPS.

“Your number one job as a founder and CEO is to be right,” Pincus writes. “There’s something magical about being right, about finding true signal. When you’re looking at a restaurant menu and can’t decide what to pick, it’s because nothing on the menu is right. But when you see the right thing, you just know.”

The Trajectory of Computer Science

Analyzing the move from the early Web 1 environment to today’s Web 3, Pincus suggests there’s a lot of opportunity in the air.

“Today, we have so many reasons to be optimistic,” he writes. “We’re on the verge of five new planets: AI, robotics, space, crypto, and the metaverse. AI is massively reducing the time and cost to turn ideas into apps we can test. We have line of sight to humanoid robotics. It hurts my brain to imagine what life will be like when there are nine billion R2-D2s following us around.”

I feel him on that last one. When a robot is next to you talking, it’s going to be disorienting at first. But presumably, we’ll get used to it.

In conclusion, Pincus articulates his hope to empower and influence a new generation:

“My hope is that this book inspires you to go pursue your own ideas right now and to start working on and refining your own taste, what makes products great for you,” he writes. “These frameworks and practices represent a mindset you can use to approach any idea. By going narrow and small, we find the edges, and that’s where we can innovate and expand the world’s boundaries.”

Pick up a copy of this ground-breaking business book to prepare for the rest of our AI revolution.