Life at the Speed of Play

An unconventional, hands-on guide to turning ideas into products that matter—and that people love—from the legendary Silicon Valley pioneer, founder of Zynga, and creator of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s product management course.

Mark Pincus has been at the forefront of each iteration of the internet. He built the original app company ahead of the mobile app economy and sold virtual goods to the masses long before in-app purchase generated $85 billion on smartphones. As the founder of Zynga, he brought us FarmVille, CityVille, and Words with Friends, launching eight hit games and reaching more than a billion users in four years.

Pincus has turned hit-making into a repeatable system, birthing one of his favorite guiding principles that “all new fails”. Life at the Speed of Play is his framework for moving faster and massively increasing your odds of success. His insights and advice are essential in the new world of AI, where speed of testing and learning defines winners.

Bursting with wit, wisdom, and a core belief in tech’s endless capacity, each chapter of Life at the Speed of Play contains actionable takeaways based on Pincus’s unorthodox “Mark-isms” including “hire people with broken resumes,” “protect investors from themselves,” and, paradoxically, to “f*** scale” in favor of quality over quantity.

What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School for the twenty-first century, here is the essential “bible” for entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators, and anyone who has an idea—digital or analog—that they dream of turning into a reality.