We need a modern people's lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda. Imagine voting for a president we're truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights.
You are as good as your product. When you are used and loved by everyone, your brand equity is high. When you are not, you're not.
We can't wait until elections to fight for what we care about. We can't hope for a benevolent leader who may choose to listen to us. We need a network that lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top through an open, inclusive democratic process.
About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.
There are people who have formed guilds in 'World of Warcraft' who may have played together for years before actually meeting, but because of the adventures they had together, they formed really deep-rooted friendships.
I regularly encourage employees to break rules. I also say to employees that leadership starts with complaining and dissatisfaction. But it doesn't stop there. It comes from saying you're dissatisfied with something and then fixing it and making it better for everybody.
I think it is rewarding to manage, but it is not what I am passionate about. Managing more than 200 people, maybe 150 people, isn't fun to me and is not my skill set.
There's a lot of opportunity for game developers to show value to people, things they want to spend money on. I think offers are just another kind of ads.
About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.
I still believe that we can offer you a much deeper, more engaging, more compelling play experience on a PC than we can on a mobile device, but one can enhance the other, and one can expand the other. I don't think they necessarily will compete with each other, just like how we find a place for movies in our lives, and TV and radio.
I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front... and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.
As an entrepreneur, you can have an instinct, and your instinct is right, but your idea you're substantiating that into is wrong, and the world is not ready for it.
Even if I'd wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, they weren't going to hire me, because I was saying things like, 'That's a dumb question' when I was asked something stupid in the interviews. I just didn't have a lot of respect for authority.
The more you can be self-aware and honest about yourself, the more you can cultivate that in other people.
The overall tectonic shifts that are going on in games and more broadly in media are that everything is moving to becoming free, social, and accessible. But we're just at the beginning of that. We can get to a day where short-session play can enhance, if not replace, text messaging as a way to stay in touch with people.