Life at the Speed of Play: Building Products People Love in the Age of AI with Mark Pincus, Founder & Chairman of Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), Co-Founder of Reinvent Capital, Author of Life at the Speed of Play

Series Seed is honored to host Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, for a conversation on how to turn an instinct into a product people love, and how AI changes the odds of getting there.

Mark founded Zynga in 2007, the company behind FarmVille, Words With Friends, and Mafia Wars. He served as CEO for seven years and took it public on NASDAQ in 2011 in the largest internet IPO since Google, then stayed on as Chairman through Take-Two Interactive's $12.7 billion acquisition in 2022. Zynga was his fourth company of ten. He invested early in Facebook and Twitter, and in 2018 founded Reinvent Capital, which has backed SpaceX, Lyft, and Oscar, and whose SPACs took Joby Aviation and Hippo public.

His book Life at the Speed of Play, published by Harper Business in June 2026, is where he wrote the method down. He argues that your instinct is right 95 percent of the time and your idea is wrong at least 75 percent of the time, so the winners hold the instinct tightly and the idea loosely. He replaces the MVP with what he calls Minimum Idea State and Maximum Launch Product, lays out a framework called Proven Better New for earning the right to make an original bet, and calls AI the biggest fundamental shift in computing, one that hands builders far more shots on goal than they have ever had.

This session will explore how to tell a real instinct from a bad idea, why founders lose years building before they learn anything, what thirty years of platform shifts from PCs to AI teach about timing, how Mark judges founders and products as an investor, and the practice he calls The Book of Life: ten days each year auditing where he is against what he committed to, which he credits for ten companies and countless avoided dead ends.

Attendance is limited. Reserve your spot early.