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Even though consumer is arguably not investable right now, the opportunity has never been greater to offer people a new, you know, internet treasure, reinvent some service that we thought was over or just generic, but it's enabled now because of AI and agents. I think that is highly likely and that makes me want to keep building consumer product. Today I'm sitting down with Mark Pinkinis, founder of Zinga, a relentless idea machine and one of the sharpest product minds in tech. Mark has a new book out, Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. And we're
going to dig into the playbook behind it. AI optimism, The Failure Machine, Proven Better New, Founder Mode, and a lot more. Mark, it's great to have you. Thanks. I love being here in San Francisco, the motor city of the internet. I love the title. I mean, you know, here at YC, we give people the t-shirt that says, "Make something people want." And so, make something people love is like another level, really. Yeah. And make something you love to start with. That's right. Yeah. I mean, maybe we start there. I mean, you know, why'd you write the book? What's the core motivation? I mean, you've made so many products that people love in the past.
What does this book mean to you? In building five companies, but especially mainly Zingga, I over time built this playbook, literally a playbook of my approach to product management, my approach to being a founder, to building companies and this holistic realization that you can't just focus on any one piece of this. If you want to build great products, you can't avoid management. You can't avoid having a board or investors. And so you just got to dive into the whole enchilada. And you should think kind of full stack from first principles of customers and products and coding all the way to like long-term sustainable strategy. some of the things we were just talking about that you said Eric Reese was talking about of how do I structurally
set up a company in a way that I can play the long game and align everyone's interest. So I finally sat down. It took four years. I think everyone should write a book one time, but I really just wanted to get this in one place or be helpful of service to really everyone from a stay-at-home mom who has an idea and wants to get think about if she could actually go build it to my peers to you and, you know, be just be in conversation. One of the things that really jumps out at me um as I've gotten to know you is that like you've been through and a leader through like all of the a lot of the ages of computing itself.
Yeah. What that means is like you have like this sort of first principles wisdom from these different moments. You were mentioning the five companies and two of them went public, but you know some of the earlier ones were literally at the dawn of a brand new thing with social networking you which is kind of some of the people watching probably can't even imag like you know social networks are water now. It's just like you know you couldn't imagine a world before that and yet you could say the same thing is happening again. We're sort of the right now at this moment going from a moment where we didn't have AI and intelligence on tap to now AI everywhere. And so you're sort of
uniquely blessed to be able to both tell us what the first principles are, but also, you know, what's going to rhyme. I guess it feels like the third time that we're about to enter a new era. When I started my first company, Freeloader, in 1995, it was just the web and trying to convince people they might want to use this online network. And with Tribe, Zingga, it was social and mobile and now with AI and so it's really exciting. What are some of the things like from that first wave? I mean, were there parts of like social networking that you know, you thought it was going to be X and then it became Y?
Well, the first thing I'd say is I traced the beginning of social networking to Napster, which Sean Parker started. He worked for me as an intern when he was 16. So, you remember that first moment that you loaded Napster and it said 4.5 million machines are connected to you right now. That's wild. And this song file, there's 15,000 copies of it available on the network. And that's the first time to me that I felt like we looked through the network at each other. We connected to each other. We didn't just connect up to XYZ corporation or database. And it was truly a decentralized peer-to-peer. And it always was that. It had grown as that. But this is the first time that we're able to actually experience
it and visualize it and even feel a little bit rowdy. And Napster to me was a little bit rowdy in a great way. And to me that was the beginning of this people web even though it was a bunch of years before we got to Fster and Facebook and LinkedIn my failed company tribe. I find so often as a founder that we're too close to something to even see how big it's going to be. And so I was working on the beginning of social networking and I met Zuckerberg when he first started. He came in my office. The thing I got wrong with tribe was trust. So first of all, the thing that I built a social network before Facebook and I managed to fail and I just got the trust component wrong that for people to
put themselves on the web, they first had to feel this good container of trust and that's the thing that they got right with.edu from the beginning. I don't think Reed or I ever imagined how I know we none of us ever imagined how big this Peter Teal all of us we all sold our stock in Facebook so we voted with our shares you know none of us could have ever described how big the this all got what are some things you know when you reflect on that like and then you see you know we're sort of a few years off of the chat GPT moment but now you know I would say that we're uh in the opus 4.5 and later moment like I you know I would trace it to like that model was the thing that changed everything for
me. The things before that were usable but like toys that release there was something magical that happened and now I can you sort of treat the agent as a peer. Yeah. Like I can trust it with things like not everything and it still hallucinates and it's not quite right but like it actually is smart enough. Yeah. And you know, if you surround it with the right harness and the right context, it can actually do relatively magical things. My main use case now and since the latest release, um, is that I walk around talking to it.
Yeah. And I'm just in conversation with it a lot. I've been frustrated. I know Granola is really successful. I'm surprised that the product hasn't evolved faster because what I want is to just have my AI listening in on this conversation now with us and just have it be a smart other person at the table. You know, any moment we can turn to the AI and ask it for its point of view. Maybe sometimes it'll interject it, but I find I'll be walking and talking and then I said, "Let's see what the AI says." and I turn and I say it into it totally and then it gives me a response. But it's I mean this is a great example of like
consumer AI that is almost certainly going to be a 10 or hundred billion dollar company that no one's built yet. I did exactly the same thing today with uh actually my therapist. It's kind of funny. It's uh I like Granola in that it has like the real time transcript. Yeah. Uh and then I took the transcript and I pasted it my uh to my open claw. Yeah. And I was like, "Hey, like this is how my therapy session is going right now. Is there anything from the last week that I should have brought up that I haven't brought up yet?" Wow. And because it has total context and awareness of like all my emails and like my texts and everything and I talk to it all the time about like what I'm
thinking about, it was really useful. And so, you know, yeah, basically it could be sitting here right now in our interview. I don't know. It's like very weird. You know, the tech is all there. Like I'm actually going to open source my Gemini live um voice plugin on GBrain shortly. So, you know, I mean, it's not hard. Like, and the weird thing is once I get it going, it's like I, you know, sometimes talk to this open source thing that's just built on Gemini Live and it's better than Siri and I'm like, why isn't Siri terrible? Siri so bad. Even just the voice input on it is so bad. And then at Amazon, it's just unbelievable, right? You have an entire uh Alexa team. I heard there's like 10,000 people on that team.
No. I was like, what is happening? Like if there's no L, it's been years and there's no real like LLM that you could feel. It's just like what is going on with these organizations at this point? I'll often not even use granola. I just turn on voice memo for important like meetings like a doctor for my kid and then just copy transcript and then have my own prompts and I find I get something way better and more sharable. Someone could do proven better new on it. That's right. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we should use that right now. Is that like a good example? Like how would you do proven better new for this idea of like just always on AI intelligence that
we just talked about? Like we hacked it together with whatever we got. But this framework proven better new would start with an instinct that we have that something's missing. In this case, we have it. Yeah. Okay. Here's our instinct, which is also kind of our innovation zone that we want to test. but then isolate that and make sure we're testing just that instinct and not the things we don't want to test. And so we would look at Granola, let's say, is probably the most successful AI noteaker product. Totally. And we deconstruct it and we would say everything that they're doing that we're not innovating on, we're going to legally copy. We're just going to not
even question it. We're just gonna We don't have time. Well, it's proven. Yeah. Why would And we don't have time to make it better because that's where we're in the wheel here. Yeah. And better would be something that 10 out of 10 existing users would say better. So that would be like now it's free. It's half price. It's faster. It's there something that no one would friction. I mean in this case like it feels like the friction part is the biggest problem because it's like you and I but that's a hypothesis. So that would be new.
You and I say, "Okay, the friction's the problem or the fact that it's not listening is the problem. Maybe we're right. We're probably wrong." And so that's the part we want to test. And so we do all the proven mechanics of it. And then the only new thing is that it's always on listening, but we start off with the proposition that idea is probably wrong. And so we don't get attached to it. and we test a lot of other ideas around it. Proven better news sounds like a perfect uh thing to do right now because there's basically all the things, you know, I made a GPT and a Claude skill to do upload my book and do proven better new and part of what it did was amazing. So, the proven part I would
give it like an A minus. It was faster and better than most. It knows what has been done. Yeah, it's it's brilliant at proving. Yeah, it's in distribution, you know, it's literally in the model sometimes, right? The better part I'd give it like a B minus because it was not always getting better like the concept of better, right? And then for new I'd give it a D. Yeah. Which makes I mean that's what the human's for. We're still useful for something and you know making new things is probably one of the most fun things that you could do. Going back to consumer, I mean earlier we were talking about I mean I
had just you know did office hours this afternoon with someone who they have like some of the best consumer metrics I'd ever seen in like you know years and then the other investors uh who had invested in it are telling them like you need to pivot to enterprise and I was like no this is amazing. And why did they want them to pivot to enterprise just because that's more fundable right now? That's what investors want to invest in. So, you know, what's your sense? I mean, I was on the opposite end of that during in like 1999, I was building an enterprise software company called support.com, which went public and no one had any interest in us because everything was about consumer.com until all of that failed
and we were one of like only two companies that could go public. Do you find that odd? It's just uh the investors, you know, they're sometimes exactly 180 degrees off. They're not thinking about first principles at all. It sounds like they don't think about the new part enough. And then maybe these days they're overrelying on ChatGpt and Claude, right? And so, you know, they like the GPT doesn't like consumer. Maybe if you had an idea and said, "Where should I go to get funding?" It would probably tell you enterprise. So, yeah, that's exactly the deal. And then the thing is, you have to work on the new stuff. And the new stuff is out of distribution.
If you and I were just starting today, would we go do consumer when there's no distribution, no proven distribution? By hooker by crook, I'd try and figure out how to get distribution. I mean, ideally, there's like some viral hook inside of it. Can I get people to email their friends? Well, what about when those things fail? I mean from a standpoint of proven there's there is no proven path for distribution right now in I would argue in consumer which is why it's so hard. Yeah. You probably don't have a whole lot of consumer companies coming through right now. Yeah, that's right. What's interesting is um we have things that kind of resembled consumer. They're dev tools. So there's like proumer.
Yeah. There's definitely proumer. And if you talk to AI investors, like that's actually, you know, one of the key markets that they like to go after right now. It's the proumer thing is that um there might be like 20 million developers, for instance, and you can basically use consumer style uh tactics. I don't know, some of us consumer is hard because you just don't have that many hours in the day. Right. We're booked. Even this voice idea that we were just talking, we should start this idea. We should start this. Yeah, we should. It's just Can you code it tonight?
Yeah, I can. Yeah. Yeah, I'll use GStack. Supposedly, thinking machines, their big innovation is like close to zero latency on AI response times. That goes in the new category. It sounds like we got to test it out. It's a tough one. Is that better or new? Because zero latency, less latency, everyone's gonna say yes to it. That's true. So, that's better. But the feature we want to do with it is probably new. Yeah. They have the AI listening and responding to our conversation. So once I know proven, better, new, it's like, well, proven like gives me a base and then better gives me a direction and then new is sort of like all the spikes that go out and like some of these things are going to catch.
Probably none of them will catch to be fair. Yeah. I mean, be prepared for none of them to catch. Assume. Yeah, assume none. I mean, new is like the novel idea that will get someone interested in your product. If we just did proven and we're like, "Hey, we have a copy of Granola. Do you want it?" You know, no one's going to be very impressed. Yeah, I'm already using Granola. It's cool. So, but if we're like, "Oh, this is like Granola, but it's always listening. It's always on." It might get someone to try our product, but that feature might die. The feature might actually get trial. It's like they call it the back of the box, like what got you to buy the new cereal, but it's probably not what you came back for. like you come back for the granola.
This is actually a really important part of the process. I feel like it's you know understanding that new will not work and then not getting demoralized about like how do you do it or how you know you've worked with so many product teams and designers and they like think they're convinced like the new is going to work and then it doesn't and then what do you say to them? It really kind of gets into like this death of the ego like how do we stay passionate about the the instinct that we're pursuing the vision but dispassionate about this particular product variant and idea and that's really difficult and it's and what do you say to your team when you they're taking this hill and everyone's working day and night one of
the worst things we can feel as a founder is to come in on Monday or Sunday I lay in bed and think, you know, I don't think this product's exactly right. Yeah. But what do I do? I've got investors convinced and I have people killing themselves to build this. Do I come in Monday and say, "Guys, I'm not feeling it." You know, or do I just kind of suck it up and then slowly try to like move them, you know? It's kind of like being a parent. Like, how do you manage things with your kids? And it gets to I think one question which is like alignment and
style like have we given ourselves permission as founders to pivot a lot or are we trapped in this one product path it there's a funny thing about I call it true signal but or heat you know about the right product the lightning in the bottle moment when you have it you know it and when you don't know what I mean is you don't know it's not you know positively when you achieve it. Like from everything and you don't need metrics cuz everything works like every feedback loop is a [__] yes. But when it's not quite right, then it's debatable and then you're really you're looking for lots of different data and
and trying to just test one more thing. When you've got that heat, that true signalance right, you don't have to tell anyone to work harder or faster like everyone sees it. I call it the fish are running. Like when the fish are running, you're up all night throwing nets and it's great. It's a high. You kind of I think have to go slow to go fast. Like get to real conviction and then everyone is going to move fast against it. How many times in your life have you felt like the fish are running? Only a couple times. I mean with Freeloader, my first company, we were in the right place at the right time and we got 2 million downloads of our free app
in the first month. And then a lot of times at Zingga, I felt it. I mean, there was so many game launch moments. You had so many hits. Yeah, we had a lot of hits and so many even big feature releases. And I like to say great product makers, you know, they're collecting winnings, not making bets. And so you know long before you launch that it's a hit or that this that your users are going to love this. You don't look to see if they like it. So what are some other things other than proven better new that you know you would suggest to founders? They want to invoke fish are running when things are going right or when
you're when you're in that and you have a bunch of companies now that have things going right that are hitting big ARRs and then they hit a question of scaling and scaling is and management are like these black boxes and people are like what do I do? I bring in do I hire someone who knows scale? Do I bring in an investor who knows it? I try to coach founders and the class I create at Stamford, I just said, "You don't need to go get an MBA. You don't need to learn management." The only point of all of these management tools is to get people to do the right thing when we're not in the room. That's it. The first lesson is be in the room. Mhm.
It's like be in the room as much as you can if you are the best player in that position and then replace yourself with people and processes that you can feel confident are going to do the right thing when you're not in the room. And and there isn't any one playbook. There's lots of ways, but that's what this all boils down to is how do and there's a lot of things in my book about like how do you get alignment with people? How do you hire the right people who are going to be in that culture and style that you're creating? And talk about making people CEOs. Like there's there's a bunch of different things you can do. I've tried and others, but the whole point of it is just so they do
the right thing when you're not there. Basically, what you're mentioning there sounds a lot like Brian Chesy's founder mode in a way. I can always hear him saying like, Gary, leadership is presence, not absence, right? And that's like the first part of what you're saying. I love that movie. I think it's called like Master and Commander. Do you know what I'm talking about? And he like goes down and grabs an ore and he's rowing and he's like, "Come on, man. Freedom. We got to make it to freedom."
Yeah. But I definitely think that is a part of founder mode and that's whether it's Elon sleeping on the factory floor, but your team seeing you get into the details and know the details and pay attention to the details as much as them. I don't trust the CEO of a consumer company that doesn't love their product and doesn't know their product better than anybody else. I know there are some really successful, but I don't understand how they can be. I love founder mode. When it when I first heard Brian talk about it, it spoke to me. I'm like because to me founder mode is so much of it is about giving ourselves permission to be ourselves. And I love the way that he talked about it and I love the debate that came out
after founder mode where on Twitter or X where a lot of VCs were saying founder mode is only good for the very small percentage of founders that deserve it. you know, like Jeff Bezos, right? And I'm like, founder mode is for every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself and now you don't you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors. And it's just funny that founder mode is for when no one else believes in you, right? When no one wants to let you. What you're doing is so unpopular, but you're the only one who believes in it, you And I like to say that we all start as expert witnesses in early in our careers that we're closest to the answer and furthest from the decision.
And founder mode was made for you because you're but don't be an expert witness in your own company and we do that to ourselves. Oh, that's so interesting that's what happens. We make so many compromises as we're building our company to hire that CTO or get that major investor or that we contort ourselves and we end up not building a house we want to live in. And then one day we're like, well, I guess it's not really the company for me or I'm not for it. We're like, no, you're the star player.
Yeah, you're the owner and you're they're the star player. I have a feeling the company's worth more with you there. So, what did we do or what did you do? you just create an environment you don't you're not even welcome at or you don't belong in where I've started to interpret founder mode is it's not just at the governance or the board level it's there's a question of how do we as founders live in founder mode in a weekly basis and I think it's you have these instincts that got us here it got Airbnb to where they are and so much of it is Brian having the confidence but also creating the context with everyone around him that if he comes in on Monday and doesn't like that product, is he able to tell the team
that or does he have to manage them or couch it? And people have said working for Mark can feel like third grade soccer and every Monday he comes in and falls in love with a different idea. And sometimes they're right. But if they're saying that, I'm also not doing a good job of managing them and creating the context for me to change every Monday. You know, that's one thing I've learned. But first of all, founder mode is like being ready to tune into your own instincts and follow them and not ignore them because you're a people pleaser. But the other part of founder mode that we start to learn is create the context that your team is okay with that you say, you know what, we're going for
that continent over there. That's our mission. It hasn't changed, but I'm going to talk at a lot of different altitudes now. That's 100,000 ft. Today, we're at 5,000 ft. This tact is not heading towards that content. We got to go that way. and where everyone comes in where we're trying to be intellectually honest and there's a culture of that so that people come in on a Monday like what did you learn the last week well I saw this other product that I think is doing what we're talking about better like tell me more about it like are we humble and curious and intellectually honest and is that our culture or are we an execution machine and there's no room for anybody to raise
their hand and say I don't get Yeah, I think that's so hard because like every company is in different modes. Like sometimes you're in the new product mode and you're trying to do something that's never happened before and then sometimes it's like, hey, this thing's great. Like we just got to like, you know, keep squeezing the lemon here. I'm curious what's what's your point of view on are there massive trillion dollar consumer services and companies that are yet to be invented that we haven't seen yet? I mean I think almost certainly like how could there not be right? it's uh intelligence is on tap though I guess it's uh people are starting to get a little demoralized about it interestingly you know even on the
enterprise side like there was a stat yesterday that I saw something like 90% of enterprises that have like invested in AI haven't received any benefit yet I've seen that too yeah isn't that weird but it's also like so early and I think there are just so many things arrayed against adoption you think that includes all of these companies that are spending a million dollars a year on tokens probably. But, you know, I guess it just depends on what people are doing. Like, if you just spend the tokens and don't do anything different about uh how you make products or it doesn't touch a user, I could see how that's just like spending more money and not having any effect. So, you know, for now, I
still think, you know, it's if it's 2026 and people are still figuring it out, I assume it's skill issue. Yeah. If that number continues to be true in like three or four years, like, you know, I might get a little worried. Yeah, but you think we have three or four years before it has to deliver. There's just so many weird confounding effects. Like one of the things I'd be not too surprised is happening. Um is actually this token maxing thing. So many of our friends like are spending, you know, I'm spending a million dollars a year on tokens. Like uh Peter Steinberger apparently is spending a million or $1.1 million a month. That is like sort of the frontier of what you
can do with this stuff. like you can literally do the work of a thousand people uh right now but you have to pay for it and very few if you're doing the work of a thousand people but you're not getting the output of a thousand people yeah then something's not adding up yet I mean I would say like I feel like I'm getting that and like you know my open source projects seem to be quite usable and use useful and the better version is actually open claw it's like that the entire reason why I think Peter Steinberger was able to make that was you know he was already wealthy and He was messing around and I heard he got sick of Aiza and he just said like you know what it's way more you know he just
loves coding and you know why not just spend a million dollars a year on tokens just to like make you know the world's best open-source platform that like gives this gift to everyone and that's how the open claw phenomenon happened. But, you know, embedded in that is actually an interesting lesson, which is like, you know, how many of those 90% are um spending a million dollars a year on tokens, but like it's in one or two people and how much of it is like divided out by like a thousand people and everyone basically is using like GPT3.5 on Copilot and it's like, yeah, basically like they're using, you know, sort of models from a year ago. they're, you know, really worried about cost and
they're just not using it correctly. You know, I mean, I got in a lot of trouble on the internet for talking about lines of code. I realized they were actually right cuz I wrote half a million lines of Rails code um when I first started coding again. Mhm. And that was the wrong thing to do because I was writing a lot of code that then would call the LLMs. Oh. And that's the old way to do it. And the new way to do it is actually have the LMS just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more uh customizable. It does, you know, more and is more awesome between token maxing and even like, you know, don't write code that calls LLMs. Write markdown that teaches LLMs to write code.
Like they're just a few like big shifts in how to think about building software that like nobody knows yet. But I also like the concept that the R&D now is about going and like squandering tokens. I know, right? I don't think it always is a squander of tokens, but maybe that's what we should be doing right now. Yeah. I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good. Like, you know, I think that in 2 years like that'll be 100,000 and, you know, down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen.
I heard you say that, but I also wonder if you're just going to squander that much more. You might still be spending a million dollars. It's just that now you're getting the work of, you know, a million people instead of a thousand people. I guess we're going to find out what the limit of um just pure software is. I mean, you know, a pessimistic view would say like we're already there. Like it, you know, you don't need a million people coding anything actually. I mean there are only 20 million coders in the whole world apparently. So well now there's probably a lot more. Yeah. I mean depending on how you define a coder.
Yeah. That's right. The one thing I'd say back on the question of are the big consumer services is that ground taken and is that is that over? I'd be curious. What do you think? I mean you know I look at my phone. That's your home screen? Yeah. That's my home screen and it's half empty and the half that is full is of generic apps for the most part. You know, it's clock, notes, photos, camera, weather. But I think that these what I call these internet treasures, these services we can't remember life before or imagine life without like a Google um or a GPT.
Now, I think that there's so few that have been invented that's in our digital life stack. And so I think that even though consumer is arguably not investable right now, I do think that oddly the opportunity has never been greater to offer people a new, you know, internet treasure and reinvent some service that we thought was over or just generic, you know, whether it's the camera or like an Uber and Airbnb, a service that we didn't yet really imagine, but it's enabled now because of AI and agents. I think that is highly likely and that makes me want to keep building consumer products.
Yeah. I mean, I would argue, you know, if the Opus 4.5 moment was just in December, you have to pay, you know, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to get like real work done with those things. Um, it means that the ideal consumer moment is still like three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029. That sounds right. I mean, that makes sense to me. I guess you think about like the beginning of the internet and there was huge investment in telecom and infrastructure just kind of in an analog to today, but it was mostly dark fiber. So, we know that was different. And then there was huge investor interest in the consumer internet. And then that crashed and we saw eBay take
off early, but it wasn't until two late in 2002 that I started to see Amazon's numbers start to like really consistently climb like quarter on quarter of that they were kind of doing their thing, but it was starting in the fall of 2002, they announced a big quarter and it was kind of shocking because the internet was supposed to be over and that's when I was like, "Oh, this is finally happening." So to your point that was, you know, a good six years in before we got to it. How do you think about timing for all this stuff? You know, I mean that's a great example, right? You these things seem to take a long time and then you have to be wrong for like almost a decade and then suddenly everyone's
like, "Oh, you were so right." And then finally, right? Then everyone feels late. Yeah. And they are. Then they are late because you had to have started something right now that like took over in three or four years from now. Do you have any advice for people who they're like, well, you know, I don't even know what I'm going to eat for lunch tomorrow. You know, like how did you find your staying power? I've always had a love for building consumer products and I've found over time that I seem to be like 18 months ahead of the early mass market majority. I think about it that way in terms of myself as a user. And it is interesting that
half my phone is empty other than GPT and claw. There isn't consumer apps that are grabbing my attention right now. Definitely not games. And so it's it is hard to have the staying power, but it depends on how you think about it. It's hard to just keep building things when there's nothing that you're falling in love with. We need to go out and fall in love with things to get our inspiration. And so these zones we get in, I call the abyss. And the abyss is this place that in between passionately pursuing products that we find ourselves in where we're not sure if we'll ever find some a thing we're passionate about again.
Yeah. And we don't know if we'll ever come out. And then it's like, well, what do you do in the abyss? But I think that during this time in the abyss is when you actually can expand your taste zones and potentially find things that you know are part of your way out. You just don't know it at the time. Well, we're in this weird moment where, you know, the more I think about it, I feel like it is like a cost problem. Like the really magical things you have to pay a lot of money. We got to get to that Jevans paradox point, right? Where you can squander it. And it's definitely a problem in games.
Yeah. especially with a premium product in most consumer and games every cent counts and so how do you make it work like you can't actually you can't do that kind of compute and processing that's why you know where Elon says games are just going to be you know created pixel by the AI while you're looking around I'm like that's going to be very expensive I mean until we build enough GPUs my friend Suddosi was just mentioning um you know one thing that we could probably count on is like a 10,000x increase in inference uh like from a Jeff Dean you so there's a breakdown like how all this stuff is going to go down you can't bet against Elon so Elon is probably right it's at a different point in time that maybe is coming you know faster than we realize that he sees a
point that you have that many GPUs and that's and the cost of any one cycle or token is so cheap that we can squander it you know everywhere in games this moment is coming like for people who are watching and they're you know watching to the end and they're like well what is the story about consumer like that might be the story might be and that might be the time machine moment is to come back to today and say remember when we didn't understand that this was intelligence I think you said on tap like water right and we're not there yet but if you can get your head in that space it's probably the right way to think about consumer that if you think how will all of these services be when
that compute is basically free. How would I use it if I could just use unlimited amounts for everything all the time? You know, we'd have our app that would be listening and Yeah, cuz you can have that app now. It'll just cost $1,000 a month and so you could afford it and I could afford it and a bunch of our friends could afford it, but like it's that's not consumer. That's basically enterprise. Right. And so it's just a matter of time. Actually, earlier I was making a joke about like neither of us are time travelers, but actually we are time travelers right now. Most of the people who can't spend that much money can't get it yet and
that pains me honestly. Or you could be inspired to say everyone eventually will have this like soon. So we have to figure out the primitives right now. You could start building now and working backward. I mean I that's an incredible head start. You know, that's like one of the classic ways to uh come up with startup ideas is like you take any like log graph of like a cost curve or like some capability curve. Like you could have guessed the moment that the iPhone could have been possible because memory came down and display cost came down and compute came down just to a point where like someone could afford an iPhone.
Yeah. And so you can do this right now with the cost of intelligence. I love the business plan of free. If you want to say like what do you always know is better? Free, right? And it's one of the rules of the internet. Like anything that can be free will be free. And my first company, Freeloader, we had a free interactive screen saver that competed with Berkeley Systems $35 flying toasters, right? It's a good win, right? It's not even new. It's just better. you want. Yeah. But the new was the internet, but the interactive download the internet, but the better was just free screen saver. And then with Zingga and social games, again, like the game industry was only $23 billion and they had one model which
was go to the store and buy a box and it was $60. And we said, can we make decent quality games free? And you know, the free worked again. And so I love thinking about well what does free mean in the age of AI and compute and like how will we rethink all of these services when it's unlimited and free. I mean what's interesting is like it's always darkest before dawn right and so maybe that's the moment that's why we're sitting here lamenting that there are the consumer is not investable but it will be and we know this now. Yeah, it's a good argument to imagine any one of these franchises or any of these consumer services and think if how would it be different if you offered that with free unlimited AI inside of it.
That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future. And it's not even a couple years away. Yeah, Mark, this is so amazing. Thank you so much for spending time with us. And for everyone watching, make sure you go out and buy his new book. It's going to be available uh anywhere books are sold. Thanks for joining us.
