We've got to be in a mental state where we're playing offense and not defense. You've got to be in this place that you're thinking, "What if everything goes right?" If we're starting with what if everything goes wrong, you're playing defense. You've lost before you're even out of the gates.

What are the first principles of great products?

I think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling and it's been unexpressed or unmet. When we first experience that, there's something magical to it that it could be an unlock. And lots of times it's where we're most cynical that we're ready for the most magic. But I found that if a product speaks to you, or at least this is my experience, if a product speaks to me and it makes it on the front of my iPhone, I think it has a billion dollar stick value. Or maybe I should update that. That's what I thought 15 years ago. Now maybe it's trillion. Two at least two billion. But if it's enough to be on the front of my iPhone, to me, that's saying a lot. Like that I'm going to use it more than once. A new app that's so seldom and and the front of my iPhone is I could go get and show it to you, but it's half empty. So, I still think that there's so few at least digital consumer products that give us that magical experience that we feel compelled to use every day.

You have a system for sort of proving ideas before you know that they're going to work. Really? Talk to me about that. How do you do that?

I'm looking for real heat around an idea.

What does heat mean?

Heat is something that you know it when you see it. It's kind of like being really in love with somebody. When you've found your person, I believe you know it. And then every other one that was not quite your person, you're not sure, right? And heat is the same thing. And it's like you want to see heat. So you're looking for signs of heat and you're like look at this click-through rate or look at this. But it's not heat. When you have heat around the product, everything says heat and you just know it. It's part of what I call true signal, right? It's this. When you have true signal, we all know it. You don't need anyone to tell you. And when you don't have true signal, you need lots and lots of stats and other things cuz you're like, is this the signal? Isn't it? It's not. But when you see heat in another product or and even better, when you see heat in your own, it's like Christmas morning. Like everything lights up.

Were you always playful? Yeah, I grew up in a family that was very competitive around these kind of family social games like charades and Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. Competitive like tipping the board over if you lose... almost like my dad was very playful and into games and so much so that he first did this and then we all did. We'd start to change the rules if we thought the games weren't made right. The best one was in Scrabble. It kind of sucks that there's this luck of the draw on your letters. And my dad made this rule that you could take a letter from your your little tray. And change it out with a letter on the board as long as it still made a word, right? So you could put an O for an A. And then you had to reuse that letter in the same turn. And so my dad sometimes would take a half an hour for a turn and all these intricate things, but it made it more you had more dimensionality to games and it added a whole dimension.

You had a falling out with your dad and that seemed to be one of the pivotal early moments in your life. What happened? My dad, we all kind of played a role in his movie and he loved being in a fraternity in college and it was like defining for him and he wanted me to do that. I wasn't into the fraternity and they weren't into me either. It was like mutual and and I initially went to this Big 10 school, University of Michigan and I was just not in the right place in any way and I just was not on lots of fronts becoming the kind of man that my dad wanted me to be. He wanted me to be just like him. This got more and more tense and our family was on a sailboat in the Caribbean in the Virgin Islands and we was bear boating so it was just us crewing and my we had grown up sailing and my dad was the worst sailboat captain ever. I mean just famously like epically bad captain like we would get stuck on a sandbar because he didn't read the tides right you know we were in this harbor in Virgin Gorda and the keel got stuck and we always had something go wrong and the boat was going in circles and headed eventually for this like rock barrier and I got in the dinghy and I turned on the engine and grabbed the rope and I pulled the boat into the slip and save the day. And my dad was furious and he said, "You could have killed us all and there could only be one captain." And you know, I think he was also a little humiliated. And that escalated to this bigger fight. And he said, "I was going to wait until after this trip, but I've decided to take you out of college to finish raising you." And I said, "Fuck you. Bye." And I left right there. I went and rented a C plane and flew away and and I also had transferred been accepted to transfer to Wharton University of Pennsylvania from Michigan. And so then I just packed up my car and left and drove to Penn.

So after school you had some formative experiences at sort of Bane and you worked with John Malone. I'd love to spend a few beats on those.

Sure. I had all these great experiences in my 20s. Um, really amazing, but they were all kind of despite myself because I had these kind of fatal flaws as an employee. One is I'm terrible at interviewing because of this like overindexing desire to be honest more than to please the interviewer even though I wanted to get these high-paying jobs. So getting out of college, I was the only kid in my section to graduate without a job. And then I was lucky enough to get a 15-minute interview with TCI, John Malone's company... Brendan Clus, who was the president, said, "Why do we need a second MBA here?"... And I said, "Because I read this book by George Gilder called Microcosm... your company is positioned for this coming information superhighway."... He said, "Well, it's funny you say that. We're having dinner with George Gilder tonight."... But then I had a few career-limiting meetings with Malone... TCI was going to buy a third of Prodigy... I said, "Why don't we just buy this company AOL? They're way better. It was 110 million and nobody liked that."... Malone said, "I don't need some wet behind the ears MBA telling me what's a good deal."... Then, yeah, Bane... they had this graph in the company that Mitt Romney had first made... says if your relative market share is high enough, your return on sales, your margin will be high... I proved that in the snack industry it breaks. I presented... I showed their graph with a flashing X in it. I said, "Look, the graph is wrong. This doesn't work." It's like going to church and being like, I don't believe in God... I was one of two summer associates in the history of the firm that they asked not to come back. So, a lot of evidence was building up that I was not employable.

At 28, you realize you're not getting the results you want. Things aren't working out. You find yourself in a synagogue again. Walk me through what was going on.

I just felt like I'd made a lot of bad career decisions and I was washed up early... I just sat there in this temple... It was just a good place to sit and think. And I just started writing in a notebook about why my life sucked so badly. And I just ended on like this one thing that I smoked cigarettes... I didn't want to do it, but I kept doing it. So it was this sense of like my life was a little out of control... if I could do one thing to like know that I'm making some positive change in my life, I'm going to quit smoking. So on October 19th 1994, I did a lifetime quit on cigarettes. And then every day for that year after that that I didn't smoke, it was something I could feel good about... evaluating your life effectively with honesty and it wasn't coming up good... prove to yourself every day that you're sort of in control of your circumstances.

And then you do it again. You call this your book of life.

Yeah. I think that a practice like the book of life... is just be strategic about your life. Like be thoughtful about like I like say what would your future self thank you for doing this year. We can be strategic, hold ourselves accountable and and force ourselves to make some tougher decisions now because you know you'll thank yourself later. And right around the time I was brainstorming on the side with this guy Sil Paul. Sunil was the only internet product manager at AOL... we came up with this kind of peanut butter and jelly idea that like he wanted to build hardware, I wanted to build software, but we both want to make the internet easier for people... Sunil and I got the company going. We each put in 30,000. 60 total. It was called freeloader. And you guys sold that company for 38 million, was it? Yeah. And then everything possibly everything that could have gone right went right.

Skip a few beats after Freeloader and come to tribe.net. So, you have the right instinct for a social network and then you meet Zach and he's got the right idea for a social network. Talk to me about that tension.

I think we all know founders like this that are just they're so attached to this idea that they're going to go down with the ship... it is like a bad relationship... I like to say that with tribe, I had three winning instincts and one losing idea. We learn over time hopefully as founders that our instincts are almost always right and our ideas are usually wrong. And so that is a really powerful philosophy and tool if we can hang on to that and really use that. And so I had this instinct I called a cocktail party and it started with Napster... I was the first check into Napster... it was this cocktail party where we could connect with each other with nobody in between. And to me, that was the beginning of this social web... Reid Hoffman and I were during this nuclear winter... re-coining the term web 2.0... anything on the internet that can be free will be free starting with data... Fster was the first thing I saw work and didn't copy it... I thought, Tribe, it's Craigslist meets Fster. I got trust completely wrong. I mean, like so wrong, it's unbelievable... Zuck came through my office about a year after I started Tribe... I had amazing virality and amazing user growth and I had terrible retention... It was like a sinking speedboat... and the real answer to sinking speedboat is to fix the hole in the bottom, you know, not go faster. Zuck and Sean Parker came through and I saw they got it right and I think it was my ego and the kind of morality... that you don't copy people. Um, and so I wasn't going to go do the exact thing that they had done... stuck with the same losing strategy.

From this concept and the failure of tribe, I ended up getting to this framework at Zingga that I called proven better new. Um and it's based on my philosophy that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. And the problem is that I see with so many products and founders is that they're losing for the wrong reason. So they're losing because they didn't just stick to their one isolate their one area of innovation. They tried to reinvent every single part of their product...

Slack is a great example of proven, better, new... proven means these things are proven and what's proven you should legally copy... Better is is there something about that product that 10 out of 10 users would say you could do better... For Zinga Poker, our proven was poker games. We didn't mess with the rules of poker... Better for Zinga Poker was no download... New in Zinga poker was pictures of real people often your friends... my philosophy is all new fails until it finally doesn't... if you assume all new fails you probably won't be let down. It means you take a different approach to new which is you can't try one new idea... You have to try many many variants of each new idea and look in much smaller atomic units of innovation for new.

Before you have the right to do better or new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven. So, I remember at Zingga having a roadmap meeting with the poker team and a newly minted product manager proudly showed me the new poker profile that he was going to launch. And I said, "Okay, show me your PhD in profiles. Show me what are the best game profiles on mobile ever done and tell me why." He's like, "I don't know." And I'm like, well, you haven't earned the right to change the profile if you're not an expert. You can't you need to be the world's leading expert in profiles... I want to see a war room full of profiles. You need to care at the pixel level before you have the right. And that's what I mean by proven and deconstructing. And deconstructing is an art form and a science... anytime a new product comes out like be a student of yourself in that experience and like what is it that feels great or doesn't? And we have a responsibility to our users like it's sacred.

I want to talk about the abyss a little bit. So after tribe and before Zingga, you went into this hole. Can you describe how you felt?

Yeah, at some point I started calling this place the abyss. The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure... My dad used to call this in between successes... This abyss is this usually dark place because at first it feels great. Maybe freedom... And about a week or two later, maybe a month later, it starts to dawn on you that I may never find gainful employment again. I mean, gainful meaning something I want to do. I'm not gonna ever go work for anyone else, so I'm not employable anyway. So, I don't know if I'll ever come out of this abyss. I've been in this abyss sometimes for multiple years... I find finding lots of small things to work on that are on maybe going to unlock the passion thing. I got to Zingga. I was in the abyss and I had just side projects that one of which was a poker game. I was dabbling... You're either all in or kind of like dabbling.

When I was all in with Zingga, I was a maniac... my why I got to is like what I can offer the world is building products that move people...

Well, I love these markets and they're all around us where we think they're mature and over and they haven't even started yet... Google was the 56th search engine... games was the same thing... In 2007, the whole video game industry worldwide was like $23 billion. It was mature, not interesting. And yet there was, I believe, this latent demand... what we got right with social gaming was make it for the mass market, not for gamers, and give you enough value in it that an adult would give themselves permission to play... but actually you're here for this cocktail party to do social networking. What if in our game we give you a new dimension to your social networking that can improve a relationship in your life?... And then the second thing that came into play for social gaming with us was virtual goods, user pay... We were one of the first companies in the western world to do this inapp purchase thing... monetize your engagement instead of trying to show you an ad and getting you to leave the game.

I knew I could make what I call an internet treasure... a service you can't remember life before or imagine life without... I made this way harder for myself when it should have been easy at this point to raise money for Zinga... know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises... if it's not the right place for you, you've failed... The first round I raised was impossibly hard... I got caught in between a fight in between Peter Teal and Sequoia... eventually Fred Wilson... he negotiated a hard deal cuz he could but and the funniest thing is I never used the dollar I raised the whole time.

I got to failure machines through a lot of failure, painful, slow failure... I started and ended every meeting with, "What will our players thank us for?"... the problem was that this team was a bunch of mostly 20some dudes making a game for middle-aged women... They'd spent six months on this, hundreds of engineering days, and they never really tested the top of the funnel... 99% of Words of Friends players say no way when you show them this game... and the team... they did start click testing every day hundreds of ideas starting with what will our core audience thank us for... and that was the beginning of the whole turnaround.

I see too many founders get stuck in what I call the MVP trap... too many teams waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market. And we don't have time anymore for that... build it wrong before we don't have time to build it right. Don't build it right. Build it wrong and build it fast. And don't make it viable. Viable is the bad word... Let's build wrong and see if it proves right. Then let's build right.

Founder mode is why we became founders in the first place... You owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct. You owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself. It's your right to be wrong... The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote.

I don't really believe in management... Early on... I wrote everyone's names and I said, "By the end of the week, write down what you're CEO of."... Everyone here needs to own something that matters... In the same way we have a responsibility to our users we have a responsibility to our engineers... there should be a moral contract if you're going to take that hill I'm going to show you that I am going to work just as hard to unlock value out of the work you did...

I don't do one-on-ones... Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on-ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time... If anyone did finally get my ear and complain about someone else, you stop, you call the other person, and you say, "Hey, Shane's complaining about you. I think you should come up and talk to him." And you walk away.

Tech Assistant... it's through like passing your vampire blood... you pick someone from the organization who's promising... They're your shadow. They go to every meeting you go to... training up a mini me.