All New Fails

Mark Pincus founded Zynga, the company behind games like FarmVille and Words With Friends. By his publisher’s count, Zynga launched eight hit games and reached more than a billion users in four years, and the publisher calls “all new fails” one of his favorite guiding principles, born from the system Zynga used to make those hits. Pincus has been teaching it for about a decade: in 2017 he described the method built on it as the “core concept” of the product class he taught at Stanford’s business school. It is still, he says, a mantra “repeated in the hallways at Zynga.” The words above come from his May 2026 appearance on the podcast The Knowledge Project, shortly before he published his book Life at the Speed of Play.

Pincus builds products in three steps, which he calls “Proven, Better, New.” First, copy a product that is already a hit with the people you want to reach, down to the smallest detail. Second, make one improvement that its users would all agree is better, like making it free. Third, add a single new idea, and “assume that this one new idea of yours probably will fail.” Keeping that idea apart from everything else means that if the product fails, it fails because of the idea, not because you broke something that already worked. Then you try again: he wants “many, many variants” of each new idea.

When Zynga built its poker game, it copied the leading poker games on Facebook so closely that there was “not a single thing you could detect that was different.” The one improvement was skipping the download: the other games made you install software before you could play, and Pincus says most people quit at that step. The one new idea was playing at a table with your real Facebook friends. It “happened to work on my first try,” he says, then adds, “that’s not a promise.”

Another quote on this site has Steve Jobs saying “great artists steal.” Like Pincus, Jobs was not embarrassed about copying: he said Apple had always been “shameless about stealing great ideas.”