“After decades of building products, I've learned that your instinct is probably right, but your idea is probably wrong. And that gap between the two is where most founders lose.”
Your Instincts Are How You Win
From the conclusion of Mark Pincus’s Life at the Speed of Play (Harper Business, 2026), in a section titled “Your Instincts Are How You Win.” Pincus founded Zynga, the company behind FarmVille and Words With Friends. In a May 2026 post on X, a few weeks before the book came out, he put numbers on it: “Your instinct is right 95% of the time but your idea is right at best 25% of the time.”
In 2003 Pincus had the instinct that people should be able to order a taxi from their phones. His idea was to have them text the taxi dispatcher. He bought smstaxi.com and wrote a business plan, but the plan topped out at a million dollars a month in revenue (he figured on a dollar a ride), so he never built it. In the same post, he credits Uber’s founders with the idea that won, “to enable anyone to be a taxi,” and adds: “I never would have come up with that.” He was right about the phone and wrong about the dispatcher.
In the next paragraph of the book he writes, “Too many founders find an odd sense of honor in sticking with their losing product.” His own case was Tribe.net, a social network he co-founded in 2003, the year MySpace launched. He calls Tribe his example of “going down with the ship”: if he could go back to 2004, he would shake himself and say “you’re trapped in one losing idea.” In a June 2026 interview on the Sourcery podcast, as quoted in the episode’s written recap, he put the cost in letter grades: “A B+ is the enemy of an A.” Stick with a merely good idea and it “is taking up space,” distracting you from finding the A. The book’s answer is patience with the instinct and many cheap attempts at it, “without being attached to any single one.”