Zynga Founder: The Consumer Is Not Investable Right Now – That's Why You Should Build It

Let's put it this way: today, anyone who wants to build a new app for the general public is told that the "consumer" is not investable, meaning that the money won't come. But Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga and a Silicon Valley veteran, sees it the opposite way: “It's precisely because no one believes in it that it's the best time to invent the next thing that everyone will use.” It seems paradoxical, but history confirms it. People think that the app market is saturated, that everything has already been created, that the big tech companies have taken up all the space. Mark, on the other hand, has experienced three waves: the web of the 1990s, social media like Tribe and Zynga, and now artificial intelligence. Each time, the feeling was the same: it seems like it's all over, then there's a leap and everything changes. He talks about how, in the early days of social media, his mistake with Tribe was underestimating the power of trust: “To put themselves online, people have to feel safe. Facebook succeeded thanks to .edu emails and won.” The lesson? We are often too close to innovation to really understand its scope until it explodes. Today, with AI, we are in a similar phase: technologies that seem like games, then suddenly become indispensable. A personal example: Mark talks about how natural it is today to walk down the street and talk to an AI as if it were a person, asking it for advice about work or life, and how he gets angry because no one has yet built the truly perfect version, always listening, that everyone will want. Yet the technology is already there: “I could release my open source plugin tomorrow, and it's already better than Siri. So why is Siri still so bad?" And above all: why can't large companies with thousands of engineers raise the bar? There is a key point as to why innovating in the consumer market today is so difficult: there are no "proven" distribution channels, that is, tested ones. Investors prefer the enterprise because the numbers are easier to read, but the real windfalls come when no one can see the path yet. Mark calls it "fish are running": when the right product arrives, you don't need to convince anyone to work harder; everyone feels that something big is happening. But when that spark is missing, every detail becomes a struggle. Another point that overturns classical logic: often in startups, you try to be "efficient", but real innovation comes when you can "waste" resources. Mark talks about friends who spend a million dollars a year on AI tokens just to see where the experiment leads, and he says that this is precisely the frontier: throwing resources in until something new happens, because when the cost of AI power really drops — and it will — those who have already worked on it will have a huge advantage. There is also a practical strategy that Mark uses to build products: he calls it "proven, better, new". Take what already works (proven), improve it where everyone agrees it's better (better), and then try something totally new (new) — without falling too much in love with the new part, because often it won't be the one that stays. The most counterintuitive part? Mark says that when all this is finally possible "for free", that is, when AI costs very little and is everywhere, we will see the birth of new "internet treasures", services that today seem trivial to us — such as the camera or notes — but which will be reinvented and become indispensable. And those who started building them now, when it seemed crazy, will be in pole position. The real mistake is to think that everything is already decided: the history of the Internet says otherwise. The phrase that sticks in your head: "When everyone thinks it's over, it's actually about to begin." If this perspective has sparked something in you, you can press I'm In on Lara Notes — it's not a like, it's your way of saying: this idea is now yours. And if tomorrow you tell someone that the next Google or Facebook will be born just when no one believes in it anymore, on Lara Notes you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline: this way, there is a record of who really counts in your discoveries. This content comes from Y Combinator and saves you 37 minutes.