The Kitchen Table

The NY Times today reported the existence of an intimidating, uncaring, and exploitative culture at Zynga, the Valley’s latest public offering darling. This did not surprise me, although it did impress me that such a culture had persisted — thrived, in fact — in the face of a ridiculous opportunity for big bucks. This all recalled a number of interesting meetings we had there.

Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, is a Harvard Business School graduate who is best described as a smallish man with prominent cheekbones and bleary eyes who is wont to wear slogan T-shirts and sweatshirts. His hair is almost always a bit in need of washing, and his ears and face always seem to want to be swabbed to take away a whitish residue.

Nevertheless, he is impressive.

The founder of Electronic Arts and Amazon board member Bing Gordon introduced me to Mark a couple years ago. I went over to his south of Market lair, which I will describe in a moment. Derek Robson and I watched as Mark did his famous talk, the one that obviously got him the seed money to make Zynga what it has become.

The premise of Mark’s talk was as follows: Social media is the digital drug, the fastest-growing thing around. People check into it a dozen or more times a day. What if there were a product that took advantage of that A.D.D.-like, short attention span appeal?

Games. It had to be games. But not Simms or Second Life kind of games. Think simpler, faster. Snack food games. Zynga would be the snack food of games. You could eat it at work, or even at home, right in front of your spouse or kids.

Inside those games could be advertising, sure. But the real genius of it all was the thought that PEOPLE WOULD PAY REAL MONEY FOR VIRTUAL THINGS. It seems trite now, but that was the big idea. In Zynga games, people actually paid money to give cows and guns to their friends as gifts. And, in a less selfless act, they could buy things that helped guarantee their own success as gamers. Yes, you could buy your way to victory in a Zynga game. It was, well, like the real world.

Pincus’ speech was magnificent, the second best business speech I’ve seen outside of Steve Jobs’. However.

We began work for Zynga, not realizing that it was the hottest brand in The Valley at the time (Bing told me so, but I thought he was simply drinking his own Kool-Aid from a machine that further purified the Kool-Aid before he drank it. Actually, he was right.)

But the reality of going to Zynga was quite different. It was perhaps the least flashy Silicon Valley/SOMA company I’d ever visited. There was no attempt to create an impressive greeting space. Instead, Zynga aggressively threw out the impression that such blandishments were unnecessary bullshit if you really had an idea. The people here worshipped THE IDEA. And Mark. They wore very basic T-shirts and ripped jeans to work. They were disciples. The walls were bare. Extension cords criss-crossed the carpet.

Bing and Mark told us that they’d contacted our agency because we’d coalesced Electronic Arts into the gaming brand of the eighties, nineties, and beyond. They wanted that for Zynga.

Perhaps I didn’t really get Zynga enough. Perhaps none of us did. But I must say, I brought some pretty hip characters over there led by Paul Stechschulte. We were asked to develop a logo for the brand, and then put together a brand vision for them. Something that would become world famous and totally dominate an industry like EA did.

Okay.

At our first meeting with Mark, he explaned that his own dog had, by default, become the company’s logo. The dog was a pit bull and he obviously loved him but, at the same time, he didn’t seem concerned about the image of a child-maiming pit bull as the logo for a fun game company. I asked Bing about this later.

“Am I crazy or are we being told to use the pit bull or else?” 
“You can lose the pit bull,” he said. “You’re the doctors. Tell him what you think he should do.”

Thus began a six or seven week design development. We showed Mark logos without the dog, logos with the dog, logos with totally new imagery. He didn’t really respond to presentation. Instead, he seemed to riff about what was worrying him that week. Certainly, we were never told to use or not use the dog.

That became the question: Use or not use the dog. Clearly, Mark wanted the dog, but would never say so.

Instead, Mark had a tendency to take the discussion sideways into a rather socialist direction. He talked a lot about people as ants. “I think of us in terms of an army of ants,” he said. “Our job, here, is to lead that army into a movement of power and revolution. The army of ants has power and can do anything.”

It was the kind of locution that led my people to roll their eyes on the way home. It was clear that the main purpose of the ants was to make Mark money. But we persisted.

I suggested to our creative team that we use the tag line: “Trust Play.” It just seemed to capture what was great about the ethos of the company, its young and enthusiastic employees, and the philosophy of young professionals addicted to Mafia Wars and Farmville.

Bing loved the line. So we made it into a big video, featuring people at Zynga. Mark requested that he watch it in the company of a coterie of his most trusted engineers and technical people.

They hated it. But then again, what they would have loved was hard to discern.

“I don’t know,” the engineers typically said. “I think it’s too playful. And we don’t really trust anything because we’re trying to do something new here. We’re beyond play as people know it right now. And why would we care about whether people trusted us?”

That was before Mark tried to rescind their stock grants and options. It’s true: he’s blackmailing his own employees by offering them continued employment only if they give back some of their ownership. Not only that, but it’s all happened in the face of the public offering later this year.

Stories have emerged about horrible treatment – long hours, disloyalty, bad faith. Mark has responded publicly with a self-analysis. He will examine himself and fix everything, he told the press. He will confront the complaints and take everyone on.

We had perhaps six meetings with Mark at which we presented the results of much research, designed dozens of logos, theorized about the brand and the future of social networking, and gave him a finished internal video and a tag line that I still kind of like, actually.

“Do you think Mark will ever do any of this stuff?” I asked Bing, who is a good friend.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think Mark feels that you guys still haven’t gotten the mission, as he sees it. You haven’t nailed it.”
“Could we maybe get paid a little, as we figure all that out?” I asked.
“I’ll discuss it with him,” said Bing. “It sounds reasonable.”

Six months of pretty intensive work. Nothing was ever produced. Worse, nothing was ever acknowledged.

In the end, Zynga was just never able to do the next meeting. Too much going on. We never got a cent.

As of now, Mark is in a race with his employees for The Money. He will no doubt win. It was, however, reported recently that many of Zynga’s new titles, including the much-lauded Mafia Wars II, are lagging well behind expectations.

I think I saw the ants smirk.