While the main focus was center stage on Monday for day one of TechCrunch Disrupt, there was plenty of action backstage— or rather just a few yards to the right to the stage, where our ad-hoc TechCrunch TV studio is located.
Throughout the day, we ran follow-up interviews with a string of Disrupt notables, like KPCB’s John Doerr and Bing Gordon, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, David Sze, GE’s CMO Beth Comstock and Intuit’s Scott Cook. If you didn’t catch the action on our live feed, they are all available on demand after the jump. A plethora of videos ahead.
fresh off the Disrupt stage is John Doerr and Bing Gordon in our backstage studio. Thanks for joining us guys. A pleasure to be here.
So, you talked to Mark Pincus.
You better look into that audience for us .
Thank you. So, you got a chance to talk to Mark Pincus kinda grill him on being an internet treasure or trying to turn Zynga into an internet treasure. Now, one of the things that I wanted to know was kind of the direction of the gaming industry and you being talked about, you know, you sell 4 Disruptive trends. You saw Disruption, and social analytics, the API, the App Eco nomy and the new payment methods. How do you think it's changing today and you John is an investor, where do you see gaming going as well? You know, I don't think social gaming is having a huge effect on traditional video gaming, very additive and just as, just as casual gaming was additive to video gaming. So, very additive. We're getting a bunch of new people and in general people under 30 on the internet want to do more things at once in less time. And so, in social games you can talk to your friends, build social capital, entertain yourself, communicate all at once and for some of that it may feel a little bit productive because I'm actually improving my farm.
But you know, of the trends you mentioned, I just kinda wanna know the directions you see them going like what do you think Mark has to do to keep Zynga at the forefront of, you know, the evolution in gaming?
You know, I think in a creative business it always comes back to people. So, Colleen McCreary, the head of HR needs to keep running an organization that allows people to be a CEO, that gets the best and the brightest, the number one draft picks out of University and turn them loose. There's just no substitute for great people inspired in the line. So to me, that's job one. You know, there's, in the internet, working at scale is always really hard. Zynga has been spectacular about its data warehouse and its net operations, it just doesn't crash and that's also hard and then new games and also new features. I believe in the service like games, it's really important to have refreshing features like crafting right now in FarmVille, like Vegas in the Mafia Wars. So, new features are to social games what new series and new seasons of The Sopranos are to HBO.
Gotcha. And John , during the panel you talked about how you used to see the gaming space as kind of this hit making machines. How do you see them now and even close to common and where do you see trends going in the space? Well, I think the important trend is that we're witnessing the web being re-imagined and re-invented the old web was a web of websites and documents. In this new one, it's a web of people and places. So, the extraordinary thing for me is to see Zynga is a proof point that you can achieve completely unprecedented growth in users, in revenues, in growth and really happy and delighted customers. So, I was inspired by what Mark had to say, you know to the TechCrunch community. Now, let's go do that in travel, and let's go do that in health and let's go do that in areas that we otherwise might not imagine.
Education. Commerce.
Education, great one . Exactly. So,
And Politics. Mark would, Mark would say, you know maybe it's would, Mark would say, you know maybe it's time for E-politics.
Yeah. Everything is really right for Disruption now. A nd now, John you mentioned the term unprecedented growth which everyone associates with Zynga and, you know, you have to look at San Francisco where there, they just recently leased a huge building not too far from
It's the growth both has been just ridiculous, you know, abroad, and also domestically speaking, so.
And, they're just getting started. You know?
Yeah.
Zero to 12 employees in less than 3 years.
Well that's my question here, I mean, how sustainable is this kind of growth? I mean what do you have to do at Zynga to kind of maintain that to manage it. I mean when you're trying to create an operation that touches millions and millions, and eventually billion plus you know on a regular basis, how do you deal with that? Well there's all the normal things to making sure you have desk where new people can sit. And, it'd be surprising how challenging that can be, and part of the city like San Francisco.
But again, you know, the enemy of scale is when people lose meaning in their daily jobs, and so making sure that everybody has authority match their responsibility and is kind of psyched by the vision of the company that's priceless, and then the Second thing that Zynga focused on inside the door is that I think people outside the doors don't fully understand is that Zynga really focuses on happy customers and retention. I think Mark said that yesterday only 1% of customers renew that day .
Okay.
So, you know, by reality it's interest ing
Yeah.
But if you got a good party going you're not depending on the next p erson coming in the front door unless it's like Snoop Dog. If you got a good party going, you gotta have the people that are in the party wanna stay and now there has to be food in the kitchen and there's gotta be music and if you turn off the music and turn off the food and turn off the b ar, you kill the party. So, Zynga has got to keep the food coming and keep the people talking to each other and keep the music going.
Yeah. Now, I just have one more question and then I let you guys go 'cause I know you have to catch flights. But, the idea of Zynga and independence h as been a hot topic, you know, because they're so reliant on Facebook and eventually you know Google Game. So, how important is it For Zynga to become more independent in the next few years in order to become that internet treasure, is that
I would, I'll go first. I would say, the independents, you know, their most important partnership for Zynga is with customers.
Yeah. And, if customers will find what they want, where they have to go, s o having a close and meaningful relationship with the customers is absolutely the most i mportant. And, whether distribution is single source or multi-source, t here's proof points in the world that both work. But having that fibrous relationship with customers is the key to the destiny of Zynga.
What do you think John?
I think Bing said it really well. I don't have anything to add.
Okay, well thank you so much guys. Once again, my guests have been John Doerr and Bing Gordon.
