I just sat down with Mark Pincus. 

He founded Zynga, the social gaming giant behind FarmVille and Words With Friends. 

He built Tribe, one of the first social networks, before there was a Facebook. He also put up the money for Raya, the invite-only dating app for people who'd rather not be found. 

He's been a quiet hand behind half the social internet you've ever touched.

He also wrote a book. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's good. I told him so.

He then told all of my followers not to buy it. He said it's already out of date.

That's the kind of guy he is. 

And that's why I wanted to talk to him. 

So here are seven life lessons from the billionaire who sucks at everything—on purpose. (Which is exactly why he wins.)

A.] Build a failure machine.

In the early days, Mark and his team would send their subscribers dead links. 

"Click here for 1,000 chips." 

The link just went to a 404 page. No product behind it. They didn't build anything until 25% of players clicked. 

The result? They tested more ideas in a week than the industry tested in a year. 

That was the mantra. The product came last. The vein came first.

B.] Everything new fails.

Last year 40,000 apps launched in the App Store. 

Zero hit the top 10. 

Maybe one or two scraped the top 25 and couldn't hold it. Statistically, everything new gets crushed. 

So Mark built a framework: Proven. Better. New. 

Find a big boring proven business. Make one thing 10-out-of-10 obviously better. 

Then add the smallest new twist—because that twist is the part most likely to kill you if you start there first. 

C.] Copy like a master.

Words With Friends was just Scrabble with a twist. It got 14 million daily players. Scrabble got 2 million. 

Slack was HipChat with better polish and a little fun bolted on. 

Zynga Poker copied the leading poker games pixel for pixel—except there was no download, and 80% of users quit at the download button. 

The real magic trick, Mark says, is copying something so well that nobody even accuses you of copying. 

Kill your ego. Define success by whether a nurse in Indiana vibes with your thing and can't say why.

D.] Consumer is dead. For now.

This one stung. 

Mark's old rule was the 90/10: if a platform could get an app to 10 million daily users in 90 days, it was investable. 

No platform does that today. 

Nobody downloads new apps. You don't. I don't. 

We're not in discovery mode anymore. So the smart money has gone to enterprise and prosumer—a smaller base willing to actually pay. 

Even despite everyone being able to build new apps with AI, that's where the puck is for the next two years.

E.] AI is an A student at proven and an F at new.

Good news for us humans. AI can benchmark and copy at the level of the best product manager Marks’ ever had. 

It cannot invent the twist. So we're not getting replaced this week.

F.] Ship your weak ideas off to die.

Zynga sent failing games to its India studio. 

The place became a hotbed of innovation—because nobody in India cared, so the team could just try things. 

That's where they discovered subscriptions worked. Freedom lives where the stakes are low.

G.] Your cautionary tale will teach you everything. (So do the dumb thing anyway.)

Tribe grew faster than LinkedIn. It had no retention. 

Mark got the trust layer wrong and stuck heroically with the wrong idea because his ego was glued to it. 

Every theory in his book was forged in that long, painful failure.

Even though he says you shouldn’t read his book, he’s wrong. You should. 

He's the godfather of social media and he represents, in his words, “the dumb f*cks.” 

It sounds like an insult. It's actually his superpower.

Go listen. It's one of my favorites.

Click here for the full conversation.