I still believe that we can offer you a much deeper, more engaging, more compelling play experience on a PC than we can on a mobile device, but one can enhance the other, and one can expand the other. I don't think they necessarily will compete with each other, just like how we find a place for movies in our lives, and TV and radio.
There are people who want the comfort and structure of a job where they're given tasks and told what to do. I think it's actually a minority of people. The majority of people don't want that, but I'd say that the companies I've built are full of people with something to prove.
The art of it is, the more we can bring complex game mechanics to a mass market, the more engaging the games will be. But at the same time, we have to simplify everything: the mass market has a lower attention span; they're not seeking that experience from the outset.
About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.
From the beginning... I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have.
I regularly encourage employees to break rules. I also say to employees that leadership starts with complaining and dissatisfaction. But it doesn't stop there. It comes from saying you're dissatisfied with something and then fixing it and making it better for everybody.
I believe in the opportunities for social gaming. It's overlapping with mobile gaming and lots of video gaming, but it's still different. It's all getting more blurry as hardcore games and console games talk about being social.
Even if I'd wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, they weren't going to hire me, because I was saying things like, 'That's a dumb question' when I was asked something stupid in the interviews. I just didn't have a lot of respect for authority.
We need a modern people's lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda. Imagine voting for a president we're truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights.
I think we live in a unique time - the verbs that make up our online and mobile lives haven't been completely invented or imagined for us. That was kind of a life path I was on.
People were hanging out in these places, and just like at cocktail parties, they needed something to do together. I thought, 'How can we fit games into someone's life?'
Zynga made social gaming and play a worldwide phenomenon, and we remain the industry leader.
I got involved early on in social media - I created one of the first social networks - and for me, social gaming was a natural evolution of that.