Mark Jonathan Pincus

Fred Wilson had backed Pincus's first company, FreeLoader, which sold within seven months for $38 million. When Pincus came back around for a seed round to build a social poker game on Facebook's newly opened developer platform, Wilson passed, and so did Josh Kopelman; Pincus funded it himself to keep control.¹ That game became Zynga, a company that makes free-to-play social and mobile games, including FarmVille, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker, and CityVille, monetized through in-game purchases of virtual goods and advertising, and Pincus is its co-founder and executive chairman.² He served as Zynga's chief executive twice, most recently from April 2015 to March 2016, and is a serial founder who started, by his own count, roughly ten companies before and around Zynga.

Background

Pincus was born on February 13, 1966, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, into a Jewish family. His father, Theodore Pincus, was a business columnist and public-relations adviser to executives and politicians; his mother, Donna, was an artist and architect. He attended the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago through 1984, earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Wharton in 1988, and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1993. In between he spent two years as an analyst at Lazard Freres, then two years as a vice president at Asian Capital Partners in Hong Kong, roughly six years in finance before founding companies. He married Alison Gelb, a co-founder of One Kings Lane, in 2008 and divorced in 2017. He has said that raising children with rare genetic conditions taught him to distrust overconfident specialists.²

Getting started

Pincus's founding career predates Zynga by more than a decade. In 1995 he co-founded FreeLoader, an early web push-news service backed by Fred Wilson and SoftBank, acquired within seven months for $38 million. In 1997 he co-founded help-desk automation company Support.com, later SupportSoft, which went public in July 2000, in what he calls the last week of the dot-com IPO window. He founded the incubator Tank Hill in 2000, which closed after nine months, and the early social network Tribe.net in 2003, which achieved real growth and working virality but failed as a business. Pincus often cites Tribe.net as his central cautionary story: the instinct was right, the idea was wrong.²

Pincus has said that in late 2002 he and Reid Hoffman studied Amazon's continued quarterly growth during a period when consensus held the consumer internet was dead, and concluded that usage, not sentiment, was the signal to trust.² Zynga was founded in January 2007, originally as Presidio Media, as a side project to build a social poker game for Facebook's developer platform, which opened in May 2007. He renamed the company Zynga that July, after his late American bulldog, Zinga, and funded it himself early to keep control, reporting only $693,000 in revenue in 2007 while already profitable. Fred Wilson and Josh Kopelman both declined to fund the seed round despite his track record.¹

What he built

Zynga's model gives games away and monetizes a fraction of players through purchases of virtual goods and advertising. Its first outside round, roughly $5 million, closed in January 2008 with Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, and angels including Hoffman and Peter Thiel; a $29 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins followed that July, bringing former Electronic Arts executive Bing Gordon onto the board. The company launched FarmVille, CityVille, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars among eight hit games that reached over a billion combined users within about four years, most distributed through Facebook. Zynga went public on NASDAQ on December 16, 2011, pricing at $10 per share and raising about $1 billion at an initial valuation near $9 to $10 billion, with Pincus retaining outsized voting control through supervoting shares.³

Pincus stepped down as chief executive on July 1, 2013, replaced by Don Mattrick, and returned to the role in April 2015.³ He held it until March 2016, then remained executive chairman. In January 2022, Take-Two Interactive agreed to acquire Zynga in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $12.7 billion, closing that May among the largest gaming acquisitions on record.²

How he operates

Pincus taught product management at Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than ten years, a course he co-created with professor Amir Goldberg, and has articulated several recurring ideas. He teaches separating a durable human-behavior instinct from the specific product idea built on it, and says "a B+ and a B+ is the enemy of an A."¹ He believes the only consumer metric that matters is retention a year after signup, and that new consumer products must embed inside an existing congregation of users rather than hope for organic discovery.² He has said a founder's primary job is to be right, and describes a "fake CEO" trap in which conference appearances and culture speeches crowd out real product and team work.¹

Where things stand

As of mid-2026, Pincus is executive chairman of Zynga under Take-Two and is building Hivemind, an enterprise artificial-intelligence company he co-founded with Reid Hoffman, focused on human judgment in edge cases and reported to be in use at several enterprises. He published a memoir and playbook, Life at the Speed of Play, on June 23, 2026, with a foreword by Hoffman, and has done an extensive media circuit around it. He is a billionaire, though estimates vary. He believes consumer AI remains hard to invest in for lack of distribution, while enterprise AI and infrastructure are the real opportunity.²

Key facts

• Named Zynga after his late American bulldog, Zinga.
• Founded roughly ten companies, including FreeLoader, Support.com, and Tribe.net, before scaling Zynga.
• Both Fred Wilson and Josh Kopelman declined to fund Zynga's seed round despite Pincus's track record as a repeat founder.
• Took Zynga public in December 2011 at a valuation near $9 to $10 billion, retaining voting control through supervoting shares.
• Zynga's eight hit games reached over a billion combined users within about four years, mostly distributed through Facebook.
• Take-Two Interactive acquired Zynga in a $12.7 billion deal that closed in May 2022, among the largest gaming acquisitions on record.