Mark Pincus

“Zynga made social gaming and play a worldwide phenomenon, and we remain the industry leader.”

“As an entrepreneur, you can have an instinct, and your instinct is right, but your idea you're substantiating that into is wrong, and the world is not ready for it.”

“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.”

“I'm fearful the Democratic Party is already moving too far to the left. I want to push the Democratic Party to be more in touch with mainstream America, and on some issues, that's more left, and on some issues it might be more right.”

“I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.”

“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.”

“There's a lot of opportunity for game developers to show value to people, things they want to spend money on. I think offers are just another kind of ads.”

“In my early career, there were more negative lessons than positive ones. But I don't think I was looking for the positives enough.”

“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?'”

“It takes sometimes years in the market to get the tuning to the right place where your game is as compelling at level 100 as it was at level 10.”

“It's okay to be misunderstood - as long as you're not misunderstood by your consumers.”

“I need to aspire to be a great CEO and not just a great product engineer.”

“I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front... and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.”

“Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.”

“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 like to bet on people, especially those who have taken risks and failed in some way, because they have more real-world experience. And they're humble.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The more you can be self-aware and honest about yourself, the more you can cultivate that in other people.”