Social-games maker Zynga goes public Friday, so the spotlight is shining anew on CEO Mark Pincus, the hard-driving serial entrepreneur who’s poised for what looks to be his biggest success yet.
- The recurring theme is Pincus’ toughness. “Fearsome” negotiator, says Google’s Eric Schmidt, according to Bloomberg. Also from Bloomberg: “Mark didn’t get where he is by being a softie,” said Roger Dickey, creator of the popular Zynga game “Mafia Wars” and former employee of the San Francisco startup. Reuters quotes an anonymous fellow soccer player of Pincus’: “Mark’s willingness to be ruthless is necessary. He learned that by getting burned by VCs and investors.” (Pincus reportedly left a company he founded, Support.com, after tension with the board. With Zynga, he has set it up so his shares have 70 times the voting power of shares being offered to the public.)
- Pincus, 45, runs a tight ship. Also in the Bloomberg article, Marc Andreessen said “Zynga is very much in the mold” of “tightly wired business machines” such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. But the metrics-focused company’s culture has led to disgruntled employees, who may soon be ripe for the picking by rival companies. In a blog article dated November 10, 2o11, a Wall Street Journal reported that some Zynga workers were being asked to return pre-IPO shares or risk getting fired. And a New York Times DealBook article by Evelyn Rusli a few weeks ago included a quote from another valley VC, Roger McNamee, who said “Zynga should be an example of entrepreneurship at its best. Instead it’s going to be a Harvard Business School case study on founder overreach — this will be a cautionary tale.”
- Pincus gets social. He founded Tribe.net in 2003, a social network whose technology was eventually bought by Cisco. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg: Pincus “was doing social when Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.” Pincus was an early investor in Facebook. Said the Facebook CEO, also according to Bloomberg: “He had a pretty good intuition early on that this would grow into something.” Facebook games are now Zynga’s main source of revenue. Pincus has also invested in Friendster and Twitter, according to Reuters.
- Pincus himself is quite quotable, and the reminders of his more controversial statements about the way he has conducted business are resurfacing. For example, he admitted to doing “every horrible thing in the book to just get revenue right away,” including getting game players to download malware. (video) Zynga was sued over false-advertising claims and once dubbed ScamVille by TechCrunch — which Details points out named Pincus CEO of the year in 2010. “The same people who called you an idiot will kiss the ring because we have the chance to make history,” Pincus told Details.
COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated July 1, 2011, I reported on Zynga officially filing their S-1 with the SEC for an initial public offering or IPO. Zynga's IPO is now reportedly set for Thursday, December 15, 2011. You can view their S-1 (revised December 2, 2011) filing below:
Zynga Inc is seeking a more modest valuation than Wall Street expected for its initial public offering, hoping to attract investors after a series of Internet stocks fell below their IPO price in recent weeks.
The social games maker, known for Facebook games like "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars," plans to sell 100 million new shares between $8.50 and $10 each, which will raise $925 million based on the midpoint of the range, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
The deal values Zynga at as much as $9.04 billion, about a third less than the $14.05 billion valuation that the company cited in a filing two weeks ago.
Courtesy of an article dated December 13, 2011 appearing in Silicon Valley blog and an article dated December 2, 2011 appearing in Reuters
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