“And in our game, Words with Friends, you know, it was Scrabble”
Words With Friends
By Newtoy / Zynga
1 recommend/use · 2 sourced episodes
Every sourced reference
Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.
“where he grew the game Words With Friends to over 14 million daily active users”
Related frameworks
Assemble Spikes, Not Well-Rounded People
Hire sharp, complementary spikes instead of developing everyone into generalists
Build for Day 365 Retention
The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals
Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right
Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months
Find the Cocktail Party
To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive
Impact Above All Else: The Two-Question Priority Loop
Two daily questions, driver-mapping, and back-of-envelope math before any project earns your time
Inquiry Over Advocacy
Dial up questions, dial down your case — then check if you still disagree
Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You
Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets
Let Fires Burn (with Three Never-Burn Exceptions)
Agree which problems you let burn this week — and the three that never can
Make Everyone a CEO
Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room
Manufactured Chaos: The Artificial Time Constraint
When things feel too calm, inject an absurd deadline to force intuition and creative leaps
Poke the Bear
Never self-censor — but poke only after the homework, and only with data
Proven Better New
Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins
Start Embarrassingly Small
The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000
Stay Close to the Metal
The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product
Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant
Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you
The Anti-Sell: Hiring by Describing the Worst Day
Tell candidates the worst day at your company in full detail — then ask if they still want to join
The Serenity Prayer and the Discard Bucket
Two rituals for perfectionists: the Serenity Prayer, and a bucket you cannot un-bin
People in these episodes
Related resources
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- BeReal
- Claude
- Craigslist
- Discord
- Eppo
- Faire
- FarmVille
- Foundation
- Gobblet Gobblers
- GPT
- Index Ventures
- Instant Book
- Internet Explorer
- iPhone
- iPod
- Lenny's Podcast
- Life at the Speed of Play
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Midjourney
- Napster
- Netscape Navigator
- OpenAI
- Pendo
- Proven Better New
- Red Rising
- Rise of Nations
- Serenity Prayer
- Silo
- Silo series
- Slack
- Smithsonian Institution
- Snapchat
- Survivor
- TBH
- TED Conference
- Threads
- TikTok
- Vanta
- WorkOS
- Zynga
Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.