Mark Pincus on Embracing Process

Mark Pincus gave a presentation on lessons learned from start-up to sale this past week. He emphasized to a largely start-up entrepreneur audience at VatorSplash in San Francisco, how important it was, at least in his case, to embrace process as you grow. "I used to hate process, but now I love it," he says. "We're scaling and it's working, because we embrace metrics and process."

He also told attendees to "keep your eye on the prize," and added with humor, "I didn't want a fur coat moment too early on." (this was when he was around 26 and am pretty sure Mark and I are about the same age now, but there's no need to broadcast that number :-).

Questions to ask as you grow, "What's the end point? How do you stay at scale? Is it a trend, or is it a movement?" How do I feed this consumer behavior and create a thing that people will always do? How do I deliver on a promise?" (in their case, the promise of social gaming.)

As for his style of working, he doesn't use a PCs or wikis. "If it's not on a wall or stickies or a blackberry, I don't see it," he says.

And on lessons learned at Zynga. "If the metrics didn't work, we'd kill it. You'd have to kill your 'young' and move on."

A very amusing slide on food brought a smile to the foodies in the room. Forget the pizza he said, "feed your team." I was personally thrilled to see the honoring and cherishing of good food as part of the corporate growth process warrant its own slide.

Vator TV's summary of his presentation here: Ten Chapters to Build a Company (lessons learned).