Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. Photo: Ariel Zamblelich/Wired
The home screen on Mark Pincus’s smartphone is pretty empty. Not because there aren’t a ton of interesting apps out there. It’s just that there aren’t that many he can’t live without.
That why the Zynga founder is launching a startup incubator called Superlabs, hoping to unearth some of those can’t-live-without-it ideas.
Pincus, who stepped down as CEO of Zynga in 2013, announced the new project on stage at Web Summit in Dublin on Thursday. In a video streamed across the web, he explained that despite the frenzy of activity in tech today—which some might call a bubble—there are still only a handful of truly transformative apps. Pincus held up his empty home screen as proof of that. “It means it’s a great time for all of us to be entrepreneur-ing and trying to invent some of those new services to fill up that home screen,” he said.
With Superlabs, Pincus joins a growing cohort of entrepreneurs who have moved on from the companies that made them famous only to launch their own startup factories. Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, for instance, recently launched Expa, a so-called “startup studio,” which has attracted high profile investors like Richard Branson and Meg Whitman. PayPal founder Max Levchin’s HVF incubator has spun off projects like the financial services startup Affirm and the fertility app Glow. Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg, has done it twice, first with Milk and most recently, with a new initiative called North Technologies.
And yet, so far, none of these incubators have turned out any runaway successes. Pincus is hoping for a different result. That said, on stage, he admitted that at Superlabs, he’ll probably strike out a lot before finding one homerun. In fact, he said, the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make is getting overly attached to a single idea. “I think you’ve got to give yourself a lot of space and permission to fail, so I’m going to launch products, experiment, try stuff, and be ready to look stupid. It’s ok,” he said. “My hope is I can get to a single product that really matters to people and resonates and that’s a big hope.”
As for what types of products they may be, Pincus was light on details. But if his goal is to create something lasting, something people truly can’t live without, it seems unlikely that more mobile games are in the cards. If there’s anyone who knows just how fleeting the lifespan of even the hottest games are, it would be him.
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