Zynga CEO interviewed by Zynga Investor at Techcrunch Disrupt (but still interesting tidbits pop up)

Techcrunch Disrupt opened today with roundtable discussion with Mark Pincus (CEO, Zynga) and Bing Gordon (Advisor and Investor, Zynga) being interviewed by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, who is… an investor in Zynga.

As you can imagine, this was about the most non hard-hitting panel of all time. Nonetheless, anytime you get these three gentlemen on a panel together, some new data is bound to come out:

• According to Mark Pincus of Zynga, Zynga has 215 million monthy active users and 33 million daily active users, including through Facebook. How many are from Facebook? Perhaps if the moderator was not the lead investor in Zynga, he would have asked. Alas, we don’t know.
• Zynga has 1200 employees which means in terms of employee count, its actually almost as big as Facebook (which has 1800 employees).
• Bing Gordon, the industry heavyweight who founded Electronic Arts and initially invested in Zynga, says that Zynga is successful because it hits four disruptive trends: social, analytics, APIable Internet (app economy) and new payment methods. This is very insightful for business geeks like myself.
• John Doerr, the very famous and successful VC invested in a later round for Zynga, had his daughter sit in his first meeting with Pincus. When he asked his daughter what she thought, she told him that “Mark Pincus is cool” and so then, John Doerr invested. This is quite uninsightful for business geeks like myself.
• Zynga is an unbelievably data-driven company. The company’s “data junkies” measure every single click across millions of experiences daily and let empowers its employees to make changes based on such data every day. Back to insights.

For more information and video on the Zynga panel over at Techcrunch Disrupt today, check these articles out:

• Bing Gordon: Zynga is Four Disruptions in One (Techcrunch)
• Zynga’s Data Junkies aim to improve game design (Venture Beat)
• Techcrunch Disrupt coverage (Inside Social Games)

Joel Brodie