One great thing about the top b-schools is that you get industry leaders coming to the school to speak, all the time. Almost every weekend some school club or another has a conference and invites top speakers from the field to the school. Last week was the Entrepreneurship Conference at HBS, with keynotes from Nathan Blecharczyk, AirBnB co-founder, Alfred Lin, previous Chairman and COO of Zappos, and Ali Pincus, OneKingsLane co-founder. By leveraging Ali, the organizers were able to to drag husband (and HBS alum) Mark Pincus along to give a lunchtime speech to the attendees. In case any of you have been living under a rock, Pincus is a serial entrepreneur who founded social gaming juggernaut Zynga in 2007, a company now worth about $10 billion, and is apparently a "fearsome" negotiator according to Eric Schmidt.
He spoke a bit about making non-traditional career choices as an HBS student and alum, and took the opportunity to portray himself as a bit of an outcast from the traditional HBS consultant and financier circles (easy now that he's made more money than all of them). As he describes it, he was one of two people in Bain's history NOT to receive a full-time offer after spending a summer interning for them. Then, he had no job lined up for most of the time at HBS, and people felt sorry for him. However, he found a job he enjoyed after graduation at a telecom firm. More recently, at 41, he decided to start Zynga, seemingly very risky at the time given how little money companies were making on Facebook, and says again his peers felt a bit sorry for him. He said it's a bit like a 41-year-old trying out to be pitcher for a baseball team, when all his peers were owners and managers of ball clubs already. However, he saw a big opportunity and was passionate about going after it. In fact, he spent several years trying to acquire CNET in order to leverage its assets to launch a gaming platform before giving up and deciding to do it organically by creating Zynga.
He later also talked about his policy of making every employee CEO of something. While he's talked about this in the past, it's a great management tactic worth reiterating. At one of his previous companies, one day he put everyone's name on sticky notes on a wall and told them to write down by the end of the week what they were CEO of. Not only did it help keep people accountable, but the employees liked it. Every employee should not only be responsible for some area, whether large or small, but should know what they're responsible for. Otherwise, as he points out, too many people end up going to work all day and not knowing what their job is or what they're responsible for.
