I randomly heard that Zao was giving a talk at the UCLA life sciences area about gamification, and I was able to watch it remotely and take some notes. The talk was part of UCLA's "Managing Invention" series, and it was titled, "Hooked on Gaming: Applications for Education, Scientific Knowledge and Marketing."

I met Zao at BetterWorks, and he's one of the smartest guys I know -- quick, action-oriented, and no-BS. He's the founder of MyMiniLife which became FarmVille and the engine behind most of Zynga's social games after it acquired his company.

Notes on the talk are below.

FarmVille story

• Was working on MyMiniLife on side while doing CS grad degree at UCLA
  
• Goal was virtual self-expression through online artwork + interactions w/ others
  
• Was turned down by 8 angels
  
• Dropped out of grad school
  
• Wasn't getting traction for a while
  
• Got 2 part-time jobs in Bay Area to bootstrap company
  
• Finally got some distribution and traction
  
• Raised first round
  
• Scaled 1st product to 4M registered users
  
• They were the cust serv dept
  
• Realized ppl thought of this as a game, wanted simulation + game mechanics
  
• Took 5 weeks to re-skin it (FarmVille was just first re-skin); basically pivoting
  
• Grew 20-30% per week after
  
• Had a bidding war between multiple companies, 4 acquisition + 1 investment offers

Consumer internet trends

• Consumer internet so fast that core competency is UX, product design, tech execution, not IP protection
• Consumer internet going more towards bite-sized consumption
  
• WWW first started as publishing medium
  
• Became bite-sized publishing w/ social feedback
• Second era from social communities

Virality

• figured out how to do bite-sized gaming
  
• Most play FarmVille at work
  
• Virality
  
• Broadcast (1 to 1), multicast (1 to many), unicast (one to all)
  
• Built in gifting
  
• Used newsfeed
  
• "Lonely cow" published and others click to help you
  
• Different incentives for ppl to interact
  
• Virtual goods not gotten unless through others
  

Psychological tricks

• appointment gaming
  
• psychological bias towards commitment
  
• "get in the door" in sales
  
• giving you a bunch of virtual currency in the game and telling you to plant seeds and wait
  
• you invest it in something and then get reward
  
• mechanics map directly to brain reward mechanisms
  
• humans have tendency to complete task
  
• progression/progress bar
  
• hidden/next levels
• concept of gifting/reciprocity
• guilt tripping
• reward mechanisms in brain light up on tweets 
  

Execution

• at the time there were lots of farm games
  
• just about execution
  
• how cute the character, how big the eyes, camera angle, perspective, onboarding user experience
  
• hipstamatic had all instagram features but was too complicated and mimicked old features of filter cameras
  
• game mechanics
  
• social mechanics
  
• art style
  
• user experience
  
• farmville was not the first social app
  
• they launched in 2009
  
• FB platform launched in 2007
  
• a lot centered around experimentation
  
• lots of product pivoting in consumer startups
  
• certain element of taste and judgment
  
• he plays around w/ a lot of apps to understand new/returning user experiences
  
• in early days it's extremely manual
• nuances are lightweight, 1-click feedback mechamism for publishers
  

Female appeal

• most social media consumers are women
  
• nurturing crops, animals appeal to women
  
• males want to challenge and kill each other, competitive
  
• females equally competitive in diff. way
  
• nice shoes and handbag are decorating yourself by comparing against other females by posing
  

Gaming

• gaming companies: playfish, outfit7, zynga, pocketgems, machinezone
  
• 4 aspects of gamification: (not just about adding points and leaderboards and badges)
  
• 1. figure out what aspirational item of community is
  
• in social community, there's always aspirational item
  
• youtube: fame
  
• facebook: popularity
  
• quora: respect
  
• 2. seed it with the right community
  
• don't get viral off the bat
  
• when yelp started, there were 4-5 major competitors, better funded; others did national campaign
  
• yelp was UGC site, just wanting SF restaurants to start
  
• cultivate community, throw parties and events, reward members
  
• do it geography by geography
  
• 3. design ego statistics around it
  
• for some, badges and points
  
• want stats to fit community
  
• want 2-3 stats that are the aspirational items for top guys
  
• from 100 ppl, 80 will be lurkers, 19 will comment, 1 will post
  
• must design around that 1% that posts
  
• to create a lot of social feedback, reputational items, lightweight mechanics to provide it to them
  
• 4. figure out social feedback loops
  
• little feedback mechanisms to publishers: likes, upvote, downvote, comments, endorsing, tagging
  
• in social communities, incentive is not economic
  
• mostly amateur pro's who want to share expertise
  
• incentive cannot be economics
  
• encourage and design around intrinsic motivation
  

Pinterest

• pinterest pivoted like 6 times because he knows # of investors that said no
  
• pinterest was flat for a long time because none of their friends wanted to use it
  
• ben silverman went to design conference, a bunch of designers really loved it
  
• loved aesthetics and UI
  
• from core community then ballooned
  

BetterWorks

• reward and recognition software
  
• perks
  
• in retrospect didn't understand B2B software
  
• underestimated sales & marketing side of it, headed by paige craig
  
• realized it couldn't scale in early May and laid off half the company in early May
  
• # of lessons from it
  
• was able to raise money effectively
  
• money caused a lack of discipline
  
• ironic part of it
  
• in 1st company, raised a total of $380K, not a lot when paying salaries
  
• were able to raise $2.5M in 1 week and $8M in another week
  
• didn't prove out the model before they scaled
  
• should've proven out the model earlier
  
• should've figured out sales side before scaled
  
• MyMiniLife wasn't easy either
  
• learned different lessons, brought closer to earth
  

2 types of pivots

• soft pivot from hearing customer feedback about which area to go into
  
• hard pivot which is completely new idea
• exploring both options

What he looks for in investments

• #1 thing that dictates success is "running back" analogy: very persistent and can pivot and roll w/ punches
  
• correlates w/ success
  
• no one knows the actual stories of the startups
  
• very deep domain expertise
  
• ability to recruit people
  
• steve jobs' reality distortion field: allows you to attract ppl to the cause
  
• problem w/ that is you have 2 types who can do it: delusional and actual operators
  
• most w/in their domain can execute
  
• problem w/ startup is it's emotionally challenging; your social circles won't accept it
  
• family was calling him weekly to change; embarrassment of failure; most underestimate pressure from these
  
• higher order bit is if want to do startup or not, not whether have great idea
  
• all the companies pivoted a lot
  
• Sony started as rice cooker co
  
• Toyota wasn't car company
  

Voice recognition

• valley of disappointment w/ voice recognition techniques
  
• certain verticals and communities will take to it but most not
  
• still early stages of voice
  
• key to voice is the HCI part, not the actual POS recognition
  
• Dragon and Nuance have done well there
  
• dialog manager
  
• how you interact w/ device in smooth manner
  
• can you make a game out of voice? not quite there
  
• MMO/RPGs
  
• probably not for mobile devices
  

Education applications

• should be possible but execution hard
  
• can produce games teaching math concepts, but less scalable
  
• needs to be different format
  
• not sure how
• social community around ppl curating edu content; put reputation points and authority and aspirational levels w/in diff areas (math, etc.)

importance of curation

• research on experts showed 10K hours/5 years, etc. but this research is old
• life cycle from academic research, to being well known, to magazine publication, to Malcolm Gladwell book is long time
  
• Dumbing down content, thinking of it in diff. way
• Create a community modeling and speeding this process up

Gathering market data using gamification

• Carnegie Mellon prof/grad student story: machine vision, image recognition were too hard for machines to process and needed correction from humans
  
• Approach was creating a game around posting an image and allowing ppl to recognize objects and interact
  
• facilitated image classification and recognition
  
• Google acquired the tech
  
• Can incentivize social community
  
• really depends on the nuances, what community, how seeded