Profile: Mark Pincus, Farmville's head gardener
Profile of the man who created Farmville and Mafia Wars - Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus.
Pincus founded Zynga in 2007, which he named after his late American bulldog. Photo: Bloomberg
7:54PM GMT 14 Feb 2011
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Mark Pincus, the man responsible for putting mafia bosses and Farmville animals on Facebook feeds around the world, was born in Chicago in 1966.
Pincus studied Economics at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, before obtaining an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Between 1993 and 1994, he served as a manager at Tele-Communications, now AT&T, and set-up and sold his first company, Freeloader, an early internet broadcast service for $38m - all before his 30th birthday.
Pincus was also one of the first to dabble in social networks, although his version, Tribe.net, proved to be one of his less successful ventures.
Pincus founded Zynga in 2007, which he named after his late American bulldog.
Zynga develops games that are designed to be played on social networks. It received massive success with its Texas Hold ‘Em game on Facebook in 2007, which was followed by Mafia Wars, then Farmville in June 2009, which within two months became the first game on Facebook to reach 10m daily active users.
The social gaming company, has now been given a staggering $7bn (£4.4bn) to $9bn valuation amid talks with potential investors to raise $250m.
In an interview with the New York Times, Pincus suggested that he prized reliability over star quality.
He said: “I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people who you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than them”
Pincus is married with twin daughters.
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