Mark Pincus, founder of @Zynga, on "proven, better, new," the product framework that was Zynga's religion: 1. Proven: start with what 10/10 existing users of a category already love, and don't change it. "You do not have the right to change proven. You have not taken enough time to change proven. It is an art that we do not completely understand." 2. Better: only add what 10/10 users agree is better. "For Zynga Poker, better was no download. That was it. Turns out you lose half your users every time you click download." 3. New: treat anything you think is better as new, and assume it fails. "Assume all new fails. Write that on the wall... If all new worked, we'd be using new s**t all the time. But how often do you change what's on the front of your iPhone?" "Users don't care how innovative it is. All they care about is does it feel better, and they can't even tell you why." @markpinc w/ @JoshLu

Travis Kalanick on the founder's paradox: the better you get, the harder it is to stay fired up. "The young entrepreneurs that are coming up right now don't totally get it." "When you get into your 3rd and 4th company, I don't know, this may be even my 5th at this point, you get fricking really good at doing stuff." "Things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like, 'How am I gonna do this?' take me like 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing." "I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur, so I gotta make sure I'm still fired up." "You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem." Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=r8qKNFeB… @travisk

Airbnb's Brian Chesky on the classic management philosophy, and why he rejects it: "Go through the list of great CEOs, almost none of them that I'm aware of do recurring one-on-ones... Jensen Huang does not do recurring one-on-ones, famously." "I do think a CEO should meet one-on-one with your people. I don't think it should be recurring... If you wanna get time with me, get a meeting with me. If you wanna call me, call me. Bump into me, talk to me. But most of my recurring meetings are group meetings." "If there's lots of one-way kinda sensitive topics, there's probably something wrong in the company... If we're having all these sensitive conversations, well, why are they so sensitive? Why can't other people hear about them?" "If I have a one-on-one with you and you tell me there's a problem and we debate it and we say, 'Here's the solution,' we haven't consulted anyone else. So now we just made a decision and no one else helped, consulted, or knew how we made that decision." "'Hire great people, trust them, let them do their job, stay out of the details, do recurring one-on-ones.' I don't believe any of that, and I wanna acknowledge that many great leaders do." @bchesky w/ @sampjacobs