Mark Pincus

Mark Jonathan Pincus (born February 13, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company.

Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com.

Pincus attended Francis W. Parker School from kindergarten through 12th grade and graduated in 1984.

He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania earned in 1988 and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he founded the Communications Club with Sherry Coutu.

Before he became an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital and financial services for six years.

After graduating from Wharton, Pincus spent two years working as an analyst in the New Media Group at Lazard Freres & Co.

After that time, he moved to Hong Kong, where he served as a Vice President for Asian Capital Partners for two years.

He returned to the United States in order to attend Harvard Business School (HBS) where he was a contemporary of Chris Hohn, Guy Spier and Chris Shumway.

He graduated in 1993 and also spent a summer as an associate for Bain & Co. in 1992.

After Pincus graduated from Harvard Business School, he took a job as a manager of corporate development at Tele-Communications, Inc., which is now AT&T Cable.

A year later, he joined Columbia Capital as vice president, where he led investments in new media and software startups in Washington, D.C. for a year.

In 1995, Pincus founded his first startup, Freeloader, Inc. Freeloader was backed by Fred Wilson and Softbank.

The company was acquired seven months after its launch by Individual, Inc., for $38 million.

Sean Parker worked as a summer intern at Freeloader when he was 14 years old.

He later went on to co-found Napster, and Pincus became Napster's first investor with an investment of $100,000.

He then started his second company, Support.com, in August 1997.

As Chairman and CEO, Pincus built the company into a leading provider of help desk automation software.

The company went public in July 2000 at a $1.5 billion valuation.

In 2002, the company changed its name from Support.com to SupportSoft, Inc.

In 2003, at age 37, Pincus founded his third startup, Tribe.net, an early social network.

Tribe.net partnered with major local newspapers and was backed by The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital, and Mayfield Fund and Guy Spier,.

In 2003, Pincus and Reid Hoffman purchased the Six Degrees patent, a broad, sweeping patent that describes a social network service that is the heart of social networks from the extinct Sixdegrees.com company for $700,000.

Pincus and Hoffman stated at the time that their objective in buying the patent was to protect innovation in social networking and to prevent large companies from interfering with this.

Pincus and Hoffman have never enforced the patent.

Pincus was a founding investor in Napster, Facebook, Friendster, Snapchat, Xiaomi and Twitter.

He was also an early investor in JD.com, Brightmail (later acquired by Symantec for $400m), and Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce for $800m).

In 2007, Cisco Systems acquired the core technology of Tribe.net to develop a social networking platform for its digital media services group.

In July 2007 Pincus founded his fourth company, Zynga Inc.

Zynga developed games on top of social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, and Bebo.

Pincus was named 2009 "CEO of the Year" at The Crunchies technology awards and a year later was named Founder of the Year at the 2010 ceremony.

Zynga is considered to be the pioneer of the social gaming industry.

In 2011, Zynga went public with a $1 billion IPO.

Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.

In 2015, Pincus invested in the nootropics company HVMN (formerly Nootrobox), man-made diamond company Diamond Foundry, and in 2014 automated investment service firm Wealthfront.

Pincus co-founded Reinvent Capital in 2018, an investment firm, with Reid Hoffman and hedge fund manager Michael Thompson.

He co-created the Stanford Graduate School of Business course on Product Management with Professor Amir Goldberg.

Pincus is Jewish.

His family lives in Chicago in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.

He is the son of Donna (née Forman) and Theodore Pincus.

His father was a business columnist and public relations adviser to CEOs and politicians and his mother was an artist and architect.