The Secret to Building a Social Gaming Empire: Justin Waldron

Secret Stash

At age 19, Justin Waldron built an app that would go on to have the biggest IPO since Google. That company was Zynga, and it completely changed the way the world played games.

Listen now for behind-the-scenes stories that shaped an era of social gaming, as well as Justin Waldron’s own secret for scaling up Zynga and setting it apart from the competition.

In this episode of Secret Stash, co-hosts Archie Stonehill and Justin Kan sit down with Justin Waldron to talk through:

👉 origins of Zynga and the edge they found in the market

👉 the innovative business model that helped Zynga win

👉 the company’s love/hate relationship with Facebook

👉 rise and fall of social gaming (and who’s to blame for the fall)

Read the highlights here: https://dev.stash.gg/blog/secret-stash-ep-4-matt-ball

0:00 - Intro

1:21 - Justin’s first Facebook app

3:45 - Building Zynga Poker

6:10 - Facebook’s missing puzzle piece

9:00 - Browser power

11:46 - The winning freemium model

20:35 - Scaling horizontally

28:33 - A culture of experimentation

33:57 - Love/hate with Facebook

36:57 - The rise of mobile

38:49 - Apple as a gatekeeper

42:17 - Amazing corp dev

43:47 - Scaling organically

48:09 - The fall of social gaming

59:36 - Telegram’s killing it

1:0922 - Crypto

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