Secret Stash
Secret Stash
Justin Kan and Archie Stonehill
The Secret to Building a Social Gaming Empire: Justin Waldron
1 hour 17 minutes Posted Aug 15, 2024 at 11:13 am.
Intro
Justin’s first Facebook app
Building Zynga Poker
Facebook’s missing puzzle piece
Browser power
The winning freemium model
Scaling horizontally
A culture of experimentation
Love/hate with Facebook
The rise of mobile
Apple as a gatekeeper
Amazing corp dev
Scaling organically
The fall of social gaming
Telegram’s killing it
Crypto
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Show notes
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
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