Mark Pincus - Zynga

Zynga

Pincus co-founded his fourth company, Zynga Inc., in July 2007 and currently serves as CEO. The early supporting team included Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale and John Doerr. Zynga develops social games played on various social networks including Facebook, as well as on mobile devices including the Android, iPhone and iPad. Zynga currently boasts over 265 million monthly active users across its network of games, which include CityVille, Empires & Allies, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, FishVille, PetVille and Indiana Jones Adventure World. In addition to making their own games, Zynga has created a network which allows third party developers to become part of the Zynga network. Zynga claims to be the largest social game network on the web.

In a video posted on November 9, 2009, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said, "I did every horrible thing in the book, too, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it,".

In October 2009, Pincus started Zynga.org, which claims to be "committed to transforming the world through virtual social goods". Zynga.org has raised more than $10 million for several international nonprofits by occasionally selling virtual goods for charitable causes. However, the company had been criticized in the past for keeping up to 50% of donations it collected.

On March 11, 2011, Zynga announced that 100% of the proceeds from the purchase of virtual goods from more than seven of its games would go toward Japan's Save the Children Earthquake Emergency Fund.

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