Making the workplace a fun place
Game creator Zynga’s new headquarters is intended to spark creativity with a capital C,
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Pincus is convinced his employees will create better games if they’re having fun.
The CEO of Zynga, maker of such popular online diversions as Words With Friends and Farmville, recently moved his staff to a garish, loud and eye-popping new headquarters here.
Since making the move, Zynga went public and raised more than $1 billion, and Pincus has been on an acquisition spree. In the past weeks, he bought the game company OMGPOP for $180 million and shelled out $228 million for the new headquarters.
He recently carved out some time to show off his new workplace playgrounds. His hopes were to have Zynga’s new home — known as The Dog House — be like a videogame version of Willy Wonka’s factory in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“When my niece and nephew came to (the old) Zynga and saw people sitting around, working on computers, that was a letdown,” he says. “We’re trying to help our players socialize and have community, so it never sat well with me that you’re sitting in a quiet cubicle designing a party.”
Instead, he wanted a “playful gaming environment” that conjures up a “fantasy land.”
That begins when entering the building from a tiny lobby. That sends you walking through a multi-colored “Light Tunnel,” with blinking Las Vegas casino-styled lights, to make you feel as if you’ve gone through a transformation when you walk in.
From there, it’s into the main lobby, a cavernous space that’s mostly taken up with a big cafeteria and a Blue Bottle Coffee bar, offering free food, drinks and tables for Zynga employees to socialize, one of many free refreshment operations in the building. There are also several bars and an old-fashioned “Sweet Shop.”
There have been wild company digs before, especially for those in the Internet business.
Google’s “Googleplex,” in Mountain View, Calif., is colorful and includes lots of free perks for employees such as unlimited food, a gym, volleyball court, pool, ping-pong tables and more.
Facebook encourages visitors to doodle on the wall in a campus-like setting with graffiti art and employees bunched together in an atmosphere that resembles a library.
Pincus goes a few steps further by encouraging his employees to do what’s necessary to their surroundings. “I’d like to see you spray paint the walls in here,” he tells a team of workers in the rather staid and traditional cubicle set of the marketing department.
To engineers working on the FarmVille game, he wants them as well to take his ball and run with it. “If you’re working on Farmville, you should feel like you’re on a farm,” he says. “We have pictures of farms on the wall, but I wish there was hay on the floor and live goats walking around.”
Ultimately, there would be dirt in the middle of the studio to till and to research different crops. “The more the virtual feels real, the more fun and entertaining it is for our players,” he says.
On the tour, nothing was off limits — except for Pincus’ office. It’s a wasted space that he says he never, ever uses.
“This is just as much my desk as anywhere else,” he said while seated in a yellow booth in one of the upstairs Zynga cafes. “I spend my days in meetings with teams. As CEO, there’s not a lot of useful time for me to sit by myself at a desk. It’s more management by walking around.”
He has a computer but doesn’t use it. Instead, he walks around with two phones, a Blackberry for e-mail and an iphone for Web browsing, apps and game playing.
“It’s all about making all of this cool and great, rather than my one room,” he says.
But after all this effort to turn Zynga into the coolest place to work in a very competitive environment, will it work?
Charlene Li, founder of researcher the Altimeter Group, says it appeals to a certain type of person.
“If one of the key things you want to do is to create highly engaging social experiences, then fostering this kind of environment is not only appropriate, but probably also an advantage,” she says. “And if you need to concentrate, there are always noise-canceling headphones.”