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Hollywood couldn't write a better backstory for a Web 2.0 entrepreneur than the bio of Mark Pincus, founder of the Zynga Game Network, an online game startup that takes the concept of a Facebook application to a whole new level and that has gained hundreds of thousands of players for its version of the popular poker game, Texas Hold 'Em. Zynga recently won a $10 million Series A round, led by Union Square Ventures and including Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and angels Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn,  and Clarium Capital managing partner Peter Thiel.

Pincus has several Internet startups to his name. In 1996 he sold early Web-based "push" service FreeLoader Inc. to Individual Inc. for $38 million; led an initial public offering for Support.com, now called SupportSoft Inc. [SPRT], in 2000; and sold the core assets of social networking pioneer Tribe Networks Inc. to Cisco Systems Inc. last year for an undisclosed sum. He's also had his flops. Pincus co-founded an incubator called Tank Hill in 2000 that, you guessed it, tanked. He and co-founder Martin Roscheisen did the right thing and returned the majority of the funds to their investors.

"Pretty sure we were the only incubator to ever give the money back," Pincus says in his bio. "Did any VCs?"

Rounding out his hand, Pincus has also worked as a VC and an investment banker, and was an early investor in Facebook Inc.

Zynga's games, which include BlackJack, Battleship and other social games, run on Facebook, Bebo, Friendster and meebo.

Zynga "has shown us a model for a sustainable business operating Web apps on top of other's platforms," says Union Square's Fred Wilson in a post today. "Zynga has built the largest social game network in the short period of six months. And they've moved beyond Facebook to include the entire social Web as their ultimate platform." - Mary Kathleen Flynn

See Jan. 15 post from Fred Wilson's blog
See Jan. 15 story from The New York Times
See Nov. 2003, story from TheDeal.com
See April, 2007 story from TheDeal.com

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