Mark Pincus Allegedly Steals From Tribe.net to Fund Zynga

Ai,yai, yai! @Chai_Guy recently tweeted an article in Gawker that doesn't paint a pretty picture of Mark Pincus, Founder of Tribe.net and CEO of Zynga.

Sad to say, but the article makes Pincus come out looking like a douche.

Here's a quote:

Tribe.net, which fizzled, Pincus told Details, because there was "nothing to do" there once had brought "all these people together... it's like a [bad] cocktail party." But Darren McKeeman, whom Pincus described as his "great" sysadmin, has alleged (here, here and in an email to us) that Pincus misappropriated $30,000 in donation and subscription revenue from Tribe.net users, intended to keep the site running, to start Zynga. Pincus took out a temporary restraining order on McKeeman.

Be that as it may, below is an interview BURNcast did back in 2007 in which we talked to Pincus about Tribe.net. At the time, Tribe was the de facto social network for burners world-wide.

Posted to BURNcast on 15 May 2007

BURNcast #041 - Donut Freakout! It's Mark Pincus from Tribe!

In today’s episode we meet up with Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of the social networking website Tribe.net. Here, Pincus discusses the growth and development of Tribe, goes off about his favorite topic “Community vs. the Corporation”, and gives insight on how burners and artists can create a sustainable livelihood based on doing work that they love.

UPDATE: 30 April 2010 @ 15:45

I just found this old correspondence from Mark in which I asked him for a refund of my Premium Services payment:

From Mark Pincus to burncast, darren, A.T.
show details 10/09/2008

DaBomb, I'm sorry you had this experience. Darren will make sure you got the t shirt and no ads but tribe cannot make refunds.

Tribe is *not* a business. It is definitely not a profitable entity.

Best,

Mark

----- Original Message -----
From: burncast@gmail.com
To: feedback@tribe.net ; jeanie@tribe.net ; mark@tribe.net
Sent: Wed Sep 10 06:32:19 2008
Subject: Refund Please

Dear Tribe,

I'd want my money back for my premium membership that I purchased in December of last year.  Attached is my receipt.

Except for one fugly new profile theme, the ability to block advertising was the only feature that was delivered as promised. I never got the t-shirt. The rest of your promises never came through. That to me feels like Internet fraud. To make it worse, now after your recent outage, I am now seeing ads again and my year's premium membership is not even over.

It's really sad to experience the decline of what was once a vibrant social network. It's also frustrating to see Mark Pincus develop apps and games like Poker and Attack, a Risk clone, for Facebook and other social networks but fails to put any more money or effort into Tribe.

I'm out of patience.  When Tribe announced premium memberships, its users flocked to rescue the social network that had already been suffering from issues and that was last year!  Following the premium memberships, nothing changed. Tribe is not a charity. It is a business, a business that clearly doesn't care enough about its customers or the communities it fosters. It's disappointing and it sucks.

Love & Rockets,
DaBomb
http://burncast.tv

zynga, farmville, mafia wars, marc pincus, facebook