I spoke with Pincus years ago when he was struggling as the hard-driving, metrics-obsessed culture he’d built was spiraling amid rapid growth, a volatile IPO, and poor management decisions. He was, by his own admission, a bad boss who had to learn leadership lessons on the job. But he’s also a successful serial entrepreneur who has built popular products and empowered others to do the same.

I spoke to him recently about his advice for creating and popularizing products in an AI era. Some observations:

Science before art: “There is an art and a science to product making. The best leaders really have mastered the science, and then they do the art. Picasso spent the first part of his career tracing … until me and our teams have mastered what’s proven, we haven’t earned the right to do something new. When great companies launch their products, they’re collecting winnings, they’re not making bets.”

The impact of AI: “What we find quickly is that AI gets us to a B‑plus in seconds. Not only does it never get us to an A, it distracts us.  You don’t know what an A looks like if you’ve never really owned it. You have to learn how to do it first to know what A looks like … but I’m an extreme AI optimist; we haven’t gotten to the new economies that are going to be created by AI.”

Grow your talent: “At Zynga, I found that we had to grow our own product makers. People we hired from outside were smart, but they’d been taught things in a way that were not useful. They weren’t fast enough, or it wasn’t the right kind of speed. Our whole ethos was test more ideas in a week than the industry tests in a year. I picked this one room and called it my teaching hospital. We were trying, ideating, inventing in the space of a game.

Demand ‘bold beats’: “It’s something we made up to convince our teams to innovate and try to grow futures. We said, every quarter you have to do a bold beat, which is a positive disruption in the consumer experience that, if it’s successful, lights up Twitter or the blogosphere or TikTok—and moves some real metrics by 10% or more. Whether you’re running American Express or a startup, you’re trying to figure out: how do we launch really bold ideas this week? Not three years from now.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top leadership news

Corporate AI plans face an accountability gap

A Pearl Meyer survey found that only 34% of C-suite executives say it is consistently clear who owns AI decision-making, even as companies pour money into adoption. The report warns that AI ambitions are running ahead of companies' ability to manage them, amid the growing threat of employee burnout and unclear outcomes. “Ambition for AI outcomes is currently outpacing the leadership structure needed to deliver on them,” the Pearl Meyer study states. 

Amazon plans major drone-delivery expansion

Amazon plans to expand drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by year-end, reaching tens of millions of customers. The move would represent a sixfold increase in its drone network footprint, and gives new momentum to Amazon's air delivery plans after over a decade of setbacks. Amazon says it's already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, though that's still a small fraction of the roughly 20 million packages it delivers every day.

Who's getting tariff refunds?

Amazon, Target, Nike, Ford, and FedEx are among the companies benefiting from U.S. tariff refunds, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump did not have the authority to impose many of his import taxes. Some firms, such as FedEx and UPS, are passing along the refunds to their customers; others, like Walmart, say they will instead use the refunds to lower prices.

The markets

S&P 500 futures are down 0.1% this morning. The last session closed 1.2% higher. South Korea’s KOSPI is up 5.9%, Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.4%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index rose 0.8%. India’s NIFTY 50 is currently up 0.6%, while the STOXX Europe 600 is down 0.1% in early trading. Bitcoin surges to $71,600.

Around the watercooler

Bitcoin posts surprise rally as currency nears $70,000 for the first time since June by Camila Grigera Naón

Geopolitical risk needs to move away from the ‘after-dinner speaker’: Eurasia Group and Rio Tinto’s Dominic Barton by Nicholas Gordon

National debt crosses $40 trillion and think tank warns: ‘The level of fiscal mismanagement is tragic by Eleanor Pringle

The AI boom made San Francisco so crowded even ‘tech bros’ making six figures are left scrounging for homes and apartments by Joshua Hong

Moderna’s and Merck’s personalized mRNA vaccine shows real promise against deadly skin cancer melanoma in late stage trial and sends stocks soaring by Catherina Gioino

Today's edition of CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Nicholas Gordon, and Lee Clifford.