In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning its upcoming IPO, Zynga is expected to unveil two key management and board changes at the online gaming phenom:

Chief Business Officer Owen Van Natta — who came to the San Francisco-based start-up several years ago to help CEO Mark Pincus grow it and develop it — will step down from his job and become a strategic adviser focusing on major partnerships. He’ll still remain board member at Zynga, but will give up millions of pre-IPO shares by moving out of his operational role.

And director and venture investor Brad Feld will leave the the board, which VCs sometime do as companies move to a public offering and add members with more specific business experience.

In his place, longtime entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who founded a company called FreeLoader with Pincus many moons ago, will join the board.

Zynga confirmed the changes to me in a statement by Pincus:

“Owen is a valuable business partner. He’s made great contributions to Zynga and continues to be an important part of our team.”

Sources said the changes related to Van Natta around are not part of a recent controversy around a Wall Street Journal story about clawing back of some share options grants of early Zynga employees who had become less involved in the company. While the company cannot actually take back already vested shares owned by those staffers, the article has put a lot of scrutiny on Zynga and raised questions about how to cope with the kind of hyper-growth some Internet firms experience.

That’s certainly been the kind of rocket ride Zynga has been on, as it has grown from a small social gaming company on Facebook to a high-profile public company.

Zynga is in the final stages of its IPO process, answering questions from the SEC that are typical. If all goes well, Zynga execs are expected to go on a road show after the Thanksgiving and go public by the end of the year at a market valuation of close to $20 billion.

That was different from when Van Natta officially got to Zynga in the spring of last year — after a rocky experience running the doomed Myspace. At the time, he told me at the time that planned to be focused on scaling the business and did not consider himself a long-term operating executive.

Since then, he has helped Pincus hire a series of experienced gaming execs, including a chief operating officer, a chief marketing officer and others.

Zynga was Van Natta’s third high-profile Web company in recent years. He was a top early exec for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook until early 2008, and in 2009 he took over News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, a job that lasted less than a year.

Early in his career, Van Natta was also was a top strategy, marketing and deal exec for Amazon, which bought an early social networking start-up called PlanetAll that he worked at.

It will now be interesting to see what Van Natta does next, but it is unlikely he will take a permanent position. He is a longtime angel investor in Silicon Valley, including in hot start-ups such as Asana and still holds a significant stake in Facebook.

But, in moving out of his job at Zynga, he will be giving up many millions of shares of a rich trove he was given when he arrived at the company. That said, Van Natta already owns millions of accelerated vested shares and will get another large grant as a board member.

Translation: Don’t cry for Mr. Van Natta, Silicon Valley — he made $42 million last year from Zynga shares alone.

Just days after selling $180 million in private stock to a group of investors, including Facebook funder Digital Sky Technologies of Russia, Zynga’s Mark Pincus came to visit the BoomTown Worldwide HQ for a video interview.

The San Franisco-based Zynga creates and distributes online games, including Mafia Wars and FarmVille, which are played on social networking sites like Facebook. It claims 60 million active daily users.

While playing, users can also buy virtual goods with real dollars.

Zynga took the pile of money, Pincus explained to me, so it would not have to do what everyone thought it was set to do soon: Go public.

But with 700 employees and a reported annual revenue “run rate” of $300 million, the fast-growing start-up needed more options, he added.

Thus, rather than selling out or going public, Pincus went for megafunding, a path similar to the one Facebook took.

Along with DST, which accounted for the majority of the funding, investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and Institutional Ventures Partners.

Previous investors in Zynga are Union Square Ventures, Clarium Capital, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Kleiner Perkins, along with personal investments from Silicon Valley players such as Reid Hoffman.

Pincus will need all that cash given that the arena is heating up and consolidating fast.

Playfish, a competitor, was recently snapped up by Electronic Arts (ERTS) for $275 million in cash and $125 million more in stock and earn-outs, for example.

This is not a fate Pincus says he wants for Zynga, instead insisting he would rather create a powerful and innovative standalone gaming company of the future.

Obviously, Zynga is the big shot at that prize for the longtime entrepreneur, whom I met way back when I was a reporter in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s, when Pincus co-founded another start-up, called Freeloader.

In our interview, Pincus talks about the new infusion of cash, controversies around questionable “offer” advertisements that appeared on Zynga’s site and more.

Here’s the longish video:

And here is a video interview I did with Pincus, back in May of last year:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091218/zyngas-mark-pincus-talks-about-big-funding-offer-ad-controversies-and-more/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20080513/games-people-play-zyngas-mark-pincus-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20080513/games-people-play-zyngas-mark-pincus-speaks/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 19:15:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080513/games-people-play-zyngas-mark-pincus-speaks/

Since I posted an interview with Social Gaming Network’s Shervin Pishevar today on the announcement of his $15 million funding, it seems only sporting to post this lively video interview I also did with his main competitor, Mark Pincus of Zynga, recently too.

Zynga, named after Pincus’s dog, is one of the two main social-gaming networks that are competing for audience by offering highly interactive games of all kinds. Its aim is to be more engaging and create a series of addictive games that users will return to again and again.

Pincus, who also founded the Tribe social-networking site, is a longtime entrepreneur. I met him way back when as a reporter at the Washington Post when he and Sunil Paul launched one of the few start-ups–Freeloader–in the D.C. area.

And I can report that Pincus is as jumpy and energetic today as he was 15 years ago.

He has certainly been busy lining up a spate of fancy investors, garnering $10 million in funding in January, including from: Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, along with personal investments from Silicon Valley players Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.

Zynga, which is larger than rival SGN, claims 2.3 million total daily active users across Facebook, with its Texas Hold’em game being the largest it offers. Other games include Sea Wars, Blackjack, Attack! and Scramble.

As I said in my SGN post, while BoomTown often makes fun of viral apps, most of which are faddish and juvenile, the better-made gaming apps actually are likely to be a real business over time, as long they remain engaging and fun to play as the classic real-life games are.

Zynga plans on making money through ads, including creating its own ad network for other gamers, as well as via the sale of virtual goods and premium offerings.

Here’s a chat with Pincus at Zynga’s offices (Pincus owns the building, by the way, which also houses a bunch of other Web 2.0 start-ups) in San Francisco:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080513/games-people-play-zyngas-mark-pincus-speaks/feed/ 1