It was a failure, but I remember having dinner with Mark around that time and it made him more and more motivated to have a win.
He took the fire from that failure and the knowledge of social networks and went all in on social games.
i was actually with him the night he was thinking of hooking up with the poker guys and i was like "who is going to play poker for fake chips... that's so dumb!"
... on top of that I didn't invest in Zynga and he invested in Mahalo! :-)
"In 1995, Pincus launched his first startup, Freeloader, Inc., a web-based push technology service that was acquired seven months later by Individual, Inc. for $38 million" - Wikipedia.
