Biography | Matthew Bromberg — The Eighth and Townsend Block Where He Took the Zynga COO Chair

On 8 August 2016 Matthew Bromberg walked into Zynga as chief operating officer.

The company's San Francisco headquarters then occupied the paired buildings at 650 Townsend Street and 699 Eighth Street, a 670,000-square-foot block in SoMa that still carried the white bulldog on the facade.

Zynga had paid $228 million for that campus in 2012.

By the winter before he arrived, Mark Pincus was already exploring a sale-and-leaseback of the same buildings.

Bromberg was the fourth person to hold the COO title in four years.

He came from Electronic Arts, where he had been senior vice president of strategy and operations for the mobile division and, before that, group general manager of the BioWare studios.

He reported to Frank Gibeau, himself a recent arrival from EA.

The public brief was operations: studios, product, technology, data, and the Bangalore studio, on a company trying to finish the shift from Facebook desktop games to mobile.

Words With Friends and FarmVille were the names everyone already knew.

The job was to make the next ones land on phones.

He stayed until November 2021.

Unity's later 8-K treats those five years as the operating chapter that qualified him to run a public game-tools company.

The pin is the SoMa block, not a private house and not a current workplace.

The buildings have changed tenants since Take-Two bought Zynga in 2022.

What a visitor finds at Eighth and Townsend is a piece of mid-2010s San Francisco office stock, not a preserved studio floor.

The date on the memory is the Monday his appointment took effect.

GamesIndustry.biz, PocketGamer, and GamesBeat all printed the same start date that week.

Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons