地球上でいちばん大きな遊び場を作った——Roblox デイビッド・バズーキ

So, first off, super interesting story cuz arguably one could say I started Roblox when I was 2 years old cuz a lot of the … really fascinates me. But, there's an interesting story cuz before Roblox, I had started a company called Knowledge Revolution, physics, enter, you know, educational software, simulator, how to learn physics, very early getting into motion and simulation and all of that. We were in this very unique position with Knowledge Revolution way back in the early days of the Mac in that we had all of these kids instead of using it to do their physics experiments, they were like starting to build stuff. It was 2D at that time. It was just in the pre-internet time and so we could see them all trying to build and share their stuff. And so we'd see the Oh my gosh, there's going to be a whole new market here, immersive, 3D, multiplayer, playing, working, learning, listening to music, all of that stuff. What happened along the way to the founding of Roblox is in that period after Knowledge Revolution, I took a two two-year sabbatical. And in a way, I went a little astray. I started going more law almost more logical. Okay, I want to start a company and I wasn't thinking about just all of the stuff we learned at Knowledge Revolution. So, about a year in, I had a bit of a it's almost like a vision where I was saying, "Well, you can't be logical in this. You have to be intuitive and go back to some of the roots of Knowledge Revolution which was all about fun and about play and about building something very innovative." So, instead of this logical track, me and some several people actually from Knowledge Revolution said we're going to do this very unorthodox thing and build this wacky new product, you know, immersive human co-experience, multiplayer, cloud-based, creator-led, UGC. Very logical, very risky.

Very

No one got it at then. And no one quite thought of it. We had a business plan slide along the way when we finally raised some angel money that's actually very accurate to today. And it was a little bit what's the history of storytelling and communication, you know, that that history of communication was um the mail system, voice, texting, maybe video. But in sci-fi everyone was talking about the holodeck and, you know, that immersive stuff we would see on Star Trek. We actually believed it and that was part of the idea behind starting Roblox. We thought 3D immersive digital stuff would combine communication, being in the same place, with storytelling and the rest of that's kind of how we got our launch. Um and the the other cool thing about the launch is we initially thought it was so fun and cool to work on. Even a four-person lifestyle company at that time was very appealing.

Knowledge Revolution got very far without raising any money.

right.

That's correct.

I think logical goes to what are what's someone trying to optimize for. Literally, at think that time I had been a CEO and so in a way I was optimizing for being another CEO and dropping into CEO-ness when in fact a lot of the magic of Knowledge Revolution had been about inventing new stuff and that was actually for some of the early Knowledge Revolution people and myself, that was actually our superpower. It wasn't like just that being a CEO thing. So I when I came out of Knowledge Revolution, I actually went and looked at a bunch of CEO jobs. That seemed like the logical thing.

That's right. What a mistake, right?

Well, I kind of learned at that time like actually my founder kind of mode from Knowledge Revolution, I couldn't find a position. Obviously, it was a mistake to be looking for that type of thing. That was much more of a founder.

What you're describing is literally like a vision I had one night where like I was on this path and there's like this big barrier there, but this path which was more world builder creators like boom, I got it and that's when Roblox started.

Yeah.

They're both very valuable and so I would say that early CEO lesson was definitely a sign of not following my intuitions. It's like logically be another CEO rather than follow my intuition and build Roblox. I would say combining intuition with tenacity and taking the long view, if those things can coexist, it's super super powerful. And I think along the way with um hope, for example, that metaphor of building a clock, it's funny cuz when we started Roblox, we used to joke we want to start a perpetual motion machine. And what is a perpetual motion machine? It's something that can keep going, get better and better. That's what kind of the the notion of building a cloud 3D UGC system. If we keep building that system, creators are going to make more and more amazing content. We can keep tuning the system and we'll get kind of that perpetual motion machine. And the metaphor of that clock thing is really interesting because if we dive into that, um it's harder to build a clock, but if you ask me the time every day for the next 20 years, it's probably easier to build the clock than to tell you the time every day for the next 20 years. And that was part of the thought behind Roblox.

It's interesting. I I think the lifestyle business could be a metaphor for having no expectation and being so excited about the area we were going into. It was like a validation of our intuition. We're going to go do something enormously both fun and something on our business plan, like it could be really big, but it it was at the time so fun. We I think we're thinking we'd be very satisfied if we could work on this for many years. What happened is it got a life of its own and it it just the responsibility got bigger the second we were live. We could see this thing is going to keep growing.

There was actually an original product that was an incredible failure. So, and the the original product that was the incredible failure was arguably us knowing we intuitively knew what the viral product would be. We we knew the viral product would be online in the cloud, multiplayer digital stuff, physically simulated, access anywhere, um user creation, build cool stuff. We kind of knew that. We wanted to get something out sooner and so what we tried to get out, which luckily was along that trajectory, was something that was more of a single-player puzzle builder type game. We um we thought, "Oh my gosh, if this puzzle game and thing kind of gets viral, that will give us a little bit more runway to build the four Roblox." But as you can imagine, that single-player puzzle type game is not quite as fun as multiplayer immersive 3D with your avatar and going with your friends and doing all of these things. So, sure enough, within like a couple weeks of that, we're just like, "Yeah, we knew it. It's not going viral. Like, what are we going to do?"

Just deep breath. Six more months of engineering. Let's go.

Initially, it was just Erik Cassel and myself. And then John and Matt Duesik were just coming on board. So, that decision happened when it was two of us.

Nope. Just having a good time building this thing.

Yeah.

After selling Knowledge Revolution and taking my two-year sabbatical, I tried that, you know, that CEO thing when I wasn't using my intuition. Then I came back and the revelation was almost so big. Just like, "Oh, I could work on invention, fun, and inventing Roblox. What a luxury. That is such a fun luxury. I could do that for my whole life." And so, I think I think that was more coming off of that other linear track, just being so pleased with it. Obviously, the second we started going, a lot of other instincts kicked in, the responsibility, how big can we make this, that the the second we saw the perpetual motion machine starting to work, that was really interesting.

I was using it, yeah.

Perpetual motion machines in physics are even now, if I go on short-form video platform, every once in a few months, you can see some crazy mechanical gadget that if you look like if you look at it, they'll say, "You know what? The water falls out of here, and that falls out of here, and it's a breakthrough in physics, and the machine will just go forever." And that's what a perpetual motion machine is. They they've been around for hundreds of years. Obviously, it's physically impossible. You know, thermodynamics, more energy in than out, friction, no perpetual motion machine ever works. But it is it is kind of this interesting moniker for the notion, are you building a system that will have a life on its own? Will it grow on its own? I think in the in the context of Roblox, is it something that will organically gather traffic rather than buying traffic? And in that case, the content on Roblox was perpetual. It was made by creators, and the acquisition of users was perpetual in that it was word of mouth.

20 years ago, roughly. So, like early 40s.

I did.

Yeah.

I think I actually knew it in my 20s because I think and I actually think I knew it even very early on, like when I was programming Apple II stuff. For some reason, I intuitively wanted to build world simulations, and you know,

more building them. So, like when I was hacking up Apple II code, I always wanted to build how do we simulate reality type games. And then when we built knowledge revolution, that was arguably a two-dimensional world simulator. I would say video games have historically been more about how they look. I was pulled to not just how they look, but how they function as well and what's like how much fidelity can we get out of it. So I was really interested in that. When we formed knowledge revolution, it was very early in the days of simulating physics on a computer and it was and you know, there were papers in SIGGRAPH at the time, very early, you know, algorithms of how you do collisions and all of that kind of stuff that we had to pull that research out to build that knowledge revolution physics simulator. And I would say I would say that instinct carried into Roblox as well. So I would say um when we um sold knowledge revolution and we started Roblox, I was thinking that immersive 3D physically simulated stuff should have a 20 30 40 50 year trajectory.

Yeah, yeah,

I did.

Yeah.

That's right.

I got I got lucky I fell off that and got back on it.

I think so.

We did.

At that point we had four people. Um Matt and John joined Eric and myself. Sean was a really good game maker. And so then we have we had a little bit of a warm-up phase where John made a couple very famous first Roblox games like classic crossroads and chaos canyon. They were really pretty fun and they tested the system. So we had in-house creation, the three of us are coding. Um, and then we have we had some users starting to play on classic crossroads. How are you getting them? Really interesting. I don't know what entrepreneur I heard this from. They said, "Look, just go buy 50 users a day from Google. Like that's it." And you can buy them for a buck a buck a user. And so we said, "Oh, that's a really good idea. Let's go buy 50 users a day." That was the germination of all of Roblox. If we were able to like reverse engineer the whole social graph tree all the way back to the starting of Roblox, we'd probably see a one-month period, you know, times 50 users times 30 day probably see 1,500 users that were saw some ad online building game come try it out that are the initial social graph of everyone on Roblox. Now in the afternoon, the four of us go online. There's maybe third 20 or 30 people just hanging out in these games and we're kind of watching them. We had been making those games with Roblox Studio which was our creation environment. And we we were in a rush. When can we publish the full closed-loop system? The The closed-loop system is anyone can download Roblox Studio, you can make an experience, you can push it live. There's a a page where you can see all of the experiences you can jump in and start playing that. And that's a, you know, that's a kind of a closed-loop perpetual motion machine. So we're we're just like, "Okay, we got to get the studio thing out. Like, what's going to happen? We don't know. I hope someone likes it. Blah, blah, blah." We got about 1,500 users.

That's right.

They're big.

And it happened very virally. So, there there's a day we were in a little office on Chestnut Street in Menlo Park, the four of us. It's like, "Okay, it's 1:00 in the afternoon. Let's push Roblox Studio live. See what happens." And then, probably around 3:00 or 4:00, we started seeing our "Whoa, someone has published something. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, someone published something that other people are playing. Oh, look at that. Oh my gosh. Now, there's 20 things published. And that has a bunch of people in it. Oh my gosh." And so, we went home that night just going, "Okay, closed loop, viral system. Like, these are users now that have way more word of mouth than anything we're buying. This system is growing on its own."

They made a game. The variety of the games all of a sudden there's a hundred different things. It's not the boring stuff we made uh for the existing users. I'm seeing something new every minute rather than this boring stuff we made 3 weeks ago. So, new content, uh breadth of imagination, creators bringing friends, all of those just viral.

I think it's it's interesting. Um it's a little different. And I I think

I I think there are there's both consumers and creators, but you hit it exactly right. The comparison I would say to YouTube would be a just difference between the phone system and reading a magazine. Like reading a magazine on a cloudy day 50 years ago, you can do by yourself. On the phone system on a cloudy day, you call your friends in the you know, Beaver Cleaver 50s and say, "What's up?" kind of thing. And so I feel the difference is they're both content platforms. The content in a video platform is typically solo.

The content in Roblox is really a a scaffold for communication and being together.

We've actually said um we have slides in our early business plan showing two viral loops rather than one viral loop.

So in YouTube, there's a bit of a content viral loop. The better the content, the more retentive it is, and they you know, they they have very thoughtful ways of everyone finding good content. In Roblox, the viral loop is both the quality of the content as well as the users being with each other. So there's both a content viral loop and a communication connection viral loop.

I would say um it's interesting what's the utility of messaging um even very visual messaging or ephemeral or non-ephemeral messaging versus immersive 3D. And in a way um I don't think we think of it in terms of how much time doing this versus how much time doing this. I think there's a natural evolution of a wide range of types of platforms. You know, we've seen natural evolution of text, natural evolution of photo type messaging, natural evolution of short form video, these categories. I think we actually think less about like we're comparing with the time of this activity. And I think we're typically saying how can we increase the quality of this experience? Like our our niche is immersive 3D co-experience. How can we make it better, better, better? We think it's a naturally emerging niche and I would say we feel the spec of our product has a long way to go. Like Roblox is a very primitive product relative to what will be possible someday.

We have all kinds of organic things popping up. There's arguably of course concerts, music, that's starting to get we're starting to see more and more of that be done organically rather than ourself, you know. So, I think Bruno Mars showed up on one of Jandel's games without us organizing it. I'd say that's a good sign of I actually think Bruno was the peak concurrent of music anywhere on any immersive 3D platform and it was actually within a game. I think we're early signs of shopping, early signs of who knows, you know, someday older people are going to go to church on the platform. Older people are going to work together on the platform. Older people are going to do other things. I think the natural evolution of a communication platform is what are the ways people use a communication platform.

I still don't think I understand the total like depth and breadth of your vision. So, if if I come to you and I don't know anything about Roblox and you're the systems designer and I say, "Okay, explain to me what you have built."

Take as long as you want with this question.

Okay, but explain how you built the world though.

Why did you decide to do that?

go in deeper. I want to go back to the nine companies cuz this is stuff This is what I meant before we started recording. I was like you got all this crazy … in your head that haven't heard in any of the podcasts. You got to find a way to get it out.

Hold on. Back up. Back up. You have a team of engineers working on the Roblox operating system, which is just the operating system on how to run the company, the company building the world.

Okay.

How did you come to the design of the way you have the company operating?

Essentially like you created a series like primitives.

But the way you think about this these nine, you think of them as almost individual companies inside the company? Is that the term you use?

Say more about how this is organized. This is very fascinating.

What do you What are the horizontal things bringing them together?

So, who's in this meeting? It's these nine people, they're reporting directly to you?

Well, no. What's the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch? You got to explain that.

hour?

Uh I just I just recorded with uh Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat. Yeah. And he is he was explaining his design meeting. And he says, I forgot maybe an hour or two hours after we listen to the episode back. But he's like, "We'll go over hundreds of ideas. So, we just go through it really really really rapidly."

How do you keep track of all this?

Okay, can you say more about these nine separate companies? I think you just described two of them.

Does all do all nine of these companies have the single threaded leader?

Do you think that will be the case a year from now?

Okay, so you don't see the need to change that.

All right, so let's go back. This is very fascinating. Essentially, you're you've designed a system

which your company to design another system which is the

platform that you're building.

I still don't understand the jump. So, within like a couple hours of letting people start building their own games. So, now you're turning users back into creators.

But there's no economy there. There's no Robux. What is

And you're not there's no revenue at the company at the time?

Okay, so what is taking back to your decisions? You're seeing this like, oh, we're onto something. This is going to work. What's your next thought?

Yeah, I think you right now you said you last time I saw you have like I don't know 150 million daily active users or something.

Whatever the the last public number was. Out of those 150, how many are building games? 150 million.

Yeah, especially if they can do it in natural language.

And that's going to scale with user growth in a way that the Builders Club would never.

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Very early on. It's got to be 15 years ago.

That's right.

another flywheel where it's like, "Okay, I was making games for fun. I'm a user. You turn me into a creator. That was all fun. Now you're turning me from a creator into an entrepreneur. Therefore, now I have I'm making more money. I can also It has to increase the quality of the games."

of realistic uh photo real yeah because right now the games look shitty

I I'm not obviously insulting you

it crazy how far you've gotten like you hit on something about you know deep in our nature that's the fact that you don't want to do things alone you don't want to shop alone

I just thought something so you the fact you got this far with cuz the the kids just don't care what the game looks like they just want to hang out with other people

but I would if I was in your position I'd feel very confident investing and continuing to reinvest in this platform given how far you got could you imagine how big the platform could be if it's photo realistic

what's the most concurrent users you said that Bruno Mars was the most you ever had on the platform or not?

This is why you keep saying that it's a it's like a little secret that Roblox is an infrastructure company.

Okay. You have not yet figured out how to create the technology to go with to do what we are describing what you want to do, correct? And that's what you're doing every day?

And very hard to compete with.

Mike Michael Dell said the exact same thing on this podcast where you know, I think five years he he stood up and he's like, you know, there's a company that's going to be doing going to compete in every single area we're in. They're going to be doing going to be faster, better than us. They're going to be using better technology. And he goes, and we're going to be that company.

And he believes in like even if you don't have a crisis, you make a crisis.

Very similar to how Dell thinks. I just did this episode on Elon, and he said the same thing. He's like, "Uh even when we're it looks like we're going to win, I always assume that we're losing." He goes, "Keep that mentality."

yeah.

Yes, it is.

That's right.

I think they're still around doing military simulation. I think um the reason it was $500 million, I think that was at the peak of like VC I think it was Masayoshi Son or whatever.

And that's just that's the check you get, yeah. You know, so it's sorry, there's no $100 million, there's $500 million.

Yeah.

I think we've always been very good at product management of the surface and always been very good at doing the right minimum viable, you know, walk almost through the space so that do less um take the long view, know where we're going uh get a lot of stuff on the way. I do think we're pretty good at eliminating distractions so we're we're kind of going down the right path and I think we do that pretty well.

Oh, man. Like there's just um it's it takes a lot of hubris to build platform because I think everyone it's so fun to build content. Like we all want to build games and stuff and big complicated features and a lot of times the features our creators need are boring and purely performance-based and uh we we have a saying in the company like um perf performance is a is a growth feature and you know we put an enormous amount of work on raw performance features, scale features, those kind of things. That takes a lot of hubris. So

We watch um how long it takes on a wide range of devices when someone clicks I want to play that experience to the time till they're interacting and um the the vision would be video we've come to assume on in video um in short form video I can just scroll through like do do do do. We're used to that. Gaming has traditionally never had that. Gaming has traditionally like you download or you do this

you get to have like this background thing. People love I text you or something. Let's go try this. Chunk. Okay, we're in. People actually like that without maybe knowing it. So we we just made the decision we want to get the time to jump into any Roblox game down to zero, basically. And that's very technically complicated, um but we do believe it has long-term growth aspects to us.

That's right.

Yeah, we got viral very quickly and then we started monetizing very quickly.

That's right. And and we did right, we had secondary, we went public, um there's a certain amount of financial prudence where um I I think we didn't spend any money, but we all we always made sure we had enough cash along the way. Um and so, you know, if we if we raised a secondary round, we might put some padding in there, but we actually never dipped below that initial 10 million.

Uh with with some of the VCs we talked to, we definitely in that sense, I think we did a really good job intuitively connecting with go-long VCs. And we really we we got very fortunate whether it was um Altos or Greylock or Index or others that in a way we got uh VCs, I think, who could risk it all, who could um not like, "Oh my gosh, this is one of my first deals. Like what are we going to do?" You know, could really go long with us and I think that was very helpful. So, why was it important? What you were just worried about dilution? Like, what was Are you a control freak?

Yeah, like the the more

No, but you're pretty vertically integrated. You like to control everything. Uh you build your own data centers, your rendering systems, your AI creation tools. Uh you're funded by operating cash flow.

We're talking about work.

Yeah, but the the only way you own your destiny is if you maintain control, right?

What other areas of the business do you like that with?

I think you just like building things.

you go back to your description, like, "I built an operating system. I built the company and then I built the operating system, too."

Yeah, it's interesting cuz we we're going to be building some other interesting things that we just decided on.

Yeah.

There might be like a thought around efficiency, growth, control.

That's That's And And and many components of our stack where we went exactly the opposite way and we said, "We don't need to control that." Like very in the game engine business 15, 20 years ago, like what audio system are you going to use? We'll use FMOD. Everyone use it. We'll plug it in. So, we we don't build everything. Like when we feel we can plug that thing in and use it, we'll go that way.

Let's go back to this idea that I've heard you say a few times and I want to understand more deeply that the the dirty little secret over at Roblox is that we're actually an infrastructure company.

Okay, explain this.

And you started this from the very beginning of the company.

Okay.

Can you describe what you see as the flywheel of the world that you built?

Blake Robbins is a friend of mine. He hangs out on the edge of the internet. He always finds these like weird things for me. And he's the biggest Roblox bull that I've ever come across. This is the way he describes it. I'm curious if you agree with this. More creators brings more games. More games brings more players. More players spend more Robux. More spending attracts more creators.

Yeah, the way he described to me is that Roblox is a compounding machine with network effects and a fully functioning economy.

You mentioned safety a few times. Ho Nam, when we had dinner to prep for this, he said something interesting that you have been essentially the biggest playground in the world, right? One way to think about this. Biggest playground in the world. Obviously, it's the safest playground in the world, but it's also huge, so there's going to be some kind of, you know, issues that that come up. But, he actually was saying like the investments you guys have been making for 7, 8, 10 years around safety and AI way before anybody else was. You're getting so good at it. It's It's actually a moat. Because over time, it's going to get safer and safer.

Okay, but is this something that you've been building and compounding since your co-founder

Like, the first year to in into that.

Explain what like Can you I don't know if you can talk about this publicly, like, what have you built to make it so safe?

Something came to mind when you said, you know, now other companies are looking what we've done in this and like, hey, I want some of that too. Would you ever sell this kind of technology to other companies?

So, the majority of the revenue that Roblox makes now just comes from this platform, this virtual economy, this world that's all correct? But, you have to have a million of these giant model companies coming and wanting to train their data. Cuz you have 4 12 14 billion What's the hours a month?

But how many hours of

So, 13 billion of actual people interacting. Like what does this data set look like?

That's what I was going to ask.

So, let me go back to you guys are buying 50 users a day from Google. Now, if you're building a a game on your platform, you guys actually use real like the the data from actual users on Roblox to test what you're building.

The level of indirection is making amazing NPCs that look and behave and act like humans by training on that data for our users. So, what we'd like to be able is you're building your cool experience, you want 10,000 virtual testers. You want to describe how they act, what they do, and put those into your experience and use that to test overnight.

I feel like I can't predict the stock market.

And and I think though I think ultimately, you know, it's showing I think the future for many companies is like we're in a time right now where raw user growth and engagement growth is mixing with a lot of factors. I think um technical excellence, continued innovation, having people understanding where we're going with this. I mean, there's just going to be more and more of that. So, I'm optimistic.

It's an interesting time, right? Like it's a really interesting time. People are questioning all types of different types of companies. What companies are going to grow twice as fast? What companies are going to this happen? For us, it's so many areas. It's not just making games better and faster. It's increasing quality, time to market of experiences. And I do think ultimately AI will power some of what we've said around our ultimate spec.

I would say we're getting close. And I'd say um right now Roblox Studio is starting to embed a pile of AI-capable type functionality. The beauty though that we have all of our Roblox Cloud open to MCP server and all of that stuff. We're now we're just seeing devs like push at this with AI coding tools and creator tools and like start to create that flywheel.

Absolutely correct. Absolutely.

I mean DevEx is well over a billion bucks a year. You know, that's the

the amount of raw money flowing to creators on the platform. Um it's it's really been I'd say it's a really interesting time because in the midst of AI throughout the game industry as a whole, there's been a lot of you know, maybe logic legitimate concern about a lot of creative people of having AI displace what they do. The thing we've said is we believe that money flowing to creators is going to increase, not decrease. And so that's pretty good news. If that money flowing to the Roblox creative community is increasing, we should see even more opportunity for creators. Um we've also seen something really interesting. You know, top creators on Roblox are making tens and twenties and fifties of millions of dollars. Like these are pretty serious

Uh I don't I can't say that, but I would say they're

confirm or deny, but I would say like one thing when you hear that as a measure of platform health is if we look at the year-on-year growth rate of creator 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, creator 1,000 year-on-year is consistently growing faster than creator number one.

The curve is even flattening more. Um the growth rate in bookings per year for creator number 1,000, um ranked by how much they're making, they're growing faster than creator number one.

Curve is flattening, wider um use around the world, more opportunity for vertical content, um more opportunity for some content for older people, so that is a a flattening of the curve, which bodes well for creator 1,000.

Yeah, I think the top 1,000 I think the top 1,000 is on average making a million bucks.

Uh okay. And then I think as we go beyond though, that curve goes way out to creator 10,000 on that part of the curve.

Who knows? I do

It's funny cuz I get these I get these short-form videos in various platforms of really cool Roblox creators living in like this giant studio, driving these cool cars, doing short-form video about how cool it is to be a Roblox creator. Think what they're saying is if you do this, there is a potential to make a great business.

That's pretty viral. People know. I think what we're trying to do is create the tech literally, like you said, the technical infrastructure so more and more of them can bring their ideas to reality. Like we've said publicly, we want to get to 10% of global gaming on the platform. I think that means you know, taking that black and white film projector and turning it into a 4K projector in the in the gaming world. So, you know, we think a lot about the responsibility of building the platform for them.

I think um in many dimensions, concurrency, um performance, cost, photorealism, ease of creation, AI acceleration and creation, all of those things help bring ideas to reality.

I'd say it's load balanced, actually. So, I think one of the good things we've done is we If I looked at that mix and I looked at where our engineers are working, it's not like everyone is working on that one thing. We've got a balance of those things that are pushing forward.

There is a market out there. I think if anything, we're trying to get the message out to our creators. Like our DevRel team can help you assess what your game might actually be worth cuz a lot of them are worth a lot of money.

We never have. I think what we want though is some transparency in the market. So, you know, early creators can actually know what kind of a gem they're sitting on.

Not really. I've seen like amazing actually profit sharing, revenue sharing, like things that have really worked out for buyer and whatever. But I do think over time we want there to be a lot of kind of transparency in that.

In a sense, it's an entrepreneur game.

You could literally um teach them how to use AI coding tools, come up with a crazy idea, get it live um on Roblox. Now they could buy traffic. They could spend $50. Um same thing, buy users on Roblox, that whole cycle.

I think so.

It would be fun to imagine an entrepreneurship class that kind of connected all the dots. I build this, do this, can see this happening. That could be super educational. What's your biggest threat to that would inhibit you from building what you want to build? Like what you're describing is actually

How often does this imaginary company come up inside of the discussions you're having in your real company? The pacing at which you move? So the way I would think about what you've been telling me is you have this excessively long view. Fact that 20 almost 25 years ago you're like Okay, well so 25 years ago or 20 years ago you're like this is going to be the last company that I'm going to work on. Uh so therefore you even said I think earlier in the conversation 30, 40, 50 year kind of view. So an excessively long longest view in the room basically. So you think about this with infinite number of daily iterations towards what you're trying to build. A combination of those two? So something we haven't talked about but I think I heard you speak uh I think you you said this in your Stanford talk which I thought was interesting that there was multiple like near death experiences or almost death experiences of Roblox. We haven't talked about that at all. Looking back now, I mean you were obsessed with science fiction. There were all these other like virtual economies, right? At the time. There.com. There.com and Second Life, they really were early and in parallel to us. In a way, they were so early and so parallel, they made these very big visionary things. You know, Second Life's architecture was contiguous Earth kind of thing, which had some issues around scaling because in a contiguous Earth type situation, which is just the way the real world makes, there's only one copy of that roller coaster. And when 30 people want to go on that roller coaster, no more can go. So, we I think we were a lot more practical around scale. Whereas, like, no, man, if there's if there's 100,000 copies of that roller coaster, we're going to figure out how to route people to that so we can have 10 million people riding the roller coaster. But, there were a lot of early early visions out there, I would say, at the same time, for sure. We had a lot of fun going on the platform. Like, we're just like, "Whoa, whoa, everyone's having fun building, you know, this viral stuff. Would we distort it if people could make money?" And but the idea the idea that look, in the traditional game market, you have studios with hundreds of people, like we could probably get better quality if we nudged in that direction. Other than your death or rough things is our economy got hacked once. So, we had to like shut down the whole economy for 2 days, literally. That was somewhat scary. And the reason is we'd just been so early, moving so fast, that our the way our economy was working right now wasn't like double-entry bookkeeping and journaling and all of that. And we had no flow control anywhere in the economy. So, this is a famous economy hack very early in the days of Roblox, where the second the economy was hacked, money could bounce from place to place very quickly. We caught it pretty quickly and we just said shut everything down. We had to shut Roblox down for a while, then bring it back up without the economy on. Luckily, we caught it pretty quickly and only, you know, a small portion of the money had moved around. But, we had to run for several days with no economic activity. Were you already a public company when this happened? No, no, no. I got the SEC the SEC does some really good stuff and I would say some of the good stuff, if we go through a lot of the controls in the SEC, those were things we did 15 years ago in as far as this economy and backups and all of that. We I would say all four of us founders were very into high integrity systems. Um, like what's the amount of float in the economy, how much currency we have, do you trade it and not trade it? We saw that very early on in our economy, we had something really interesting in the early days of video games, people would have multiple currencies and we had something that in retrospect, the Roblox community really loves but isn't really a good idea, I don't think and that is a a participation-based currency called tickets as well as a money-backed currency called Robux. We the the thing that comes out is when you have a participation-based currency, you get one ticket for every day you log in. That's really not a very good way to have people log into your system. You know, it's much better they just love chatting with their friends or playing games. The other thing is any currency that um a user can get from work or log in will immediately be botted now. And so, we just we could see people trying to bot that currency all day long, and we had to ultimately get rid of it. Um So, we had some good learnings with that. But ultimately, our current economy it has a you know, as I've said, is kind of scaled better than linear with user engagement. That's right. It's just started pretty recent, but if you go on to the Roblox homepage, you can see some of the experiences say sponsored right now. We have a long-term vision of what percent that is, but it's actually really helpful because um most of our discovery primarily organic. We've been very transparent with discovery. Um and so, one of the things that Roblox creators like is we share all of the signals of what's boosting something. It's almost as if we were YouTube or TikTok or Reels saying, "Here's all the factors you know, bring you up here." But for some creators who want to do that entrepreneurial experience, buy 50 users um very early, their game isn't viral yet. They can use that sponsored thing just like when we bought traffic from Google. We're almost out of town. Are you jumping up? You want to leave already? Why do things like this? Why are you doing podcasts? Okay. I'm glad you use the word depth cuz what I want to do is for the time now, I want to run this back like as much as you want me to be every 6 months or something like that. Because I do these selfishly. Like I'm obsessed with making podcasts, but like I'm obsessed with entrepreneurs and I want to know like uh something Toby Lutke had said to me that I thought was fascinating. She's like, "There's not like one right way to do something in a company. There's probably a hundred right ways." And you have to figure out like what makes sense for the context you're in and then who you are as the founder and like what you're trying to accomplish. And I have a better understanding of you. Way better understanding than when we started the conversation even though I've listened to every single interview you've done. Your company is very misunderstood and there's not a lot about you as a person. And yet I find these people that I respect their opinion very much and I'm like, "This guy is special and the way he's building his company is interesting." And I'm still I feel like I just like scratched take it as a compliment. You built something amazing. Um so, thank you very much for the time. I hope you uh accept the invite the future invitation. And every time we have this conversation is I peel more and more layer of the onion of like what you're building and why you're doing it. I think it'd be very fascinating. All right, perfect. Thanks, man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast Founders. For almost a decade, I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.