Roblox CEO David Baszucki knows what your kids are doing.
48:08 Share

It's a question everyone has asked at some point in their lives. Now what? And on The Prop G Show, we're finally going to try to answer it. We're running a special series right now where I'll answer listener-submitted questions about the best way to further their careers and how to position themselves for success as they consider the next step in their professional journey. It's time to look to the future and stop worrying about the past. So tune in Wednesdays to The Prop G Pod for these special Q&A episodes sponsored by Canva. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

♪♪♪

from the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Channels. I'm Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today I'm talking with David Buzuki. He is the CEO of Roblox. That is the hugely popular gaming platform that lots of you have heard about and probably very few of you use. That's because the overwhelming majority of Roblox users are kids, some of them pretty young. And that poses a bunch of issues for Roblox, and we discuss some of them in this conversation.

On the other hand, think of how many media and tech companies are desperately trying to figure out how to reach and engage with the next generation of internet users. David Buzuki has that problem solved. I've wanted to talk to Buzuki for a long time, especially for the few years one of my kids was deeply into Roblox. I spent a lot of time cursing Buzuki for making such addictive and annoying games.

So we've got a lot to talk about here. We've discussed the company's struggles to police its own platform, how it's trying to combat the negative perception lots of parents have about the company. And we talk about Roblox's giant ambitions, which inevitably require it to reach older players, which is definitely not given. Also discussed here, why a company that's worth $40 billion doesn't turn a paper profit, why Roblox is okay with Apple and Google taking a big chunk of its revenue,

And what happens when the startup you thought was going to be a lifestyle company becomes a giant behemoth? So it's a full agenda. Let's get to it. Here's me and David Bazooka.

I'm here with David Bazzucchi. He is the CEO of Roblox. Welcome, David. Hey, it's great to be on the program. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. I'm sorry this is not a video podcast. You shaved, you look really sharp. People are just going to have to imagine what an attractive man you are. You're looking good too, by the way. This is the best kind of podcast, the best way to start a podcast. A lot of people who listen to this podcast will know what Roblox is, but some of them probably haven't played it. Maybe they don't have kids who play it.

How do you describe it to a normal person? Not an investor pitch, not an elevator pitch. If someone doesn't know what Roblox is, how do you describe it? I describe it as every day over 90 million people come to Roblox to play, to learn in an incredibly wide variety of games and experiences.

All of the games and experiences, hundreds, thousands are created by the user community. It's a user generated content platform. Some of the creators are small single proprietors over time.

a big economy has evolved on Roblox and we've turned into a public company generating over 4 billion in bookings. And now some of these creators are running companies with more than 100 people as studios making tens of millions of dollars.

And because it's all user-created, the variety of experiences on the platform is incredibly diverse. We have everything from hide-and-go-seek to battle royale-type first-person shooters to sports experiences. And our thesis is that this type of cloud platform that runs on all devices is amazing.

Really the future of how games will be delivered over time. It's a user-generated gaming platform. Did I boil it down? Beautiful. Exactly right. I remember hearing about you like back in 2007, 2008. And someone was an early investor of yours, Chris Freilich. And he was trying to explain what it was. Oh, hi, Chris.

And he was trying to, I think he was comparing it to Minecraft a little bit or Lego. And I couldn't really get my head around it. And flash forward, I don't know, 2015 or so where my kids were using it a lot. And all of a sudden I got it immediately. But I think it's a little difficult for someone to get abstractly. As you said, you've got 80 plus million. You said 90 million people playing daily? North of 90 million. And I feel back when in those days, a lot of the earlier games were,

were more primitive looking, had a blocky style. Over time, fidelity's gone up, quality's gone up. We have experiences like NFL Universe sponsored by the NFL. We have experiences that older people are playing like Dressed to Impress so that we continue to see that growth. So David, you said it's this big platform. I was just rattling off numbers, $3.6 billion in revenue, $40 billion plus in market cap.

Who is Roblox aimed at? Who are the users today? It has a reputation as a platform for kids. And it's something you are dealing with. And that's something I think you want to expand. But what is it? What is the user base today?

We've shared a goal of getting 10% of the global gaming market running on Roblox. Right now, it's about 2.4%. That global gaming market covers younger and older people all around the world and a wide variety of games on a wide variety of platforms. And the global gaming market right now is about $187 billion.

So there's a lot of room for us to grow within that. Right. So that's where you want to go. So where are you today? Right now, we are more daily active users over 13 than under. We are 17 through 24 year olds growing very rapidly north of 25 percent year on year.

countries around the world, either really big gaming countries like Japan, growing north of 50% year on year, countries with over a billion people like India, growing over 50% a year,

And so we want to be a platform supporting all ages all around the world. And we're seeing great growth into those older international users. I'm going to come back to how you grow around the world and how you add older users. But focusing right now, you said the majority of your users are over 13, but it's still primarily kids and teenagers using the platform.

correct? If we looked at how many are under 18, we would say the majority are still under 18. We think of that as a good thing because the gaming market has so much opportunity over 18 as well. And we have seen hits start to more and more break out in that 18 through 25-year-old segment. Once again, I mentioned Dressed to Impress as an example that we could dive into.

I want to come back to the older cohorts later, but sticking with kids for now, because this is a primary issue for you guys. You get a lot of criticism about it. There are regulators concerned about it. Short sellers have brought it up. This idea that...

that Roblox is unsafe for young players. Sometimes the concerns are about grooming on the platform, getting kids to move off the platform, do something else. Some parents just think the games are uncouth or I just don't like the idea of my kids talking to other kids sort of in an unregulated way, regardless of whether it's a safety concern. I just don't like it. This has been an ongoing issue for you guys. You get bigger and bigger. I'm wondering, as you're thinking about

the issue of kids on your platform changed or has it been consistent since you started it? I think in retrospect, when we think about starting the company for all ages 18 years ago,

In retrospect, we're very glad we did that. It was a really hard thing to do. It's much easier to build a gaming platform that's 13 and up, which is where many social media apps are today. And when something's built for 13 and up, it can create a situation where you don't go straight after the real big challenges. For us, when we got started 18 years ago,

Literally in the first few months of being live, we started building our first safety systems and made it a top priority. So there were a time when the four of us who were the Roblox founders were in the room moderating. Each one of us took a day to

That has evolved over the last 16 to 18 years to development over 200 AI systems, automatic filtering of all text on the platform, automatic filtering with human supplement of all image on the platform. And I would say over time, we have gotten better, better, better, better, better.

Not to say that any single issue for us is one too many. And we do treat any issue as one too many, but we're very optimistic that we're going very much in the right direction and that the value of embracing this

prevents maybe the common end around of what happens when eight, nine, and 10-year-olds are on a 13 and up platform that doesn't have these same ways of maintaining safety and civility. So it's a hard challenge. We've embraced it.

Any one issue is one too many, and we constantly are improving on this. Do you feel like the perception of the brand has changed over time? What I was just talking about, I could talk to my coworkers who've got young kids, and say, oh, I don't want my kid to get on there. I want them to stay on Minecraft. I'm worried about Roblox. And they might not even be able to articulate what their concern is, but they've just heard it's bad.

or they're worried about it. Does that filter back to you? I'm assuming you guys are sampling that all the time. That does sample back to us, and we take that very, very seriously. What we have seen over the last four to five years, both through COVID-19

So many parents recognize the benefits and differences between a 3D connection platform versus maybe a social media platform where you're watching videos or you're sharing pictures of yourself. And during COVID,

Many, many, many parents around the world said, oh my gosh, this is a way for my kids to stay in touch with their friends in a way parallel to maybe when I was younger on a rainy day, I used the telephone and I'd call my friend up and we'd hang out on the friend for half an hour. People are doing that on Roblox right now.

I feel there's a general recognition in society that connection is a positive. We see it all the time on Roblox. And I do think parents are getting more savvy about that type of connection versus short form video by yourself or getting catfished by sharing your picture online.

on a social media platform. So we, you know, based on our usage numbers, once again, we take everything very seriously. But the vast majority of parents we run into are very supportive of our platform. You

talked to the BBC recently and you had a line that stuck out, which was, if you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox. And on the one hand, that totally makes sense to me. I'm a parent. I totally get the logic of it. And on the other hand, I could imagine parents saying, wait, wait, wait, you're putting all the responsibility on me and you've built this platform. Isn't it your responsibility to control this thing? I would put a bracket around that single statement. And that bracket was a

dialogue we were having around just so much we do because we know not all parents are able to get on the platform with their kids and set parental controls or there are many parents who are so busy in their life they

they hand their youngster an iPad and say, go play Roblox. Or they literally have no idea what's going on. That's right. So we have to be ready for the parent who isn't able to be involved. And we have to be, I would say, even from a company values and moral responsibility driving the vision on that to be a great place for civility and optimism. In the middle of all of that, we do.

I would say definitely to parents, we're doing a lot. Like we're going to focus on it, whether you're an involved parent or not. If you're uncomfortable with your 12 year old in any situation, whether it's Roblox, whether it's the community pool, whether it's the playground, whether it's anything like we stand behind you. Different platform debate. It's really between Apple and Meta is about who should be responsible for determining how old a user is.

Apple says meta and developers. This should be... Can you hear? You're programming. Oh, yeah. No, I'm giving you a symbol that I like where you're going. Okay, good, good, good. I was concerned we were having a breakdown. So I was going to ask you, you like where I'm going. Where do you come down on this? Should this be managed on the device level? Should this be the application's responsibility? We would love it if every device in the world said the user of this is exactly...

11.2 years old and it's been validated. The reality is we can't wait for that. And the reality is

We're not sure if and when we will have that. What we've taken the notion is we will get better, better, better irrespective of that. And if we get a signal like that, we will welcome it. But we are leaning into our own age estimation. We are leaning into, I think, a really interesting area, which is not just 12 and under age.

but the 13 through 17 area. And the 13 through 17 area is independent of age estimation, very sensitive because that's a very sensitive part of the life of young people. And in most platforms right now, they can chat unfiltered with whoever they want. And

a lot of things happen in that area. So I think we're moving to a point where for older people who we know who they are, you can imagine you and I are going to play poker and we're going to talk about whatever we want and we're going to not be filtered, possibly not be recorded, like let's embrace free speech and the laws of the physical world. But for 13 through 17 year old, we're going to be very thoughtful about

who they chat with and if and when they get to know who that person is in the real world. We'll be right back with David Pazuki, but first a word from a sponsor.

Support comes from ServiceNow. We're for people doing the fulfilling work they actually want to do. That's why this ad was written and read by a real person, and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring, busy work. Now with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, IT, HR, and more, so your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people.

It's your turn. Visit servicenow.com.

Support for the show comes from CyberArk.

Did you know that 93% of organizations have suffered an identity-related breach in just the last year? As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, every single identity within your organization, whether human or machine, becomes a potential entry point for attackers. That includes IT teams, workforce users, developers, and even automated machine identities.

And securing each one with the appropriate level of privilege is no longer just a best practice, it's a necessity. A single compromised identity can lead to severe consequences, from data theft and financial loss to severe reputational damage. That's where CyberArk comes in. CyberArk's Intelligent Privilege Controls provide a cutting-edge approach to identity security.

Empowering organizations to strengthen workforce security. It ensures users have the right level of access, modernizing IT security, reducing vulnerabilities that attackers love to exploit, and protecting your developers. You can secure credentials and secrets across the entire DevOps pipeline. You can even scale and automate machine identity security, preventing automated processes from becoming hidden weak points.

Take control of your identity security. Secure every identity with intelligence privilege controls only from CyberArk. Learn more at cyberark.com slash box.

And we're back. Let's talk about laws. I think in the early days of the Internet, there was this World Wide Web, right? This idea that this was sort of this would be go the Internet would go beyond borders, sort of be free of borders, that everyone would get to interact with each other in cyberspace. It looks like we're moving towards a much more balkanized world where each territory has its own rules of the road. Some places I can't even play Roblox right now.

Turkey banned you last year, right? How are you adapting to that world? And it also looks like that world is changing even as we speak, right? The EU has been doing a lot of regulation. The Trump administration says the EU should be backing off regulation of US tech companies. That seems like it's going to be part of the tariff debate. Before we get to specifics, I'm just wondering, how are you adapting to what seems to be changing rules of the road?

Very dynamic environment. And on top of that, we see states in the United States starting to do their own laws independent of a national one. So it creates a hyper granular playing field, not just by country, but by state. I would say first and foremost, independent of laws, given how we run our company, our values and what we know about young people,

We're going to drive good decision making, not waiting for law, but what we think is this vision, safe and civil for under 12, for 13 through 17, very thoughtful about this phase of who you meet, who you can meet in real world.

And then for 18 and up, in certain cases, a lot of freedom and essentially following the freedom of the physical world. So that's how you'd like it to be, right? But I assume different states and different countries say, no, no, no, actually, it's very different. We want you to do the following for 12-year-olds. And in that case, what is interesting is in many of these cases, the laws have legislated things we're already doing. So, for example, the California Age Appropriate Design Code says

We were already doing it. We endorsed it. We just came out and endorsed COPPA 2.0. We've been supporters of COPPA, the original COPPA. Because we are primarily not an advertising platform, we can very comfortably say we're not going to target under 18 and we don't need to sell information for advertising. We came out of the Take It Down Act from Senators Klobuchar and Cruz saying,

because Roblox isn't an image sharing platform. And so people don't have that. But where we're going with it is full adherence to the laws of country and state and doing that in a dynamic way where users and creators ultimately will know where they're operating, what the laws of their country or state are, how that might be affecting what they can play on Roblox,

and creating a very automatic dynamic environment so that if you or I are a game creator and you make an experience and you're 13 years old and you push it all around the world on every platform and

describe your experience, what types of things are in there, will automatically figure out for you where it can be played and by who. How do you think things are going to change under the Trump administration, either domestically or in terms of regulation from around the world? It's hard to know. What I can sense globally around the world is there's a tension between laws that

that are trying to protect people. And there's also a tension where more and more I see countries that are viewing 3D interaction on gaming as something that's starting to go side by side, the phone system and the text system and the video system, and something that's supporting a lot of STEM learning

and is actually beneficial to the country. Oh, I thought you were going to say it's a threat because that's communication and social networking, and it's the equivalent of those. I actually think countries like...

I was just in Emirates at the World Government Summit in Dubai, and I think there's a lot of thought around wanting to stay connected to a world gaming grid, both for STEM learning and more be responsible about it. Work with platforms online.

on childhood safety, on filtering, on what are the experience guidelines of that country. So I'm optimistic, really, about that. Are you guys seeking an audience? Have you spoken with Donald Trump since he was elected? Have you said, I'd like your help with regulation? Well, first off, if it was in private, I wouldn't share it. I would say I was just in D.C. last week speaking with a lot of people around D.C.

The notion that we've seen, we have a lot of expertise around how young people behave on these platforms, including under 12.

And we have a lot of experience around how we're going to approach 13 through 17. So we've thrown out the notion we would like to be a resource to craft really great legislation. One of your competitors, Epic Games, which owns Fortnite, got into a fight with Apple during the pandemic over app store fees. And the net result is Epic is now essentially banned from iPhones and just great effect on Android phones as well.

It's cut off a big part of their audience. They say it's a sort of moral, ethical stance. They basically don't want to give Apple 30% of each transaction and or want to be able to run their app stores. You have a very similar business. You have not gone that route in a fight with the platforms. What explains the difference in your approach? I'm optimistic about a couple things. One is I'm optimistic over time that

We can build an amazing business, you know, irrespective of where Apple's fees are. I would note that if any of these vendors move their fees from 30 to 15 percent,

a lot of that money would flow right back to the creators that are building stuff on our platform. And it's worth noting generally when people look at our financial statements and all of that, those fees which show up as cogs in our bookings and revenue are...

You know, in the zip code of the amount of money flowing to our developers. So one could say-

Yeah, and we'll get to that because we generate amazing amounts of cash, but we don't generate gap revenue. So yeah, taking a step back from 10,000 feet, if you look at the money flowing through Roblox and 800, 900, a billion, whatever it is flowing through our developers, there's a good chunk also going to those COGs.

And I would also share that we have an idea that for Google and Apple, for smaller creators making under a million dollars, their fees are 15%. And we, in a way, are doing a similar good work in that we have many, many, many creators who are doing that. So in a way, we're kind of consolidating those creators, except they're paying 30 rather than 15. So-

But why not stamp your feet and say this is ridiculous, you guys are cutting off a business, something must be done. And either fight them in court or campaign in the EU and in Washington to have those extrovert views changed. I actually don't think, I personally am not so sure where this is, where we might see movement, whether it's in the courts versus legislation versus other places.

And at the same time, it's interesting because we're very, very good partners with all of them. We do a lot of work together. We appreciate being on their devices. And we have done something that's very interesting recently.

in that we've moved our user base to really giving them the proportional amount of Robux, not to what they pay, but to the cash we have coming in the door after COGS and after store fees. And it's allowed us to give our user base 25% more Robux for gift cards,

on the web. - Robux is your digital currency. - That's right. And so we are seeing an interesting market reaction to that.

That is one way to be fully compliant with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Sony. And at the same time, have a little bit of notion there. And that, I think, is one positive way to do it. I think Google and Apple are both starting to...

give a little bit more flexibility. So I would say stay tuned on this one. We would, we prefer to be good partners and work through this rather than, as you said, you know, throw up our hands and stomp our feet.

I did want to ask about those revenue splits. Essentially, prior to some recent announcements, if you guys made a dollar and I'm a developer and someone was playing and a dollar was spent on my game in some way, I'd essentially keep around 30% of that. And now you're saying in some circumstances, you're basically flipping that. So what were you trying to do when you made that? And it's not across the board, right? It's in certain circumstances. I would say...

Long term, we would like to move as much money to the creators as possible. And we think over time we're going to do that because we're going to see the bookings on Roblox growing faster than what we pay employees, which is really healthy, growing faster than what we pay COGS.

You're going to see our trust and safety, moderation, AI, infra, all of those costs get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It's about a penny an hour right now for anyone in the Roblox for us to support all of that, moderation, all of those. And you're going to see, we believe over time, bigger and bigger chunks of that revenue going to creators. So we have our eye on that. Creators drive that.

the quality of content on our platform. And to get to 10% of the gaming market space, creators are going to have to be putting bigger amounts into their pockets.

How does IP work with the user-generated games that you're talking about? If I make a hit game on Roblox, can I port that somewhere else? What else can I do? I can. Hyper respectful of your IP. It goes further than that, I would say, relative to other experiences like Minecraft or Fortnite, where the IP is very tightly coupled in a way.

We are hoping that Dressed to Impress...

Someday makes a movie. They have a unique look and feel for their avatars. It's not our Roblox look and feel for their avatars. We have seen some of the games on Roblox start to dabble in toys on their own. Some of them start to dabble in other types of IP. And do you guys participate in any of that? If a game is created on your platform, becomes popular on that platform, do you share in the success?

We would share if they are using it to monetize on Roblox. But if you made your own experience and developed your own characters, and then you went to pick your favorite studio, right? You went to Disney and said, make a Disney movie on my cool characters, and they were your IP. That's your IP. Like, we don't participate. 100%. And I'm sure that you guys have been thinking about Hollywood and extensions like that for a long time. Yeah.

And really in the last few years, game movies have become not guaranteed, but pretty reliable successes. That's right. Has that changed your thinking about sort of what the opportunity is for either you or your developers? Do you watch it? What do you see what happened with the Minecraft movie this month? Oh, that's great. Or you go, Oh, I wish we can't, we don't benefit from that in any way. I think there's one thing that happens with the Minecraft movie. It's both the,

an awesome movie. It's like the number two movie and it's really exciting. But at the same time, it's validating that Minecraft is IP and a platform and IP that's inexorably linked rather than on Roblox. What we would like to see is

We'd like to see the Blox Roots movie or the Brookhaven movie or the Adopt Me movie or the Jailbreak movie. Jailbreak is the last one I remember. That was a terrible game, but my kid loved it for years. And so we think if we were to see a Jailbreak movie...

It would really highlight the notion that we want to be the supporting infrastructure and platform that features amazing creators, some who are making experience with more than a million or even some five to 10 million daily active users. And it's all about the creators and their IP. So the Jailbreak movie is a billion dollar movie. You don't see a penny from it. And you would say it's still good for us because it was built here. People know that.

What a validation of our platform that we can support. That would be going in the direction of 10% of gaming. If we saw five of those movies, it would be really even better. We'll be right back with David Pazuki, but first a word from a sponsor.

Canva presents a work love story like no other. Meet Productivity. She's all business. The Canva doc is done. Creativity is more of a free thinker. Whiteboard brainstorm. They're worlds apart, but sometimes opposites attract. Thanks to Canva.

The data is in the deck. And now it's an animated graph. Canva, where productivity meets creativity. Now showing on computer screens everywhere. Love your work at Canva.com.

When it comes to keeping your home clean and tidy, all of us can use a little help. A Roomba robot is the perfect household helper. iRobot has listened to their customers to figure out exactly what they need. The result is the next generation of Roomba robots designed with your priorities in mind. The Roomba 205 Combo uses innovative technology to compact dirt and debris inside itself.

That means you only need to empty it once every 60 days, giving you hands-free cleaning for up to two months. The powerful Roomba Plus 405 combines brains and brawn to give you a level up in clean. After it vacuums, it can use its advanced spinning dual clean mop pads to help your floors shine. It can even empty itself automatically and wash its own mop pads. And you can control all your Roomba robots from the redesigned Roomba Home app.

Meet the next generation of Roomba robots from iRobot, made for your needs, your routine, your home. Roomba robots were made for this. Learn more at iRobot.com. That's I-R-O-B-O-T dot com.

Lowe's knows how to help pros save. That's why the new MyLowe's Pro Rewards program lets you unlock exclusive member deals on the things you need every day on the job. Plus, MyLowe's Pro Rewards members can get volume discounts on eligible orders through a quote of $2,000 or more. Join for free today. Lowe's. We help. You save. Exclusions, more terms, and restrictions apply. Programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowes.com slash terms. Subject to change.

So you've been talking about expanding the age of players who play you, and you're talking about growing it past the early teens into the later teens. Again, I've got a 16-year-old who used to play Roblox a lot, now doesn't. I asked him if anyone's playing at his age now, and he goes, eh, a few people, generally weird. Then he paused for a second and goes, actually, girls play it.

And there's a bunch of girls I know who play it. And I was surprised, I think in part just because general myopia I have about how young girls work in general. But also, even though I know they're obviously gamers, I didn't really connect them to Roblox. Are you surprised to hear that 16-year-old girls are playing Roblox?

I'm very happy. And I would say both surprised and not surprised. One of the things we, when we focus on building our platform, there's some things we can control and some things we can't control. We can control everything.

Is our technology getting better and better to the point where we could build a very high-end game? Is our technology getting better and better to the point we could support something that works very fast on a low-end device, maybe in a difficult networking environment? Are the economics getting better? Are developers able to drive acquisition? Is there great IP? We control all of those.

And if we do it right, there should be, given the number of people on the platform and the economics, great opportunities. So with Young, on the female side, we saw last summer that

a lot of new emergent fashion-type experiences. Dressed to Impress was one that popped out of nowhere. We've also seen various interesting IPs pop on the platform as well. And so it was gratifying to see that by doing all of these foundational things, a developer hit it and the community can take off.

And that's with, once again, only 2.5% of the gaming market running on Roblox. So the more of these foundational things we build, we believe the more opportunity to build amazing properties. What's more important for your growth? Sort of the technical back end and being able to make bigger games, more sophisticated games? Or is it getting the platform out to a wider group of people who can...

play the games that exist now. You talked about how Roblox was sort of blockier and cruder. And I think that that whole, I think people get hung up on that. And I think they shouldn't get hung up on it. People like all kinds of games. They don't have to be technically sophisticated. Yeah, I would say our view would be, and we don't recognize it sometimes, that there's enormous opportunity for technical innovation in the gaming space.

and that where we are right now is arbitrarily still in the Stone Age as far as how this is all working. The notion that games are compiled altogether and downloaded, the notion that what runs on a phone isn't necessarily the same that runs on a high-end PC,

The notion of when I want to play something, I wait for a while rather than immediately access it. There's a lot of amazing innovation here. And so I do feel we're really focused on those innovations. We have said we think we're going to be able to support a creator building a super high quality battle royale that runs on a 2 gig RAM Android phone.

and simultaneously looks great on a console. We're going to be able to build a fashion game that more and more on a high-end device looks photo real. So there's an amazing amount of technical stuff we're working on, and I would say we're just getting started on this. And so I would lean to the technology as fundamental, the innovation of technology to keep growing what we're trying to do.

One of the big hits for at the iPhone app store in the last year is a really simple card game called Bellatro. It's 10 bucks. I bought one. It's a sort of poker meets solitaire. It's fun. There is far as I can tell, there's nothing technically sophisticated about it. People seem to respond to it. When you see successes like that break out, what is it? What's the signal there? What is it telling you?

It's a good signal. We've looked at our business and we've looked at that $187 billion gaming space and we've broken it down into the size of the market for each of the genres in that space. How big is the genre for sports, for RPG, for battle, for puzzle, for up and down that stack? And we've used that to compare where we are relative to those genres

There are some genres where we are, the properties on Roblox are extraordinarily strong. I would say Avatar Simulation, Brookhaven, Bloxburg, Adopt Me, where arguably we're well on our way to having 10% of that. Explain what that means and what's an Avatar Simulation for some of us. You and I may be like The Sims except multiplayer. Got it.

are hanging out, we've got our avatar, we're going to school, we're hanging out in the town, and using it really not just for play, but for being together and communicating. And we're very strong there. We're not as strong in sports, for example. We've started to see brands like NFL Universe and the NBA come out

But we think 10% of the sports gaming market should be on Roblox. And that's a fairly big genre. The card game you mentioned is part of a, I would call it puzzle or whatever genre that is a part of that market that we have our eyes on a bit. And...

I would say, though, it's not one of our biggest primary targets to get to 10% of the gaming space. But I do think we're going to get innovative versions of that for free. We're going to get multiplayer versions where you sit down with your friend and then you pop into that card mode and start playing that. Interesting. Like I said, you've been building this for, I suppose, since what, 2004, 2006? How many employees do you have now?

We're roughly in between, I'm going to say roughly 2,700-ish. So obviously enormous growth since where you started. I'm assuming in your wildest dreams, you did not imagine you would be here. How have you thought about just sort of how you manage an organization that is growing so much bigger, that is generating so much more revenue, reaching so many more people than I'm assuming you ever imagined?

Yeah, it's been interesting because when we started this, there were four of us and we thought it'd be fun to have a lifestyle business building this immersive 3D platform with a lot of learning components. And it just kept, you know, the vision of what it could be was in a way spot on at the start and at the same time somewhat conservative. The vision that there would be in a new category of immersive 3D platforms

creation and communication, I think, was right from the start. But when we started, the vision was very modest. Club Penguin was so big, and we thought that was great. Fast forward to where we are today, and it's a very similar feeling and vibe. We see the vision of having 10% of gaming

on the platform still feels just like it did then. Do you have a model or a mentor that you look at in terms of like, here's how you go from running a four person operation to a 2700 person operation? Several mentors along the way, I would say very thankful for some of our board members, investors, people like that who have helped me because we've had to adopt and try to keep some things the same.

We want to keep hyper vision the same, hyper innovation the same, hyper reaching for much beyond where we are.

We are very much systems thinkers. Roblox is a platform. It's a system. It has an economy. People make businesses on their own. We've tried to adopt that a fair amount to how we run the company as well. And inside of Roblox, we have a thing called the Roblox operating system. It's the way we think about building the product and iterating. We organize the company into arguably one

smaller companies that are very aligned with areas of the product. We

We try to have the leaders of those smaller companies have a lot of autonomy and ability to iterate very quickly. So we do think a lot about the primary product is this operating system that then makes Roblox that is then a platform. We're used to seeing found there's sort of a traditional founders arc where you started in the garage with a handful of friends and you maybe you're ambitious, maybe you're not, but the thing grows really, really big.

You're the founder operator, you run it for a long time, and eventually either it grows beyond your capacity to manage, or you just grow tired of managing the day-to-day bullshit of running a big publicly traded company and say, I'd rather spend half the year in Italy or whatever else it is that you want to do. Have you ever considered handing the reins over to a professional manager and or...

how much longer do you think you want to run this company yourself? Yeah, we think about that a lot, right? We have a bunch of amazing people here, are very autonomous, and once again, running things like our infrastructure, our AI platform, our game engine, almost as if those are individual companies. The interesting thing about being a founder is if one is able to adjust one's individual role to

to be something incredibly inventive and fun, it can create a situation where it's more fun to work in the company than to go to Italy. And I would say, you know, we see that sometimes in the movies, but we don't think about it. When we see Tony Stark, Iron Man running his lab, we don't really notice that, whoa, that looks like

a really fun job or when we see Walt Disney designing Disney World, we kind of think, oh, that's a really fun job. So I think one thing we have done, I would say with our board and in thinking about the company is let's optimize my role for fun and inventiveness

so that it's better than going to Italy for six months. That's a perfect way to end the conversation. But Italy sounds pretty good too. They have a position. Yeah, well, it would be fun to go to Italy. So yeah, that would be fun too. David, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Really appreciate it. I enjoyed it.

Thanks again to David Buzuki. He was a lot of fun to chat with. Thanks to Jelani Carter, who edits and produces the show, to our sponsors who bring it to you for free. And thanks to you guys who listen to the show. You're the best. See you soon.