What Dungeons & Dragons can teach entrepreneurs, with Reid Hoffman and Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks
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It's a bunch of people getting together in a fantasy setting, giving themselves permission to tell a story with each other and be a little silly and have some laughs. And, you know, there's some dice rolls and some rules thrown in in between. It was a long and winding journey for Chris Cox to go from being a kid in the 80s obsessed with the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons to the CEO of its parent company, Hasbro.

Before we dive into how Dungeons & Dragons taught Chris, and me, valuable entrepreneurial lessons as kids, let's make sure everyone knows how to play. The Dungeon Master is your master of ceremonies. The Dungeon Master helps to set the scene.

helps to kind of identify what the goals of the evening are, really serves as kind of like a jack-of-all-trades actor or actress playing and portraying a bunch of the non-player characters you will come across.

The most important part of any D&D game, the dungeon master. They assemble an adventure party and act as a sort of omnipotent narrator. Then there's the adventuring party, each taking on a fictional character they've created. So you can be a dashing rogue who sneaks around and steals pocketbooks or plans heists. You can be a charismatic sorcerer.

who, through the power of personality, weaves magic from out of the ether. Or you can be a quick-on-his-feet bard, which I often find myself in the role of, who usually provides a little bit of comic relief and generally has an aptitude for putting their foot in their mouth in all the wrong situations. Or burst into song on occasion. Oh, for sure. Dungeons & Dragons celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

As a lifelong fan of the game, I asked fellow superfan and the person in charge of bringing D&D into the future to join me. As CEO of Hasbro, Chris Cox has led the brand through a decade of tremendous growth. He's taking a creative approach to scaling a beloved property with passionate fans, all while expanding its reach to new audiences.

We haven't made just how you do it.

This is Masters of Scale. I'm your host, Reid Hoffman. Hasbro CEO Chris Cox and I had a blast reflecting on all the entrepreneurial skills D&D instilled in us from an early age. And don't worry, even if you've never played, there are plenty of business lessons baked into this adventure for you too. What's the origin story of D&D? Where did this all come from? Man, it's a tale as old as time.

And it goes back to sharing stories around campfires. And, you know, I think it moves forward over time in terms of, you know, the earliest fantasy literature epics from like Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales. And, you know, you can go way back into all kinds of different cultures and canons and really kind of comes to full circle around, you know, the world wars when J.R.R. Tolkien starts to take a lot of like these

ancient kind of myths and turns them into a big fantasy epic that we know today as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And then Gary Gygax in a small town in Wisconsin basically took all of those concepts and gamified them.

And really what the team at TSR did, which is Gary's company that he founded in Wisconsin, is they came up with all of these kind of basic game mechanics that today feels like they've always existed. But prior to 1974, no one had ever heard of a hit point before. No one had ever heard of like levels before. No one had ever heard of like classes before. Right.

And it really founded, you know, I think a lot of the basics of both modern tabletop games, but even more importantly, you know, the basis for almost every hit video game that exists today. Yeah, no, exactly. And the way I got into D&D, shoot, what year was this?

I was 84 at my best friend's Hans Schroeder's house. Yeah. I may be a little older than you. I actually think it was pretty soon after. I think it was 76, 77 was the first thing. And it was partially because I was a kid and my babysitter was like, okay, here's the babysitter that keeps the kid entertained because the babysitter shows up and says, let's play D&D. And I'll be like, dad, go on more dates because I'm like, I would like to be doing this more.

That's an awesome babysitter. Yes, exactly. And so when you think about D&D and entrepreneurship, how do you think about the relationship between

the mindset, the creativity, and business and entrepreneurship. I actually credit D&D with a ton of my development as kind of an adult and as a business person. When I was a little kid, I was diagnosed with

This highly scientific term called hyper activism. And I'm sure it was like some, you know, before they had the term ADHD, it was basically like a version of it. D&D, when I discovered it at around the age of 10 or 11, kind of opened up a couple things. It opened up like the world of fantasy and no one else in my family was really into it.

Now, all of a sudden, I could explore Tolkien. I could explore these things called fighting fantasies, which were a favorite of mine, which were kind of like a twist on choose your own adventures. But almost more importantly than discovering like a joy in the love of reading, it also taught me about design and about systems that underlie design. And, you know, from there, it really kind of like structured my thinking. And I became much more successful in school as a result of

And it's kind of been foundational to how I approach business, how I approach problems, how I approach creative endeavors. And I'm not alone in that. I think, you know, a lot of like the studio leaders of today who are in their 40s, maybe 50s, early 60s, grew up in that mid 70s to mid 80s time frame. And they also had a similar experience with D&D.

Where they understood that, you know, building a business or building a creative vision for something complex like a modern day video game or a modern day blockbuster movie requires you to think systematically about the setting, the narrative, the characters, the composition, the conflict engine, you know, you name all of these aspects of it.

And it taught you a lot about leading a group of people on a creative endeavor at an early age. Like, you know, as a DM, especially if you're DMing, you know, 10 and 11 and 12 year olds, you got to work really hard to keep people's attention and kind of read the room. And that's a powerful aspect of leadership is, you know, being an attentive leader and giving of yourself and always having a portion of your mind focused

focused on the table around you and focused on a common goal. And then there's a whole bunch of, I think, just great kind of leadership lessons that you learn from playing D&D that applies to business. You know,

Having a clear objective in mind, knowing what the principles are and values that underlie your party, whether those are chaotic and evil or pure and good. You know, the concept of forming a well-rounded party, which I think is like just basic in building a great business, which is like, hey, let's make sure we're not all a bunch of wizards going off to fight an army of orcs.

We're probably going to need a meat shield, so someone who can be like a barbarian or a warrior. We're probably going to need a healer to help kind of back us up. We're probably going to need a smooth talker like a bard, and we're probably going to need a couple magic users to kind of like prepare the way and help us pass some devious traps. And then last but not least, I think the cardinal rule of D&D, which every DM loves when their party doesn't follow, which is don't split the party.

or in kind of modern parlance, disagree and commit. So there's nothing more powerful in business, especially when you're kind of an entrepreneur starting things out, than having unity in terms of action. Like having really strong dialogue and even disagreement about what you do, that ultimately leads to conviction about what the right approach is, and then uniformity in how you execute that conviction.

So, you know, whether it's the basics of organizational design, the basics of product design, the basics of group leadership to important leadership principles about how you form a team and how you lead a team and how you execute as a team. I think there's a lot of metaphors that you could fall from it. I'm just surprised there hasn't been a D&D business book yet.

Maybe we're on the starting chapters of one. Maybe we're framing it right here, right now. By the way, I agree with you about that. And let me build on your excellent answer in a couple of things. One, part of what I think too rarely happens amongst kids outside of sports is learning that life is a team sport.

And, you know, obviously it happens in sports. It's one of the reasons why sports can be important, whether it's basketball or football or soccer or baseball or any of these things. It's like, okay, it's a team sport and there's kind of different roles and ways that you play. And then another part that I think is particularly useful is useful everywhere, but particularly useful in entrepreneurship is

is the hero's journey. And like, for example, you learn one of the things in Improving Along is that we are all heroes in this journey, right? Like we're heroes collaborating, working together. How do we have a collaborative hero ship, a mission, a goal? We can be ambitious. And then, you know, how does collaboration work? And how does collaboration work under adversity? Because part of like a good dungeon master adding this is to put in things that

that cause this mutual learning thing. There's adversity in the journey. Like one of the things I did when I was playing DM would be like, well, you go save the children or you go save the princess. You know, and you get a dialogue and it's collaborative and it's discourse oriented and it kind of gives you

you know, some roles in simulation. Like, could you express arrogance or ambition, but do so safely and then figure out, sure, I'm playing a character that isn't me, being a little bit more lenient, being a little bit more ambitious, that's good for me. And that's good for the team. And that's the kind of psychological thing that I think is also super important in this. And, you know, the more I think of this as we're talking about this, the

the D&D business book is definitely something that would be... Someone should create the scenario pack, right? Or whatever they're called these days. Are they still called scenario packs? Oh, no, we just call them adventures. And I also think playing D&D is super developmentally positive for kids. You know, in fact, I think we've been doing a bunch of middle school and elementary school programs. And what I love about that is...

It gives kids a permission to be silly in school, which I think they need. But more importantly, I played a bunch of sports growing up. I love sports. It was important for me developmentally. But the thing where the sports analogy in business often falls down is I find in business the problems usually are really ambiguous. And figuring out what the problem is is actually a big part of the problem.

And, you know, in sports, it's very simple. It's like, hey, get the ball from here to there and get across the line or into the hoop. And in business, it's figuring out what problem you're trying to solve and then how you're going to go solve it. And D&D really helps with that unstructured problem solving and that creative thinking.

Still ahead, Chris and I talk about how Hasbro is shepherding this 50-year-old game into a technology-fueled future.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more at the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. I'm always curious how people are finding ways to use AI to help them with creative endeavors and wanted to know where Chris sees opportunities to integrate AI into Dungeons & Dragons.

A lot of people have used AI to run an adventure for them. I have used AI to clone my friends and playtest an adventure before I run them through it. And they're actually, it's actually pretty good. Any key lessons about the current state of generative AI? Like what really worked well and what didn't work well? Well, sadly for my friends, the generative AI generally has better problem solving skills than they do as a group.

Oh, they can recruit AI to help them too. So yeah, that might be more of a function of maybe the number of bottles of wine that are consumed over the course of the evening rather than like their cognitive abilities. I find AI in my personal games to be great at image generation. Like, you know, you can create images lickety split. It makes your characters come to life. You know, you can paint the picture of a scene in a really compelling way.

AI is pretty good at puzzle generation. I find putting together like puzzle rooms a little taxing now and then. And AI is able to, you know, use like our SRD and open game license and a bunch of kind of like crowd content in a compelling way and recombinate them in different parts. I use AI a lot. So I'll have like narrators who will come in and do guest bits and saves my voice a little bit.

I use a service called Suno that creates songs on the fly, which is really fun because, you know, you can, especially as a character, like, you know, if there's like a dramatic portion of the campaign that's going south, you can write a quick like 200 character blurb. And then all of a sudden out pops out a cool rock anthem that kind of celebrates how someone just rolled a one. So there's a lot of emergent creative opportunities with it. You know, I,

In game playing and kind of user generated content for games like D&D, I think you see the best of some of that technology in terms of its playful attributes. There's obviously...

a lot of aspects of AI that we need to work on quite a bit. You know, most importantly, making sure creators are paid for their work and there's fair attribution. But I have confidence that we'll be able to figure that out. And I also have confidence that as we figure that out, we'll be able to mine the playful aspects of AI in a positive way that makes the games more fun, whether it's D&D or just about any other kind of game that you have to use your creativity.

I totally agree. And it doesn't surprise me that The Bard is focused on the music creation in Sonu as one of the great discovery. You know, I wrote a book called Impromptu where I described AI's amplification intelligence because it's going to be giving us superpowers. And, you know, obviously the superpower in music is a very important part of human expression. So let's kind of shift a little bit from the pure creativity with the game and gameplay to AI.

The mechanics of business, D&D kind of started as almost like badly printed paper sets as homebrew computer hackers were playing it. But now, like with Hasbro, there's much more of a scaled industry. What have been some of the scaling lessons along the lines of this adventure? About five years ago, I discovered a white paper that the McKinsey Institute did.

They basically looked at startups over like the last 30 years or so. You might have seen something similar to it. And they basically looked at, okay, who is successful at going from $0 to $100 million? And then who was able to go from $100 million to a billion dollars? And then who was able to scale, like hyperscale to a billion dollar plus? And what did they have to do?

I think the general lesson, or at least that I took away from that paper, is what got you here won't get you to the next stage. And what gets you to the next stage won't be the thing that gets you even farther. And I think that's been true with the history of D&D. You know, D&D came out of the gates really strongly in the 70s and 80s as kind of like this tabletop game for gaming enthusiasts.

mostly men at the time. It waned in the 90s and 2000s and then came back in a big way around 2014 with the release of fifth edition. And it's just been on a growth tear since. And

And so, you know, I think what did we do in that 2014 time range when we released 5th edition? And how did we go from it being like a $10 million business to now, you know, a multi-hundred million dollar business? I think the big things for us were, A, let's embrace a broad audience. Let's invite everyone to the table and make sure everyone can see themselves in the game.

You know, the original version of D&D, you had a penalty if you played as a woman. That's ridiculous. So the first one was, hey, let's invite everyone to the table. I think the second one and related to that was, hey, the rules are really just guidelines. They're there to help structure and start something, but they're not there to ever limit you. And so when someone asks me, what is D&D? I'm purposely like, it's fantasy improv.

Because, like, a lot of people are surprised by that because they're like, well, I thought it was all these rules and I had to read all these books. And I would almost say, no, the books are almost more collectibles, right?

And then I think the third thing that really helped to lift up the brand over the last decade has been the opportunities available with digital technologies and digitally enabled tools to help drive user-generated content and share content around the globe are amazing. And even though we started as a pen and paper pastime that were heavily in a heavily book-based business, we

That can't be the thing that limits us or prevents us from trying new things. And so, you know, D&D was probably one of the early champions of Twitch and game streaming. It's a really easy game to stream. The next one was digitization of the books and basically transitioning from a book-based business to kind of like a service-based business, especially with D&D Beyond and third-party services like Roll20.

And then I think the thing that we're in the process of doing is enabling more user generated content, building out marketplaces that that user generated content can be shared on and offering tools to help set that up. And I think those things have led. Gosh, I think it's fair to say it's like a 15 X growth over the last eight years in the game.

And then I think the things that will help take the game to the next level moving forward to use the rule of, hey, what got you here isn't necessarily what's going to get you moving forward.

is really continue to embrace that digital palette of options. You know, what can we do to bring the visuals and spectacle of D&D to life? And so, you know, we have a digital tabletop in development that basically brings video game level visuals to life in kind of like a virtual sandbox, but still keeps human ingenuity and human design and human play at the center.

I think, you know, we're going to have to be careful with what we do with it. But I think AI and user generated content tools are going to be a huge enabler to help people enjoy and expand the spectrum of play.

And then I think, you know, continuing to kind of take the lessons of, hey, don't let the rules bind you too much and don't let tradition bind you too much. Respect it, but embrace change. I think bringing in other brands and other content like we've done with Magic the Gathering, which is another brand Wizards of the Coast does with Universes Beyond and opening up new worlds and new kind of settings for play will be another big enabler of the brand and of the tradition. And

And then, of course, video games, which have always been big. And, you know, hopefully you've gotten a chance to play Baldur's Gate 3 because if you're a D&D nerd, that's catnip. It's actually been on my list. I'm aware of the Baldur's Gate 3, but I just I'm hoping this December. Just make sure you have a spare couple hundred hours. Yeah, that's precisely the reason it's kind of waiting for the December holidays as I boot it up and take a look. So.

So in terms of the tools to enable the user-generated content, what's a little bit more substance to that? Because I actually think it's a very good idea to say we're participants in the world creation and in a platform for this. And so enabling developers is a really good thing. And that's one of the ways that we could take the level of scale on this to another level. So what kinds of things are you guys doing, thinking of doing, et cetera, on the tool enablement side of this?

Well, I think, you know, to the less digital, to the more digital, like, you know, D&D was an early proponent of an open games license and kind of opening up the rule set and opening up a bunch of the content to help users be able to explore their own kind of worlds and their own creations.

So RSRD, which is kind of like the core content for the game, is now in the Creative Commons. The open game license is perpetual and out there for people to be able to use. So that's enabled a whole bunch of content creation over the last couple decades.

I think what we're also doing, starting to get maybe more digital, is we've taken D&D Beyond and we're starting to open it up from just a closed ecosystem of wizards content to bringing on more and more user-generated content. We're starting off with independent publishers, but I think over time you can see that we'll open it up to more and more people and have more and more APIs for them to be able to access that.

And I think we'll take that model, which is starting off now and like kind of like the the adventures or like the scenario modules, like basically digitized books.

And as we have this new digital tabletop, which is codenamed Sigil and is in friends and family right now, you can see a world where we can start expanding it from beyond just kind of words and concepts to actual like digital objects. Like you can build a scenario that you can actually play or you can build like virtual figures or virtual set pieces that can be for sale and be available inside of that environment, which I think will be big.

Then I think as you start thinking about how you virtualize content and bring content to life visually, either tools that we create that help to make that easier for you to be able to make or working with AI solutions or people who have cool AI technology. I think there's obviously a whole bunch of cool things that we can do with that.

Now, that's where I think we have to be careful because we have to make sure that we respect how the AI is trained and we're doing it with content that we know who owns what. And so that we can pay creators a fair wage for what they've done and make sure that we're recognizing their contributions.

But gosh, from everything from how I could create a figurine of my character to how I could create a character portrait of like this wild new bard that I've dreamed up to help me think through a couple scenarios that I could take my players through. Or if you want to get a little bit more far-fetched, kind of like an AI...

dungeon master companion who listens along to your campaign and gives you prompts or helps you understand where you could go in either a fixed adventure or kind of like branches that you could have some fun with. I really think the sky's the limit. And the next five to 10 years, I think, could be very exciting in terms of what those tools could be. And in terms of marketplace and network,

This is from the co-founder of LinkedIn and PayPal and a bunch of other things. Not quite as big as LinkedIn. But it attracts the, oh, that sounds interesting. So what does that current marketplace look like? Well, right now we're at about 19 million registered users on D&D Beyond. So it's growing at a healthy clip, albeit for a digital network. It's on the smaller end.

But when you think about like the reach of 19 to 20 million people in the tabletop gaming hobby, you know, we basically reach 80 percent of everyone who plays a tabletop RPG actively.

So if you're an independent publisher or if you're kind of like a content creator who wants to start making a name for themselves, as we open up that network and open up that marketplace, there's no kind of greater opportunity to expose your content and help to engage with your content than on that platform.

And in that way, it's like any network. The more content creators you're able to drive in and more content you have, the more attractive that network becomes and the faster it starts to grow. And I think the total addressable market, you know, if we're at 19 million today, look at the number of people who play action adventure or role playing games on their phones, on the PC or consoles. That's more like 500 million people around the world.

So, you know, we have a relatively high growth, underdeveloped network today that I think we can start to supercharge by adding in more user generated content tools, more marketplace opportunities for higher end content creators and indie publishers, in addition to our own efforts.

And so then you can scale to a more meaningful penetration of that 500 ish million interested marketplace in related content that is kind of more dominated by video games today. What's one book that you think everyone should read?

The Exponential Age. It's a book about how all these transformative technologies are just only now starting to hit the hockey stick portion of the curve and how the world will be transformed through a combination of 3D printing, you know, network speeds, CPU speeds, you name it. What's an invention or product you wish you'd thought of first?

Gosh, an invention or product I wish I would have thought of first. I'm trying to...

No, that's too cute. Any variation of the question you like? Google, for sure. Oh yeah, Google, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Although people were thinking about search, although Google specifically is- Yeah, yeah, like what, like the whole concept of like the keyword and then how they index the internet. Google is the first product I remember hearing about for the first time. I was playing golf two weeks before I got married and there was a guy up from Silicon Valley and he was like, have you tried Google yet? I was like,

Yeah. He was like, yeah, it's going to totally change the way you surf the internet and it's going to be the most valuable company in the world. He was right. Yes, indeed. How would you like AI to change your future? Well, I'm a huge DM and that's just not for the purpose of this podcast. I probably play D&D three times a month with two or three different groups of people. We have big groups, so I'm usually playing with probably 20-ish people a month.

And as CEO of Hasbro, I feel like if you play D&D with me, it better be one of the best games of D&D you've ever played in your life. And, you know, I should be bringing like the industrial lights and magic equivalent special effects to the game.

And so one of my biggest jams right now is using a company called Eleven Labs to create like cool voices for the campaigns. So I can't wait for more celebrity voices to get on that service and transform my campaigns because I'm

I want Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer to be the NPCs that my party meets in a bar. And I can just do the mic drop moment and basically be able to real time put in their answers. And they sound good. Is there anyone that you think people would be surprised to learn as a D&D player who proudly loves the game? You know, business leaders, celebrities, other folks. I mean, some of these must come across your path in ways that the rest of us don't see.

I was pretty surprised that Anderson Cooper loves D&D. I didn't peg him for that, but I haven't had a chance to actually meet him. It would be fun to play with him. It would be super fun to play with Stephen Colbert. He's another big fan. Yes. Yeah. All right, Chris. Well, thanks for joining me on Masters Scale. It's been awesome. Yeah, Reed, thank you so much. And if you're ever in the Providence area and you want to roll some dice, do you just let me know? I will indeed.

In the last half century, Dungeons & Dragons has instilled creative problem-solving skills and taught teamwork to countless players. Now it's exciting to see the game is evolving in the age of AI.

It's hard to imagine a more fun way to experiment with how these technologies can amplify our creativity than putting them to work in our fantastical adventures. The conversation with Chris Cox has me itching to assemble an adventure party, break out my best dice, then slay some dragons. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening.

The top companies in the AI space are continuously evolving, which is exactly what Turing is helping its clients achieve. They improve LLMs by providing post-training solutions to enhance reasoning, coding, multimodality, and more, all backed by their proprietary expert human data. If you're focused on improving model performance within your company, the experts at Turing are ready to help. Learn more at Turing.com.

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