David Baszucki

“With this keto thing, I think I've developed a theory that in some cases, mental health things are very physical. It's, is your brain getting enough energy?”

“And I do think it's good to make decisions in that if you can tell the difference in that I want to go do stuff mode, I think those end up being longer term decisions. They can be decisions that in a less optimistic mode seem that that's impossible. Like, that…”

“If one is not reducing bureaucracy, there's no neutral ground. Like, I think in a lot of situations where one thinks we're pretty good, like, we're just gonna let it be in this steady state, that's actually things are imploding in a way. If one is not trying t…”

“What I have tried to do is move to more frequency, more in the moment, relaxed, not a big deal, rather than let's have a feedback session. So trying to be in the moment oh, what do you think about that? I think is much better than blocking or waiting or trying…”

“I think the feedback is hyper tone related. I actually think if delivered in a neutral positive tone where people can sense my blood pressure's not going up, where I'm just like, I got your back no matter what. It's all cool. Even if the feedback's pretty hars…”

“There is something, I think, inside of an organization where for many decisions, it's actually more important just to let's identify the person who's going to make the decision and let them be somewhat free and creative to make the decision. Then, in many case…”

“Universally, all of the gaming industry people we would talk to, whoa, whoa, whoa, do not ship that. Like, you need a full avatar, you know, you need a meshed avatar. It's got to be high res. Your objects need to look better. So we got that universally. I woul…”

“We are running right now a I'm not going to say what the company looks like. It's not an existing company. In my own mind, I have like, I'm imagining the company across the street that is like our, you know, could call it a threat. Like, what's it look like? W…”

“Trying to think of mistakes I have made have been typically where, where I've hung on to a concept too long. When I actually was very free to change my course. I think we have a lot more optionality than we imagine when I look backwards in time.”

“In retrospect, that was a really bad idea because building should be unlimited.”

“And so launching all of those things at the same time, there's virtual currency. People can buy it. Creators can incorporate it. You can see what's earning. It created like a loop or a system that within eight hours, we just said, yep, we got it.”

“If you were or I were to go buy some Robux we would see it's generally somewhat like a penny per Robux. It's generally been that way for about 20 years, so I would say that's no, no promise long term. It's directly tied to the dollar, but I think we would try …”

“It's interesting to think that many, many Eight through twelve-year-olds, their first exposure to money is Robux.”

“So I do think there's going to be a future world Where we have all the aspects of the multiplayer gaming interesting, but it feels like that. And I think that's going to be pretty mind blowing. It's going to be a little bit like going from black and white to c…”

“But getting to the point where you or I make a beautiful thing, share it with our family, play it just by talking about it, I think is going to come true as well.”

“So at 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 on 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 Build…”

“We thought three-d immersive digital stuff would combine communication, being in the same place with storytelling, and the rest, that's kind of how we got our launch.”

“Knowledge Revolution got very far without raising any money.”

“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.”

“There was actually an original product and that was an incredible failure. So, and the original product that was the incredible failure was arguably us knowing, we intuitively knew what the viral product would be. We knew the viral product would be online in t…”

“The content on Roblox was perpetual. It was made by creators, and the acquisition of users was perpetual, and that it was word of mouth.”

“We think of our company as the system and the company Roblox is really running almost as if it's nine separate companies.”

“There is a mini cloud infrastructure company running with 40 data centers and hundreds of thousands of computers.”

“We have a group of engineers working not on Roblox, but on the Roblox operating system. Looking at who are the various teams, how we're organized, how we do all of our things in the company.”

“How does the leader of an individual group like that game engine cloud thing, how do they actually operate almost like a mini CEO? How do they run that vertical stack? How do they control the types of engineers and product managers, how they compensate them? T…”

“Someone is going to be in charge of the whole social graph, user facing components, a web component infra. And all of a sudden we got a lot of acceleration because they could load balance between all of those pieces.”

“Executive staff meeting Every Tuesday, we get together four or five hours. Leaders of all these nine companies come together. We go through the things they're working on by themselves, but we go through a lot of times of all of the horizontal things that are b…”

“We have probably 50 to 60 things that are core to hitting, you know, the objectives we have this quarter, next quarter, the rest of the year. It's almost like a hand curated list at the company level and group level. Of things that we think are emblematic as a…”

“We believe we're gonna get to photoreal.”

“If we raised a secondary round, we might put some padding in there, but we actually never dipped below that initial ten million.”

“I would say we're getting close and I'd say 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 dev…”

“The whole history of the company has arguably been a motion from quarterly things, monthly, weekly, daily, like the whole pace of our company, I think, has just been a historical acceleration of the pacing of the company.”

“And you're hoping one is hotter, And so, like, you eat three or four, and they're not hot, and then you hit one that's hot, and it's some weird mental hack that makes the chips viral.”

“So we never really Said remote forever. We kind of kept it together, and we have almost the vast majority of our people here now.”

“My, I guess my belief is that for many, many people, accomplishing something is really a big, important part in their life, and so it may be very dangerous if, Everyone can just go do their hobbies.”

“I think it's a craft that like requires Like fitness and mental health and like a whole structure around it, you know, figure skating is a craft, being a chess player is a craft, but I also think being a CEO is a craft.”

“It's part of what our Family Foundation researches is going into ketosis for bipolar and schizophrenia, and we're finding more and more People who tend to have these medical issues. This can be like a partial treatment for them.”

“So there is a Roblox business plan PowerPoint deck from almost 20 years ago that we pull out sometimes and we're amazed at the fidelity of it. It pretends a new category. One could call it the category of human co-existence. It's got the sizes of a bunch of co…”

“I think as a technology for multiplayer, four D simulation gets better and more photo realistic. It's almost going to be like video is the down sampling. And it's like, if we were having this for the immersive communication, we'd say go to legacy analog mode a…”

“I think zero right now. I do. I don't think we're close to crossing the human AI barrier.”

“One could say no matter how cheap it is to create assets, the expectation of quality from consumers goes up at exactly the same velocity.”

“We're using that data to create not an LLM, but a three D foundational model within our AI team. And we're, we've said publicly, we're going to release the first version of it this quarter, and we're going to release it in several forms. We're going to release…”

“I think there's a class of technology problems that don't involve Things like faster than light travel or hacking human biology that we can imagine with more compute and better algorithms are naturally going to emerge. This is one of those that I believe is ju…”

“I think the same will stay for that Assassin's Creed game you mentioned. Like, there will be a lot of taste and a lot of art, even with AI acceleration.”

“Behind the scenes, there's over 200 different models running on our system that are doing so many things at higher quality and higher performance.”

“Imagining those being driven by AI physics and aesthetics, I think, you know, we're all going to be designing our own homes. Absolutely.”

“Okay, I'm making the super Dungeons and Dragons thing, but as it watches you play, and maybe we know your history, you're, you'll be playing a three-D experience that Snow has ever seen before.”

“We'll talk to other co-pilots using like natural English, I think will be the universal interface of co-pilots.”

“You'll go to ancient Rome and most of the people you'll interact with will be historically as good as we can create representations to enrich in that experience.”

“I built asteroid type games, and there was a way to in a primitive way, go to Radio Shack and buy these knob potentiometers and wire them up to the Apple II and build a primitive game controller, and I can remember having my siblings come down and play this ch…”

“At our peak, we probably had 40 employees, and we were, I think we were doing six million a year when we were acquired.”

“We were profitable the whole time, because we were bootstrapping the company as we went.”

“We were in the midst of the very early phases of what we were doing, which was more of this super scalable physics puzzle system. We had some people play it but we knew within a week, oh my gosh, this is not going to go viral. We have a lot more work to do. An…”

“And in those early days, we probably knew half of the Two or 300 people on Roblox, and we were in there every day chatting with them.”

“There were a lot of people we met in those days that is too primitive, too crude, not gonna be fun, games have to be this and that, that we really gently ignored, respectfully.”

“I think in the early days, we stayed away from the exact Lego form factor. We just said, let's go simple one by two by one, but there was for sure some sensitivity when using, for example, yellow in the avatars, which is this classic Lego look. They were very …”

“We very early on Knew that this has to be about the creators on the platform, not us. We want them to be famous, not us. And so I think that, that mirrored more to Eric and my, you know, specialty, which is let's just build great technology.”

“Even, even early on, there was a bit of a thesis that if we could mirror and really couple raw things Three D cloud base. We used to call it digital stuff, simulated stuff in the cloud, that this is such a fundamental technology that on top of it, people would…”

“Ultimately the total amount of money that went into the company to get to the point of profit was about nine million dollars.”

“We've done experiments along the way with paid acquisition to maybe accelerate here or there, but by and large, everything on Roblox has been viral.”