Roblox

“And Roblox, like, I actually think Roblox should just be banned.”

“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…”

“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…”

“We're migrating all of our avatars to a position where rather than just being a monolithic block for those users who choose, the head may smile if they want it to smile or something like that.”

“Well, you can look at where we're tracking on our bookings, and I think if you divide our bookings by two hundred billion, we're in the three to four percent.”

“Roblox got pretty big without a developer A way for developers to earn money on the platform. It was a hobby for everyone.”

“Eric was very different. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't do that. Like, we need to interface a language with this thing. We need an API. We need to have this thing be very generalizable. There's a game creation language called Lua. Let's connect that up and…”

“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 …”

“We're now using AI to check the age of every single person on our platform. We've open sourced our voice safety filter.”

“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.”

“We actually pushed that out on Roblox. I think it was, yeah, it was December, 24. We had all these AI characters in a Roblox game. We just kind of put it out there. People could create AI characters, or they could just kind of hang out, and we had about a mi…”

“In terms of the digital marketplace, and they are already doing it to a certain extent. I mean, like, all kinds of Roblox digital items are bought and sold, but and I've actually bought them for my kids, and there's so much fraud on the platform. Like, we're b…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“When we sold Knowledge Revolution and we started Roblox, I was thinking that immersive, three-D, physically simulated stuff should have a 20, 30, 4050 year trajectory.”

“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, probably see 1500 users that were saw some ad, like an online building …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Like all of Roblox runs for less than a penny an hour. For every person around the world.”

“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…”

“There's a very large group, arguably the largest safety and civility group, engineering, product, policy, and live ops under a single threaded leader, chief safety officer, Matt, who can just run that whole thing and make decisions.”

“At that time, Club Penguin had a club membership. Can we just charge people five bucks a month for something? So we worked on that for a while, and so we had this thing called Builder's Club.”

“Something very similar happened with the Builder's Club and we Entered this interesting period where user growth was going like this, but re revenue and bookings was kind of going like this. And so what that meant is builders club was getting a little old and …”

“I don't know if we give out our latest Roblox Studio numbers, but it's definitely a lot of people, but it's not ten million. Small percentage. It's one or two million.”

“And I would say the good news is that vision may actually return, because I do think over time with AI acceleration, And all of the things we're working on, just like maybe in the very early days of video or YouTube was mostly consumptive. There was a little b…”

“If everyone needs to spend money to have fun, your game isn't viral.”

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

“So in Bruno Mars, we're talking twenty million people but those are sharded amongst copies of experiences.”

“We have to run the company almost as if we're imagining a virtual other company who really loves this space. So we have like an imaginary competitor. So we literally think about running the company that way.”

“The features our creators need are boring and purely performance-based, and we have a saying in the company, like performance is a growth feature, and, you know, we put an enormous amount of work on raw performance features, scale features, those kind of thing…”

“We want to get the time to jump into any Roblox game down to zero, basically. And that's very technically complicated. But we do believe it has long-term growth aspects to us.”

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

“Our game engine, for example, we said, we always imagined we need a multiplayer, three D immersive engine that does 10% of everything really well. Early on, it's like, you should use that game engine, you should use that game engine. We said, no, that's like a…”

“Age check. We made the call on our own. It's not because of laws or anything like that”

“So at Roblox for many, many years, we were pushing very early AI BERT models, primitive type models to drive safety.”

“Like I believe we will end up with the best AI tech for text, for voice, maybe for video, doing a wide range of safety things, either monitoring for critical harms, Flagging, adjusting, all of that.”

“So there's a consortium actually with some various companies involved in safety. We've open sourced one of our voice models. We've open sourced one of our Sentinel models.”

“Thirteen billion plus a month.”

“We would, of course, never sell that data. Never, ever, ever, ever. For several reasons. One is just from a values thing of respecting the community. Can you imagine, like, what kind of whacked out decision that would be? Yeah. Roblox is selling their three D …”

“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 th…”

“Devex is well over a billion bucks a year, you know, that's the amount.”

“The thing we've said is we believe that money flowing to creators is going to increase, not decrease”

“The growth rate in bookings per year for creator number a thousand ranked by how much they're making, they are growing faster than creator number one.”

“We've said publicly, we want to get to 10% of global gaming on the platform.”

“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, because a lot of them are worth a lot of money.”