The Exchanges

Q Can you say more about these nine separate companies? I think you just described two of them.

A Yeah. We publicly talk about all of them. So I would say there's, um, um, there's a people systems company that actually builds It's the Roblox operating system and has all of our recruiting and people and performance management stuff. There's an infrastructure company and that's running like our 40 data centers and all of our compute and bandwidth. Persistence, they're building out cool persistence systems as well. Uh, game engine, simulation tooling, and Roblox Studio sitting in a group or a company. There is a group, um, called the Economy Group. It's literally All of the things around how we have Robux, how we monetize, how we, um, you know, collect money, the ledger, all of that. 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. There is a user-facing group that is all involved with Social Graph, Virality, um, the various apps we have for having Roblox run in different places, so it's like a wide range of these user groups.

AI assessment note: “there's a people systems company that actually builds It's the Roblox operating system”

Q Okay, so what is, taking back to your decisions, you're saying it's like, oh, we're onto something, this is going to work. What's your next thought?

A So then what starts happening is Roblox started a persistently viral mode, um, Like, we could track the growth day by day, week by week. It's like, this is organic growth. This is not paid acquisition. It's just like, we're sitting back and watching that. We then, the fun started being there. It was just like, 10 concurrent, hundred concurrent, thousand concurrent, 10,000 concurrent. Creations are getting better. We know everything we do with Roblox Studio, the better Roblox Studio gets, The more viral it is, the better the game engine is, the more viral it is. Um, very early on, to Eric's credit, I think, literally on week three or week four in the afternoon, when we're, now we're sitting there, we know the names of a lot of these people, there's hundreds of people. Eric said, um, we need to build the first safety moderation system, and And John and Matt and I all look at it and say, you're right. He's right. Oh my gosh. Like we got to get on this thing. So along the way, we build like a moderation system. We have user reporting, all of that. For a long time, Matt and, um, Eric and John and myself, we were the moderators, like we would switch off. So we got to get a vibe of that. And so this keeps marching on. And then Then finally we say, okay, how can we start making some money on this thing? Um, it's growing, we have costs, all of that. Um, interestingly enough, this is ano…

AI assessment note: “Eric said, um, we need to build the first safety moderation system”

Q What other co-experiences besides games take place on the platform now?

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

AI assessment note: “There's arguably, of course, concerts, music that's starting to get... early signs of shopping”

Q Can you reconcile those two things for me?

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

AI assessment note: “combining intuition with tenacity and taking the long view, if those things can coexist”

Q So were you taking ideas from that as well?

A There.com and Second Life, they really were early and in parallel to us. In a way, they were so early and so parallel, they made these very big visionary things. You know, Second Life's architecture was contiguous earth kind of thing, which had some issues around scaling, because in a contiguous earth type situation, which is just the way the real world makes, there's only one copy of that roller coaster, and when 30 people want to go on that roller coaster, No more can go. So we, I think we were a lot more practical around scale. We're just like, no man, if there's, if there's a 100,000 copies of that roller coaster, we're going to figure out how to route people to that. So we could have ten million people riding the roller coaster. But there were a lot of early, early visions out there, I would say at the same time, for sure.

AI assessment note: “There.com and Second Life, they really were early and in parallel to us.”

Q When you were designing this, were there any, like, books you were reading or, like, were there any examples? You're like, okay, I'm going to take an economy that I see functioning well in the real world and just make the virtual version. How did you even come up with the set of rules that you had?

A We, I would say all four of us founders were very into high integrity systems, um, like what's the amount of float In the economy, how much currency we have, do you trade it and not trade it? We saw very early on in our economy, we had something really interesting in the early days of video games, people would have multiple currencies, and we had something that in retrospect, the Roblox community really loves, but isn't really a good idea, I don't think, and that is a, a participation-based currency called tickets, As well as a money-backed currency called Robux. We, the, the thing that comes out is when you have a participation-based currency, you get one ticket for every day you log in. That's really not a very good way to have people log into your system. You know, it's much better. They just love chatting with their friends or playing games. The other thing is any currency that, um, A user can get from work or log in will immediately be bought it now. And so we just, we could see people trying to bought that currency all day long and we had to ultimately get rid of it. Um, so we had some good learnings with that, but ultimately our current economy, it has, you know, as I've said, is kind of scaled better than linear with user engagement.

AI assessment note: “all four of us founders were very into high integrity systems”