The Exchanges

Q Aside from systems thinking, what are some of the mental models that you use to think through problems?

A I think one mental model that we've had in thinking through problems is kind of an irreverence, in a way, to the problem. You know, one of the decisions I think back to the early founding of Roblox, and I would call this a set of an irreverence, is the very earliest version of Roblox had a, what we would call a classic Roblox character We were saying, okay, we're building a user-generated gaming platform. We're gonna have an avatar. The very first Roblox avatar was, it was a very fast programmer art avatar, um, to get something working. Its proportions are ridiculously simple. You know, the legs are one by one by two. The body's two by two by one. The face of the early Roblox avatar was just programmer art that we put together. 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 would say even within our team, we got that, but we decided it's better to ship that early and start getting feedback on it. I thought that was a great decision, and we found out, actually, that a lot of the input we had been getting, thank God we didn't listen to that, basically.

AI assessment note: “one mental model that we've had in thinking through problems is kind of an irreverence”

Q You mentioned a couple of false starts. What are some of those false starts where you guys went down the wrong path, and how did you realize you were going down the wrong path?

A Along the way to building an economy on the platform, we started with a very different economic model. It was a membership model. You got a few extra places to build on Roblox. In retrospect, that was a really bad idea because building should be unlimited. But along the way, that economic model started to fail, actually, and we had a situation where our user growth was going up, up, up, up, up, up. But less people wanted to buy this membership, and so this is really interesting, right? Our users are growing, it's all great, but money is flat to going down, and so what we did on that, I would say, is a very typical tactical response. Ok, something's up. Let's fix the current system. Let's make a list of 50 things that might be broken, 50 small tune-ups that we can do towards this system. Ok, let's do that. So as you would imagine, we made that list of 50 things, did like 30 of them. Oh, we still have the problem. Now what? But in the back of our head, we had been thinking about the, the economy, about virtual currency, about how this was like a whole outside of the box game changer. This wasn't just tuning up something that was arguably broken. This was like, this could be a hundred times bigger than what we're doing. And so then all of a sudden, like maybe in the, in a disparaging moment, like just, oh my gosh, you know, all of us in the company said, we just have to do this, l…

AI assessment note: “we started with a very different economic model. It was a membership model.”

Q And how do you think about the relationship between mental health and our, our, our body, I guess, in that sense?

A If I, if I roll back the clock and think about my mind and how I thought about mental health, um, 10 years ago, I use that as a template for how everyone without someone in their family must think about it. It's just, oh, people go crazy. Oh, they're having a mental health thing. I never thought of it as a super physical thing, because now I think of it, it's the same as a broken arm. It's just part of a, your body is physically not working. It just happens to be your brain. 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? Um, the theory behind keto is that arguably we were eating some, you know, maybe more Primeval foods up till 10,000 years ago. We hit the agricultural revolution. That was wonderful in many ways. Our population flourished. But in certain ways, we might not be fully adapted. There may be certain people who just are not fully adapted to that many carbs in their diet. And so for my son, he may be one of those people. And that launched a family foundation, I'd say, for the last four or five years doing research on this.

AI assessment note: “now I think of it, it's the same as a broken arm.”

Q Do you use AI internally to help make decisions or help expand your context window in the company?

A I would say we, we have all kinds of AI. We have a bunch of internal systems that we have built. So, you know, we have a thing called the Roblox operating system that we use for tracking the work in the company more and more, um, helping people see how they fit into the organization. Those are all like MCP enabled, so anyone can take their AI system and run it on top of those. In a way, we think of all of our Roblox systems as things that either people or AI can look at and run things against. So we have all kinds of people building custom little things that are looking at the work tracker or doing some things. Um, some people auto generate like our one-on-one discussion topics. Um, so I would say, yeah.

AI assessment note: “we have a thing called the Roblox operating system that we use for tracking”

Q I think that that's like, credible. What do you think will be the second and third order consequences of that?

A I think the, the positive thing to think about is actually, um, the fun parts around connection and digital play will in a way become very, they're already quite meaningful. I think the, the consequences will be More fluidity in digital play. The feeling that it's not, um, me as a user and them as a creator. The notion, it'll almost be like, um, in the old days, only, you know, one percent of us were oil painters documenting the king's portraiture. Whereas now, I think we all feel like we're oil painters. We have our phone, we have digital, you know, image tools, and we're, we're all kind of feeling like we're part of it. And in a way, rather than a digital technology like reducing the job market for oil painters, it's probably increased the job market. There's a lot more people doing digital imagery. I'm actually thinking the same thing will happen for gaming and that the, the, both the hardcore creator market and all of us will be more involved in the creation of immersive experiences.

AI assessment note: “I think the, the consequences will be More fluidity in digital play.”

Q When things aren't working the way you want them to, what's your inner monologue in those moments?

A Interestingly, I think when we're running companies, we have all the evolutionary biology of being like out there in the wilderness trying to survive and, you know, having battles and all of that. So I think, um, CEOs can get that feeling like, oh my gosh, do I have enough firewood For the next three winters. And it's like, oh, it's not feeling too right. That has been for me an intuitive early thinking thing. What's great is it leads to typically a refinement in strategy or a little bit where you're like, uh, uh, uh, uh, then all of a sudden the light goes on. It's just like, oh, we got the plan. We know exactly what to do. We're gonna send four people out. They're all gonna have axes. We're gonna put in three months Three years of firewood. We think we can do it in three weeks. Everything's great.

AI assessment note: “oh my gosh, do I have enough firewood For the next three winters.”

Q What about incentives for people? What have you gotten right and gotten wrong over the years?

A I think we got really lucky in being really fascinated With incentives. And I think, um, very early on when we started building Roblox, some of the early founders, you know, John and Eric and Matt and myself, we were just really into economics and incentives and what makes people, um, do things in a nice, appropriate way and drives it. At the very start of Roblox, we thought just the incentive of user-generated content, like, whoa, Everyone can make their own game, and they can come and play it, and show it to their friends. We thought that would be an amazing incentive, and we thought that would give us amazing amounts of content. That did prove to be really true, you know. Um, along the way, we, we had a lot of questions around economic incentives, and we, Roblox got pretty big without a developer A way for developers to earn money on the platform. Uh, it was a hobby for everyone. We had people who were working 24 hours a day. Just, they loved their Roblox creation. They were struggling, like, wow, I gotta make a living. I just wanna build on Roblox. So there, we had a lot of, um, board-level discussion. Should we turn this into something where someone could make a living? We actually, in retrospect, it's crazy. Wim went back and forth a lot, like, well, I'm not so sure we should do that. But we did come up with the notion, okay, we're going to build a really elegant system. …

AI assessment note: “we thought just the incentive of user-generated content... That did prove to be really true”

Q How does your metabolic state affect your decision making?

A I do think eating a lot of food or even, even a lot of carbs, we can all feel that kind of slow down, kind of hibernate, Sleepy mode. I think in a more fasted state, you can feel that more alert, like I want to go do stuff kind of thing. And I do think it's good to make decisions in that, um, 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's so hard. I do feel I have learned to tell when I'm in an on mood, when I'm in an off mood, when I'm a little more of an optimistic mode, which I think is general. I do try to observe that from the outside in and say all big decisions make in the optimistic mode. So I do try to like say, is the decision making machinery in the optimal state?

AI assessment note: “I think in a more fasted state, you can feel that more alert”