David Baszucki, Roblox

**David Senra** (0:02)
You just said something interesting right before we started recording. I asked you how old you were when you started Roblox.

**David Baszucki** (0:07)
That's right.

**David Senra** (0:08)
You told me the age, and then you said, oh, there's actually an interesting story and metaphor there. What did you mean by that?

**David Baszucki** (0:11)
So first off, super interesting story, because arguably one could say I started Roblox when I was two years old, because a lot of this shit really fascinates me. But there's an interesting story, because before Roblox, I had started a company called Knowledge Revolution. Physics, enter educational software, simulator, how to learn physics, very early getting into motion and simulation and all of that. We were in this very unique position with Knowledge Revolution way back in the early days of the Mac, and that we had all of these kids, instead of using it to do their physics experiments, they were starting to build stuff. It was 2D at that time.
It was just in the pre-internet time, and so we could see them all trying to build and share their stuff. So we see, oh my gosh, there's going to be a whole new market here, immersive, 3D, multiplayer, playing, working, learning, listening to music, all of that stuff. What happened along the way to the founding of Roblox is in that period after Knowledge Revolution, I took a two-year sabbatical, in a way, I went a little astray. I started going more, almost more logical. Okay, I want to start a company.
I wasn't thinking about just all of the stuff we learned at Knowledge Revolution. 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 building something very innovative. So instead of this logical track, me and some several people actually from Knowledge Revolution said, we're going to do this very unorthodox thing and build this wacky new product. Immersive human co-experience, multiplayer, cloud-based, creator-led, UGC, very illogical, very risky.

**David Senra** (2:20)
It was logical and risky because at the time you were doing this, this is like 2002, 2003?

**David Baszucki** (2:26)
No one got it back then and no one quite thought of it. We had a business plan slide along the way when we finally raised some angel money. That's actually very accurate to today and it was a little bit, what's the history of storytelling and communication? That history of communication was the mail system, voice, texting, maybe video, but in sci-fi, everyone was talking about the holodeck and that immersive stuff we would see on Star Trek. We actually believed it and that was part of the idea behind starting Roblox. We thought 3D immersive digital stuff would combine communication, being in the same place with storytelling, and that's how we got our launch.
The other cool thing about the launch is we initially thought it was so fun and cool to work on. Even a four-person lifestyle company at that time was very up-dealing.

**David Senra** (3:24)
Okay, so four-person lifestyle company, because the first company you started, you didn't raise any outside capital for, correct?

**David Baszucki** (3:29)
Knowledge Revolution got very far without raising any money.

**David Senra** (3:32)
You sold it for what, 20 million?

**David Baszucki** (3:33)
That's exactly right.

**David Senra** (3:35)
That's when you took the sabbatical.

**David Baszucki** (3:36)
That's correct.

**David Senra** (3:36)
Explain to me how you knew that you were being logical instead of following your intuition during this sabbatical. What do you mean by logical?

**David Baszucki** (3:44)
I think logical goes to what's someone trying to optimize for.
Literally, at that time, I had been a CEO. So in a way, I was optimizing for being another CEO and dropping into CEO-ness when, in fact, a lot of the magic of Knowledge Revolution had been about inventing new stuff. That was actually, for some of the early Knowledge Revolution people and myself, that was actually our superpower. It wasn't like just that being a CEO thing. So when I came out of Knowledge Revolution, I actually went and looked at a bunch of CEO jobs that seemed like the logical thing.

**David Senra** (4:25)
Wait, applying to be a CEO of a company you didn't start?

**David Baszucki** (4:29)
That's right. What a mistake, right?

**David Senra** (4:31)
What's your distinction between the difference between a founder and a CEO?

**David Baszucki** (4:35)
Well, I kind of learned at that time. Actually, my founder mode from Knowledge Revolution, I couldn't find a position.