How Roblox Built a Digital Economy Beneath the Games

**David Baszucki** (0:00)
In Q4 of last year, I was 35 billion hours, pushing 12 billion hours a month. That's a pretty interesting stat. In Q4 of last year, we were at 150 million daily actives. Global gaming market is emblematic of really a new way of people to communicate. When we think about this market, we think not just gaming, but ultimately what we might call the human co-experience market. Our developer creator earned about a billion and a half on the platform, and it goes pretty deep, like top thousand devs are averaging 1.3 million. The most underrated aspect of Roblox is how much deep tech and theories around economics and theories around systems sit underneath it. Underneath it, there is enormous technical complexity. There's two ways to think about the acceleration. One is, what is the future of a game? If I was a user and infinite AI was available to a user, it's almost as if we can't imagine what that game would look like. Imagining AI is super powered in 50 years, what percent of adults work 8-hour jobs a day?
Hopefully, we've already been rolling. We already have some good material.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:27)
Yeah, we're gonna see how spicy this can get.

**David Baszucki** (1:29)
You want, what level of spice do you like?

**Molly O'Shea** (1:31)
Let's go like super flaming hot Cheeto spice.

**David Baszucki** (1:35)
Okay. Did you know that some Cheetos products have various levels of spice on the individual chips?

**Molly O'Shea** (1:44)
No.

**David Baszucki** (1:45)
Yeah, and it's a Pavlovian response where you don't even know it, and you're eating individual chips. No. 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 when you talk about spicy chips, like, yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:09)
Okay, wow, it's like Cheeto peppers, but it's...

**David Baszucki** (2:13)
Unpredictable Cheetos. Yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:16)
How did you know that?

**David Baszucki** (2:17)
I don't know.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:18)
You don't know.

**David Baszucki** (2:18)
It's some weird Pavlovian psychology thing.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:21)
Wow. Okay. Well, let's just keep, you know, the hottest Cheeto possible, I guess.

**David Baszucki** (2:29)
We'll try to keep it hot. Okay. We'll try to bubble the hot Cheeto to the top.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:33)
Well, thanks for having us today.

**David Baszucki** (2:34)
Great to be here.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:35)
Welcome to Sourcery.

**David Baszucki** (2:35)
Thank you.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:36)
Your campus is huge.

**David Baszucki** (2:38)
Thank you.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:39)
It's ginormous. How many buildings are here?

**David Baszucki** (2:41)
So there are five buildings. We are sitting 20 years ago. We would have been watching horse racing. Like we would have been looking that way and there would have been horses. So we're in the Old Bay Meadows area of San Mateo. This was a development of five buildings. I think we're in four of them right now. I would say it's a vestige of what happened in COVID where it has some very wise people in the company and weekly executive meetings. Are we remote forever? Are we in person?
We are very much innovation culture, used to whiteboarding, used to being together. 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.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:24)
How many miles around the campus do you walk a day?

**David Baszucki** (3:27)
Depends on the day, because some days, I go for walks for an hour with people.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:35)
You guys also come in with a squad, like even coming through here, I think there's been like 15 people in this room.

**David Baszucki** (3:42)
Oh really? You like that? Yeah. Yeah. Now we have like, hey squad, what's going on over there? Now we have a good squad. Yeah. Hopefully, you can pick up some energy.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:53)
As you build out the headquarters, how is that going to facilitate this new development of digital worlds? I know you want and you have a goal of reaching 10 percent of global gaming.

**David Baszucki** (4:06)
That's right. The external goal is 10 percent of global gaming. Global gaming is about 200 billion dollar market. We did 6.8 billion in bookings last year, 10 percent would be like 20 That'd be a reasonable first step at where we would like to go. But really, I would say the global gaming market is emblematic of really a new way of people to communicate. In a lot of games, people are in, sometimes it's the holodeck almost, a 3D place where they're playing hide and go seek, or they're playing a more traditional sports game or something like that. And so really, when we think about this market, we think not just gaming, but ultimately what we might call the human co-experience market or that sci-fi, holodeck type space. So we need real people, real engineers, real product people, real designers to build this platform out. There's a lot of interesting magnification in our products. So for all of the several thousand people we have here, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people working on Roblox, making a living on the platform.