Building The Next-Gen Entertainment Platform with Roblox | Greymatter

Hi everyone, I'm David Z, general partner at Greylock Partners. Welcome to our podcast Gray Matter, where we bring in some of today's top tech entrepreneurs and business leaders to share their story from startup to scale up. Today we're talking with David Buzzucki, the CEO and founder of roblox, the first next generation gaming and social platform. We're going to discuss, go to market strategies, learning lessons of founding CEOs and the future of gaming. Dave, happy to have you here.

Dave, it's a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited to share this podcast with you.

That's great. Well, let's start out where we first met. You and I share a history in that our kids went to the same school together for many years. I remember, gosh, probably 10, 15 years ago when there was the annual science fair at our school and you were showing off the very first version of the physics engines of Roblox. Tell me a little bit about what that was there for you and how you had gotten to that point and how you went from there to where we are today.

Yeah, so our kids went to a school that was really founded around creativity. And prior to testing Roblox, really in the science fair, even prior to that, with the product we made, it was called Interactive Physics. We had worked with students using tools from my last company. It was called Knowledge Revolution. We made a tool called Interactive Physics. It was, it allowed students to build and model physics experiments on the computer. We found, though very interestingly, that when kids and students and people were playing with Interactive physics, more than doing physics experiments, they wanted to build stuff. They wanted to build buildings, they wanted to build cars, they wanted to see what happened when the car hit the wall. And it was kind of the germination for this idea about Roblox. We saw that the people playing with interactive physics, they wanted to go into the worlds they were. We saw that they wanted to have an avatar to go into that world. They saw that they wanted to have a bit of a social graph so they could play with their friends. And we saw that they wanted to start sharing this. So these notions all kind of came together with this idea around Roblox. We built the very first version, just me and my co founder. You saw a very, very early, primitive version of a physically simulated. In the cloud sandbox construction game that later became Roblox.

It was amazing. Even in its very primitive form, you could see the kids engaging. You could see their eyes light up when they could build something. And it had real physics to it. Something they created could be empowered with the platform and the features that you'd enabled even then to create great experiences.

Yeah, you know, we knew UGC and user generated content was big with interactive physics. When we saw people go into their worlds, then the light bulb really, really went on in our heads. So we knew from the start we wanted Roblox to be a UGC creation platform. And that intuition was validated again. When we started the company and ran for about a month, there was only one place on Roblox. There was one game, we had made it and at peak times we maybe had 30 or 40 people playing. It was very small. But there was a magical day when we then released Roblox Studio and opened the UGC floodgates. And that's where that validation was essentially revalidated. Because from that day on the, the amount of creation just became overwhelming to us. And it started what is today, this really big platform where we have over 90 million players and over 2 million creators every month making content.

Yeah, it's a big jump from 30 to 60 users at a time.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So that's interesting. So the physics engine and the platform and I think one of the strengths of your vision has always been build the fundamental primitives, the fundamental building blocks and inspire the community to create great things. Talk a little about that.

It's a principle that we have seen time and time again in that when we go to the community and use UGC or crowdsourced or self serve type principles, it does us very well. And ultimately the power of our user community is much greater than anything we could ever create. So we've revalidated this principle not just for creation and for fun, but in other ways as well. For example, our monetization, it's based on our development developer community. Those 2 million developers each independently coming up with creative ways to monetize their individual games and experiences. So it's always done well for us that way.

Yeah, it's been amazing to watch your evolution. I mean, I came from a background of having worked in games, first at a company called Electronic Arts and then another smaller company called Crystal Dynamics. And the traditional game model has always been in house or contracted developers where you hire a bunch of engineers, you hire a bunch of game designers, you hire a huge art department nowadays and you make these big investments and you need real big hits to succeed and you have to have a string of hits, which leads inevitably to an emphasis on doing sequels if you have a hit and reduces creativity over time. If you're not careful Roblox is a very, very different model. Talk about that ecosystem that you created and how it's different from traditional games.

Yeah, we like to think that UGC really stands for self service, self service publishing, self service creation. And it's much more difficult than a traditional gaming platform. It involves issues of civility, of safety, of moderation. It also involves creating a tool set that millions of people can use and dip their toe in, get their feet wet as they're learning, move from one person to five to 10 bigger studio types things. So UGC is a very powerful thing. It requires a lot of responsibility and a lot of extra care and feeding. But then once it starts to go, you create an ecosystem where the content is explosive. And the range of content that we see on Roblox now spans from traditional games to things that you would much more call an experience. Let's together run away from a tornado because it's kind of scary, it's not competitive, or maybe let's be in a fashion show together, let's pretend we're birds together. So we actually see the range of experiences more bounded by our tool set than by our own imagination. And it's starting to cover gaming, social experiences, learning type experiences, even experiences where people start to practice real life skills. There's experiences in Roblox where you can learn to use a cash register. So we think there's enormous power in the UGC concept.

I know you've had a real great emphasis on creativity and education and talk about some of the programs that you're using at Roblox to use the platform to help that sort of education, creativity, because I think it's very inspiring.

So the prior company, Interactive Physics, we were an intentional educational tool. We like to think that Roblox is a unintentional educational tool where we can create enormous educational benefits by making Roblox as big and fun, as safe as possible. Because then we have hundreds and hundreds of engineers making Roblox better. We can support a freemium model and teachers can use it for free in their class. All their students might get used to it. So what we see is an enormous groundswell of creativity and learning where the people learning and creating don't really feel like they have to do it. We see people learning how to code because they want to make great games. We see people learning how to do 2D and 3D art because they want to make avatars. We see people learning group political skills because they want to be a group leader. So we see a lot of skills organically evolve and when we talk to kids and parents, we see a lot of people getting really excited about doing well in school, starting to pick what they're good at, and getting motivated to try being a computer scientist. Even though they might be coming from some area where they might not have considered that.

Yeah, it's very cool to see. We've been at Roblox now for more than a decade. I know for a long while it was slow going and you had to lead a team when success was not completely clear. And then there was a period of massive churning, that classic curve that people always draw of how their company is going to go and no one ever does it. And all of a sudden you did it. Talk about the challenges as a CEO leading in both those environments, the long haul through the desert to get to the promised land, and then the crazy rapid growth over the last three or four years.

So when we started the company over 10 years ago, we had a slide in our business plan that described a category parallel to gaming and to social and to media. It's the category we think of as the human co experience category. It's the category where people do things together like they do on Roblox. Having that as a foundational vision coupled with what you might call slow growth. 40%, 50% a year in Silicon Valley can sometimes be slow growth. But doing that for many years. I think what was very powerful for all of us is we knew that vision was out there and all of the people on our team were going for that vision and we had enormously good people. So we what happened about three or four years ago, we believe we've analyzed it and tried to figure it out and done. All this correlation analysis is more simply Metcalfe's law. And that is the bigger a network gets, the more valuable a network is and the more valuable then the more fun it is for other kids to come and play. So when two or three people from the same classroom start to like a platform, you start to get critical mass for that whole classroom to kind of jump in and join the platform. It's coupled with something unique about the types of businesses we're in, in that there's a couple viral loops driving the business. There is both a content viral loop and that is the better and the more content we have, the more people want to play and then the more our developer community can expand and make a bigger living by making more content. So you have a bit of that YouTube UGC content loop. But what's cool about Roblox is that content isn't Just consumed by my itself. People play together in that content. So the content loop then can power a social graph loop, which is also viral. And the more of my friends that are on the platform, the better the platform is as well. So we like to think we have two viral loops running together that power each other. Having those types of fundamentals for our business and seeing that early on, that also gave a lot of confidence and faith to the team as we went through what we would call slow growth in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, it's amazing. The old gaming model that I described has been sort of compared to the Netflix model, where you make these huge investments and you have to drive your own hits. And it can work if you're at scale, but it is hugely, hugely risky. And I know you just made the analogy to YouTube. Roblox has been described as that where it's really creators and consumers working together in an ecosystem. It's interesting to hear you add in how the extra viral loop is in there and also how the experiential loop is more engaged. And I think that is magic. Talk about a little bit for you as a CEO. What were some of the things that you had to learn as the company scaled and things you're proud about that you took on as challenges? What were the things that you had to learn and were surprised by?

Yeah, I think a couple learnings that I think have done well for us. And we have a little model sometimes that there's various types of Silicon Valley companies. Some companies are founded with the idea of making a lot of money and then they back into a vision and then they back into great people. We founded maybe fortuitously in a little bit of a more naive way where we just loved the idea of immersive experiences and what this could be. So we actually started the company without ridiculously grand vision. Could we just be a small team? Could we do this? But our vision was very big. At the same time. What I've seen happen in our company now is by following that vision, we were able to take really big risks and take some big shots five or six years out. And as that has started to pay off, we have now migrated more and more to a people company even than a vision company. And I think once a business model is proven and you show some robustness in having a 10x scale on that business model, that's the time when we've made the intentional movement. It's all about the people now. And it's can we find great people? Can we organize the company in a way that we can scale to drive that vision. I think that's a natural progression. And caution people about starting a pure financial type company as opposed to that risky vision company where you can take some big bets.

Yeah, you've done a nice job of balancing those things. I've been lucky enough to see a lot of hyper growth companies and you certainly would fit the bill. And I've noticed they're usually founded by a founder who is instinctual and really understands the vision embodies that vision. As the company grows, usually find two challenges. One is as there's more people, how do you transmit that vision? How do you keep people focused when there's so many different people in the company now compared to when it was a much smaller group? Number one and then number two is all of a sudden you have data. Before you didn't have data and there's sort of a beauty because you could do it from your gut and your instincts. Now you have all this data coming and sometimes they don't match up. Can you talk a little bit about how you keep the vision and true north in people as they come on and as you grow much, much bigger than you were when you started and can then also touch on how do you think about innovation and instinct and the knowledge that you have and the team has embedded along with data coming in from the side and when those don't actually agree.

We have a vision that we can connect the world through play. And that play stands for something bigger which is doing things together, meeting people overseas, understanding people from different backgrounds. And eventually we believe as people connect and play in a digital realm, it can help bridge some misunderstandings. It's absolutely essential at any scale that every individual contributor can map their contribution all the way from the feature area to the team area, to the product roadmap area, to the one year roadmap for the company, to the mission, to the vision. There's amazing power in having very simple principles and allowing people to work in teams with a lot of responsibility that we try to map inside of our company. So we've developed a little bit of a really cool structure. Everyone in the company works on a team. The team has a vision and a mission and a roadmap. We tie those teams together with yearly themes and you know, by doing this month after month company meetings, creating that connective tissue. Hopefully everyone at Roblox, if you say like what are you working on? They say, well, we're kind of trying to connect the world through play. So I think that's super, super important. We are In a bit of a migration from heavily instinctual visionary company to now starting to carve off intentionally the piece of the company that's a little bit more of a traditional growth analytics type basis thing. We've had our growth team for a while, that's going to get bigger. And I would say our natural evolution would be as we start to line up the big visionary chunks is that ratio of growth iteration type pieces of the company will naturally expand. And then the final thing, I would say one of the most exciting things in the company is seeing analytical results that don't match your intuition. Those are really the exciting mind blowers because they give you an opportunity to step back and try to re understand. Oh my gosh. That can happen because it can reset not just your intuition on one feature, but your whole worldview. Like how is this possible? So we like to see that.

Yeah, it's great, it's great to see those two things coming together because that's usually a big step in the next phase of a company when they can do that. You have a dominant presence in youth in America and increasingly internationally who play on your platform. Can we talk a little bit about what kind of responsibility that creates for you and also how you think about trust and safety in that context? Because I think each one of these networks and systems have different attributes. For example, having been an early investor in LinkedIn, the trust and the connectivity between people in a business environment was very important. And so it was built differently than some of the other social networks to reflect that. Talk about roadblocks in that context.

When we put together our corporate values about eight years ago, when we were much more under the radar, one of the big ones was respect the community. And it stemmed really from the early days of Roblox when we used to do customer service. We used to read reports coming in and we would take it down to an individual player. So thinking about that individual person, then magnify that by 91 million, it's an enormous responsibility. The responsibility I think gets almost magnified in that we're still very early in the days when parents and families view digital 3D experiences like Roblox as another form of media. Just like we view video or we view books or we view other things, we're still very early. We're very optimistic that long term the educational benefits and the social benefits are going to be ginormous. We're also in a bit of an early phase where the technology is just getting to the point where digital experiences are many, many more times safer than many physical experiences or many other types of online experiences. So we have an enormous responsibility. I'm quite optimistic that in some amount of time, we will all view digital experiences with the corresponding AI and the safety. And almost as if there's a virtual person watching that interaction and taking steps, we'll view that as incredibly safe, you know, hundreds of times safer. We just have to kind of lean into this, and I believe there's almost an opportunity, opportunity here for leading that revolution, kind of leaning into the civility thing and creating civil society online. That can be an enormous benefit for us. And I think a benefit of it is that our players get to be good digital citizens. In the process, they learn how to interact and experience things in 3D, that they can take lessons to their regular physical life from their digital life.

Yeah. One of the things I think is really exciting is this platform that you've built between creators and players and the interactions between them and the ecosystem and the monetization system that you've created. As you grow internationally, there's just a huge opportunity for incredible diversity. I mean, one of the ways this system has really thrived, as you said, is the creativity of the diversity. Now you put international into it. I remember we were investors in a company called Viki, which did crowdsource translations of media from one region to another. And it was amazing things that were unexpected. Like, it turned out that in the Middle east, they loved Korean soap operas. The Korean soap opera company would never have realized this, and they never would have bothered to go translate it into Arabic. But once Viki, as an open ecosystem, had user generated translation, suddenly this explosive usage happened in the Middle east of Korean soap opera. So it was just this aha moment for me on when you unleash creativity on a platform and you take it to a worldwide scale, some of these magical things that can happen. Talk a little about your excitement about that and some of your visions, even if they're a little further out there on what could happen.

We are just in the process of starting to provide our developers with the tools that allow them to share their experiences in many, many languages and to allow their whole community to come in and translate an experience into many, many languages. So now on Roblox, if you happen to be in Korea and I was in the us, you may be playing where all of the signs in this room are in Korean and I'll play with you where everything I see is English. So there's a little bit of this vision of the universal 3D translator, where ultimately we'll be chatting together as well and kind of coexisting in this space. And we've seen signs of this as well. When we look now at some US experiences that don't quite hit the top 10 in the US we've seen a few of the translated versions hit number one or two in Korea. So starting to see this ability for different experiences to do differently in different countries, even though there's a lot of overlap. Our vision is a 12 year old publishes a cool game or experience or 3D whatever on Roblox and besides working on all devices, phone, tablet, computer, console, the community, if they like it, can jump in and make it run all around the world. So one experience running everywhere on all platforms is a bit of where we're going.

Let's move into competition. I remember early on at Facebook when I was an early investor there, MySpace was 10 times as big and was considered this dominant player. There was a lot of pressure that they would never catch up to MySpace and it was going to be this dominant thing that was going to win everything. I note that in the days of Roblox, Minecraft was really big early on and there was a lot of people that were doubting it was Even true with LinkedIn. I've always been incredibly inspired by a founder CEO's ability to stay the course, to believe and to execute on the things that need to make a difference. Now, of course you've zoomed as you predicted and as many of us were naysayers on way past Minecraft. Talk about how you as a founder, how you keep your team focused around that and what are the things you think you did that allowed you to get through and blow by them.

This 3D human co experience space is really interesting because it's a little bit unbounded on what it can be. So it's a really big playing field to play on. The Minecraft experience was, as you can imagine, both interesting, invigorating and difficult. In that out of nowhere came one of the top Hindi hits of all time. We'd been plugging along for several years and it really stole the thunder. We did have many meetings with people who on first glance, well, you should copy them. And that was always a little uncomfortable intuitively to us. I believe the job of the CEO is seeing what 10x can look like and what your own vision of that 10x is. How do you tell the future? What, independent of your competition, do you think the future is going to look like and are you working on that? The good news is, and I think what panned out there's about seven or eight future things that we were working on at the time that we stayed the course on. Our prediction came true on many things. One is a unified platform across all devices. No segmentation, stable APIs that are never deprecated and always work. A friend graph and a social graph being important freemium rather than paid, important play. There's about four or five others that we did stick the course. Some difficult board meetings, as you can imagine, in the midst of it. But now we're glad we stayed the course. And I think the lesson there is our job is to have that same set of things going out five or 10 years, you know, move the aperture. We're in the same stuff all over again. The things are heating up. We have gaming on Snap, on Facebook, on Tencent, we have gaming on Stadia from the Unreal Store, from Valve, from Apple, from Google. There's now so much heat in this ecosystem that we're again in this mode of can we foretell the future and stick to those principles and things that are going to take us there? So we think we are, but we'll see in a few years.

One of the things that's on that path that you just described is if you're lucky enough to get successful, all of a sudden large partners come to you and say, hey, we'd like to work with you, we'd like to partner you with you, we'd like to associate with your brand and vice versa. That can be both a huge opportunity. It can also be a huge distraction and risk. You've got some interesting things that you've done in partnerships. Maybe you can talk about those as lessons maybe to others on how you thought about partnerships and what you think the opportunity is and the risks.

Yeah, so we have been very lucky in not having an advertising model so far. It makes us leaner. We don't have an ad salesforce. We have a transactional model which works wonderfully. What's interesting is in immersive 3D experiences, rather than seeing something, you can experience something. I could wear shoes from Nike or I can become one of the stars from the World Wrestling Federation. So what's interesting long term is a lot of our users associate with some pretty cool brands. And we have the opportunity because we don't have to take all brands to pick brands that we think our users want to relate with and dip a toe in the water, let them become one of the NFL players, let them wear potentially Nike shoes. It's really wonderful. And the numbers are enormous. Fives and tens of millions of people experiencing these types of brands. So we're in a beautiful place now with these brands. We're using them more in a way to make the experience better for our users. It hints at a future that many people have been dreaming about for 10 years, which is immersive 3D native advertising that is way out there that we don't have to tackle right now. But it hints at a wonderful way for brands to ultimately reach people.

One of the key aspects of the platform, of course, is your identity and the creation of the avatar and how you're represented in that world. Can you talk a little bit about why that's important?

When we started Roblox, we had this notion of just as UGC gaming was going to be big, we wanted the avatar to be UGC as well. And so we've evolved the system now where all of our players put together all kinds of pieces, Body parts, heads, faces. They can design their own clothing and sell that clothing. We end up with a system where there's a real deep connection with everyone's avatar. The connection is actually so deep that we've started making toys on the side of a lot of the famous avatars on Roblox, and that makes this unique educational proposition. Whereas people see Roblox action figures in the stores, it drives home, oh, my gosh, look at this variety. It's being powered by UGC just as our games are, and it helps educate people that this is a UGC platform. We see this connection with avatar as being really important. And as our players go through various phases of growing up, we can see our players starting to have a phase in the ages of 12 to 15 where identity is critically important. Who you are, what I stand for, what avatar I choose to be, and we almost view it as our job. We need to supply that avatar. We need to let them either build or find or become that avatar in the future. Just as our players very much know how to discriminate between physical and digital reality, that avatar starts to represent them in this digital reality. Our view would be, it's not dystopian, like second Life. It's part of your life where good things actually happen. And that avatar over time is your representation. So we really want to be a UGC avatar platform for all of our users as they get older.

Well, we couldn't talk about avatars without talking about the very first avatar. Talk about how you chose your avatar and what it is and what it represents.

Today, when we were launching Roblox, one of these social networks, when you Signed up. You immediately had a friend with someone and it might have even been, I forget which one.

It was MySpace.

Yeah. So we thought, we need to have someone who's gonna be a friend with everyone. There was time. A day I remember in particular Eric and myself were in our office playing. Was one of those afternoons where we said, okay, we've launched this next version. Let's go make new avatars. I sat in front of the computer, log into Roblox. There's about 200 users, which I be. And building was so much a part of it, I said, I'm going to be Builderman. So pick the name. Became Builderman for about a month when we had just launched, where in the afternoons we would play on the platform and we would know everyone on the platform. You know, we, we weren't like a company today where you launch with 100,000 people. We launched with 100 people and we knew everyone. So then Builderman became this avatar that everyone friended and now it's achieved this life of its own. It's a little bit of our iconic character on Roblox.

I've been lucky enough to witness some of the numerous kids that come for your in office tours. So it crosses from the virtual to the physical. And I've seen the awe in their eyes when they meet Builderman, AKA David Bouzucki talk about that. The crossover from the virtual to the real.

The tours reinforce our respect, the community values we have. People come from around the world every Friday to visit Roblox headquarters and classically on these tours. We've always had the notion that we're going to treat our players as if they're up and coming professional content creators. So we always treat our future artist, your future pro game dev, you're a future producer, your future whatever. One of the things we like to do on the tours, we walk them through a little bit of a product feature, roadmap, discussion, bug discussion, and wrap that tour community in. We learn a lot of great stuff from all these people who visit and now it's become a bit larger than life every Friday.

It's a great thing to witness. So In April of 2019, Roblox hit a new milestone. 90 million monthly active users. Talk a little bit about how you and your team made this happen.

Yeah. So one thing we realized probably three or four years ago is to get to the scale that ultimately we believe these types of platforms can support. The growth has to be organic in not just viral loop, friend invite, but at the most primeval level, which is pure Word of mouth that has been the engine that has driven Roblox enormously. And it's amplified because a lot of our players are making content. We see that now starting to take hold in other countries. So in Germany, in France, in Japan, in Korea, in all those countries, we're growing at more than 2x per year. Once again, not from paid traffic, but from people inviting their friends to come and play together and see their creations.

Yeah, it's wonderful, Steve, just to give our audience a sense of what you've achieved and what Roblox has achieved. Talk about how big Roblox is and some of the metrics that give people a sense of.

Yeah, our primary metric at Roblox is engagement time. How much time are people spending, creating, playing, learning with their friends? That number's now gone over a billion hours per month. So to put that in perspective, it's about 10% of Netflix. It's much bigger than any show on TV and it starts to dwarf a lot of other typical type media experiences. Our developer community is over 2 million developers and I believe we have over half a million creators in Europe last year, which is just a great signal that we're starting to see creation grow around the world. Really. Our top creators on the platform have migrated from individuals to small teams to studios, which are now burgeoning companies making upwards of $5 million a year running on top of this ecosystem that can continues to expand. So we're really happy with the growth and we can see many countries where we're still very small and there's enormous potential.

Switching topics a little bit to culture, always something hard and always something evolving. Can you share your philosophy on company culture and how that's played out in Roblox?

I got some good advice very early on that one way to talk about an established culture is take your first five or ten employees where you weren't really thinking about your values yet, you're just thinking about getting started and getting something going. Take those five or 10 employees and don't make up the values, just record the values that worked to how you got there, because that's almost the core DNA that got you there. Those values for us include self organization and respecting the community, getting stuff done. Take those values and then rather than telling people to memorize and follow those values, make sure your executive leadership team and then the next layer down espouses those values and you hire against those values. Because then what people can find out is, whoa, they're walking the walk and talking the talk. These values do make sense. I can see how Roblox's team structure is based on personal responsibility and self organization. I can see why we have so many customer service people in moderation because we have to really respect the community. So you got to do it early and it's got to be authentic and then you have to live it by example. People learn it that way as opposed to trying to teach everyone your values.

Makes a lot of sense. Well Dave, as we've discussed, I've watched you over many years with Roblox and really you've been visionary and stayed the course and proven that the course you are on is where the world would come to rather than reverse. That of course leads me to have to ask you the question, what do you see going forward and what do you see in the future of gaming, the future of social and how does Roblox play in that?

We're looking at enormous new categories that are being created. And what I see is gaming companies trying to be more social, recognizing the need to make a game social and try to make it an evergreen experience so that we don't have what you talked about from your early days where you could imagine a game lasting for five or 10 years. And then you can see social companies all saying, oh my gosh, we need to have gaming part of that social fabric. So it's almost as if gaming companies are going to get social, social companies are going to get more gamified. And because of that, it's harkening at this new human co experience category that we think is emerging, really imagining the future of gaming. I would point to Sci Fi, I would point to the Matrix to Ready Player one in a positive rather than dystopian view. And that I believe is going to be the future. These environments are going to become more immersive, more realistic. We're going to be able to do whatever we want in these environments with a lot of learning and benefits of people meeting people around the world and understanding them. So then what happens is it becomes a matter of timing. How and when are these things going to happen? If you're too early, you can flame out and the technology won't support it or the culture won't support it. And if you're too late, someone else is going to do it. VR is a great example of we know it's going to happen, but it's been too early a few times and arguably might still be too early. So ultimately the immersion's going to get photorealistic. The ability to feel your way in these environments is going to feel More and more real. It's just going to be a matter of timing and how you capitalize on that. The future is going to be multi device. And we really took a gamble on that five or six years ago when we saw the iPhone for the very first time, took what was a big traditional HTML web and rather than reformatting it, took that exact same content and made it available with a pinch and a zoom. So one content works anywhere. That's how we kind of believe the future is going to work in the 3D space as well. 3D immersive content, physically simulated content is going to be accessible on any device through different camera control, different UI control, but the content is going to be universal. We also think that, that ultimately for people to build really good experiences, the more simulation that's involved in the environment, the more realistic the environment, the easier it is to build your experience. And so in our vision out of the box, when there's a forest in Roblox, if I were to accidentally drop a match, the forest will catch on fire. It shouldn't be something that a developer adds on top. The default state should be things work like the real world. If I take the wheel off a car, the car should drag the axle. I should be able to put pieces together and ultimately do a lot of operations. So I think we're going to see higher fidelity, physically simulated environments that work on any device, that work around the world in really cool ways and allow people to do amazing things.

While Roblox certainly is well positioned in that, given where you've brought it to, and the combinations of the physics, engineering, the primaries, the social aspects of it, and actually the economic ecosystem too. So it's exciting future vision. And Roblox appears to be front and center in all of that, so that's great. Are there other advice you got along the way that stuck with you or advice that you would give to someone who is starting out in a company?

At its very simplest, we are fortunate to exist in an ecosystem where we can imagine 10 or 20x headroom without pivoting the company without starting something new, and imagining that 10-20x headroom I think is necessary to have something to dig into and chomp off. So having a vision of something that can be reasonably big, that gives you the headroom to dive in, coupled with knowing that with that vision, it's all a people game, it really simplifies down to a vision in the right space and the right people. And those two things can combine to make magic.

That's great. It's funny. I've heard the example of you need to be able to see and describe what Mount Everest looks like out there in the distance. You need to assemble your team that could actually climb Mount Everest if you ever got there. And then you need to find all the points along the way to declare victory and to earn your right to get to the next base camp.

That is exactly right. And one of our final values is take the long view but iterate to get there.

I think that's great. Well David, thank you. It's been great to speak with you and the success of Roblox has been just wonderful to watch and be a part of. I'm honored that you were willing to take me on that journey and allow me to be part of it. It's been a ton of fun and I look forward to the 10x that we're going to do together going forward. Your insights have been really great, both on culture, on how to create an ecosystem, how to stick with your vision and not get drawn to the side by other people's criticisms or other views, and how to really execute and grow and scale a team that owns that vision from the top down. Listeners, if you have any feedback or any topics we discussed today or topics you'd like to hear in the future, Tweet us at GreylockVC. And thank you for subscribing to Gray Matter.

And thank you, Dave. It's really been great and fun to work with you.