Roblox
Imagine if kids learned to code while playing video games.
Today, Roblox is a publicly-traded company building a massive platform where millions of people gather in immersive digital worlds — from playing and learning all the way to going to concerts, and maybe even someday, working together.
But in late 2007, when we first met founder Dave Baszucki (aka “Builderman”), it was a basic, blocky game, just emerging from beta. After more than 13 years of partnership, here’s what stood out to us most about Roblox’s story:
- Founder
- David Baszucki
- Initial Partnership
- Seed
- Category
- Consumer
- Partner
- Chris Fralic
- Location
- SF Bay Area
- Founder
- David Baszucki
- Initial Partnership
- Seed
- Category
- Consumer
- Partner
- Chris Fralic
- Location
- SF Bay Area
David Baszucki on taking the long view
“It’s natural to gravitate toward short-term wins. During a pivotal period when we needed more revenue, we spent months implementing the easy fixes on our list, such as online ads and enhancements to existing features. Ultimately building fundamental systems — including our very own full virtual economy — was the better route, even though it took much longer to execute.”
Stay steadfast in your vision.
From working on the earliest prototype of Roblox with co-founder Erik Cassel in 2004 to going public and still leading earnings calls more than two decades later, Dave has had a remarkably consistent vision of creating a new category of "human co-experience" or building the "metaverse" for millions (and eventually maybe billions) to play and communicate together. He never wavered from this vision — even when others didn’t see it.
You can’t cut corners in a viral loop.
Figuring out the right way to deliver on that vision wasn’t easy though. “We knew we wanted an immersive 3D multiplayer immersive experience, but we thought we could get there faster with more of a puzzle game. As is true with many ‘shortcuts,’ this did not get a lot of traction. We knew within a week that this thing was not viral. Erik and I had to make the difficult decision to hunker down for an additional nine months to get to the full first cut of what Roblox is today.”
Let users take the wheel.
The next version of Roblox had just one hangout spot, called Crossroads, which was built by the team. “After a few months of working on it, we released our creation engine, Roblox Studio, so users could push their own stuff. The virality we saw in those first days was unbelievable. It was a really good affirmation of building systems and crowd technology rather than building it ourselves,” says Dave.
We realized that our creator community had incredible imagination and ideas that went beyond what any one company could do on their own.
Keep iterating
When we first looked at Roblox in late 2007, the valuation seemed high and it didn't perfectly fit our model. But thanks to one particularly enthusiastic 8-year-old beta tester (the son of First Round partner Chris Fralic), we kept tabs on the company. We invested in July 2009, impressed by how quickly Dave was iterating (already on v87 of his business model) and by how they’d grown from 300K to 1.6M hours played per week.
Don’t discount a “slow bake”
While other startups immediately took off, Roblox was more of what we like to call a “slow bake.” There were many bumps along the way, from numbers that were wildly off plan, to key hires that didn't work out, to follow-on fundraising challenges. Roblox eventually experienced 10x growth from 9M to 90M users between 2016-2019 — more than a decade after its founding. For us, it’s a reminder of the role that patience plays in company building.
It takes a long time to build a transcendent company, and you’ll often be misunderstood or undervalued for most of that time. The bulk of Roblox’s journey was steady, heads-down community building and product refinement.
Sometimes the best signals aren't on a spreadsheet.
For First Round partner Chris Fralic, the most telling early sign of product-market fit came from the walls of their early office, covered in handwritten letters from young players who had taken the time to mail their appreciation to Roblox HQ.
Rally your early users.
Roblox invested heavily in community, holding its first user conference in August 2011. Fans could meet up to share ideas, interact with the team, and learn about future plans. (First Round partner Chris was in attendance with his son, Max, of course.)
Use focus as a forcing function
A pivotal moment was when Roblox got accepted to be on the Xbox platform. But the team couldn’t include all the millions of games available on Roblox — they launched with just 15. “It forced them to think about quality over quantity, really focusing on how good the games were as the first onboarding experience, and it worked extremely well on Xbox,” says Chris Fralic.
Mind hype:substance
In 2013, First Round partner Josh Kopelman wrote: “For most other startups, the Hype:Substance ratio skews far more towards Hype. But not with Roblox. I still think it's the best kept secret of the industry.”
In 2017 that started to change, as Roblox crossed 1M concurrent players for the first time, launched a toy line based on characters, and was featured in Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report with nearly 50 million MAU.