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“The company, Roblox is really running almost as if it's nine separate companies. They are all very well connected. We all get together once a week and connect all these companies together. There is a three d cloud simulation and toolset company running within Roblox. There is a mini cloud infrastructure computers. All of it we decide to do that? We initially, we just wanted we were actually pretty naive.”

“Instead of this logical track, me and some several people actually from Knowledge Revolution said we're gonna do this very unorthodox thing and build this wacky new product, you know, immersive human co experience, multiplayer, cloud based, creator led UGC. Very illogical, very risky. We actually believed it, and that was part of the idea behind starting Roblox. We thought three d immersive digital stuff would combine communication, being in the same place with storytelling.”

“I think it's, in a way, owning our destiny, in a way. So I would say building data centers is... data center cost performance control. Yes. What other areas of the business are you like that with? Our game engine, for example. We said we we always imagine we need a multiplayer three d engine that does 10% of everything really well.”

“Behind the scenes is very complicated. So when Grow a Garden hits 20,000,000 people at the same time, there's a lot going on there. That’s 20,000,000 people all around the world. They are connecting to data centers in Poland or in Singapore or in Brazil. They are connecting to our core databases. Running that is is very interestingly complex. That is part of why our infrastructure costs are not crazy is we can do a good job.”

“I actually feel the biggest threat would be not imagining that competitive company and not building what we think that competitive company is. So the biggest threat could be complacency rather than we can see what's technically possible. Let's build that. We literally think about running the company that way.”

“And, we we have a saying in the company, like, performance is a is a growth feature. And, we we put an enormous amount of work on raw performance features, scale features, those kind of things. That takes a lot of hubris. We just made the decision. We wanna get the time to jump into any Roblox game down to zero, basically. And that's very technically complicated, but we do believe it has long term growth aspects to us.”

“Roblox used less than $10,000,000 of equity to build their business to cash flow breakeven. Is that true? Yes. It is. We got viral very quickly, and then we started monetizing very quickly. And then you were just very careful what you used the company money for. That's right. And we did raise we had secondary. We went public. There's a certain amount of financial prudence where we always made sure we had enough cash along the way.”

“And what is a perpetual motion machine? It's something that can keep going, get better and better. That's what kind of the the notion of building a cloud three d UGC system. We keep building that system. Creators are gonna make more and more amazing content. We can keep tuning the system, and we'll get kind of that perpetual motion machine.”

“The curve is even flattening more. The growth rate in bookings per year for creator number a thousand, ranked by how much they're making, they are growing faster than creator number one. Wait. Say it again. The curve is flattening, wider, use around the world, more opportunity for vertical content, more opportunity for some content for older people. So that is a a flattening of the curve, which bodes well for Creator a Thousand.”

“And I think we, more and more, you know, we're starting to say, look, we know what the gold standard for safety is. We're building it. We're pretty far along. We're actually starting now to see other companies say, oh, maybe we should do it. Roblox has done we're seeing more and more governments say we like where you're going with this. Like, this is really cool.”

“If you look now at the last two hackathons we've done, it would have been like 90% LLM based projects. I haven't studied it, but it's just my feeling and my gut. Whereas probably 18 months ago, there were like four or five. There's probably 50, 60 teams that do a hackathon project each time. I remember thinking afterwards, I'm like, you know what, we could just only do that stuff and we'll also win.”

“And in line with kind of system thinking, we think of our company as the system. And the company, Roblox is really running almost as if it's nine separate companies. They are all very well connected. We all get together once a week and connect all these companies together. There is a three d cloud simulation and toolset company running within Roblox.”

“Everyone's so worried about automating away the jobs. And I just think that misunderstands the role of companies in society. Like the role of companies is not to employ people. It's to deliver goods and services. And in fact, whoever employs the least number of people will have the lowest cost and win. And that's how they benefit society, is lowering costs and making things more available for us to buy and sell.”

“The second we saw the perpetual motion machine starting to work, that was really interesting. In the context of Roblox, is it something that will organically gather traffic rather than buying traffic? And in that case, the content on Roblox was perpetual. It was made by creators, and the acquisition of users was perpetual, and that it was word-of-mouth.”

“One of the other things that we've done is create a program for non-engineers to learn AI skills and kind of formalize programs. So your manager has to agree, but you get one day a week for 90 days. It's a 90 day program, one day a week, where we teach you kind of a AI bootcamp, vibe coding and different ways to apply. The promise of the leader who created this and convinced the managers to give up someone for 20% of their time to go into it was, I will return them to you as 10 times more productive than their peers.”

“The things that Flexport did really well compared to all the other tech companies who have tried and failed in our space, both before we came along and in parallel, is we didn't look at ourselves as a pure technology company. We're willing to pick up the phone and solve problems with humans, drive down to the port, still to this day. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of tech people in traditional markets will fail at, because they're like, oh, if there's no API, I can't do it. If my agent is unable to do this task, I guess the task can't be done.”

“I tell founders, friends of mine who raise a large round, sure, go raise a big round. As long as you're up round, you're doing good, great. Raise a large round, then do a hiring freeze for 90 days. The next day, to tell your team culturally, no, the money's not going to solve our problems. We're going to solve our problems and keep that. And then, sure, go higher. But it's because it's super, it happened to us over and over again, where you just like headcount, got out of control.”

“Our take is that we can make the price of shipping anything by ocean container shipping cheaper by between 8 and 10 percent cheaper over the next few years. And AI is a big, not the only part of that, but a big part of that. As our business model, the way we think about it is as I call it, scale economies shared, which is the bigger you get, the cheaper you get, the more automation is a form of scale.”

“There's a period in history called the Axial Age. It's about 500 years BC. And that's when coins really started to spread. What you had with... You think about it with coins is taking transactions between two people and really making them very impersonal. And simultaneously, across the world, you had four major profits that emerged. Well, profits of sort, you had Buddha, you had Laozi, Confucius, and Socrates. They all lived at the exact same moment in time, right, as coins were taking hold.”

“It's not that we just started using AI with LLMs. We've had a machine learning model for doing planning, and planning in the sense of logistics means let's say on a containerized basis, I've got a container, which ship should it go on? So our AI for that saved us 2% of our ocean freight spend while improving transit time 20%. Usually, that's a trade-off. It's either faster or cheaper, but not both.”

“This is why you keep saying that it's a it's like a little secret that Roblox is actually an infrastructure company? That's right. Okay. You have not yet figured out how to create the technology to go with to do what we are describing, what you want to do. Correct? And that's what you're doing every day? I would say part of the job being interesting and fun is I think we have a reasonable idea of how we're gonna get there.”

“At about a year in, I had a bit of a it's almost like a vision where I was saying, woah. You can't be logical on this. You have to be intuitive and go back to some of the roots of Knowledge Revolution, which is 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 gonna do this very unorthodox thing and build this wacky new product.”

“This is true of all incumbents in an industry. They have some real advantages when it comes to AI and benefiting from it. And one is the scale of the data. Two is the domain experience to know, okay, which problems should we be solving? And third is distribution. Like when we build or any large company builds a great AI product, the next day it can be used by thousands of companies. Whereas a startup doing that has to go beg people for their data to train the model and earn their trust to have that data from a security compliance standpoint.”

“I do believe the pressure we get in a good way from the media, from this, from that, it’s an incredible motivator for that mode. We the vast majority of what we've done in safety and stability, we've done on our own kind of in a visionary way. I'd say age check. We made the call on our own. It's not because of laws or anything like that. But the ultimate mode and the ultimate belief of what is gonna be possible.”

“What's cool is because we're running this three d simulator, and we're running it on our own cloud, and all of the experiences and games are running somewhat on the same simulator. We have really interesting data. We have three d location of everything. We have, how people are trying to move around with their avatar. We have, obviously, what they're texting and typing in a privacy safe way. But what's fun about it is we would, of course, never sell that data.”

“And, we we have a saying in the company, like, per performance is a growth feature. And, we put an enormous amount of work on raw performance features, scale features, those kind of things. That takes a lot of hubris. So What's a raw performance feature? We watch, how long it takes on a wide range of devices when someone clicks, I wanna play that experience, to the time till they're interacting.”