OWN STACK

“I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great. They have a Friday meeting called in it to win it. They have their leaders from across the company, not just super senior leaders, but leaders from across the company around the world all get together for about an hour, and they essentially raise their hand and say, hey. The shopping cart ball bearing is not working properly. We gotta get this thing fixed. And whoever's in charge of the shopping cart ball bearing can raise their hand and give a response. The thing they found was their leaders would solve the problem just for the store, but they wouldn't solve it for the company.”

“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.”

“I'll never forget, when I was a lot younger, I was starting the company, I had the opportunity to meet president Clinton. And his advice was, like, the job is explainer in chief. That is the job. Like, you gotta go around and explain this stuff to everybody so they understand their role at Snap or Snap's role in the world, and I think that that's super valuable.”

“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.”

“VidAngel was a streaming platform? It wasn't a streaming platform. It was a automatic remote control platform. Parental controls. Disney is the one who came after us initially. They said that we were infringing on copyright. Had a big long battle. We went to our audience and said, Our promise to you, our brand promise was that we were going to protect the home through this automatic remote control. Would you be interested in us shifting to do original content like The Chosen and Dry Bar? And the vast majority of the audience said we prefer just go after the original content.”

“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.”

“We learned very, very early on that there's no moat in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson. All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away, and it's easy to do that with software. But what's fascinating about the world today is that it has never been easier. So because we learned that lesson very early on, we've evolved our business to really focus on the things that are hard to copy. A network effects business of people communicating with one another.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every piece of great art that stood the test of time when you go back through history and you look at the ones that we have the history of the artist those artists have gone through tremendous pain and suffering to get to a point where they were able to take their life experience and all the pain and suffering that they have transcended and then put it into that piece of art or that film to the point that that film transcends space and time. They all have pain and suffering behind them and then AI is only a derivative of that output. Unless AI can get to the point where it can feel pain and suffering it will not be able to make art that stands the test of time.”

“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.”

“Everybody praises somebody who burns the boats and goes after their business idea. Like, that's a big deal. We praise it cuz they're changing the world, they're making a business. But she's like, Children change the world. And she said, It's time to start praising parents who burn the ships to have kids. We should go out of our way to hero these mothers who go and have a child before they have enough money because they're burning the boats to change the world.”

“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.”

“If I look at successful hardware companies over a long period of time, we can look at Apple. We could talk about Tesla. They really try to start with premium or even luxury positioning around a very passionate early adopter group that believes in their vision. Think like the Tesla Roadster, or the early iMac or the early iPhone. And then over time, they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to grow into the mass market while preserving their premium positioning, which means high gross margins. Then they take those high gross margins, and they reinvest in r and d, which widens their lead.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We learned something very early on. If you make them pay, they laugh better. So at first we did it for free. And then we realized, no, if they're paying, they actually laugh. If you give a free ticket, they're like folding their arms, like, make me laugh. Show me. And then as soon as we got it big enough to where we actually got paid people in both early and late show, they equaled out.”

“The studios don't own the hardware. This is what Google realized with the Android phone, they needed to own the hardware. And I realized they don't own the whole stack. Anybody who's going to disrupt the law needs to own the stack. Eventually, they're going to put pressure on you where they can put pressure on you if you don't own the whole stack. So, we've got an entire engineering team. We built all our own TV apps.”

“One of the stats in Hollywood that's really interesting is almost all of the movie like 75% of all the money in Hollywood is made off of PG and PG-13 movies, but 70 plus percent of the movies are R-rated. That's interesting. So they're just they're not connecting. They're not serving the audience. And I think they live in a bubble. Everyone around them is divorced, so why would you push on marriage?”

“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.”

“And we noticed that on our Facebook fan page people would get on and they would say I really want to watch this, but I can't afford to pay for it. And 100% of the time when they said that, somebody would chime in underneath and say, I love the series. Send me your email. I will buy it for you and send it to you. What if we just make that the model? You get to watch for free and then pay it forward to somebody who wants it right now, today, but can't watch it unless you pay it for them. And we call it pay it forward.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. It is critical. And the most toxic thing you can have is people attached to an idea instead of constantly thinking about ideas are free. There should be an a zillion of them. And if we can do that and create that culture where there's, like, just an endless flow of ideas, you're much more likely to get lucky by finding good ones.”

“The first time that the big sort of wake up call was when, you know, Facebook at the time, carbon copied Snapchat to make poke. And Mark Zuckerberg recorded, like, him saying the word poke as the notification sound. He was, like, so excited about this. The nervousness going into that holiday period. I mean, they literally put a download poke at the top of every single Facebook app. And it was just a clone of Snapchat. And then to on Christmas day, see Snapchat number one in the App Store in that context was huge for us.”

“Snapchat opens to the camera. Right? And we always want you to choose to open Snapchat to share a moment with your friends and your family. It literally opens into your experience. And so from the very beginning, we've thought about, like, how do we ground your experience of computing, like, in what what is right in front of you in the present moment and inspire you to create from that.”

“Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines. He was asked one time, how do you handle the stress? He's like, I don't handle it. I like it. I'm not doing this. Like, I wouldn't start a company in a hugely competitive environment if I wanted to take an easy path through life. But I think what he did there, what's really powerful about that, and I think this is what a lot of founders do, is they reframe it. If you can reframe stress as an opportunity, it's gonna be great.”

“I see Snapchat as the best possible vehicle to reinvent the computer. So if you think about Snapchat, we have this core cash flowing profitable business, right, in Snapchat that we're able to then use to reinvest in what has been a very long term speculative project to reinvent the computer. What's very unique about Snapchat is we've been able to do that now for — we've invested in glasses for twelve years. We've been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever in a million years support.”

“And the Angel Guild is made up of 2 million people, just regular everyday people that are voting on to decide which movies will come into Angel Studios and nothing can go into Angel Studios unless they vote first. And this community is paying a monthly fee as a member that funds the filmmakers. So it's the largest filmmaking crowdfunding project in the history of film.”

“There's a big difference between kind and nice. Huge difference. When you're being kind, it means you really want the best for somebody. And sometimes that means a tough conversation. Nice is about making people feel good. Kind is about wanting the best for them. So one of the big problems in a more hostile work environment is people are more resistant to feedback because they don't hear it coming from that positive place of wanting you to grow and develop.”

“It is easier to take a comedian cuz the ad agency and the stand-up comedy were happening together. So, it's easier to turn a comedian into a marketer. That takes about 6 months of work than turning a marketer into a comedian, which takes a lifetime because they haven't been through enough trauma in their life to actually be funny. You know, comedians have always been through something. Like, whatever really, really bad, bad experiences make great stories and great comedians.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sound of Freedom is wild. It'd been stuck on the shelf for eight movies. Tons of movies are stuck on the shelf. Because it had originally been produced by Fox, and then Fox got bought by Disney, and then Disney shelved the movie. He asked if he could buy it, they wouldn't sell it to him until he went to them and said, Because of my connections in the anti-sex trafficking world, I have some dirt on some people that you don't. Like, it's not a good thing for you to hide this movie.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”