In 2003, David Baszucki wanted to go viral. He had already sold a company that made educational software, and now he wanted to build something with mass appeal; with build-your-own avatars and myriad opportunities for users to compete and connect online. So in 2006, he and his co-founder Erik Cassel launched Roblox, a platform where you can play millions of different games, set in a wide array of virtual worlds. 

You can adopt a pet, escape from jail, build and run your own restaurant, or solve a murder mystery; you can even create games of your own. During the start of the pandemic in 2020, half of the kids in the US were keeping in touch via Roblox, and today, the company is worth over 28 billion dollars. 

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We had some people play it, but we knew within a week, oh my gosh, this is not gonna go viral.

And Eric and I had to say, okay, we've got another 9 months where we're gonna have to buckle down.

I mean, at times, this has been the hardest thing I could ever imagine.

There's been times when we've all thought, oh my gosh, this is the hardest thing we've ever done.

♪♪ Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how David Buzuki pivoted from making physics software into creating Roblox, a virtual gaming platform with more than 200 million monthly users.

A few months ago, I was going through emails on my laptop.

A nosy 11-year-old, also my youngest son, was looking over my shoulder when he shrieked out, Daddy, you have an email from David Buzuki.

How do you know who David Buzuki is, I asked.

Needless to say, a few weeks later, when I interviewed David Buzuki, I had an in-studio guest by my side.

I'm David and I'm in Roblox headquarters right now.

Okay, it turns out lots of kids know who David Buzuki is because he created a world that so many of them are part of.

It's estimated that in the United States, 3 out of 4 children between 9 and 12 years old play Roblox.

I just wanted to ask, who is your favorite character out of them all?

It's almost as if I don't have a million children, but if I had a million children, I would love them all.

where you can play millions of different games that are set in virtual worlds, Or you can create your own games.

Now, if you've never seen it, the characters or avatars look a little like Lego figures, running through an infinite number of worlds, many of which look like cities.

In some games, for example, you have to escape from jail or you can adopt a pet and even take care of it.

And inside these worlds, you can spend and even earn money using a currency called Robux.

To buy Robux, you have to use real currency, dollars, euros, yen, whatever.

And it's how David Buzuki's company has grown into a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $25 billion.

And by 2016, about 10 to 15 million people were playing on the platform each month.

But then came COVID, and millions of children had no way to play with their friends or interact.

And the company saw a massive spike in growth starting in March of 2020.

Today, hundreds of brands like Nike, Gucci, and Chipotle have built out worlds within Roblox where they even sell virtual products, and world-famous artists like Lil Nas X have even held live concerts inside a Roblox virtual world.

It's a taste of what the larger metaverse may 1 day look like, a world that, like it or not, most of us will take part in in some way.

But when David Buzuki first set out to start a business, he wasn't thinking about game playing for entertainment.

His first company was in educational software, and more Specifically, it was software for physics students.

The concept wasn't scalable, so David and his business partner, Eric Kassel, shifted their focus towards a different concept, 1 that would eventually morph into Roblox.

David grew up in Chicago and in rural Minnesota.

He always loved math and science, and in particular, he loved building simple computer games.

I built asteroid-type games, and there was a way to, in a primitive way, go to Radio Shack and buy these knob potentiometers and wire them up to the Apple II and build a primitive game controller and I can remember having my siblings come down and play this cheesy Space Invader game I made but have these you know knobby controllers it really was inspirational to me.

And how did you I mean this is a this is obviously there's no internet or Wikipedia I mean they were physical manuals that you could buy like sort of trade publications I guess is Is that how you learned how to write the language?

Yeah, this was a really early formative time.

You would go down to your local PC store.

They would have a lot of plastic envelopes with what is the current cool programs of the day and then buy a bunch of Magazines by the Apple to manuals and that collection of information none of it online Was enough to figure it out there were in in that time there were magazines that would list a program and if you wanted to, you would read the magazine and type the whole program in to learn things as well.

I was primarily trying to write in assembly language, but through all these manuals and stuff, I figured it out.

Wow, so it's not surprising that you decided to study computer science when you went to Stanford in the early 80s.

I mean I mean presumably getting to Stanford there were computer labs and it was probably a million times more sophisticated than what you had access to in Minnesota.

Yeah, in the early 80s, this is when the early Fairchild and Texas Instruments and all of these Intel type companies were just getting going.

And as part of the core electrical engineering curriculum at Stanford, there was actually a course on how a transistor works, the smallest component of these ICs at the time that were, you know, the early 6502 or Intel 8088 chip.

At the time you would go into a facility called lots at Stanford These are all time shared very primitive black and white terminals programming in Pascal really very early in kind of how you would learn computer science.

So it sounds like you were committed to doing something around this emerging technology, right?

It's still not unusual, but less common, right, for people to have PCs in their homes, although it's starting out.

And this is sort of the beginning of the PC clone wars.

You get the Compacts and the HPs and the other brands that are starting to emerge.

And so people are starting to have them in their homes, but still pre-Windows, right?

So it was still like DOS and you had, of course, Apple Mac, which made things easier, but for people who had PCs, it was still complicated, right?

What do you remember when you graduated thinking, all right this is what I'm gonna do?

I remember thinking the Mac is cooler than the PC because it had that Windows operating system And by 1985 the very earliest versions of the Mac were coming out With everything on floppy drive and we can remember those times when using a Mac was listening to that drive You know Yeah, also though I was kind of unsophisticated in how to find my career.

And so I think I ended up having a couple jobs that were not super fun.

I spent the first 3 years after school really, you know, I can remember, and this is maybe career advice for a lot of people, when you're

your career is not over if your first few jobs aren't that fun and exciting.

Like, life is long and there's a lot of good things to learn.

But, you know, I kind of spent that first 2 or 3 years saying this this isn't it I'm still not doing what is super interesting to me.

I mean were they were they engineering jobs?

They were both engineering jobs 1 was at a company that made telephone equipment and I was a digital line card designer and I was very frustrated that I was not getting to design as much as I want.

I wanted to build stuff and I was getting very frustrated.

Right because when you're in your early 20s, you want to rush into things and it's natural.

I remember feeling like I was in a hurry And it's a natural feeling.

Yeah, absolutely I felt yeah, I can remember calling my dad and in the second job just saying oh my gosh my like oh my gosh, it's all terrible.

And I can remember to my dad saying, hey, you're pretty young.

So just, you know, don't get so upset about all this.

So I guess around 1989, you were probably 26, 27, you decide to start your own business, a software company, which we'll get into, with your brother, Greg.

You called it knowledge revolution, which is, I'm not judging you at all, but it's kind of a boring name.

I was gonna take 2 or 3 months off and decompress after my 2 difficult jobs.

And we were right in the hardcore educational computing transition from Apple II to Macintosh.

A lot of schools were starting to get Macs.

And I immerse myself in the educational software market physics math history played with everything and it's interesting when you immerse in something from the outside it always looks shiny and mature but as I got into it I started looking at the physics software market and at that time the physics software market, Very awesome, a lot of stuff going on, but typically

pre-made simulations to help animate and visualize classic physics things.

I started going, oh my gosh, wouldn't this be cool if instead of these things being pre-canned, this is more like a physics construction set.

And wouldn't it be cool if you could build all of these things from 1 simple system?

That was the genesis of the idea for this product called interactive physics and the company knowledge revolution

So this is 1989 and I'm thinking God ed tech.

I mean, this is like a Nascent space, but I guess schools probably were right.

They were among the first to invest in computers and software because they had to prepare students for the future.

I'm trying to remember what educational software was in 1989, 1990, because this is pre-CD-ROM.

It was at a time when schools all around the world were putting in computer labs a lot of students didn't have them at home.

It was kind of this genesis time both for educational software and Apple as well.

So you were, I mean you were so young, 26, 27, but did you see, I mean were you looking at this as like, this is a big opportunity, or were you looking at it like, you know, I know how to make software and I like physics and I think I can make something cool?

I can remember hanging out with various people and my dad and sharing this idea.

I was very unsophisticated from a business or a market size.

I just wanted to build this physics stuff.

I think, I remember this pivotal meeting where 1 of my dad's friends said, okay, let's look at interactive physics.

These are a number of schools, blah, blah, blah.

I think the annual market for this is a million dollars a year.

And that was kind of depressing to me because I thought the idea was so big and so creative and I went forward Regardless what's interesting is maybe 5 or 6 years later the market for interactive physics was about a million dollars a year

yeah, But we had to do some fundamental work to get a physics simulator running on a Macintosh Plus.

This is collision detection, this is Newtonian physics, this is all of that.

yards away at a certain angle and velocity.

Any student would do that in interactive physics.

They'd draw it, they'd track it, they'd watch it.

But as we got that figured out That interactive physics product even though a small market really swept through the physics education market and Got to the point where all the physics textbooks were linked to it.

We had people that helped fulfill them and we essentially cash flowed that business.

And I guess you, you know, at this point it was it was pretty much just you and Greg who are working on it.

But then from what I understand there was a guy named Eric Castle who reached out to you and wound up joining your team.

And he was apparently a really good programmer, right?

He saw us and Knowledge Revolution in all, there is a big community of Macintosh magazines so Mac plus Mac user and We want a bunch of awards best educational software best teaching software So that's where he heard about us

Eric will feature prominently in the founding of Roblox, and we'll talk about that in a bit, but between you and Eric and your brother Greg, what were you all doing?

Was Eric focused on sort of the technology side, and Did you kind of move away and focus more on the business side or was it your brother or were you all doing all those things?

Eric and I predominantly coding Greg predominantly marketing and selling When it was time to go to all of these shows or work with the community at that point we would drive or fly and you know go to all of these conventions.

I can remember 1 National Association of Science teacher shows where we had a booth there was an Apple booth and it was really hard work I think this is a four-day show where my brother and I ran both of those booths pretty much 8 hours a day for 4 days.

But that's kind of how we got the word out, demoing live to people.

But this was, I mean, you were going after a very, very specific slice of people, like a tribe of people, physics teachers.

And so I guess – I read at a certain point you sort of realized that if you wanted to grow that business, you would have to pivot, right?

And I guess that pivot was you sort of built a 3D computer assisted design product for engineers, mechanical engineers, people who wanted to see how something's going to work before it's built.

And we entered a whole new market, a whole new type of customer.

Kodak, Xerox, Ford, people making mechanical things where our product, which was called Working Model, which I love that name, it really described what we were trying to do way back then when this wasn't widely available you could simulate how that elliptical trainer would work you could simulate the car suspension you could simulate the camera shutter mechanism.

And so we built a pretty substantial business around that.

Uh, we were partners with all of the 3d design software at the time.

And that's how we, that's how we ultimately built knowledge revolution to the point where it was acquired by another company.

Alright so 10 years a little less than 10 years after you founded it The company was acquired by the way at its peak.

We were in downtown San Mateo at our peak.

We probably had 40 Employees and we were I think we were doing 6000000 a year when we were acquired

We were profitable the whole time because we were bootstrapping the company as we went.

All right so acquired by another company reportedly for about 20 million dollars.

In in 1998 so great outcome for everyone and and in this company that acquired you is called MSC Software.

So presumably under that deal, you went to go work for them for some time.

Yes, I went to work for them for 2 years.

And could you have, I mean at that point, were you, did you feel like you could retire?

I mean, were you, I don't, I mean were you at that point financially sort of independent?

And I think, you know, if we were conservative and managed our money properly, I think we for sure could have.

And so I was for a while thinking, maybe I will be retired.

But at the same time, I think as I kind of, after that was sold and after the 2 years I'm working there, I went into a two-year sabbatical mode, which more over time, more and more got me itchy to do something else.

And I guess I should mention that at this point you were married.

In fact, I think you also had kids, right?

You had, because you had kids in pretty close succession, right?

You had like 3 kids all under the age of 4 at that point, right?

Yeah, after I left MSC Software and started thinking what we were gonna do, we rented a motor home for 3 months and went on a round the USA trip for 3 months with those 3 little kids.

It was an awesome break after all of that stuff, really well remembered.

And then came back and did a few other things, but I started getting itchy about a year into this.

So you knew that really, ultimately, you had to start something again.

And when you kind of came to that conclusion had you already been talking to to Eric Castle and and Your brother Greg or others who had worked with you at knowledge revolution about what you could do Like did you start to like call people up and say hey, let's get the band back together.

Yeah, there was an early experimentation phase where I had a rough idea of what I was interested in.

I was interested in the idea of a simulation on top of which people could build puzzles or scenarios and the idea of Unlike a knowledge revolution where we had to be really accurate in what we built because people were designing stuff I was very interested in the notion could we make something that's very scalable so it can do a lot of things But not be perfectly accurate and I started down the route of making this simulator more as a puzzle experience rather than an immersive avatar type experience.

And that's where Eric joined me and we started working on this together.

All right, so let's go back to 2004, because this is really the early outlines of what would become Roblox.

But at the time I'm thinking there were some, I mean this is still early internet and most people had dial-up.

And there were things like, I think, like Second Life and SimCity, right?

Those were already out there at the time.

They had all to some extent built these systems that would, you know, bring people together in immersive 3D environments.

Well, we were in the midst of the very early phases of what we were doing which was more this super scalable physics puzzle system.

We had some people play it but we knew within a week oh my gosh this is not gonna go viral We have a lot more work to do and Eric and I had to say, okay We've got another 9 months or 10 months where we're gonna have to buckle down Really make this multiplayer avatar based, you know Coreality if we want to get the that virality, which is really our vision all along It was just almost a realization.

So we shut that puzzle down and went back to work again for another 9 months.

When we come back in just a moment, how David and Eric create the virtual world of their dreams, but how it doesn't take off until they add 1 irresistible feature, virtual money.

I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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So it's around 2003 and David realizes he's working on an idea that has no legs.

People are not going to flock to a site where they just get to solve a bunch of puzzles.

So he and Eric spend about a year working on something much more interactive with multiple players and avatars and cool spaces to hang out.

And they start with the name DynaBlox, but eventually call it Roblox.

When you sign up, you're going to join 1 specific place where there may be 6 to 20 people rolling around, bumping into each other in a place called Crossroads, which was our very first 3D place.

Yeah, It was, imagine maybe a space the size of 2 football fields, side by side.

And then in each of the 4 quadrants, imagine in 1 there was a castle, in 1 there was a little area where you could put things together, in 1 there was a little cave that you could go into and That was the very first version of roblox that started this virality

So the idea it was you'd log in and then you'd have a character Maybe and then and then you would see other Characters moving on which were actually connected to real humans through the internet somewhere else and you could And and initially it was not it was just like it was you could talk to them and chat with them But but really was still about building Structures

It was really about hanging out with people, chatting with people.

The fun of feeling as if we're in a physical environment, so, oh, let's go over here and stack some blocks up and see what we can build.

Ooh, let's put a fun little time bomb over here and watch this thing fall down on us.

But it was actually really social and Eric and I and then soon John and then soon Matt and then Keith, we'd spend a lot of time hanging out, meeting these people and chatting with them.

And in those early days, we probably knew half of the 2 or 300 people on Roblox.

And we were in there every day chatting with them.

So, it's interesting to me because you were, I mean, you were committed to creating like physics, this sort of physics software, and then these kind of puzzles and games.

So, clearly there was this kind of educational component to what you sort of were passionate about.

But it seems like early on, you were kind of moving in a different direction saying, you know, actually, let's just make a place where people can hang out.

We carried the theme of the physics forward in that we wanted the world where people would hang out as much as possible to be like the real world because then interesting cool things would happen.

If a building was leaning over and we pulled out 1 of the supports, the building would fall down or the early cars on Roblox, those were really had axles and motors.

So if we pull the wheel off the car, it would scrape along on the ground.

That simulate the real world became this foundation on top of which we said, okay, now let's get more social avatar hangout on top of that foundation.

So I'm curious, I mean, in in that first kind of year, year and a half, it was just you and Eric designing this, coding it.

By the way, did either of you have a background in design?

Because you were creating a world with graphics and characters.

There were a lot of people we met in those days that was too primitive, too crude, not gonna be fun, games have to be this and that, that we really gently ignored respectfully.

There was also a notion that function and making this work so well is so important to us that we're comfortable leaning in on programmer art to the point that the blocky Roblox avatar, That is now just 1 of many many avatar shapes.

If you analyze it, it is actually very 1x2x1 on the arms.

So that classic Roblox avatar is really just an extension of us putting some simple blocks together to get that going.

I know this might be a very sensitive question, but I've checked and you've never been sued by Lego, but I know that people must have said, Hey, they kind of like Lego characters.

Yeah, I think in the early days, we, we stayed away from the exact Lego form factor.

We just said, let's go simple 1 by 2 by 1.

But there was for sure some sensitivity when using, for example, yellow in the avatars, which is this classic Lego look.

And I think we were able to work out, okay, yeah, we'll make the defaults this way.

We'll try to remove any confusion whatsoever that this has anything to do with Lego.

Here's what I'm wondering about too, which is you were already in your early 40s, and I think Eric was not too far behind.

And when I think of video game developers, I think of younger people.

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Roblox: David Baszucki