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David Senra: David Baszucki, Roblox

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David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the platform where tens of millions of people gather daily to play, build, and socialize inside user-generated virtual worlds. Baszucki grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, studied electrical engineering at Stanford, and in the late 1980s co-founded Knowledge Revolution with his brother Greg. There they built Interactive Physics, a 2D simulation that let students run physics experiments on screen — it sold millions of copies. MSC Software acquired the company in December 1998 for $20 million. After a few years running a division there, Baszucki left, hosted a libertarian talk radio show, drove across the West in a motorhome with his family, and eventually returned to a one-room office in Menlo Park with his old Knowledge Revolution engineer Erik Cassel. They began writing simulation code. The prototype was called DynaBlocks. It became Roblox. The platform launched in 2006, targeting kids and teenagers not just with games but with a canvas for building them. Growth was slow for years — then the pandemic made Roblox essential. In March 2021, the company listed directly on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of more than $41

David Senra: You just said something interesting right before we started recording. David Baszucki: Yeah. David Senra: I asked you how old you were when you started Roblox? David Baszucki: That's right. David Senra: You told me the age, and then you said, "Oh, there's actually an interesting story and a metaphor there." What did you mean by that? David Baszucki: So first off, super interesting story, because arguably, one could say, I started Roblox when I was two years old, because a lot of this shit really fascinates me. But there's an interesting story, because before Roblox, I had…

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