May 18, 2022 • 24 mins
David Baszucki, Roblox CEO & Co-Founder speaks with Emily Chang about building an online gaming platform with over 50 million daily users, cultivating a civil digital community, and scaling a future metaverse.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So in real life you're the CEO of Roadblocks, but
on Roadblocks your builder man, you know that name. We
just thought it up when um is, maybe two weeks
after we launched, and we were all picking our own
user names and everyone picked one night. So you've had
the same avatar since two thousand four. That's right, that's awesome.
(00:22):
Do you still play? I do? I wish I could
play the whole day. I have to be a CEO.
So how often do you play? I'm probably on every day,
but not as much as I would like. I have
four kids. I have a nine year old son who's
on Roadblocks a lot. He said his favorite games are
the Tycoon games. Oh, lumber Tycoon, theme Park Tycoon. I
(00:44):
love those. I love all of those. I have a
bit of a theory. I have four kids, and yeah
they're now they've grown up watching me do this and other.
They're pretty savvy social media people. But I'm optimistic someday
they're going to be using roadblocks for some other reason,
like communicating or more working or something like that, and
(01:06):
then they're going to be oh gosh, as like forest
to be Roadblocks. Hi, everyone, em Emily Chang and welcome
to this edition of the Bloombrook Studio One point Oh podcast. First,
a message from our sponsors. On this edition of Bloomberg
Studio one point Oh, we're speaking with Roadblocks CEO and
(01:27):
co founder David Bazuki, or as he's known on Roadblocks Builderman,
a portmanteau of robots and blocks. Roadblocks started as a
three D world where users could build, share, and play games.
Thanks to the pandemic, it has boomed into a global
online gaming juggernaut that kids are obsessed with, racking up
ten billion plus hours on the platform a quarter. It's
(01:50):
been a slow build. Roadblocks launched in two thousand four
and was building its version of the Metaverse long before
Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook's name to Meta. In this episode,
Bazooky paints his vision for the immersive and interconnected future
where users can not only play roller coaster games, but
attend town halls, go to school, industry conferences, concerts, and
(02:13):
even political rallies one day. Is this future really possible?
And how far out is it? And how do we
cultivate a civil digital society within it that keeps kids safe?
Joining me now on this edition of Bloombrook Studio one
point Oh. Roadblocks CEO and co founder David Bazooki, David's
so great to have you here. I really appreciate it.
(02:34):
It's wonderful to be with you. Well, I'm a parent,
I'm a mom, and so I've been really excited um
to have this conversation for parents and anyone out there
who still doesn't quite understand what exactly our kids doing
on roadblocks. Yeah, kids on roadblocks aren't just playing, they're learning.
They're hanging out together when they can't be together in
(02:55):
real life. They're hanging out on roadblocks. They could be
playing hide and go seek. They could be pretending they're
running a store or a pizza parlor. They could be
making the next big game or adventure. So it's really
a wide range of things, and it involves doing things together,
pretending you're together. So right now it's mostly games or
(03:15):
experiences four kids by kids. How old are these players?
How old are these developers? We have young players who
are getting interested in coding, who are getting interested in
designing things. But more and more of the community on
Roadblocks has blossomed into this super rich ecosystem, thousands of
developers making a living on the platform. Some of these
(03:36):
developers are making tens or twenties or fifty millions of
dollars a year. So how many of these developers are
really kids? And how many of these developers are now
grown ups? Yeah? Well I think two million plus developers.
A lot of them are grown ups, and more and more.
In addition to the natural organic people that started on Roadblocks,
we're starting to have studios come in on the platform
(03:58):
as well. Professional game develop oppers who are developing on
other platforms starting to take a look at it. So
our developer demo naturally leans a little bit older, although
we've had kids as young as thirteen. Is there something
about preserving the ability for young kids to be able
to make games for other kids? I mean, because obviously
(04:18):
if you have you know, fancy studios muscling in um,
does that change the dynamic of the PLATF I think
it does. One of my favorite experiences as Natural Disasters,
that's been on the platform forever by one of our
early developers. It's not the kind of thing that I
think a normal studio would ever think of, but when
(04:38):
developed by young creator, you know, we're gonna be We're
gonna be hanging out together and there's gonna be a
hurricane and we've got to like run away from it,
or there's gonna be a lightning storm, like that kind
of stuff. We see a lot of that creative gameplay
coming from the younger developers. What were you into as
a kid? Were you a gamer? I was kind of
a nerd when I was a kid. I was studied
(05:00):
really hard. I luckily grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
At the time, it was out in the boonies from Minneapolis,
Minnesota's there were sand pits and so we did a
lot of model rockets, and we built go carts, and
you know, it's kind of one of these idyllic childhoods.
The one key thing that happened to me very early
on as we had a computer lab in the school,
(05:21):
and then my parents bought me an Apple two at
the time, and that kind of got me interested in this.
I also heard you were the captain of your high
school TV quiz team. Yeah, so think of think of
Minnesota in the nineteen seventies and eighties, where every weekend,
two different schools compete for students from each school, you know,
(05:43):
in a really funny four by four configurations on a
quizzble thing, and so yeah, Eden Prairie had a pretty
good quizz Bowl team. You eventually made it to Silicon Valley,
went to Stanford. You started a company called Knowledge Revolution
in the eighties where users could create and test physics experiments.
That's right. So the science kid in you coming to life. Yeah,
(06:04):
you know, went to school, had a couple of hard
years with jobs that weren't really that exciting. Took a
few months off and I got really excited about there's
this whole blossoming educational software marketplace at the Macintosh had
just been introduced, and it was just really interesting, exciting.
I did a survey of all of that, and a
lot of the educational software was very pre canned. So
(06:26):
when we looked at physics, it was a whole different idea.
Could we make a wide open laboratory where you could
build anything, any physics experiment, bring it to life, measure it,
see what it feels like. You sold that company, made
some money, You became an investor, and you invested in
friends stirre. Oh yeah, wow, I I had a friends
(06:47):
Store account. I'm dating myself a little bit here, but
I had a Friend's Store account. I'm curious what you
learned from the early days of social media. Yeah, so
one thing I learned is it was really fun to invest,
but it's not my sweet spot. My sweet spot is
trying to build and create things. I remember I think
having account number seventy nine on Friends there and just
(07:09):
seeing that wonderful thing of finding other people friend of friends,
playing around with that early user interface. It's a little
bit almost thinking of interactive physics, where we were simulating
the world and then friends they're seeing how important social is.
Those are a couple of the components that have come
together in Roadblocks. So when you started Roadblocks in two
(07:29):
thousand four, what was the idea? Back then, the feeling
of this new category for me started feeling almost inexorable.
It's a category that people have been talking about in
sci fi for many, many years. We've seen futurists talk
about it. We've seen a lot of movies. We were thinking, yes,
immersive three D co experience. Kids flocked to Roadblocks during
(07:52):
the pandemic. You went public in the middle of the pandemic.
Dollar market cap we spoke on that day. Even you
have said that kind of growth won't keep up. What
kind of growth can we expect from Roadblocks in normal times.
We believe every it's gonna be a part of all
of our lives. It's going to be the way we
communicate how people get to go to school when they
(08:13):
can't get into school, how people they're going to go
to school in roadblocks. If I happen to be taking
my science class and I can't get into the classroom
and we're dissecting a frog, will probably dissect the frog
in something like Roadblocks on a simulation, which I think
is going to be very very powerful, and for our company,
where there's a lot of people that are going to
(08:34):
end up working all around the world, some of us
will be in the office, some won't. Having a common
three D place where we can have those water cooler
conversations where everyone has a desk, but we get that
serendipitous thing where we both happen to go over and chat.
I think also is going to be very big coming up.
(08:59):
Roadblocks is on a mission to build what they call
the next generation of human co experience, but that comes
with some serious content moderation challenges. More on that next.
(09:20):
Everybody is talking about the metaverse as something that's going
to happen in the future. But there's an argument to
be made that Roadblocks has already built a metaverse. What
do you think, I think we've started And Um, it
goes back to how exciting it is to have a
company in this space that I think is ultimately got
so many years of growth to it and is a
(09:42):
new category following other types of technologies. There's still so
much innovation to be done, and there's so much invention
to be done in this category that's mind boggling. The
critics think that metaverse the term is just marketing. How
do you respond to that? This type of technology is
much more difficult than the net or the web, which
(10:03):
was another huge thing that we saw predicted and has
started to come. But but I think we're seeing early
signs of it. When Mark Zuckerberg announced his plan to
own the metaverse and change Facebook's name to meta as
if it was something new, did that kind of bother you? Um? No,
of course not. It's really hard to predict in five
(10:25):
to ten or twenty years, where are the companies that
really figure it out, And there's so many elements of
innovation that are needed. Um. Having a u g C
community one of our strengths we think that's like a
huge starting point for us, but we're early in our
quest for innovation here. Roadblocks has built a huge business
selling row bucks. Does this evolve into a much bigger marketplace?
(10:49):
It was this revelation that people would ultimately make a
living on platforms like this that started this digital currency
is very Roadblocks centric in that where a systems company
or you hility, so it has formed this robust economy.
It's allowed us to keep robox. You know, Roadblocks is
free for the vast majority. Would Roadblocks have a partner
with some of these other companies working on the metaverse,
(11:11):
whether it is Meta or Unity or Epic or Microsoft.
The core technology of you know, how are we going
to ultimately support fifty people in real time on a
phone going to a concert together and waving it your friends.
I think that's gonna be a lot of engineering work
that each company is going to be working on, and
it's going to be really hard. As far as ultimately
(11:34):
can an avatar go from one place to another, I
think they'll be lightweight ways of starting to think about that. So,
what role do you think Apple and Android should play
in the metaverse and what their policies need to change
to really support this vision. The biggest thing we would
take advantage of if it were to happen, is a
change in those store fees. We we stay out of it.
(11:57):
We let Google and Apple kind of run our businesses.
But when we think about more and more developers making
a living on platforms like us and having to build stuff,
if those store fees were to change, we would move
most of that money back to our developers. Your goal
is to build an entirely new category of human co experience,
(12:18):
the next phase of human interaction. How do you moderate
that on such a massive scale and are you doing
a good enough job. In the third week when we
were live, you can go imagine Eric and myself back
in our small office. Eric and I said, oh my gosh,
(12:38):
safety and civilities, we're going to have to do it.
We had maybe a hundred people at the time chatting
on roadblocks. We saw a few not that egregious, but
early signs, and we just made the call, this is
going to be the foundation of what we do in
the early years of roadblocks. As we've gotten bigger, we've
gotten to the point where there's thousands of moderators. Every
(13:00):
image that goes on our platform gets human reviewed. We
filter texts very stringently, especially for thirteen and under players.
We use a lot of AI and mL to help
do this. We're always getting better, um, but it is
a key thing for us. How optimistic are you about
AI and tech being able to do that? I'm really
(13:21):
actually optimistic. We would never compare to the real world
because our standards are so much more stringent. But I
do believe this will just keep getting better and better,
and I think over time it will get to the
point where if a six year old is on our platform,
it's literally as if the parents wanted to be there
with them, watching everything. We'll be able to offer that
(13:43):
type of thing. Now, a lot of parents are terrified.
They're terrified of a future metaverse. They don't understand the
parental controls. Do you understand that feeling? We do. We
actually have to. I think it creates a higher standard
for us because I think we can assume every parent
is going to get that involved with their kids. There
(14:04):
have been some serious content challenges, you know, stories about
roadblocks being a playground for virtual fascists. There was just
this story about Kim Kardashian's own child seeing an ad
for a game that claimed to have a sex tape
of her. What happened there? That was very unfortunate. There
was a text blurb very shortly that very very few
(14:27):
people saw. We took the place down, We moderated that user,
and they're off our platform. It was not the video
was never on our platform. There was no imagery on
our platform. It was a very short mention, but very unfortunate.
And UM, well, you know, our vision is to be
the most civil place for everyone. I asked him our Bechiv,
the CEO of alphabet and Google, this question about kids
(14:48):
and tech habits and screen time, and he said it's
something that even stresses him out. You know, this is
the guy who runs one of the most powerful technology
companies in the world. UM, I have four kids. You
have four kids. Did it stress you out? Like? How
did you deal with your kids? I think it highlights
how much Um it's a responsibility of both platforms like us,
as well as parents. You know, we're all trying to
(15:09):
figure this out. I think the one thing that we're
very encouraged is that the time spent on roadblocks tends
to be more like hanging out together or being on
the phone together or doing stuff together, and a lot
less of it is isolated, either consuming content by myself
or grinding away at something by myself. So we do
(15:32):
like the fact that most of this is either social
or involved in creation. You've been investing in high fidelity graphics.
What is the endgame here for you know, more human
more realistic avatars. I'll look way out like a science
fiction writer and talk about it, and what I'm talking
about now super difficult the end game. Sometimes we talk
(15:54):
about we would go together to a rock concert or
whatever concert you like. Um, we would be there with
fifty thus and other people. It would feel like a movie.
It would feel like real life. So are you pushing
towards something like meta Horizon worlds? Does that found you know,
more experiences like that? For adults? We sometimes think of
(16:14):
roadblocks ultimately as fading into the background, as a utility
like the electric grid. Um, even though it's photo realistic
and there's all these awesome avatars and connection and identity
around the world, the things we start seeing built on
this are a wide range of things. So you imagine
this not just for kids but for everyone adults absolutely,
(16:35):
What about entertainment would roadblocks ever make a Netflix show.
We would love it if one of our developers made
a Netflix show, so we would we would feel much
more authentic if one of the creators on Roadblocks who's
coming up with avatars and stories and ideas and characters
like that, we want them to be in the limelight.
Roadblock Shares took a dive on the back of Netflix results,
(16:58):
which obviously plum did our investors reading too much into
the connection there. I think our company is somewhat unique,
and what is very exciting to go to work and
be the CEO is being in a market like this,
you know where we think ultimately billions of people are
going to use this type of technology. And the other
exciting thing about this market there are so many big
(17:20):
inventions that still have to happen. It feels like we're
pretty mature, but inside our company we realize like there's
six or seven big inventions we need to make to
get to that next step. Would Roadblocks ever consider more
in game advertising? Yeah, there's a funny trivia note I
would share to all the Roadblocks fans out there. There
was a time the very first way we monetize was advertising,
(17:43):
And then there was also a time when we had
pre roll video on roadblocks, UM, that's all gone now,
and it's gone for a couple of reasons. We didn't
want it to interfere with the user experience, and also
our our virtual economy has become such a powerful way
to power this that we are able to take that
down in the future. Though, I think there's a certain
type of advertising that is kids safe, that is UM immersive,
(18:09):
that doesn't get in your way, and how do you
make sure that doesn't take away from the ethos of
what makes roadblocks grant? Yeah, I think are the people
on roadblocks, you know, they're they're to authentically connect with
their friends. And as long as UM what we're doing
with these brands is very clear, non deceptive, appropriate for
those ages, I think they'll they'll figure out the balance
(18:31):
of how much time do we go into a store
versus how much time do we go to a crazy
adventure tycoon and you know, build an amusement park together.
So either way, this could be a huge new revenue stream.
I believe it's an awesomely huge revenue stream, and at
the same time we've been very gentle towards it. So
as you look ahead, what do you think are the
biggest challenges roadblocks will face if our vision plays out,
(18:55):
which we hope it does, and we have people of
all ages on the platform and we're around the world.
I think maintaining that civility as we grow, as we
have older people who might want to go to a
political rally, thinking ways to do that in a systemic way,
that's a big challenge. It takes a lot of thought.
I think thinking through the technology. I really like we're
(19:16):
very technology driven company. So it's fun to be running
a company where we have to do these seven big
inventions and you know, what we're doing right now isn't
going to cut it. So knowing that technology challenges super interesting.
We do a little rapid fire section just to get
spontaneous as um. First question, what's your morning routine? Wake up,
(19:43):
go outside of my porch, do a CrossFit workout, take
a shower, go to work. Where are you most productive?
Home or office? Both? Um? Different types of productivity homes
and state flow, state at time, office, connecting, being together, brainstorming.
What's your favorite show right now? What are you binging?
Oh my gosh, If if you look at my YouTube history,
(20:05):
it's it's this weird mechanical stuff off road vehicles and
rockets and ships and big waves, best life hack. I
think it all gets down to the joy of health. Really,
like if if I'm not you know, feeling centered, but sleep, exercise,
die and all of that, everything else just completely falls.
You used to have a talk radio show. Now that
(20:28):
I've met you in person, I get this. I see
how you you'd be. You'd be pretty fun to listen to. Yeah,
what was your style? Like? So my gam was, I
would say starting in college, when I would have insomnia
at two am, I would turn on talk radio and
you know all those famous KGO people, Bill Wattenberg, Retelia Pharaoh,
all that just listened to the people calling in. So
(20:51):
I um, after knowledge revolution was acquired and I had
a year, I had a little time to dabble. My
jam was really trying to talk about ray just topics,
you know, gambling, other controversial things. It was in a
small market in Santa Cruz. I would typically it's really
hard to get people to call in, you know, It's like,
(21:13):
so it's really scary if you're a DJ and no
one's calling inside. I made it really controversial. I have
people come on and debate interesting topic. If you could
have dinner with Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, who would
you pick both? You can't pick both. I guess I
would have to slightly lean Disney just because he was
(21:35):
not just the usher of the innovation, but actually was
kind of part of the sum of the innovation. But
I think Steve leaned much more on finding the people
to drive that innovation. Best advice for your twenties, Um,
don't freak out if between the age of twenty two
and twenty five everything is a disaster. Best advice for
(21:55):
your forties. Life is short. It's such a valuable come
on every day. What you do, your friends, your time,
your family is so important. So how do you define
work life integration? I don't like the word balance. Yeah,
I would say, can I make my roadblocks job better
(22:16):
than anything else I would do? Like? Can it be
better than retiring? Can it be better than a hobby?
Can I figure out what my unique job as a CEO?
Every CEO job is different, like I like doing it,
So can I figure out what my role is? You
mentioned your co founder Eric Castle earlier, who died tragically
of cancer. If he was here today, what do you
(22:39):
think he would think? Of the roadblocks that roadblocks has become. Wow,
I think he'd be proud. It's a good question, Like
I think he would. You know his both of his
sons have worked at the company a bit um, so yeah,
I think he'd be very seems like you miss him.
He's just such a brilliant partner. Yeah, and he also
(23:01):
set the standard for taking the long view on how
we engineer things. A lot of the technology at robots
is still like you know, his vision lives on and
it goes back to your advice for you or forties.
Life is short, it is, So in five years, will
the metaverse exist in in in the form that you
imagine or is it take does is it going to
(23:23):
take much longer? Like what's the time horizon? Well, it's
really interesting, right because we're right in the middle of
it right now in a sense with fifty million people
every day on our platform. It's already here. And at
the same time, what is ultimately going to be possible
could be five, ten or twenty years out. So it's
it's all. The metaverse really has existence since online dial
(23:46):
up MUDs really two D very simple text, you could
call that the metaverse. It's existed in multiplayer gaming. World
of Warcraft exists, exists now with more people, and in
ten or twenty years it'll exist photo realistically with fifty people.
You clearly have so much passion for this job. Is
(24:07):
Roadblocks your final stop on your Journey's definitely my final stop,
but I think there's a lot of time ahead of
me here. Dave Fuzuki, CEO of road Blocks, thank you
so much, Bloombrook Studio. At one point, I was produced
and edited by Lauren Ellis and Brian Carter Gainer. I'm
Emily Chang, your host and executive producer.
So in real life you're the CEO of Roadblocks, but
on Roadblocks your builder man, you know that name. We
just thought it up when um is, maybe two weeks
after we launched, and we were all picking our own
user names and everyone picked one night. So you've had
the same avatar since two thousand four. That's right, that's awesome.
(00:22):
Do you still play? I do? I wish I could
play the whole day. I have to be a CEO.
So how often do you play? I'm probably on every day,
but not as much as I would like. I have
four kids. I have a nine year old son who's
on Roadblocks a lot. He said his favorite games are
the Tycoon games. Oh, lumber Tycoon, theme Park Tycoon. I
(00:44):
love those. I love all of those. I have a
bit of a theory. I have four kids, and yeah
they're now they've grown up watching me do this and other.
They're pretty savvy social media people. But I'm optimistic someday
they're going to be using roadblocks for some other reason,
like communicating or more working or something like that, and
(01:06):
then they're going to be oh gosh, as like forest
to be Roadblocks. Hi, everyone, em Emily Chang and welcome
to this edition of the Bloombrook Studio One point Oh podcast. First,
a message from our sponsors. On this edition of Bloomberg
Studio one point Oh, we're speaking with Roadblocks CEO and
(01:27):
co founder David Bazuki, or as he's known on Roadblocks Builderman,
a portmanteau of robots and blocks. Roadblocks started as a
three D world where users could build, share, and play games.
Thanks to the pandemic, it has boomed into a global
online gaming juggernaut that kids are obsessed with, racking up
ten billion plus hours on the platform a quarter. It's
(01:50):
been a slow build. Roadblocks launched in two thousand four
and was building its version of the Metaverse long before
Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook's name to Meta. In this episode,
Bazooky paints his vision for the immersive and interconnected future
where users can not only play roller coaster games, but
attend town halls, go to school, industry conferences, concerts, and
(02:13):
even political rallies one day. Is this future really possible?
And how far out is it? And how do we
cultivate a civil digital society within it that keeps kids safe?
Joining me now on this edition of Bloombrook Studio one
point Oh. Roadblocks CEO and co founder David Bazooki, David's
so great to have you here. I really appreciate it.
(02:34):
It's wonderful to be with you. Well, I'm a parent,
I'm a mom, and so I've been really excited um
to have this conversation for parents and anyone out there
who still doesn't quite understand what exactly our kids doing
on roadblocks. Yeah, kids on roadblocks aren't just playing, they're learning.
They're hanging out together when they can't be together in
(02:55):
real life. They're hanging out on roadblocks. They could be
playing hide and go seek. They could be pretending they're
running a store or a pizza parlor. They could be
making the next big game or adventure. So it's really
a wide range of things, and it involves doing things together,
pretending you're together. So right now it's mostly games or
(03:15):
experiences four kids by kids. How old are these players?
How old are these developers? We have young players who
are getting interested in coding, who are getting interested in
designing things. But more and more of the community on
Roadblocks has blossomed into this super rich ecosystem, thousands of
developers making a living on the platform. Some of these
(03:36):
developers are making tens or twenties or fifty millions of
dollars a year. So how many of these developers are
really kids? And how many of these developers are now
grown ups? Yeah? Well I think two million plus developers.
A lot of them are grown ups, and more and more.
In addition to the natural organic people that started on Roadblocks,
we're starting to have studios come in on the platform
(03:58):
as well. Professional game develop oppers who are developing on
other platforms starting to take a look at it. So
our developer demo naturally leans a little bit older, although
we've had kids as young as thirteen. Is there something
about preserving the ability for young kids to be able
to make games for other kids? I mean, because obviously
(04:18):
if you have you know, fancy studios muscling in um,
does that change the dynamic of the PLATF I think
it does. One of my favorite experiences as Natural Disasters,
that's been on the platform forever by one of our
early developers. It's not the kind of thing that I
think a normal studio would ever think of, but when
(04:38):
developed by young creator, you know, we're gonna be We're
gonna be hanging out together and there's gonna be a
hurricane and we've got to like run away from it,
or there's gonna be a lightning storm, like that kind
of stuff. We see a lot of that creative gameplay
coming from the younger developers. What were you into as
a kid? Were you a gamer? I was kind of
a nerd when I was a kid. I was studied
(05:00):
really hard. I luckily grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
At the time, it was out in the boonies from Minneapolis,
Minnesota's there were sand pits and so we did a
lot of model rockets, and we built go carts, and
you know, it's kind of one of these idyllic childhoods.
The one key thing that happened to me very early
on as we had a computer lab in the school,
(05:21):
and then my parents bought me an Apple two at
the time, and that kind of got me interested in this.
I also heard you were the captain of your high
school TV quiz team. Yeah, so think of think of
Minnesota in the nineteen seventies and eighties, where every weekend,
two different schools compete for students from each school, you know,
(05:43):
in a really funny four by four configurations on a
quizzble thing, and so yeah, Eden Prairie had a pretty
good quizz Bowl team. You eventually made it to Silicon Valley,
went to Stanford. You started a company called Knowledge Revolution
in the eighties where users could create and test physics experiments.
That's right. So the science kid in you coming to life. Yeah,
(06:04):
you know, went to school, had a couple of hard
years with jobs that weren't really that exciting. Took a
few months off and I got really excited about there's
this whole blossoming educational software marketplace at the Macintosh had
just been introduced, and it was just really interesting, exciting.
I did a survey of all of that, and a
lot of the educational software was very pre canned. So
(06:26):
when we looked at physics, it was a whole different idea.
Could we make a wide open laboratory where you could
build anything, any physics experiment, bring it to life, measure it,
see what it feels like. You sold that company, made
some money, You became an investor, and you invested in
friends stirre. Oh yeah, wow, I I had a friends
(06:47):
Store account. I'm dating myself a little bit here, but
I had a Friend's Store account. I'm curious what you
learned from the early days of social media. Yeah, so
one thing I learned is it was really fun to invest,
but it's not my sweet spot. My sweet spot is
trying to build and create things. I remember I think
having account number seventy nine on Friends there and just
(07:09):
seeing that wonderful thing of finding other people friend of friends,
playing around with that early user interface. It's a little
bit almost thinking of interactive physics, where we were simulating
the world and then friends they're seeing how important social is.
Those are a couple of the components that have come
together in Roadblocks. So when you started Roadblocks in two
(07:29):
thousand four, what was the idea? Back then, the feeling
of this new category for me started feeling almost inexorable.
It's a category that people have been talking about in
sci fi for many, many years. We've seen futurists talk
about it. We've seen a lot of movies. We were thinking, yes,
immersive three D co experience. Kids flocked to Roadblocks during
(07:52):
the pandemic. You went public in the middle of the pandemic.
Dollar market cap we spoke on that day. Even you
have said that kind of growth won't keep up. What
kind of growth can we expect from Roadblocks in normal times.
We believe every it's gonna be a part of all
of our lives. It's going to be the way we
communicate how people get to go to school when they
(08:13):
can't get into school, how people they're going to go
to school in roadblocks. If I happen to be taking
my science class and I can't get into the classroom
and we're dissecting a frog, will probably dissect the frog
in something like Roadblocks on a simulation, which I think
is going to be very very powerful, and for our company,
where there's a lot of people that are going to
(08:34):
end up working all around the world, some of us
will be in the office, some won't. Having a common
three D place where we can have those water cooler
conversations where everyone has a desk, but we get that
serendipitous thing where we both happen to go over and chat.
I think also is going to be very big coming up.
(08:59):
Roadblocks is on a mission to build what they call
the next generation of human co experience, but that comes
with some serious content moderation challenges. More on that next.
(09:20):
Everybody is talking about the metaverse as something that's going
to happen in the future. But there's an argument to
be made that Roadblocks has already built a metaverse. What
do you think, I think we've started And Um, it
goes back to how exciting it is to have a
company in this space that I think is ultimately got
so many years of growth to it and is a
(09:42):
new category following other types of technologies. There's still so
much innovation to be done, and there's so much invention
to be done in this category that's mind boggling. The
critics think that metaverse the term is just marketing. How
do you respond to that? This type of technology is
much more difficult than the net or the web, which
(10:03):
was another huge thing that we saw predicted and has
started to come. But but I think we're seeing early
signs of it. When Mark Zuckerberg announced his plan to
own the metaverse and change Facebook's name to meta as
if it was something new, did that kind of bother you? Um? No,
of course not. It's really hard to predict in five
(10:25):
to ten or twenty years, where are the companies that
really figure it out, And there's so many elements of
innovation that are needed. Um. Having a u g C
community one of our strengths we think that's like a
huge starting point for us, but we're early in our
quest for innovation here. Roadblocks has built a huge business
selling row bucks. Does this evolve into a much bigger marketplace?
(10:49):
It was this revelation that people would ultimately make a
living on platforms like this that started this digital currency
is very Roadblocks centric in that where a systems company
or you hility, so it has formed this robust economy.
It's allowed us to keep robox. You know, Roadblocks is
free for the vast majority. Would Roadblocks have a partner
with some of these other companies working on the metaverse,
(11:11):
whether it is Meta or Unity or Epic or Microsoft.
The core technology of you know, how are we going
to ultimately support fifty people in real time on a
phone going to a concert together and waving it your friends.
I think that's gonna be a lot of engineering work
that each company is going to be working on, and
it's going to be really hard. As far as ultimately
(11:34):
can an avatar go from one place to another, I
think they'll be lightweight ways of starting to think about that. So,
what role do you think Apple and Android should play
in the metaverse and what their policies need to change
to really support this vision. The biggest thing we would
take advantage of if it were to happen, is a
change in those store fees. We we stay out of it.
(11:57):
We let Google and Apple kind of run our businesses.
But when we think about more and more developers making
a living on platforms like us and having to build stuff,
if those store fees were to change, we would move
most of that money back to our developers. Your goal
is to build an entirely new category of human co experience,
(12:18):
the next phase of human interaction. How do you moderate
that on such a massive scale and are you doing
a good enough job. In the third week when we
were live, you can go imagine Eric and myself back
in our small office. Eric and I said, oh my gosh,
(12:38):
safety and civilities, we're going to have to do it.
We had maybe a hundred people at the time chatting
on roadblocks. We saw a few not that egregious, but
early signs, and we just made the call, this is
going to be the foundation of what we do in
the early years of roadblocks. As we've gotten bigger, we've
gotten to the point where there's thousands of moderators. Every
(13:00):
image that goes on our platform gets human reviewed. We
filter texts very stringently, especially for thirteen and under players.
We use a lot of AI and mL to help
do this. We're always getting better, um, but it is
a key thing for us. How optimistic are you about
AI and tech being able to do that? I'm really
(13:21):
actually optimistic. We would never compare to the real world
because our standards are so much more stringent. But I
do believe this will just keep getting better and better,
and I think over time it will get to the
point where if a six year old is on our platform,
it's literally as if the parents wanted to be there
with them, watching everything. We'll be able to offer that
(13:43):
type of thing. Now, a lot of parents are terrified.
They're terrified of a future metaverse. They don't understand the
parental controls. Do you understand that feeling? We do. We
actually have to. I think it creates a higher standard
for us because I think we can assume every parent
is going to get that involved with their kids. There
(14:04):
have been some serious content challenges, you know, stories about
roadblocks being a playground for virtual fascists. There was just
this story about Kim Kardashian's own child seeing an ad
for a game that claimed to have a sex tape
of her. What happened there? That was very unfortunate. There
was a text blurb very shortly that very very few
(14:27):
people saw. We took the place down, We moderated that user,
and they're off our platform. It was not the video
was never on our platform. There was no imagery on
our platform. It was a very short mention, but very unfortunate.
And UM, well, you know, our vision is to be
the most civil place for everyone. I asked him our Bechiv,
the CEO of alphabet and Google, this question about kids
(14:48):
and tech habits and screen time, and he said it's
something that even stresses him out. You know, this is
the guy who runs one of the most powerful technology
companies in the world. UM, I have four kids. You
have four kids. Did it stress you out? Like? How
did you deal with your kids? I think it highlights
how much Um it's a responsibility of both platforms like us,
as well as parents. You know, we're all trying to
(15:09):
figure this out. I think the one thing that we're
very encouraged is that the time spent on roadblocks tends
to be more like hanging out together or being on
the phone together or doing stuff together, and a lot
less of it is isolated, either consuming content by myself
or grinding away at something by myself. So we do
(15:32):
like the fact that most of this is either social
or involved in creation. You've been investing in high fidelity graphics.
What is the endgame here for you know, more human
more realistic avatars. I'll look way out like a science
fiction writer and talk about it, and what I'm talking
about now super difficult the end game. Sometimes we talk
(15:54):
about we would go together to a rock concert or
whatever concert you like. Um, we would be there with
fifty thus and other people. It would feel like a movie.
It would feel like real life. So are you pushing
towards something like meta Horizon worlds? Does that found you know,
more experiences like that? For adults? We sometimes think of
(16:14):
roadblocks ultimately as fading into the background, as a utility
like the electric grid. Um, even though it's photo realistic
and there's all these awesome avatars and connection and identity
around the world, the things we start seeing built on
this are a wide range of things. So you imagine
this not just for kids but for everyone adults absolutely,
(16:35):
What about entertainment would roadblocks ever make a Netflix show.
We would love it if one of our developers made
a Netflix show, so we would we would feel much
more authentic if one of the creators on Roadblocks who's
coming up with avatars and stories and ideas and characters
like that, we want them to be in the limelight.
Roadblock Shares took a dive on the back of Netflix results,
(16:58):
which obviously plum did our investors reading too much into
the connection there. I think our company is somewhat unique,
and what is very exciting to go to work and
be the CEO is being in a market like this,
you know where we think ultimately billions of people are
going to use this type of technology. And the other
exciting thing about this market there are so many big
(17:20):
inventions that still have to happen. It feels like we're
pretty mature, but inside our company we realize like there's
six or seven big inventions we need to make to
get to that next step. Would Roadblocks ever consider more
in game advertising? Yeah, there's a funny trivia note I
would share to all the Roadblocks fans out there. There
was a time the very first way we monetize was advertising,
(17:43):
And then there was also a time when we had
pre roll video on roadblocks, UM, that's all gone now,
and it's gone for a couple of reasons. We didn't
want it to interfere with the user experience, and also
our our virtual economy has become such a powerful way
to power this that we are able to take that
down in the future. Though, I think there's a certain
type of advertising that is kids safe, that is UM immersive,
(18:09):
that doesn't get in your way, and how do you
make sure that doesn't take away from the ethos of
what makes roadblocks grant? Yeah, I think are the people
on roadblocks, you know, they're they're to authentically connect with
their friends. And as long as UM what we're doing
with these brands is very clear, non deceptive, appropriate for
those ages, I think they'll they'll figure out the balance
(18:31):
of how much time do we go into a store
versus how much time do we go to a crazy
adventure tycoon and you know, build an amusement park together.
So either way, this could be a huge new revenue stream.
I believe it's an awesomely huge revenue stream, and at
the same time we've been very gentle towards it. So
as you look ahead, what do you think are the
biggest challenges roadblocks will face if our vision plays out,
(18:55):
which we hope it does, and we have people of
all ages on the platform and we're around the world.
I think maintaining that civility as we grow, as we
have older people who might want to go to a
political rally, thinking ways to do that in a systemic way,
that's a big challenge. It takes a lot of thought.
I think thinking through the technology. I really like we're
(19:16):
very technology driven company. So it's fun to be running
a company where we have to do these seven big
inventions and you know, what we're doing right now isn't
going to cut it. So knowing that technology challenges super interesting.
We do a little rapid fire section just to get
spontaneous as um. First question, what's your morning routine? Wake up,
(19:43):
go outside of my porch, do a CrossFit workout, take
a shower, go to work. Where are you most productive?
Home or office? Both? Um? Different types of productivity homes
and state flow, state at time, office, connecting, being together, brainstorming.
What's your favorite show right now? What are you binging?
Oh my gosh, If if you look at my YouTube history,
(20:05):
it's it's this weird mechanical stuff off road vehicles and
rockets and ships and big waves, best life hack. I
think it all gets down to the joy of health. Really,
like if if I'm not you know, feeling centered, but sleep, exercise,
die and all of that, everything else just completely falls.
You used to have a talk radio show. Now that
(20:28):
I've met you in person, I get this. I see
how you you'd be. You'd be pretty fun to listen to. Yeah,
what was your style? Like? So my gam was, I
would say starting in college, when I would have insomnia
at two am, I would turn on talk radio and
you know all those famous KGO people, Bill Wattenberg, Retelia Pharaoh,
all that just listened to the people calling in. So
(20:51):
I um, after knowledge revolution was acquired and I had
a year, I had a little time to dabble. My
jam was really trying to talk about ray just topics,
you know, gambling, other controversial things. It was in a
small market in Santa Cruz. I would typically it's really
hard to get people to call in, you know, It's like,
(21:13):
so it's really scary if you're a DJ and no
one's calling inside. I made it really controversial. I have
people come on and debate interesting topic. If you could
have dinner with Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, who would
you pick both? You can't pick both. I guess I
would have to slightly lean Disney just because he was
(21:35):
not just the usher of the innovation, but actually was
kind of part of the sum of the innovation. But
I think Steve leaned much more on finding the people
to drive that innovation. Best advice for your twenties, Um,
don't freak out if between the age of twenty two
and twenty five everything is a disaster. Best advice for
(21:55):
your forties. Life is short. It's such a valuable come
on every day. What you do, your friends, your time,
your family is so important. So how do you define
work life integration? I don't like the word balance. Yeah,
I would say, can I make my roadblocks job better
(22:16):
than anything else I would do? Like? Can it be
better than retiring? Can it be better than a hobby?
Can I figure out what my unique job as a CEO?
Every CEO job is different, like I like doing it,
So can I figure out what my role is? You
mentioned your co founder Eric Castle earlier, who died tragically
of cancer. If he was here today, what do you
(22:39):
think he would think? Of the roadblocks that roadblocks has become. Wow,
I think he'd be proud. It's a good question, Like
I think he would. You know his both of his
sons have worked at the company a bit um, so yeah,
I think he'd be very seems like you miss him.
He's just such a brilliant partner. Yeah, and he also
(23:01):
set the standard for taking the long view on how
we engineer things. A lot of the technology at robots
is still like you know, his vision lives on and
it goes back to your advice for you or forties.
Life is short, it is, So in five years, will
the metaverse exist in in in the form that you
imagine or is it take does is it going to
(23:23):
take much longer? Like what's the time horizon? Well, it's
really interesting, right because we're right in the middle of
it right now in a sense with fifty million people
every day on our platform. It's already here. And at
the same time, what is ultimately going to be possible
could be five, ten or twenty years out. So it's
it's all. The metaverse really has existence since online dial
(23:46):
up MUDs really two D very simple text, you could
call that the metaverse. It's existed in multiplayer gaming. World
of Warcraft exists, exists now with more people, and in
ten or twenty years it'll exist photo realistically with fifty people.
You clearly have so much passion for this job. Is
(24:07):
Roadblocks your final stop on your Journey's definitely my final stop,
but I think there's a lot of time ahead of
me here. Dave Fuzuki, CEO of road Blocks, thank you
so much, Bloombrook Studio. At one point, I was produced
and edited by Lauren Ellis and Brian Carter Gainer. I'm
Emily Chang, your host and executive producer.
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