 Great. Super excited to be here at Slush. Especially with David and Sondre. I'm Neil Reimer. David, I just wanted to start with a little shout out to Slush. You said something to me as we were walking up here comparing it to Burning Man. Could you just repeat that? Yeah, what I said, Neil, is sometimes when I've been at Burning Man, the thought has struck me that at that moment in time this is the best party or gathering of creative people in the world and it's my first time at Slush but in passing today I said right now today this is potentially the best gathering of creative people in the world. Right on. I'm glad I'm glad that you chose to come to this conference. As you know it's conference that I come to every year. So we have a lot to cover. I wanted to jump right into it. You know, one thing that most people in the room probably don't know is that you and I went to college together and I remember many years ago that we would talk about these things you wanted to build and you would fantasize about a world where people could build their own vehicles. We used to talk about vehicles a lot because it was the days of Mad Max and building their own worlds. Fast forward a few years and here we are at Slush in Helsinki and Roblox has crossed a billion hours of engagement per month. This must feel kind of unreal to you. Can you tell us where we are in terms of the journey and some of the numbers about Roblox? Yeah, it feels unreal and at the same time it feels like it did 10 years ago right when we were starting and you're just seeing a little bit of a snapshot of what people are building on our platform. Roblox is a platform where people do things together in user created 3D spaces. It's supported by over 2 million developers who create 3D experiences and every month about 75 million people come together and spend about a billion hours on the platform right now. The vision we had when we started was if we made immersive 3D multiplayer physically simulated space, we'd see an enormous wide range of types of things, things that go beyond gaming, things that are educational, things that involve social or hangouts and we've kind of seen this come through and it all stemmed from an early love of physics simulation that blossomed into this whole platform. What are some of the crazy things that you've seen people do and build on Roblox? We see a lot of things that we would intuitively not expect people to want to do together so we see people who want to work at a pizza restaurant which intuitively doesn't make sense but people spend hours and hours doing that. People like to do scary stuff together. There's experiences where you can run away from hundreds of natural disasters and get scared with your friends and we see a bunch of more traditional RPG and first-person shooter type games and then we see things that actually are very educational like bird simulator where you get to be a bird and try to survive by finding bugs. Sandra, can you talk about some of the things you saw and how you actually came to the platform? What was your experience when you joined it? Sure. Some of the fun things that I've seen in Roblox is for example kids come out of school and go back home and sit down and play high school role plays so they go straight from school to a new school which is maybe unintuitive. Makes total sense. They love doing it. I've been on the platform for eight years first as a user where I just played games, socialized, got friends and then I after a couple years stepped over to actually making games myself. So eight years so you started when you were like 12? Yeah. So I've been playing, spending like four years just hanging out, building connections, getting friends. Like the modern newer generation is a way of getting friends. Just meet them online, find common stuff that you find fun. So now 2018, about half of the kids between nine and 13 in North America play Roblox every month. That's right. But this wasn't an overnight success, to put it lightly. I think it took about 10 years for that sort of to play out. We have a graph here showing hours of engagement. Can you talk about that journey a little bit and were there tough times? Were there times when you thought the world wasn't conforming to your vision and you wanted to throw in the towel? Yeah, I would say when we started the company, we had a little vision of this, what we believe is a new category. And we had this mantra about tenacity and just how big this could be and staying in the game. It's an interesting combination of experiences that supercharge you and just blow your mind and get you motivated. For example, the day we shipped our first version of the open development tools, we immediately realized the stuff our developer community could create is just 100 times better than anything we could do. But then along the way, every type of difficult thing in the major categories, you can imagine we've had some unfortunate hacks early on when we weren't super secure. More around our economy, crises around monetization, slow growth, coupled by fast growth. So we've really seen it all. And yeah, there's been times where it's just like, oh, my gosh, just one day more. But we're super optimistic about the category as a whole. And when you, if you're in a business where you can always see 10X of where you potentially are, it makes it somewhat easy to keep pushing forward. Well, talk about where you're going to, where you want to take the platform in a little bit. But I just want to ask you, Sondre, so because you started eight years ago, you were on Roblox before the whole kind of user-generated economy was in place. Yeah. When I started, it was just like some people are hanging out making stuff, socializing. There were no incentives to do it. You just do it because it's fun. And because you get to socialize with people. And the only reward was that you could look really cool in-game if you did really well. So that was what drove people back then. And then Roblox introduced monetization and the developer exchange really lets us earn money from the platform. And the development exploded from that point on. And now, this year, Roblox paid out or will pay out something like $70 million to developers? Yeah. We had a lot of discussions around the virtual economy and Roblox always had its roots in fun and showing off to your friends. So it was a little controversial when we first introduced the virtual economy. But we saw more and more of our users go off to college wanting to work on Roblox but having to get a real job. Yeah, when they wanted to keep creating games and experiences. So we started this virtual economy early and then we saw signs of people starting to do this for a living. We've now gotten to the point where some of the teams have 10 or 15 people. The game Saundra just worked on had 15 people on the team. And we've seen these teams become studios, some of which are making millions of dollars per year. We've also seen a beautiful expansion of the types of things people do. There's coders, artists, gameplay, producers, kind of a really well rounded collection. And what I find incredible is that Roblox is beyond just being a place where you can enjoy playing together with your friends. You're also a coding school of sorts. And you're kind of also a business school. Can I talk about that? Yeah, I think on the very first glance when people think game development, they think coding, but it's infinitely richer than that. You know, experience development is art. It's architecture. It's creative. It's landscape design. It's also business. It's also economy. It's also business. It's also entrepreneurship. And it'll more and more be data science and A.B. testing and all of these things. So Sunder, you were talking earlier about the things you've learned about trading off engagement with monetization and how you use analytics. Yeah, like we have a lot of analytics at this point where we just track day one, day seven, monthly active users, daily active users, every kind of retention and then add like we do, of course, like we're I'm pretty close to my target audience in age. So I kind of I know my audience really well, which is a really strong point for Roblox developers because we are our players, basically, and we can use our like intuition about how we know our players along with like data that we collect to like optimize our games for like the players like we can optimize it for the younger users for the more older users, we can make sure that like the audience you want to hit that they have the best experience they can have, because I can practically make a game that I would enjoy, and I can be certain that a lot of other people will feel the same. And so you've got these multi disciplinary teams working together to build games, sometimes dozens or hundreds of players. What are some of the other activities or functions that you see people playing on the platform, providing on the platform as real work over the next few years? You know, ultimately, just one final caveat on that, this ability to have an open like a free game development tool that a lot of people are using is creating a lot of demand in summer camps and curriculum in schools as well. And so now more and more kids are learning computer science on tools like this. In the future, as you imagine, immersive 3D experience is becoming more and more a prevalent form of interaction and entertainment. You can almost think about the economy right now for making linear video, which is TV, movies, YouTube, and the scale of that. And then you transfer that not just to the gaming ecosphere, which is already huge, but the immersive social ecosphere where it's not just competitive play, it's hanging out together, it's learning together, it's creating together. And things like translation and other types of functions? We're in the process right now of giving tools, for example, so developers who are on large teams can wrap in their community to help make experiences that will run in many, many languages at the same time. So translation is another function, moderation. Where are you today in terms of international? You know, we're well over half of the people on Roblox are outside of the United States right now. And Europe, we think long term will be the biggest market. We're growing at over 2X per year in Europe right now. And that's before you've really localized. That's been with more of an English platform. We can see as we give developers the tools to run their experiences in German or French or Spanish or whatever, you know, that an uptick there. So we're, we really believe ultimately these types of experiences run multi-language, multi-platform around the world concurrently. So I want to come back a little bit to Sondre, because so you have, you're one of, we have four million developers on the platform today. You're one of the more successful ones. Last time I checked your games had over 100 million plays. Yeah. Can you talk about when you actually realized, oh, actually there are a lot of people out there who know my games. Can you? Yeah, I have a funny story about that. When I was in San Francisco this summer, I went to this ice cream shop and you were there, you were there for Roblox? Yeah, I was there as an internet Roblox and their development program. And then me and another group of friends went to a ice cream shop. One of them were like a Roblox work hoodie. And when we were getting our ice cream, a family walked in and the kid noticed the Roblox logo on the hoodie. So he just went straight to his mom, like, jacked in his jacket, like, look at that. And then he was also trying to keep it cool, like impress us. And then just his mom just like, he's super stoked to see you guys. And did they, did they actually know your games? Yeah, like we introduced ourselves, they asked what our username on the platform was. And they were like, hmm, I've heard that username. What have you made? And then we like set out the games we've made. And then the kid just got more and more excited because he's been playing these games. Like, one of our games have been played like the day before. So he met the creator of the game that he's been playing for the last six months, like daily just having fun. And it was super cool to like see this. Because as like a game developer on the internet, you don't actually see the real world like what the impact has. But that kid was so happy. And the mom just like thanked us. Yeah, we took a photo with them. And she was super like, proud and like happy and nice. So so now you're a student in university, you're studying computer science. Yeah. I don't want to be crass and ask you how much money you're making on Roblox. But can you give us a sense for what kind of impact it's had on your life? I cannot fund all of the startups here. But maybe half of them. Yeah, it's had a massive impact on like, both like personally and in like my like, economically and like in my growth as a person, I'm able to study and like work at making games at the same time and have everything covered by that. And it's just going upwards. So I'm really happy, like, excited for what's to come. Dave. So in the life of kind of your life leading the company and driving the vision. What was the moment you kind of decided, you know, this is really becoming mainstream? I've actually struck a chord with a with a lot of people. Yeah, I've had a few mainstream. I've had similar stories where even four or five years ago, I was in an airport with my family and recognized by a 12 year old and, you know, signed autographs and did stuff. I think both you and I had our why I know mine was what's your moment. Yeah, my moment was this when oh, when Kanye and Lil Pump did a video dressed up as Roblox characters. Yeah, that's what I knew Roblox had arrived. I we were we didn't think this we thought this was a coincidence when this happened. Originally, and everyone said this looks like some of our original blocky characters. But since then, we've been in, you know, contact with Kanye and he's a big Roblox fan. You know, when I when I saw Kanye and Trump having that surreal conversation, I assumed that they were just talking about Roblox. But there you go. Can you talk a little bit about the future? So my sense with Roblox is, even though you've come such a long way, I still feel like the greatest days are ahead of you. I still feel like Roblox in many ways is is a very well kept secret in the same way. It reminds me in many ways of when we invested in Supercell at a time when most you know, the kind of conventional wisdom was that, hey, they've already had two very successful games. What are you expecting here? And our sense was that the culture and the vision and the leadership of the company was going to lead them to build, you know, not just one, but several more great hits and it would endure in ways that lots of game companies don't. What's your what's your vision for where Roblox goes? We yeah, we more and more we see things happening on our platform that borrow from elements of what we might see in gaming and in social networking and in media. But one thing that we're really excited about is because this is real time and because people are doing things together, we see people making friends in digital space and then bringing those friendships into physical space and platforms like Roblox and many games can be friendship creating platforms. And what's exciting is many of those friendships are made between people from different parts of the world or people who think about things in different ways. And we may we may have a little situation with social networking where people tend to bubble up with their their current people. We see a lot of opportunity for expansion and understanding different people around the world. So we're really optimistic about that. And as we start to think about connecting Asia, North America and Europe together and having people from Europe play with people from China and maybe go on field trips together and almost feel like they're doing things together. We think the opportunities are both play and play has enormous value, but also learning, understanding, practicing life skills. You used to talk about the example of, you know, a young girl on the subway in Seoul somewhere. Yeah, like we the difficult technical challenge would be a, you know, providing an immersive social experience to young girl in Seoul on an Android phone that has three minutes of time, even while simultaneously that social experience might be available on the big screen with someone in a different part of the world. So unifying different types of people, different types of devices and different languages in real time is this interesting and dimensional connection matrix. Right. So across platforms, across a broader geography, that's right. And even across a broader age group. Absolutely. Surprisingly enough, more than half of the players on Roblox today are over 13. It's a little known stat. Just there's an enormously many more people over 13 than into the nine through 12 zone. So over time, we would like to be a part of our players lives as they get older as well. Fantastic. Well, I'm really excited to see where this goes. I want to thank both of you for taking the time to talk with me and keep it up. Thank you very much. Thank you, Neil.