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Conversations with Tyler

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.

Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he's skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son's experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he'll learn next, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded May 27th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:44 - Roblox by the Numbers

00:08:54 - Competition

00:12:13 - Everything Apps

00:19:50 - AI Language Translation

00:21:18 - Token Costs 

00:24:01 - Beauty and Gaming

00:27:01 - Robux

00:29:28 - Social Media and Younger Audiences

00:40:56 - AI and Gaming

00:45:44 - Mutiny on the Bounty

00:47:38 - David's Earlier Companies

00:51:16 - Mentors

00:52:35 - Outro

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:09.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:13.5

Learn more at Mercadis.org.

0:15.7

For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,

0:20.4

visit Conversationswithtyler.com.

0:26.4

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

0:30.6

Today I am here chatting with David Bazuki, who is co-founder and CEO of Roblox,

0:36.2

which is one of the world's largest and fastest growing games platforms.

0:40.5

David, welcome.

0:42.0

Tyler, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

0:45.0

So Roblox, what is it you all do to help create teenage millionaires?

0:49.7

Well, the focus isn't creating teenage millionaires and at the same time there are some teenage

0:55.3

millionaires. Roblox was founded really with the vision of creating a platform where people

1:03.1

could play and connect where all of the content, all of the games, all of the experiences, whether

1:09.8

it's hide and go seek or a fashion game or growing a garden,

1:14.6

is 100% created by the user community. You could call it self-service, you could call it UGC.

1:22.6

And what's really interesting about UGC content when creators and the community are making content

1:30.3

is they can come up with all kinds of interesting and novel ways for people to play together.

1:38.3

We started with two people a while ago, but year by year, Roblox has emerged to have millions of people every day playing

1:46.9

together. And as you correctly noted, some of those creators now who build the content on

1:53.9

Roblox have become millionaires. They've evolved from hobbyists to small studios to larger studios. And we have now a lot of people all

2:03.9

around the world really making a living, building the content for the millions of players on

...

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