Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play (Ep. 280) | Conversations with Tyler
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June 17, 2026<br>Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play (Ep. 280)
The main competition for Roblox? Itself.
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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.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded May 27th, 2026.
Thanks to Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic/WordPress, for sponsoring this transcript in dedication to everyone building Open Source.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am here chatting with David Baszucki, who is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, which is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing games platforms. David, welcome.
DAVID BASZUCKI: Tyler, thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.
COWEN: Roblox, what is it you all do to help create teenage millionaires?
BASZUCKI: The focus isn’t creating teenage millionaires, and at the same time, there are some teenage millionaires. Roblox was founded really with the vision of creating a platform where people could play and connect, where all of the content, all of the games, all of the experiences, whether it’s hide and go seek or a fashion game or growing a garden, is 100 percent created by the user community. You could call it self-service, you could call it UGC.
What’s really interesting about UGC content when creators and the community are making content is they can come up with all kinds of interesting and novel ways for people to play together. We started with two people a while ago, but year by year, Roblox has emerged to have millions of people every day playing together. As you correctly noted, some of those creators now who build the content on Roblox have become millionaires. They’ve evolved from hobbyists to small studios to larger studios. We have now a lot of people all around the world really making a living building the content for the millions of players on the platform.
COWEN: They get a share of your revenue for a game they build.
BASZUCKI: That’s exactly right.
COWEN: Your revenue comes from people paying to put their games on your platform, right?
BASZUCKI: The revenue has evolved in stages, and it’s a fun economic story, really, the progression of how the Roblox economy has evolved. The first fun thing to think about is the vast majority of the players on our platform are not spending any money. They’re coming, they’re playing for free, they’re having great experiences with their friend. Roblox runs not just on UGC content or content created by all of these millions of creators, but literally a virtual economy with a currency called Robux, a wide range of games and experiences, where, for those users who choose to, they can spend Robux in the experience.
When they spend Robux in the experience, that creator can then cash those Robux out for real money. It’s a bit of a virtuous economy cycle. The creators are extremely creative in how they build their economies. They want all of their creations to be fun for everyone who’s playing for free, which is the vast majority of everyone. At the same time, they do want to make a living and fund jobs and fund their studios, so they come up with amazingly creative ways to do it.
Very early on, in the game called Work at a Pizza Place, you could buy a motor scooter. If you wanted to get around the world more quickly, you could use some Robux, buy a motor scooter, and get around more quickly. Now we just see a vast array of incredibly innovative ways for creators to sell things within their experience.
COWEN: Is the future of...