INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The Roblox EC-1, Part I: The Origin StoryThere are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press
gaming portals and platforms
Some, like King.com, got lucky or pivoted their business
Others by and large failed.Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to
Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.But overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an
insignificant story for many, many years
The company had millions of users, sure
So did any number of popular games
In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much
faster.Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform
It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number
Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like
Steam.This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform.Seeds of an idea(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images
for TechCrunch)Before Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software
co-found Roblox, but is now on its board)
Nearly a decade later, it was acquired for $20 million by MSC Software, which made professional simulation tools
Dave continued there for another four years before leaving to become an angel investor.Baszucki put money into Friendster, a company that
pre-dated Facebook and MySpace in the social networking category
That investment seeded another piece of the idea for Roblox
Taken together, the legacy of Knowledge Revolution and Friendster were the two key components undergirding Roblox: a physics sandbox with
strong creation tools, and a social graph.Baszucki himself is a third piece of the puzzle
Rogers than Jobs himself: unfailingly polite and enthusiastic, never claiming superior insight, and preferring to pass credit for his
accomplishments on to others
In conversation, he shows interests both central and tangential to Roblox, like virtual environments, games, education, digital identity and
Somewhere in this heady mix, the idea of Roblox came about.The first release
