Roblox gives autonomous teams ownership of vertical stacks

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 25:52

   Behind the scenes, there's a massive amount of technology in Roblox. Like this is, to make it seem as transparent and easy as it does, there's an underlayer we call the Roblox operating system, which is the company that's then building this Roblox thing. And kind of in line with kind of system thinking, we think of our company as the system. And the company, Roblox is really running almost as if it's nine separate companies.

2. 26:27

   They are all very well connected. We all get together once a week and connect all these companies together. There is a 3D cloud simulation and tool set company running within Roblox. There is a mini cloud infrastructure company running with 40 data centers and hundreds of thousands of computers. Why did you decide to do that? We initially, we just wanted, we were actually pretty naive. And so rather than going down this cloud path, I would say right when we were starting Roblox, AWS was just starting to be a thing.

3. 27:06

   And S3 was just starting to be a thing. We like the idea initially of building it ourselves. Five years later, I think that's when there's a lot of discussion about this company is all cloud. This company is all build it themselves kind of thing. we at that point started to see building infra ourselves as being a cost benefit and a scale benefit and so i would say our we were great partners with aws and gcp and others we do burst into those platforms but for at the scale we're working and the cost we're working we do this very efficiently like all of roblox runs for less than a penny an hour for every person around the world and that's super critical um but so so yeah and we can go in deeper but roblox is really nine let's go deeper i want to go back to the nine companies because this is stuff this is

4. 28:00

   Man, before we start recording, I was like, you've got all this crazy shit in your head that happened in any of the podcasts. We've got to find a way to get it out. So we are, so underneath Roblox, Roblox operating system, it's how we run the company. We have a group of engineers working not on Roblox, but on the Roblox operating system, looking at who are the various teams, how we're organized, how we do all of our things in the company.

5. 28:25

   Hold on, back up, back up. You have a team of engineers working on the Roblox operating system, which is just the operating system on how to run the company. That's correct. The company building the world. That's right. Okay. Yeah, because running the company efficiently is the most powerful way to then build this vision. So, Matt, I won't go into the extent we use AI acceleration amongst our creators, but having all of our engineers.

6. 28:49

   Why won't you go into it? I don't want to say anything non-public, but I would say that is right in line with Roblox operating system. How does every engineer, product manager, data scientist, designer work in optimal ways? How does the leader of an individual group, like that game engine cloud thing, how do they actually operate almost like a mini CEO? How do they run that vertical stack? How do they control the types of engineers and product managers, how they compensate them?

7. 29:24

   That's a really big part of how we run our company. And I'd say that the common thread of what we try to do is have as much autonomy on these groups or companies within, and then simultaneously, horizontally, just continuously try to connect it together. So we have lots of groups who can go and do things very quickly on their own, and then we glue them together constantly. How did you come to the design of the way you have the company operating?

8. 29:54

   There was a pivotal moment a long time at Roblox where we were running it as three horizontal stacks. We were running it as the web stack and the infrastructure stack. And what we would see is, you know, someone's working on a specific feature like the social graph, they would have to go and try to get enough bandwidth out of the web stack and the infra stack and the front end stack. So there's always a negotiation amongst that, and it was hard to say who is building this social graph.

9. 30:28

   So there was a rotation of that where we said, no, someone is going to be in charge of the whole social graph, user-facing components, web component infra. And all of a sudden, we got a lot of acceleration because they could load balance between all of those pieces. So that lesson's been with us today, and actually it runs recursively. So within our, for example, this one group or company I've been talking about, the Game Engine group, that is subdivided into smaller pieces that also run kind of in that same way.

10. 31:03

    But essentially, like you created a series like primitives? Yeah, in a way, we're like, we have primitive system for how we run the company recursively from groups to teams to pods. And we've tried to make that somewhat, you know, an accelerant in how we build the business. But the way you think about these nine, you think of them as almost individual companies inside the company? Is that the term used?

11. 31:25

    We call them groups, but the leaders of these groups, we want them to feel that autonomy of as much as possible running a pseudo-autonomous thing that intersects with each other. And, you know, it's almost like we would have a game engine simulation company talking to an infrastructure cloud computing and storage company. They work with each other. This sits on top of that. But we want as much speed and autonomy in each of these groups.

12. 31:54

    Say more about how this is organized. This is very fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we executive staff meeting. Every Tuesday, we get together four or five hours. Leaders of all these nine companies come together. We go through the things they're working on by themselves, but we go through a lot of times of all of the horizontal things that are bringing them together. What are the horizontal things bringing them together?

13. 32:18

    It's funny, but we track at a ridiculously high level of fidelity, even in our executive staff meeting. So we, you know, we have probably 50 to 60 things that are core to hitting, you know, the objectives we have this quarter, next quarter, the rest of the year. It's almost like a hand curated list at the company level and group level of things that we think are emblematic as a way of our success.

14. 32:45

    And every week we have all of the key leaders of all of those groups come together and we just go through all that list of 50. So who's in this meeting? It's these nine people, they're reporting directly to you? Some of them report to me, some report to some without, but there's probably, we'll bring in a few other engineers as well. So there's probably 15 or 18 people in that meeting. And we spend an hour just choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo.

15. 33:09

    Well, no, what's the choo, choo, choo, choo? You got to explain that. Key deliverable one through 50. In an hour? It's two minutes. It's like one to two minutes an issue. I just recorded with Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat. Yeah. And he was explaining his design meeting. And he says, I forgot, maybe an hour or two hours, I have to listen to the episode back. But he's like, we'll go over hundreds of ideas.

16. 33:30

    And we just go through it really, really, really rapidly. We have our core list that goes between 50 and 70. They cycle every month or two or three or four. We're constantly putting new things in. How do you keep track of all this? We have a pretty good office of CEO team. We have the Roblox operating system. It's got some software in there. My office has, you know, StratOps people, senior people who kind of work with me to do this on the side.

17. 33:53

    So it's very real time.