Roblox Corporation Founder Story

Roblox has become one of the most favorite platforms to play games and its popularity keeps getting more popular especially with the current pandemic. The company of the platform named Roblox Corporation is named as the fastest growing companies in the United States of America. It received the 2007 Economic Development Association (SAMCEDA) Award of Excellent.

Aside from the company, the founder of Roblox Corporation, David Baszucki, has also received various awards and accolades for his invention. Some of them include the 2015 San Mateo Visionary Hero Award for the work done by Roblox for education and encouraging children to code. In 2017-2018, the man was also included in 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs. As of July 2021, he has more than 15 patents in his name.

Roblox is undeniably a big name and a successful one, so is its founder, David Baszucki. If you love to learn from someone’s success, here is the story of the Roblox Corporation’s founder, David Baszucki.

David Baszucki was born in Canada on January 20, 1963. He studied at the Eden Prairie High School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. He was one of the best students and loved to participate in the extracurriculars of his school. Not only that, he was also the leader of the quiz team of the school.  After graduating, he then enrolled in Stanford University and studied engineering and computer science. In 1985, he then graduated as the General Motors Scholar in electrical engineering.

According to some sources, David Baszucki always dreamt of owning his own business. After graduating, he did not let himself rest for too long and started to create the Knowledge Revolution. It was in 1989 and it was only four years after he finished his study. At the time, he teamed up with his brother. A thing known as Knowledge Revolution was in charge of producing education applications for Macintosh users. Interactive Physics was the first product born by the Knowledge Revolution. As you can guess from its name, Interactive Physics is the one that helped the users to learn Physics. It stimulated a 2D environment and thanks to it, the users could carry out Physics experiments.

Only a year after the release of Interactive Physics, the Knowledge Revolution came with another application called Working Model. While Interactive Physics helped the users to learn Physics, this one helped them to learn mechanical physics. After successfully releasing some educational educations, in 1998 for the exact, the company was acquired by a big company based in California named MSC Software.

With the merger, David Baszucki became the Vice President of MSC Software and then the General Manager two years after joining the company. His time in that company was not long as he decided to leave it only two years later and then started an investment firm called Baszucki & Associates. He was really into the new thing to the point he agreed to become a host of a radio show known as KSCO Radio Santa Cruz. He hosted the program from February to July 2003.

Following the success of his first company, Knowledge Revolution, and knowing how popular Interactive Physics was among the youngsters, David Baszucki started to work on a new project in 2004. He wanted to make something that would also involve the users of his product in the development process. He was really eager and found a thing called DynaBlocks together with Erik Cassel.

A year later, DynaBlocks changed its name to the name that is known now, Roblox. Actually, the company was released officially after two years of the change. In the same year, the official website of it was released. A creation engine named Roblox Studio was made by the company to give people the chance to make their own games and experiences on the platform. In addition to making their own games, the users also could play the games created and developed by the other developers. In 2007, the company offered extra features to the subscribers with the premium membership namely Builders Club.

Due to its interesting concept, Roblox became a favorite place for the young ones to learn and make codes. It was really popular, especially among children under the age of 13. In 2009, the company got a total of $2.2 million from the first crowdfunding and then earned a $4 million more from the second one two years later. In the same year, it held an event intended for the developers called Hack Week. The main purpose of the event was to provide a place for the developers so that they could present some extraordinary ideas that had never been thought of by anyone before.

Roblox Corporation as the company of Roblox has always been putting an effort to improve the platform. After the Hack Week, it dropped the official currency of the platform called Robux. Every user of the platform should use this currency to buy games on the platform.

In the end of 2012, Roblox came with an iOS version of the platform. A year after that, a platform to exchange the currency known as the Developer Exchange system was born. With this system, every developer could exchange their virtual currency named Robux to the real life currency.

In 2017, Roblox had a total of 2 million developers and there were more than 56 million active players every month. That year alone, it earned $30 million. In March 2021, Roblox went public at $64.50 per share. The number makes the valuation of it at more than $41 million, which is double the size of its competitor behind Fortnite, Epic Games.

The story of David Baszucki is really inspiring. Knowing that the users of Roblox are mostly under 13 years old, let’s hope these children learn from him to follow their dream and be someone that is useful. Not only these children, the other ones can also learn from him to achieve success and to not give up.

Alfin Dani

AUTHOR BIO

On my daily job, I am a software engineer, programmer & computer technician. My passion is assembling PC hardware, studying Operating System and all things related to computers technology. I also love to make short films for YouTube as a producer. More at about me…