By Joseph Flaherty , a 14-year-old, made waves last year when it raised , and now, the company is reportedly raising a new round at a . Something’s clearly working — The game is beloved by millions of players and has become a platform for four million developers who have produced forty million games while minting a few teenage millionaires in the process. Roblox slightly more social, slightly more mature alternative to Minecraft $92M of funding $2.4B valuation isn’t an investor in Roblox, but there are a few elements of the company’s success worth calling out as worthy of study: Founder Collective Ideas Aren’t Determinative Roblox was founded in 2005, four full years before . If ideas are truly determinative, as many people in the entrepreneurial ecosystem believe, Roblox should have “won” outright. Instead, Minecraft struck a chord and went from experiment to multi-billion dollar acquisition in short order. Minecraft was released Believers in the “ ” also tend to think that markets are winner take all, but Roblox is a rebuke to that theory, too. Despite a largely overlapping feature set, and a competitor who raced to a lead in public perception, the simple idea of “Digital Legos” has proven expansive enough to launch two multi-billion dollar startups — so far. Idea Myth Products Come Before Platforms Roblox has become an impressive platform for developers, but the company didn’t start offering a revenue share arrangement to developers until 2015, a decade after it was founded. Before Roblox became a platform it had a single-player mode that allowed it to attract the first of its now 64 million users. The company claims it will pay out $70M to developers in 2018, . has written about the “ ” previously, but the takeaway is that companies should focus on solving specific problems before attempting to become a platform, a principle Roblox seems to embody. up from a mere $2.5M in 2015 Eric Paley Platform Paradox Capital isn’t the Constraint Roblox raised just $9.5M in its first twelve years of operation. Most startups would spend a Series A of that size in a mere 18 months. Roblox and Minecraft together serve as a reminder that tremendous value can be created with very little capital, even in typically capital intensive categories with high acquisition costs. By avoiding the side effects of “ ,” Roblox was able to join the likes of Unity, Mojang, LootCrate, and other game-related companies that . Toxic VC got big before raising a big round Congrats to the Roblox team, and our friends at , on leveling up with a counter-cultural approach to capital! First Round Capital
