Matt Dalio (4:37)
If anything, it's funny, I am thinking of 15 examples across the 15 year journey that in the various things we've done, we've been on. Maybe I'll describe a big one, which is we started maybe just to talk a little bit about why we're doing what we do, which then makes it a little bit easier to understand kind of that this inflection point. A world in which every kid is a creator, in other words, which every human grows up able to make and contribute to the software. In our world, whether they're a coder or a project manager or product manager, people in Silicon Valley are driving so much of the world's value. And then it's like everyone else just kind of receives what they have. And a world in which everyone else is capable of creating in the same way as them, again, not just in code, but in all the many disciplines of entrepreneurship. In an AI world, it's become even more important. A world in which everyone has those is a better world because it's a world in which people become power users, can have jobs, and then can also solve bigger problems and make the world better across all the other problems. And so what we realized was that almost all of today's tech entrepreneurs, so many of them at least, especially on the coding front, learn to code by hacking their games as kids. So like Elon Musk learned this way, Mark Zuckerberg learned this way. Both of them say that most of their best engineers learn this way. We have an operating system team focused on device access in emerging markets, which is a whole other story. And most of those engineers learned that way. And so we had an idea which is, let's go build a game that you could play and you could hack. And in the process of hacking it, you would learn how to code. And we'll build thousands of hours of questline in order to make, you know, this experience that takes you from novice to NSA level hacker. I still want to build that game, by the way, which I've given kind of the little clue that it died. And we spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to crack this insight of like, how you would build the systems that make it easy to hack and how you make something that's easy on ramp and how you build a compelling narrative that brings people in on this hero's journey adventure story. And AI was part of it. Funny enough, we started, we were building this 2018 and AI was at the epicenter of it. So it's only become more relevant today. And we just thought we had to just keep Building more content. And we, we. Content is one of those things that you need breadth of content, and you also need quality of content. And with a limited budget, it's like, you know, the taffy can only stretch so much in so many directions. And, you know, at some point, we realized we needed a thousand times more than we were able to inadequately do on the budget that we had. In other words, you know, we realized it was just impossible to build the thing we were trying to build. And at that point, we had this awesome team working on it, and we were, you know, working our butts off and years into it and billions of dollars into it, and we just had to face the reality that there was no way to build the thing we were trying to build. But we realized this huge kind of like, whoa, insight that the people we were trying to teach these skills would learn more if they were able to build a game than by any game that they could ever play. And we also realized that if we taught them how to build a game, we. We could have them come and help us build the game we were trying to build. Like, they could become the creators of the game that we wanted to build. And then from there, we realized that they could build any game they want and learn. We don't need to be building a game. They can be building whatever game they want. Let's throw them in the professional tools and get them off and running and teach them how to do that. And then what we realized was that the professional tools were impossible for any of them to use. Like, you take your average human and you throw them in Unity and they just can't use it. And yet every kid in the world can use Minecraft. And so we realized there was this giant gap between Minecraft and Unity. And in the same way as a game tutorializes people, in other words, it brings you through this kind of long and exciting engagement journey of teaching you how to use, in some cases, really, really complex tools. Some games are really complex, and yet they never feel complex because you systematically learn how to use them over a long period of time. That we could build a tool that did the same thing for Unity, in other words, a tool that sat on top of Unity. It was a game. It is a game experience that lets you build games in a really simple way. As simple as Minecraft placing blocks, but with much more complicated mechanics. I could pull the lever and then press the pressure plate, and then those open the door. And then now, all of a sudden, I have a multiplayer puzzle. And by the way, all of it had to happen multiplayer, because we live in a multiplayer world. The original game we were trying to build was single player. So we realized out of this that with that tool we could then scaffold people into being creators. And so out of the kind of, you know, the ashes of this thing that, you know, imploded and burned down, what we realized was the right way to do it, and the right way to do it is teach people to build. I don't care what tool they build in, I care that they're building. And then that's frankly the most important thing about it. Like often I describe about the tool that we are building, our job is when we're effective, we are getting people off of the tool we're building because our job is to get them into professional tools. Unity, Unreal, Godot, I don't care what it is a Roblox studio. But in order to do that, we also realized that we had to build a tool to do it. And we were able to take all of the learnings from that original game we built called the Endless Mission, which is still there in steam. Early access as a kind of submerged ship, you know, sunken treasure at the bottom of the ocean. But it's full of all of the mistakes we made, which became all of the insights that we had for how you would build a tool correctly. So, for example, we would see students use this, and it was 3D object placement, and they'd line up all the platforms to jump, and then they'd rotate in 3D space, which, by the way, most people struggle with. And then they'd realize it was, you know, lined up from, you know, one axis, but it was all wonky on the other axis. Like, you know, literally just 3D placements hard. So many examples like that. And we had the chance to redo it and think about like, okay, well, let's make it block based, just like Minecraft. So it's a grid and you place it and, you know, the character will be able to jump. There's no question whether the character could jump because they could jump two blocks. And I put it two blocks. So that is, you know, we've had again, 15 years worth of examples like that. But probably the best example of really what got us to where we are today. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have the insights that we have today.