> Though Roblox isn’t profitable, there are some significant caveats to the situation. Over the last twelve months, operating cash flow—a far more important measure than accounting-defined profits—were $650MM, about 20% of revenue. Roblox has been cash-positive for at least twenty-four quarters.
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)
I'm referring to companies financial statements where these numbers are reported. It doesn't mean the cash comp isn't high or that a specific job offer won't have a lot of cash comp.
What it does mean is that, in aggregate, Roblox has issued $1B in new shares to employees in the last 12 months, diluting shareholders by 4% or so. This is the most significant factor making the company cash-flow positive while remaining not profitable. It's essentially the same as investors putting more money into the business constantly.
I'm a pretty senior IC at Roblox, and my new hire offer was 40% cash / 60% RSUs. It's now closer to 33/67 with refresher grants.
Roblox pays very competitively (see levels.fyi). The apparent strategy is to try to hire lots of long-tenured L6+ Googlers (seriously, it's crazy how many former Googlers I work with).
Having lots of ex Googlers could honestly go either way. I wouldn’t automatically assume thats a good thing.
A former mid size company that I worked at had the same scenario and it was definitely not good. They over engineered not just the systems but literally everything else, including the promotion process which involved the whole horse and pony show and was a constant distraction to shipping features while the companys finances struggled.
Not a good sign for Roblox. Yes, many smart people, but they weren't industry changing (Google almost never loses) and they didn't get or turned down Google's renewal program to retain talent.
Looks like a lot who wanted the high pay, but coast along and leverage their past experience to not be dared questioned.
If you want people who know how to build stable large scale infrastructure it is hard to go wrong by hiring people from Google. Google rewrites all their products all the time, they shut down and launch new internal systems just as often as they do external, and it is still stable, so the people from there has probably been through a few rewrites of some infrastructure part and knows what are required for that to work.
Roblox's salary ranges from $140861 in total compensation ... Levels.fyi collects anonymous and verified salaries from current and former employees of Roblox.
Total compensation means $700K, some of it being cash, some of it being stock. Company cars are pretty rare in the US, since basically everyone has a car already.
Company cars are really common in some industries, very rare in others. Ive never heard of it in tech, but I know people in sales that its just part of the gig.
I've not owned a car in 7 years thanks to my engineering gig coming with a work truck for getting around construction sites. Quite enjoy that aspect of it.
Roblox will not be issuing stock options now and likely stopped doing so for 4+ years already. The equity component of compensation now will be actual stock (shares) and not options.
Another commenter mentioned that cash/equity now has a 33/67 split meaning $700k tc would likely be $230k cash and $470k stocks
Total Compensation is the sum of all the different ways you are paid monetarily. This includes, but is not limited to: Base salary, Bonus, Equity (stock) compensation, Benefits
> if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending
This is a point that's sometimes less obvious with cash flow games. It's possible to have positive cash flow even with negative unit economics, _even when no economy of scale can sufficiently improve those unit economics_ [0], so long as you have enough growth and a good cash flow situation.
That's one of the criticisms Uber has had over the years; are they capable of sustaining their apparent pre-reinvestment profits if they cut out that spending? It's potentially a bit different from the Amazon situation because most of the money is going straight into speculative bets, acquiring competitors, ads, ride subsidies, and other activities designed to lock in the market, and it's unclear if that will give them a meaningful moat, as opposed to, e.g., capital investments in a fantastic, in-house distribution and shipping mechanism.
Can Roblox actually become sustainable by cutting spending somewhere?
[0] Imagine a product with -50% unit ROI. For every dollar in revenue you have two dollars in guaranteed costs. However, suppose the product is paid for fairly early relative to those costs (e.g., the business offers a steep discount on yearly subscriptions if you pay up-front, the costs are incurred linearly throughout the year as the subscription is used, and there's a till-the-start-of-next-month plus 30 days lag on billing for computing resources used). You haven't actually used enough resources to be in the red till 6 months after the subscription starts, and you're not actually on the hook for that last payment till 7 months have elapsed. If you're also able to hit a 2x annual growth rate in your paid subscriber count (not realistic for large companies, not uncommon for a few years with good product-market-fit in gaming or some SAAS products), you've paid for the year's losses before the year has ended and still have an extra month at the end where the money is sitting in your account. As your company doubles its subscribers, your coffers will continue to double as well, even if you have indefinitely negative unit economics.
In the real world you usually have smaller numbers being considered (smaller losses, less growth), allowing the game to go on for many more years.
Glossing at their financial statements, about half of that is due to deferred revenue (stuff they sold but haven't delivered on, which I'd guess is sales of their currency that haven't been redeemed). No particular insight on that either way.
This feels like an example of the phenomenon highlighted in another recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263855
Namely, that as long as Roblox's cash flow is increasing year-over-year, they probably don't care about profit. (And if cash flow ever does stop increasing, they can always get back to sustainability by pumping the brakes on reinvestment spending.)