Roblox Taps Industry Veterans from Facebook, Hewlett Packard, and Crunchbase as It Expands Its Management Team

Company staffs up executive team as it prepares to double employee headcount in next year in response to massive growth.

SAN MATEO – December 7, 2017 – Amid explosive growth and rising popularity, Roblox, the world’s largest social platform for play, announced the addition of three Silicon Valley veterans to its senior staff to help lead the company. The new team tasked with scaling the staff and product that supports the platform includes Jennifer Hedding as Chief People Officer, Daniel Williams as VP of Corporate and Production Engineering, and Matt Kaufman as VP of Product for Platform at Roblox. Each brings more than 20 years of experience working for a large cross-section of both early stage start-ups as well as established tech icons in Silicon Valley.

Hedding, who has 25 years of human resources experience, brings a reputation for forward-thinking and innovation, with an emphasis on engaging talented employees, stakeholders, and executives to contribute significantly to a company’s growth. As Chief People Officer, she will be responsible for the community of people who build, support, and develop on the Roblox platform with a keen eye to ensuring diverse voices are represented both within and outside of the company. Most recently, Hedding served as Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Hewlett Packard Enterprise in California, where she spearheaded unprecedented growth throughout the global corporation. Hedding has also served in senior HR leadership positions at Salesforce.com, Applied Biosystems, and Apple.

Williams comes from a career spanning 20 years of professional data center and networking experience. He will be leading the evolution of Roblox’s high-scale social platform infrastructure to support a growing community of over 64 million monthly active players. Prior to joining Roblox, Williams held various senior leadership positions managing technology infrastructures at Dropbox, the San Francisco 49ers, and Facebook. While at Facebook he played an instrumental role in building and scaling the company’s network infrastructure systems to support the company’s meteoric growth from 10 million to 750 million monthly active users.

As VP of Product for Platform, Matt Kaufman will be responsible for directing the company’s overall strategic vision for discovery, monetization, international expansion, and kid safety. Kaufman has over two decades of executive leadership experience building highly successful marketplace platforms, enterprise SaaS applications, and large-scale multiplayer games. In his previous role at Crunchbase, he defined the company’s strategic vision, built partnerships, and assembled a high-performance team that executed a successful spinout from AOL. Kaufman also held various executive roles leading engineering and product management teams at companies including Oodle, edgeio, and There.com.

“Roblox has experienced massive growth over the past two years and is at an important juncture in the company’s history that will define our future. We need senior leadership to help us create a safe, reliable platform for developers to build world-class experiences that can subsequently be enjoyed by our growing, international user community,” said David Baszucki, CEO and co-founder, Roblox. “These three executives have experience and insights navigating and scaling technology companies large and small that will be essential to our continued success.”

Roblox is well-positioned to continue its exponential growth and popularity among the ever-growing community of 64+ million monthly active players and 1.9+ million developers. The platform recently introduced Xbox cross-platform capabilities allowing users to play games with each other across any supported Roblox platform including Xbox, PC/Mac, mobile and VR. Roblox also upgraded its VR experience for users with expanded Vive and Oculus support and the launch of a patent pending Comfort Cam to make VR play more comfortable.

ABOUT ROBLOX
Roblox is the largest social platform for play that allows kids to imagine, create, and play together in immersive 3D worlds. Over 29 million user-generated online games have been produced on the Roblox platform with over 64 million players visiting Roblox every month to create adventures, play games, roleplay, and learn with friends in a family-friendly environment.  Roblox is accessible on all modern smartphones, tablets, desktops, Xbox One, Oculus Rift, and other popular VR platforms.  In 2017, Roblox was named to the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America for the second consecutive year.  Roblox – Powering Imagination.  For more information, please visit https://corporate.roblox.com.