Good Monday Morning! It’s March 15th. It’s also a special religious holiday for adherents to napping culture as today marks International Napping Day. I will be observing this holiday for approximately 30 minutes around noon. Sending my snooziest wishes for a cozy napping day to you and yours.
Anyway, here’s the SWIRL:
📱Tech: Gaming platform Roblox goes public
📈Business: You’ve been accepted to Google University!
🏛Politics: Biden is trending…further away from monopolies
If this is your first SWIRL, keep reading this part. If not, carry on to the content. Welcome, new Swirlers! Here’s a brief reader guide for you: the three teasers above will unfurl below to briefly cover a buzzy development in their respective areas. You’ll read a little about each one. At the end, we pull on a common thread among all three and explore what it might mean for us. If you missed last week’s SWIRL, tuck in here.
📱 Tech: Gaming platform Roblox goes public
Unless you’re under the age of 16, or have kids, it is likely you had never heard of Roblox until this week…or maybe even this morning 🤷🏽♂️.
Or, maybe you’re a business nerd 🤓 like me and it’s been on your radar for a while. In any case, it was a big week for the gaming company. Before we dig into that, let’s do a quick rundown of Roblox.
What is Roblox? It is an online video gaming 🕹 platform users can access via mobile devices and desktops. Think NetFlix for gaming. Unlike NetFlix, content on Roblox is user-built. There are over 20 million games developed by Roblox users.
Who uses Roblox? Since its launch in 2006, the company has grown 📈 to 199 million monthly active users. 67% of those users are 16 years old or younger.
How does Roblox make money? Most of Roblox’s revenue comes from the purchase of “Robux,” which is an internal currency 💲 required for transactions. Dollars buy Robux. Robux buys subscriptions, games, and purchases within games. With a subscription, games are free, but users make in-app purchases, like cool hairstyles 👩🏼🎤 or extra levels 🆙. Individual developers who build games get 70% of revenue from those in-app transactions and Roblox takes 30%.
There’s a lot more to Roblox, but let’s return to the main story: Roblox went public 🏦 on Wednesday with a $38B valuation. Many investors think Roblox has more room to grow, and have taken early positions in the company to capture those potential long-term gains. Others are worried the gaming platform is already at its peak. Roblox would surely disagree with that view, and point you to the ‘Metaverse.’
We’re not getting into the Metaverse today. But! We’ll be talking all about it on Friday, March 19th at 12PM ET over at SWIRL’s Twitter, where we’ll be trying out Twitter Spaces for the first time. Meet us there to chat live about Roblox, the Metaverse, and the rest of this week’s SWIRL.
📈 Business: You’ve been accepted to Google University!
For years, Google has offered tailored training programs and certifications 🏅for its own products, like Google Cloud ☁️. The programs allow Google to vouch for a certificate holder’s ability to operate Google systems.
On Thursday, the company announced a significant—and potentially game-changing—expansion of these programs.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled a new slate of career 💼 certificates that aren’t specifically tied to Google’s products. These educational programs are open to the public, offer skills that are widely transferable to many companies, and are only 6-months1 long…as opposed to the classic 4-year college degrees 📜 many companies have historically held as the minimum educational requirements.
"You can't just say the next generation will naturally have the skills they need," said Pichai. "We saw a lot of unfilled positions when it came to jobs in tech. It was a supply mismatch. Yet people were hungry to fill those positions. So we asked ourselves, 'Why is there a gap?'" - Sundar Pichai, talking with Inc.
Google is betting 🤞🏼 on these courses to close that gap by educating the next generation of workers and to provide new career opportunities for current workers who are impacted by job loss or underemployment. These certificates 🏅 target specific high-demand roles in today’s job marketplace. Google has partnered with over 130 companies like Verizon, Walmart, Hulu, and Bank of America to ensure these companies recognize the value of Google’s certificates. The benefit of the partnerships to job-seekers? Google says candidates without traditional resumes can now ‘kickstart’ their careers at these, and other companies, with its certificates.
SWIRL asked Sarah Johnston, a leading job search coach and thought leader in career development, about these types of certificates.
I am seeing a shift in the way corporations perceive talent competency away from a "show and tell" (read: "show me" your degree) to a "prove and tell"—candidates need to be able to demonstrate their results. Certificates are a low cost way to gain the knowledge and validate your subject matter expertise. - Sarah Johnston, in a SWIRL exclusive (so legit, right?)
Here’s the list of certificates Google is now offering:
🏛 Politics: Biden is trending…further away from monopolies
As the president’s administration continues to take shape, its looming scrutiny 🔎 of dominant companies like Apple and Amazon is coming more into focus.
Earlier this month, Biden tapped Tim Wu, a law👨🏻⚖️ professor at Columbia University, to join the National Economic Council. Wu will serve as the president’s key advisor on technology and competition policy. Announcing his new role at the White House, Wu paused his personal Twitter account.
Back in October, Wu told 🗣 NPR that he felt “the antitrust winter is over.“ His selection won praise from Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who said “Tim has been a longtime antitrust advocate, and he has pushed public officials to break up and rein in Big Tech—I’m glad to see him in this role.” His detractors, like tech lobbyist Carl Szabo, worry 😕 Wu is too biased. "Essentially, you've got somebody who is so convinced that something is bad that they will seek to prove their hypothesis rather than engage in true analytics,“ Szabo said.
News broke Wednesday that Biden will likely add ➕ another notable antitrust voice to his team. Lina Khan, also a progressive law professor from Columbia, is rumored to be the president’s pick for an open position on the Federal Trade Commission, strengthening signals that the White House is serious about challenging Big Tech. Khan authored ✍🏾 legal research that argued Amazon’s size and scale may make the company anti-competitive, which quickly established her trust-busting bona fides.
So, how do our three stories swirl together? They each nod to institutions on the precipice of disruption. You could argue that a $38B gaming company, Google, and the US Federal Government aren’t typical disrupters (at least any more). You’d be right. But it’s all about framing & understanding who is the target of disruption.
Roblox poses a threat to leading video game companies, like Epic Games, maker of popular game Fortnite and legacy players like Electronic Arts
Google Certificates reflect a serious opportunity to reshape the learning landscape by making 4-year degrees ‘nice to haves’ instead of ‘need to haves’ for entry-level employment
Meanwhile, Biden is recruiting the most anti-monopoly executive team in decades—arguably, closer to a century—that will have the power to shape policy & influence legislation aimed at increasing competition in technology
We often think about ‘disruption’ as territory for scrappy up-starts looking to make waves, but that’s not always how it ripples out. Roblox is a massive company that has its sights set on more than video games. Its technology could one day be as commonplace as Google, who has now officially positioned itself as an education provider. By creating new pathways to technology careers, Google will almost certainly impact the broader education ecosystem. But, as it opens up new opportunities for learners, it will do so facing the strongest antitrust headwinds from the US government in the company’s 22-year history.
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Roblox has over 226 million monthly users as of october 2021. 53.07% of Roblox users worldwide are over 13, and 45.97% are under 13 as of June 30, 2022.
Source: https://pcgamexp.com/roblox-users-revenue-and-growth-statistics-2022