Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. He recently signed a Buffett-Gates gifting pledge. First person ever to do that from Korea. Now, another founder from Korea who most recently signed. Now, they have two out of Korea all in the last few months, which is fantastic. He's such a special guy. He actually started selling some of his shares even very early before he became a billionaire. Because he just felt like it was the right thing to give back and he made some promises. We told him, you're crazy for selling the stock because we were buying. As we were buying, we said I don't think you should be selling that much. But he's like, no. I got to sell it because I got to give $10 million to these guys, whatever. He had made promises and so he sold his stocks. He's such an amazing guy. Along this Woowa Brothers journey, I talked about missing out on price. We had, again, pressures, feeling the pressures to return some capital to our founders. Woowa Brothers was on a much faster growth trajectory in the early days compared to Roblox. Maybe we thought we would sell 20% of our shares. That returns a nice little percentage of the fund, and we actually had shaken hands on a deal. We found this great long-term investor. They would be like the Altos. We would leave the shares in really good hands because they would be really with the company for a super long time, not looking to flip out of it. We shook hands and then when we got the paperwork, the price was different. It wasn’t off by a lot, but it's like, but this is not what we agreed to. We just said no. We called off the deal. It's a lucky thing because what happened was we called off the deal but we were still interested in many of the other early investors. We’re all interested in cashing out a little bit. By the time we found the next investor, which turned out to be Naver, we wanted a strategic as well because we thought Naver could become a competitor and why not make them our friends rather than our enemies. By the time we got to that deal, we actually got the price that we had wanted from the beginning. But again, six months passed. In a fast-growing company, six months makes you pause. We said, wait a minute at this price, we should be buyers rather than sellers. I think it's a decision we made with Roblox a little earlier. We were thinking about selling at this price, but I think maybe we should be buyers. Very similar to what Nolan Bushnell had told us about the Atari deal with Don Valentine, where it took so long to close the deal, months and months went by when Don showed up with the final paperwork to sign, Nolan was like, I think we're actually worth twice as much now. And they were. I mean you just have to look at their growth. Only Nolan Bushnell can have that conversation with Don Valentine.…

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