"Building Shared History" with Mike Roberts from Roll

Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Mike Roberts, CEO of Roll, which is a chat app that puts the magic of game night in your pocket by providing a virtual tabletop where players can enjoy their favorite board games. 

Users can share their identity across other networks to connect with new people, allowing them to be their authentic selves, all while Roll keeps them safe by only sharing what users want to share, at the right time.

It’s a game-changer for gaming, and a platform that combines serious innovation while also being a place for creators, offering a low-code environment for building games as well as playing.

I’ll leave it to Mike to dig into all the capabilities that Roll aims to deliver, the R&D behind their innovation, and what’s on the roadmap for this exciting new venture!

Boast AI accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Paul Davenport:

Hello and welcome to What The Tech from Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually, change the world. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Mike Roberts, CEO of Roll, which is a chat app that puts the magic of game night in your pocket by providing a virtual tabletop, where players can enjoy their favorite board games. Users can share their identity across other networks, connect with new people, allowing them to be their authentic selves. It's a game changer for gaming and a platform that combines serious innovation while also being a place for creators, offering a low-code environment for building games, as well as playing. I'll leave it to Mike to dig into all the capabilities that Roll aims to deliver, the R&D behind their innovation, and what's on the roadmap for this exciting new venture. So, without much further ado, welcome to the show, Mike.Mike Roberts:

Oh, thanks for having me.

Paul Davenport:

Awesome. So, for starters, a little bit of background. I know that I first came into awareness overall at FounderFuel Demo Day a few weeks back. I know that you're in the cohort and run by our friends, Lisa and Katy over at FounderFuel, but I'd love to know more about you. Tell me about Mike. How did you get into the space? How did you get into startups, in general? I know you have a very interesting background. I was creeping on your LinkedIn earlier. Tell me more about all of it, how you got here, and then the team behind Roll.

Mike Roberts:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Great episode with Katy and Lisa. So, for all the listeners, go back and check that one out. I was very happy to spend the last couple months in Montreal with FounderFuel. An accelerator wasn't really on my mind, honestly. I've been in the startup space for quite some time now, close to 15 years, and there was something about meeting Katy and John that just said, "This is the right program for you," for me personally. So, for other Founders that are out there who maybe have some experience and want them take the leap from technical side to business side, storytelling. John is an absolute legend. He changed my perspective on absolutely everything. So, fantastic program there. So, for me, I've been in the startup space again for about 15 years. I didn't think this is the direction I was going to go in.
I went to the University of Waterloo expecting I'd end up in academia, something around a PhD in Computer Vision was top of mind for me when I was going to graduate, but I ended up leaving school and jumping straight into a big company, Sybase, database vendor. And then I founded my own a gaming company on the side just as something to do. It wasn't quite scratching my itch working at Sybase. So, started that up, had some great traction there, felt what it was like to just really drive something end to end and fell in love. So, when my mentor at Sybase decided to leave and move on to Google, I said, "Fantastic, maybe it's time for me too," and I left, I joined Kick, I was employee number five. I was a Blackberry developer.
Just as we were about to start launching in six months after I started, went from zero to a million users in a week, zero to the next 2 million in 10 days. It was just a rocket ship and it was so exciting. So, I spent the next 10 years my career working there from Blackberry developer to mobile director to eventually CTO. Did a little bit of a stint in crypto, which maybe we won't look back on. I left to sort of see what it was like working at a larger company again. So, I joined Snap, had the Bitmoji team there for about a year and a half. Said, yeah, no, I've got the startup pitch again. Let's go do it again. And so, I went with my co-founder, Mike Chang, and we've been together for 10 years already through Kick, through Kin, through Snap, through everything. So, we're back at it with Roll.Paul Davenport:

That is so cool. It's really interesting, too. The past couple of Founder interviews I've had, it's been a similar story where, "Sure, I didn't expect going to the startup space," regardless of what the school or academic trajectory was, but it's once you get into that big company that you realize this is really what I don't want to do. And that's what kind of gets you exploring those side gigs and then those side gigs become kind of the main thing, which it sounds like has been the case with your career and what brought you along this really, really interesting and also cutting edge career path. Like you had said, we'll skip over the crypto stuff, but all the companies that you named there and all the work that you've done, that is cutting edge stuff.
Now, let's take it to Roll and get into some of the great work that you guys are doing there. If you could tell me a little bit, I guess at the top about what broadly the mission is at Roll, but then even getting down into the unique innovation that you guys are working on over there, some of the cool R&D that you guys have been focused on and just what your plans are and your differentiators in the market here.Mike Roberts:

Yeah, Roll has been something that's been spinning around in our heads. I was about to say rolling around our heads, but we don't do puns at Roll despite ample access to puns at Roll.
But it's been something we've been thinking about for a long time. At Kick, we saw this huge opportunity for meeting new people, forming relationships around a shared experience. We weren't able to really capture that there. There were a lot of reasons for that and we just never felt we got the chance to scratch the itch. At Kick, I got the chance to launch the first HTML five giving platform, something like snail Snap Games, but seven years ago. And what we found was there just isn't this great overlap of the right kind of content in mobile games that matches with this opportunity we had to help people form and deepen their existing relationships. So, what we were trying to find is this right kind of content that scratches both sides of that itch and board games always just felt right. It's this experience where it's not about the game that's on the table, it's about the relationship that you're having around the table.
And I actually went to this talk way back when, I think it was in 2018 at GDC. It's sort of one of those defining moments for me, but talking about friendship formation. It's just really explicit process, we all kind of know intrinsically. We have to get together, we need to share an experience together to build a shared history, we need to reciprocate trust to deepen our relationship together, and then that's how we form friendships. But we're just not doing that in mobile. So, we want to put a board in front of people, give them the chance to socialize in a context where it's not just about the conversation you're having, you're doing something together, you're building that shared history together. So, this isn't so much about games, it is more about friendship formation, finding that new best friend that you have or staying in touch with the ones you already do have.Paul Davenport:

That's so cool. So, Mike, nerdly, during Demo Day when you were presenting your pitch about Roll, I was texting my partner here in Boston because he's a big D&D guy. He plays more games than I can even name with all of his friends. And of course over the pandemic, that all went remote. And also just in general, his friends are far-flung. They all met in college. They've been playing the same game for as far as I can tell, 10, 15 years at this point. So, I know that that's one microcosm, but I was just thinking about all of the challenges he's had where he's been like, we have spent the first hour and 45 minutes of this session just getting all of our ducks in a row, getting the zooms aligned, making sure we have the characters in place, making sure that so-and-so is ready to go, or the kids are locked in the other room.
It sounds like more work than it's worth. It sucks all the fun out of it. And to your point about keeping friends together, I almost saw it as making it more combative than it needed to be rather than diving in and actually enjoying the game. So, just anecdotally, I remember thinking during your pitch, wow, I could see this in play today and I could really, really see how this would get used across many different communities beyond even just the D&D part of it all.Mike Roberts:

It's a really great point because we've said this a lot. We're not the first virtual tabletop in the world. We're not these guys like, "Wow, we could turn board games into video games." That's not the most original idea in the world. But what happened during the pandemic for me was we went from having this in-person board game. We played poker or mafia or werewolf or so many other games that are coming out now that are now sitting in their plastic behind me. Because we couldn't get together physically, we couldn't really take advantage of all of these digital tabletops that exist because there was all this setup time as you say. There's always that person we had to teach the pools to, and that's another 20, 30 minutes.
And there's this asymmetry of everyone's abilities in the game. They have different kinds of experiences. There's nothing really guiding them through the process. They're built for people who are really deep enthusiasts and I have a lot of enthusiast friends, but we were still struggling to just get into the game and spend the time together. What we really wanted was to eat chips, drink beer, and play games, not just spend all that time teaching. So, we're really targeting more of a casual audience. So, let's jump in, pick up and play, works across all your existing socials so it's easy to get your friends together. We think of this as social first, not gaming first.Paul Davenport:

Social first, not gaming first. I love that. You hit the nail on the head too with the point about chips and beer. Again, I'm like, why are you guys doing this if you're just yelling at each other while you're over in a corner trying to make sure that the rules have been fully digested? I'm like, it seems beyond me. So, I love your approach to it. I guess I'd love to know a little bit more too, while we're talking about the actual structure of the platform. For the creator side, like you had said, it's for people to kind of bring those tabletop games, whether it's poker, whether it's something a lot more into the virtual world. Tell me a little bit about how that works.Mike Roberts:

Therein lies some of the technical differentiation, as well. We can definitely jump into, but we've got our work cut out for us. There are somewhere close to 150,000 board games that already exist in the world. I don't think we'll end up capturing every single one of those, but there's going to be another eight, 9,000 titles published this year. So, there's a lot of new content users want to get their hands on, so we need to keep up with that. And we're a small two-person team still, so lots to do. But what we thought is we are going to have to have all this rules enforcement because that's really what we want to take out of the players' hands. We want to help them have a good time, we want to teach them about how they play, we want to get all reading rule book sort out of the way.
So, we need to encode that rule book somehow. So, we built an engine on the backend that sort of reads more like a rule book. We wrote this in a way where if you're familiar with Roblox, they chose Lua as a language because it's the tiniest language in the world, not a lot of surface area, not a lot to learn. You can teach to a teenager pretty darn quickly and go from there, and that's what we want with the approachability of Roll. So, for a creator, and it'll start out with just us, we take the rules, we take the assets they already have from their print and play editions or what they already sent out there to get published in cardboard and we can take those assets, use them as though they were physical objects in the game. And it's basically like having a programmable deck of cards.
You use Lua to sort of enhance the physicality of those objects, but it gives you all that same rules of enforcement, gives you the option to create tutorials for players, and guides them through the experience to make that really seem. For us, it's great because instead of having to write 20,000 lines of code to make a game from scratch, which it actually does take to add minimum publish new mobile game, say in Unity, we could do it in a couple hundred and it's sort of a consistent experience that people are used to across all of the different titles.Paul Davenport:

Building on that, I'd love to know a little bit about, you had mentioned earlier, you're still a two person team. You guys are fundraising as we speak. How have you leveraged the innovation, if not tax credits, but funding programs available locally to really help you guys with all those activations that you really want in there?Mike Roberts:

Canada's pretty unique on this front and like I said, I've been in the industry for 15 years. I've had to deal with Shred for that long. And I will say it's a very different experience partnering with Boast. But for us, it let us think about our hiring plan a little bit differently and especially with not just Shred, but with the OIDMTC and these other marketing credits that are available to us now. A lot of what we're going to do is to form a beachhead inside the audience of real deep enthusiasts because we're not an enthusiast platform. We're for all of those frustrated enthusiasts who want to get five of their friends who aren't to the table.
And so, that means getting boots on the ground at conferences, at physical venues and doing other activations to engage the creator side, but also to engage the player side. And those are all marketing activities that are also now subsidized by the Canadian government, thankfully, that help us get moving here and get traction because that was something that was always interesting about Shred was you have to think about this as science and technology innovation, which obviously there is, but we want the Canadian economy to grow and that also means reaching consumer audiences and growing products and developing that side of the ecosystem, as well. So, I'm very happy that that is available to us now.Paul Davenport:

And I think you hit on another great point there, too. I think when a lot of people think of R&D, they're thinking of not necessarily a consumer product. They're thinking of something that is if not B2B, just extremely technical in a fully unapproachable way, making something that's user-friendly is innovative and that requires a lot of research and development. So, it's really great to hear to your point that those Shred dollars are going into creating something that is going to pay off for the Canadian government, too. It's sure funding your marketing program, making it so that you guys can hire confidently and really plan accordingly, but it is helping the whole country because you're creating a new tax base more or less, and that's really impressive and I'm really happy that, again, you've been able to partner with teams like us here at Boast.
I say it on every episode, I think. We're a team of Founders, too. I'm probably the outlier here, but almost everyone in this company has had their hand in building a business from the ground up. And so, knowing that we can tap into companies like yours, companies like Roll, and really help them do some really innovative new stuff is so cool. Similar with the FounderFuel, I know we talked about it earlier, but their team, it's been wonderful kind of saddling up with them and seeing what they're able to do for the local ecosystem and the startup community at large. I'd love to know, what's your take on the state of startups in general, having been through the cohort with FounderFuel and survived your first Demo Day? What's your take on what's to come?Mike Roberts:

I was fortunate enough to graduate into the 2008 recession, so that was a very interesting time. I've sort of been through somewhat of this environment in the past. I was fortunate enough to find a place instead of a big company and then with Kick and then experienced the wild ride that has been the last 10 years. I think the last 10 years, especially the last three have been wild outliers and in particular, folks fundraising in the last three had a very different experience than what it was like in years prior. So, I think for most experienced Founders out there, this isn't going to be surprising. It's not that difficult of an environment, but it is return to fundamentals in probably a good way for our industry honestly. VCs need to deploy. It is a part of their business model. They need to get the cash into companies and there was a lot of cash in the last couple of years and they needed to get it out there, but there's dry powder going into good companies now.
There's a lot of great talent out there, especially with the layoffs. One thing that was interesting from the last 10 years for me was seeing Waterloo after Blackberry imploded. Blackberry imploded, surprise, tons of new startups, tons of new innovation. It's as though they locked up a pile of great talent. And so, seeing that go and spread out, it just creates more opportunity. So, I would say it's time to start thinking about your business as business. For someone like me who's definitely a builder, I love to get my hands on. I love to start creating things, but at the end of the day, it has to work on paper. If your company doesn't work as a spreadsheet, it doesn't work as a company. So, there's no sense in writing your first lines of code unless you've figured out your model and you understand there's something here.
There's going to be margins there someday, there's going to be access to an audience, there's going to be a market. You need to start thinking about this as a business first. And that doesn't mean you can't get excited about the technology because that's I think what a lot of people are here for. But you are going to be asked to come to account a little bit earlier, especially in that late seed, early A stage. The numbers people are going to expect are a lot more in line with historical averages versus the last couple of years.Paul Davenport:

Absolutely. Treat your business as a business. And I also want to bring up the point too, that you made about even Blackberry and the community out of Waterloo. We were recently looking at some CBRE stats about just the new tech talent hubs and how yeah, the sky's falling when the giant big tech conglomerates are collapsing. But then, you look at all the new talent and then all the new ideas that are just unleashed out of all that. And like, yeah, Toronto and Vancouver, just two examples shot way up in their rankings. They are power players globally when maybe 10 years ago that might not have been how you viewed either of those markets.
It's really, really cool and I think it's an exciting time. And like you said though, you've got to treat your business as a business. Get excited about the tech because that's going to be the innovation that maybe grabs eyes and gets that funding and attention, but you also really have to make sure that you can fund it for the long haul. Make sure that you have a model that actually works that can actually get the runway for success. So, that's really cool. On that note, I'd love to know what's next for Roll. What are your goals for the new year? Again, I know you're funding right now. What would you like to say Roll is up to 12 months from now?Mike Roberts:

We're headed out for our iOS beta this month. So, if anyone wants to play some games with their friends, go to roll.gg And sign up right now. We're going to be working on our Android and web versions for the end of the year. We want to get those in people's hands when they're going back home for Christmas, they have something to play with their friends and family. So, we'll be across all three platforms by end of year and starting to open up to third parties. And that's really what the rest of this year is. My travel schedule is getting a little bit crazy, but with all the conferences going on, there's PAX and PAX Unplugged, and GenCon and Essen and it's sort of all over the world for the next little while, getting out there, engaging with the creators and also the players where they are and starting to really get traction on that launch. So, start getting ready. Your friends and family will be playing Roll at Christmas.Paul Davenport:

I can't wait. I will let them know and I'm hoping your travels. If they bring it to Boston, I know that we do PAX East over here, so I'm sure I'll be seeing you at some point then. Mike, I can't thank you enough. I do hope we cross paths again at some point during the calendar year since it looks like we're both going to be traveling a lot. Best of luck and again, hope we can chat again soon.Mike Roberts:

Yeah, it's been great. Thanks for everything.Paul Davenport:

Awesome.