Moving with urgency is critical to entrepreneurial success. In the face of uncertainty and competition, the combination of focus, speed, and iteration outperforms everything else. But it is one thing to move with urgency individually and quite another to realize urgency across a creative team. The latter can feel mysterious to the inexperienced, and doing it in a way that intrinsically motivates a team takes true mastery. In my experience, there is no one better at inspiring team urgency than David Baszucki, Roblox’s founding CEO.

I have worked with Dave in multiple companies, and he has consistently inspired people to exceed their own expectations, achieving more impact in less time and often with less effort than at first imagined. Leaders are often called “pacesetters,” and Dave shows why. As a leader reporting to him, it was easy for me to lead with urgency because it came down from the top.

So what is the essence of Dave’s mastery? There are a few key ingredients. First and foremost, Dave is personally urgent—he walks the walk. He is also an enthusiastic believer in what he drives toward, and that enthusiasm is infectious. Dave also has inspiring vision, which fuels a race to finish the current projects in order to move on to the next ones. And he is an incredibly curious problem solver, which allows him to plow through objections to find a faster path to any outcome.

Dave is also responsively dynamic, extending goalposts if ideas get traction and stopping projects that don’t yield results. As part of this, Dave checks in regularly, setting the pace of results by the cadence of his check-ins. And finally, Dave is iterative, driving long-term vision through a series of short-term bursts.

Dave cultivated this mastery over years through the development of his leadership skills and a commitment to urgency as a competitive advantage. From the stories I’ve heard about his college projects, from my experience with him at Knowledge Revolution, and through his leadership at Roblox, Dave has lived urgency, gotten better over time, and role modeled it consistently. Working together with urgency and speed, Dave and Erik created Roblox’s secret operational sauce—a raw, get-stuff-done power. Thanks to Dave’s mastery, the team focused on what mattered over the merely important, keeping the team small through repeated growth surges.