ABOUT KEITH

Hi, I'm Keith.

I joined Roblox in 2008 as employee #7, excited to work with Dave and Erik again. I left a decade later, after we'd grown the team to hundreds and built a platform used by tens of millions of people. By the end — as CPO and CTO — I was running product, engineering, and operations. I built the product and operations teams from scratch, and I helped scale the engineering team.

What I honed there is the foundation of everything I do now: great teams don't happen by accident. They're built — through who you hire, who you promote, who you tolerate, and who you coach out. The behaviors you cultivate and the people you keep are your culture, full stop. Roblox didn't repeatedly convert crisis into opportunity by luck — its people and the culture did. And that combination wasn't an accident.

Before Roblox, I trained as an engineer — a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Columbia, then a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford. I also picked up a Master's in Public Policy at Berkeley, because I was curious about how big systems get built and how they get changed. The pattern, in retrospect, is consistent: I've always wanted to know how things work — products, teams, institutions — and how to make them work better.

After Roblox, I served as COO at Instrumental, a company transforming hardware manufacturing through AI; as COO,I helped build out the financial modeling and sharpen the go-to-market. Today I advise startup leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, entertainment, social, and enterprise — and I work pro bono with non-profits and schools, where the same principles translate. I wrote a book called IMPACT on what I've learned, and I speak at conferences, universities, portfolio summits, and podcasts.

Why I do this

Most early-stage leaders hit an inflection point where the things that got them here — instinct, heroic effort, willpower — stop working. The team that built the prototype can't scale the product. The culture that formed organically starts cracking under growth. They're standing at a chasm between scrappy and scalable, and many don't make it across. Not because they lack talent or ambition. Because they don't have a model for the crossing.

I do this work because the future must belong to mission-driven entrepreneurial teams — the disruptors, the visionaries, the dreamers, the hopeful. Small groups of believers with shared mission, building things and building movements. The world has too few of those teams that actually scale. I want to help more of them make it across.

What I do

Using a proven model, I help mission-driven leaders cross the chasm from early-stage scrappiness to high-performing entrepreneurial teams that scale. I do that as an advisor (deep, embedded engagements with leadership teams), as an author (IMPACT lays out the full model), and as a speaker (keynotes, classrooms, podcasts). My mantra is simple: Get in, help out, and get out of the way.