What Dungeons & Dragons can teach entrepreneurs

CHRIS COCKS: I would say it’s fantasy improv, really. When it’s played at its finest, it’s a bunch of people getting together in a fantasy setting, giving themselves permission to tell a story with each other, and being a little silly, having some laughs. And there are some dice rolls and some rules thrown in between.

REID HOFFMAN: It was a long and winding journey for Chris Cocks to go from being a kid in the ’80s obsessed with tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons to the CEO of its parent company, Hasbro. Before we dive into how Dungeons & Dragons taught Chris and me valuable entrepreneurial lessons as kids, let’s make sure everyone knows how to play.

COCKS: The Dungeon Master is your master of ceremonies. The Dungeon Master helps to set the scene and helps to identify what the goals of the evening are. Really serves as a jack of all trades, actor or actress playing and portraying a bunch of the non-player characters you will come across.

HOFFMAN: The most important part of any D&D game is the Dungeon Master. They assemble an adventuring party and act as sort of an omnipotent narrator. Then, there’s the adventuring party, each taking on a fictional character they’ve created.

COCKS: So you can be a dashing rogue who sneaks around and steals pocketbooks or plans heists. You can be a charismatic sorcerer who, through the power of personality, weaves magic from out of the ether. Or you can be a quick-on-his-feet bard, which I often find myself in the role of, who usually provides a little bit of comic relief and generally has an aptitude for putting their foot in their mouth in all the wrong situations.

HOFFMAN: Or burst into song on occasion.

COCKS: Oh, for sure.

HOFFMAN: Dungeons & Dragons celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. As a lifelong fan of the game, I asked fellow superfan and the person in charge of bringing D&D into the future to join me. As CEO of Hasbro, Chris Cocks has led the brand through a decade of tremendous growth. He’s taking a creative approach to scaling a beloved property with passionate fans, all while expanding its reach to new audiences.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m your host, Reid Hoffman. Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and I had a blast reflecting on all the entrepreneurial skills D&D instilled in us from an early age. And don’t worry, even if you’ve never played, there are plenty of business lessons baked into this adventure for you, too.

Copy LinkThe origins and evolution of Dungeons & Dragons

What’s the origin story of D&D? Like, where did this all come from?

COCKS: Man, it’s a tale as old as time. It goes back to sharing stories around campfires. And I think it moves forward over time in terms of the earliest fantasy literature epics like Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. You can go way back into all kinds of different cultures and canons.

Really, it kind of comes full circle around the World Wars when J.R.R. Tolkien starts to take a lot of these ancient myths and turns them into a big fantasy epic that we know today as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And then, Gary Gygax, in a small town in Wisconsin, basically took all of those concepts and gamified them.

Really, what the team at TSR did, which is Gary’s company that he founded in Wisconsin, is they came up with all of these basic game mechanics that today feel like they’ve always existed. But prior to 1974, no one had ever heard of a hit point before. No one had ever heard of levels before. No one had ever heard of classes before. And it really founded, I think, a lot of the basics of both modern tabletop games but, even more importantly, the basis for almost every hit video game that exists today.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, no, exactly. And the way I got into D&D — shoot, what year was this?

COCKS: It was ’84 at my best friend Hans Schroeder’s house.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. And I’m maybe a little older than you. I actually think it was pretty soon after. I think it was ’76, ’77, was the first thing. And it was partially because I was a kid, and my babysitter was like, “Okay, here’s the babysitter that keeps the kid entertained.”

Because the babysitter shows up and says, “Let’s play D&D.” Dad goes on more dates because I’m like, “I would like to be doing this more.”

COCKS: That’s an awesome babysitter.

Copy LinkHow D&D provided Chris Cocks with a foundation to complex systems

HOFFMAN: Yes, exactly. So when you think about D&D and entrepreneurship, how do you think about the relationship between the mindset, the creativity, and business and entrepreneurship?

COCKS: I actually credit D&D with a ton of my development as an adult and as a businessperson. When I was a little kid, I was diagnosed with this highly scientific term called hyperactivism. And I’m sure it was before they had the term ADHD; it was basically like a version of it.

D&D, when I discovered it at around the age of 10 or 11, opened up a couple of things. It opened up the world of fantasy, and no one else in my family was really into it. Now, all of a sudden, I could explore Tolkien. I could explore these things called Fighting Fantasies, which were a favorite of mine and kind of like a twist on Choose Your Own Adventures.

But almost more importantly than discovering a joy and a love of reading, it also taught me about design and the systems that underlie design. From there, it really kind of structured my thinking, and I became much more successful in school as a result. It’s kind of been foundational to how I approach business, how I approach problems, how I approach creative endeavors.

I’m not alone in that. I think a lot of the studio leaders of today, who are in their 40s, maybe 50s, early 60s, grew up in that mid-’70s to mid-’80s timeframe, and they also had a similar experience with D&D. They understood that building a business or building a creative vision for something complex, like a modern-day video game or a modern-day blockbuster movie, requires you to think systematically about the setting, the narrative, the characters, the composition, the conflict engine — you name all these aspects of it.

It taught you a lot about leading a group of people on a creative endeavor at an early age. As a DM, especially if you’re DMing 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds, you gotta work really hard to keep people’s attention and kind of read the room. That’s a powerful aspect of leadership — being an attentive leader and giving of yourself and always having a portion of your mind focused on the table around you and focused on a common goal.

There are a whole bunch of just great leadership lessons that you learn from playing D&D that apply to business, like having a clear objective in mind and knowing the principles and values that underlie your party, whether those are chaotic and evil or pure and good.

The concept of forming a well-rounded party, which I think is basic in building a great business, is like, “Hey, let’s make sure we’re not all a bunch of wizards going off to fight an army of orcs. We’re probably going to need a meat shield — someone who can be like a barbarian or a warrior. We’re probably going to need a healer to help back us up. We’re probably going to need a smooth talker, like a bard. And we’re probably going to need a couple of magic users to kind of pave the way and help us pass some devious traps.”

And then, last but not least, I think the cardinal rule of D&D, which every DM loves when their party doesn’t follow, is “Don’t split the party.” Or in modern parlance, “Disagree and commit.” There’s nothing more powerful in business, especially when you’re an entrepreneur starting things out, than having unity in terms of action. Having really strong dialogue and even disagreement about what you do that ultimately leads to conviction about the right approach, and then uniformity in how you execute that conviction.

Whether it’s the basics of organizational design, product design, group leadership, or principles about forming and leading a team, I think there are a lot of metaphors you could draw from it. I’m just surprised there hasn’t been a D&D business book yet. Maybe we’re on the starting chapters of one.

Copy LinkLeadership & teamwork lessons from D&D

HOFFMAN: Yes, maybe we’re framing it right here, right now. By the way, I agree with you about that. Let me build on your excellent answer and a couple of things.

One part of what I think too rarely happens amongst kids outside of sports is learning life as a team sport. Obviously, it happens in sports. It’s one of the reasons why sports can be important — whether it’s basketball or football or soccer or baseball or any of these things. It’s like, okay, it’s a team sport, and there are different roles and ways that you play.

Another part that I think is useful everywhere, but particularly useful in entrepreneurship, is the hero’s journey. For example, you learn in improving along that we are all heroes in this journey, right? Like we’re heroes collaborating, working together. How do we have a collaborative heroship — a mission, a goal? We can be ambitious.

And then how does collaboration work? And how does collaboration work under adversity? Because part of a good Dungeon Master’s job is to put in things that cause mutual learning. There’s adversity in the journey.

One of the things I did when I was playing DM would be like, “Well, you go save the children. Go save the princess.” You get a dialogue, and it’s collaborative and discourse-oriented. It gives you some roles and simulations. You can express arrogance or ambition, but do so safely.

Then you figure out, “Sure, I’m playing a character that’s in me — being a little bit more lenient, being a little bit more ambitious. That’s good for me, and that’s good for the team.” That kind of psychological thing is super important in this.

The more I think of it as we’re talking about this, the D&D business book is definitely something that would be — someone should create this scenario pack, right? Or whatever they’re called these days. Are they still called scenario packs?

COCKS: Oh no, we just call them adventures. And I also think playing D&D is super developmentally positive for kids. In fact, we’ve been doing a bunch of middle school and elementary school programs, and what I love about that is it gives kids permission to be silly in school, which I think they need.

More importantly, I played a bunch of sports growing up. I love sports; it was important for me developmentally. But the thing where the sports analogy in business often falls down is that, in business, the problems usually are really ambiguous. Figuring out what the problem is is actually a big part of the problem.

In sports, it’s very simple. It’s like, “Hey, get the ball from here to there and get it across the line or into the hoop.” In business, it’s figuring out what problem you’re trying to solve and then how you’re going to solve it.

D&D really helps with that unstructured problem solving and that creative thinking. As a DM, one of my favorite things is when my party figures out something that I had no idea how to anticipate, leading to these unexpected outcomes — and probably some of the biggest laughs of the night. I think there’s a lot of benefit for that in all aspects of life.

HOFFMAN: Still ahead, Chris and I talk about how Hasbro is shepherding this 50-year-old game into a technology-filled future.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Copy LinkIntegrating AI into the D&D experience

I’m always curious about how people are finding ways to use AI to help them with creative endeavors. I wanted to know where Chris sees opportunities to integrate AI into Dungeons & Dragons.

COCKS: A lot of people have used AI to run an adventure for them. I’ve used AI to clone my friends and playtest an adventure before I run them through it. And it’s actually pretty good.

HOFFMAN: Any key lessons about the current state of generative AI — like what really worked well and what didn’t work well?

COCKS: For my friends, the generative AI generally has better problem-solving skills than they do as a group.

HOFFMAN: And they can recruit AI to help them, too.

COCKS: Yeah, that might be more a function of the number of bottles of wine consumed over the course of the evening rather than their cognitive abilities.

I find AI in my personal games to be great at image generation. You can create images lickety-split; it makes your characters come to life. You can paint the picture of a scene in a really compelling way.

AI is pretty good at puzzle generation. I find putting together puzzle rooms a little taxing now and then. AI is able to use our SRD, the open game license, and a bunch of crowd content in a compelling way, recombining them in different parts.

I use AI a lot. I’ll have narrators come in and do guest bits; it saves my voice a little bit. I use a service called Suno that creates songs on the fly, which is really fun. Especially as a character, if there’s a dramatic portion of the campaign that’s going south, you can write a quick 200-character blurb, and out pops a cool rock anthem that celebrates how someone just rolled a one.

So there’s a lot of emergent creative opportunities with it in gameplay and user-generated content for games like D&D. I think you see the best of some of that technology in terms of its playful attributes.

There are obviously a lot of aspects of AI that we need to work on — most importantly, making sure creators are paid for their work and there’s fair attribution. But I have confidence that we’ll figure that out. I also have confidence that as we figure it out, we’ll mine the playful aspects of AI in a positive way that makes the games more fun, whether it’s D&D or just about any other kind of game that requires creativity.

HOFFMAN: I totally agree. It doesn’t surprise me that the bard is focused on music creation and Suno as one of the great discoveries. I wrote a book called “Impromptu” where I described AI as “amplification intelligence” because it’s going to give us superpowers. Obviously, the superpower in music is a very important part of human expression.

Copy LinkScaling Dungeons & Dragons through digital innovations

So let’s shift a little bit from the pure creativity of the game and gameplay to the mechanics of business. D&D kind of started as itself, almost like badly printed paper sets, as homebrew computer hackers were playing it. But now, with Hasbro, there’s much more of a scaled industry.

What have been some of the scaling lessons along the lines of this adventure?

COCKS: About five years ago, I discovered a white paper that the McKinsey Institute did. They basically looked at start-ups over the last 30 years or so — you might have seen something similar to it. They looked at, okay, who was successful at going from $0 to $100 million, then who was able to go from $100 million to $1 billion, and then who was able to scale hyperscale to $1 billion-plus? What did they have to do?

I think the general lesson — or at least what I took away from that paper — is: what got you here won’t get you to the next stage, and what gets you to the next stage won’t be the thing that gets you even farther. I think that’s been true with the history of D&D. D&D came out of the gates really strongly in the ’70s and ’80s as kind of like this tabletop game for gaming enthusiasts — mostly men at the time. It waned in the ’90s and 2000s and then came back in a big way around 2014 with the release of Fifth Edition. It’s just been on a growth tear since.

So what did we do in that 2014 timeframe when we released Fifth Edition? How did we go from it being a $10 million business to now a multi-hundred-million-dollar business?

I think the big things for us were: Let’s embrace a broad audience. Let’s invite everyone to the table and make sure everyone can see themselves in the game. The original version of D&D, for example, had a penalty if you played as a woman. That’s ridiculous. So the first step was, hey, let’s invite everyone to the table.

The second step, related to that, was: hey, the rules are really just guidelines. They’re there to help structure and start something, but they’re not there to ever limit you. So when someone asks me, “What is D&D?” I purposely say, “It’s fantasy improv.” A lot of people are surprised by that because they’re like, “Well, I thought it was all these rules, and I had to read all these books.” But I would almost say the books are now more collectibles than mandatory.

The third thing that really helped lift up the brand over the last decade was the opportunities available with digital technologies. Digitally enabled tools to drive user-generated content and share it globally are amazing.

Even though we started as a pen-and-paper pastime and were heavily a book-based business, that can’t be the thing that limits us or prevents us from trying new things. D&D was one of the early champions of Twitch and game streaming because it’s such an easy game to stream.

The next big step was digitization of the books — basically transitioning from a book-based business to a service-based business, especially with D&D Beyond and third-party services like Roll20.

The thing we’re in the process of doing now is enabling more user-generated content, building out marketplaces where that user-generated content can be shared, and offering tools to help set that up. These initiatives have led to, gosh, I think it’s fair to say a 15x growth over the last eight years.

Looking forward, using the rule of “what got you here isn’t necessarily what’s going to get you there,” I think the things that will help take the game to the next level are continuing to embrace that digital palette of options. What can we do to bring the visuals and spectacle of D&D to life? We have a digital tabletop in development that basically brings video game-level visuals to life in a virtual sandbox but still keeps human ingenuity, design, and play at the center.

AI and user-generated content tools are going to be huge enablers, helping people enjoy and expand the spectrum of play. Continuing to take the lessons of “don’t let the rules bind you too much” and “don’t let tradition bind you too much.” Respect it, but embrace change. Bringing in other brands and content — like we’ve done with Magic: The Gathering through Universes Beyond — opens up new worlds and new settings for play. Video games. Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to play Baldur’s Gate 3 because, if you’re a D&D nerd, that’s catnip.

HOFFMAN: It’s actually been on my list. I’m aware of Baldur’s Gate 3, but I just — I’m hoping this December, right?

COCKS: Make sure you have a spare couple hundred hours.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, that’s precisely the reason it’s kind of waiting for the December holidays, as I boot it up and take a look.

Copy LinkEnabling user-generated content for a richer D&D universe

So in terms of the tools to enable user-generated content, what’s a little bit more substance there? Because it’s — I actually think it’s a very good idea to say, “We’re participants in the world creation and in a platform for this.” Enabling developers is a really good thing, and that’s one of the ways you could take the scale of this to another level. What kinds of things are you guys doing or thinking of doing on the tool enablement side?

COCKS: Well, I think from the less digital to the more digital.

D&D was an early proponent of an open game license, opening up the rule set and a bunch of the content to help users explore their own worlds and creations. The SRD, which is the core content for the game, is now in the Creative Commons. The open game license is perpetual and out there for people to use. That’s enabled a whole bunch of content creation over the last couple of decades.

Starting to get more digital, we’ve taken D&D Beyond and begun opening it up from just a closed ecosystem of Wizards content to bringing on more user-generated content. We’re starting with independent publishers, but over time, you’ll see us open it up to more and more people with more APIs for them to access.

As we develop the new digital tabletop, codenamed Sigil, which is currently in friends-and-family testing, we can expand beyond just words and concepts to actual digital objects. You’ll be able to build a scenario you can actually play or create virtual figures or set pieces for sale and available inside that environment.

Then, as you start thinking about how to virtualize content and bring it to life visually — either with tools we create to make it easier for users or by working with AI solutions and companies that have cool AI technology — there are obviously a ton of opportunities.

That’s where we have to be careful, though. We need to make sure we respect how AI is trained, that we know who owns the content, and that creators are paid fairly for their work. As long as we do that, the sky’s the limit.

Imagine creating a figurine of your character or a character portrait of a wild new bard you’ve dreamed up. Or using AI to help you think through scenarios for your players. Maybe even an AI Dungeon Master companion that listens along to your campaign and offers prompts or alternate branches for the adventure.

There’s so much potential. In the next five to ten years, I think we’re going to see some very exciting tools emerge.

Copy LinkExpanding D&D’s reach in the global gaming market

HOFFMAN: In terms of the marketplace and the network — this is from the co-founder of LinkedIn — what does that current marketplace look like?

COCKS: Well, right now, we’re at about 19 million registered users on D&D Beyond, and it’s growing at a healthy clip. For a digital network, it’s on the smaller end, but when you think about the reach — 19 to 20 million people in the tabletop RPG hobby — it’s pretty massive.

We basically reach 80% of everyone who actively plays a tabletop RPG. If you’re an independent publisher or a content creator looking to make a name for yourself, opening up that network and marketplace is a huge opportunity to expose your content.

It’s like any network: the more content creators you bring in, the more content there is, and the more attractive the network becomes. That accelerates growth.

The total addressable market, though, is much larger. If we’re at 19 million today, consider the 500 million people worldwide who play action-adventure or role-playing games on phones, PCs, or consoles. That’s the next frontier — scaling from a relatively high-growth but underdeveloped network today to meaningful penetration in that massive market, which is currently dominated by video games.

Copy LinkLightning Round

HOFFMAN: What’s one book you think everyone should read?

COCKS: “The Exponential Age.” It’s a book about how transformative technologies — things like 3D printing, network speeds, and CPU speeds — are only now starting to hit the hockey stick portion of their growth curve. It explores how these technologies will transform the world.

HOFFMAN: What’s an invention or product you wish you’d thought of first?

COCKS: Gosh, an invention or product I wish I would have thought of first…

HOFFMAN: Any variation of the question you like?

COCKS: Google, for sure.

HOFFMAN: Although people were thinking about search, Google specifically…

COCKS: Yeah, like the whole concept of keywords and how they indexed the internet. Google was the first product I remember hearing about for the first time and thinking, “Wow.” I was playing golf two weeks before I got married, and a guy from Silicon Valley asked, “Have you tried Google yet?”

I said, “No.” He replied, “It’s going to totally change the way you surf the internet and become the most valuable company in the world.”

He was right.

HOFFMAN: How would you like AI to change your future?

COCKS: I’m a huge DM — this isn’t just for the purposes of this podcast. I probably play D&D three times a month with two or three different groups. My groups are big, so I’m usually playing with 20-ish people a month.

As CEO of Hasbro, I feel like if you play D&D with me, it better be one of the best games of D&D you’ve ever played in your life. I should be bringing industrial-light-and-magic-level special effects to the game.

One of my favorite tools right now is a company called Eleven Labs, which creates cool voices for campaigns. I can’t wait for more celebrity voices to get on the platform. Imagine Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, or Michelle Pfeiffer voicing NPCs my party meets in a bar. That’s my mic-drop moment!

HOFFMAN: Is there anyone you think people would be surprised to learn is a D&D player? Celebrities, business leaders, or other folks?

COCKS: I was surprised to learn Anderson Cooper loves D&D. I didn’t peg him for that. I haven’t had a chance to meet him yet, but it would be fun to play with him.

It’d also be super fun to play with Stephen Colbert — he’s another big fan.

HOFFMAN: Yes.

COCKS: Yeah.

HOFFMAN: All right, Chris. Thanks for joining me on Masters of Scale. It’s been awesome.

COCKS: Yeah, Reid. Thank you so much. If you’re ever in the Providence area and want to roll some dice, just let me know.

HOFFMAN: I will indeed.

In the last half-century, Dungeons & Dragons has instilled creative problem-solving skills and taught teamwork to countless players. Now it’s exciting to see the game evolving in the age of AI.

It’s hard to imagine a more fun way to experiment with how these technologies can amplify our creativity and enhance our fantastical adventures.

This conversation with Chris Cocks has me itching to assemble an adventure party, break out my best dice, and slay some dragons.

I’m Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening.