How Voldex Conquered the Roblox Economy With Harry Bienenstock

In June 2022, Harry Bienenstock’s phone buzzed with a LinkedIn notification. Bienenstock had been fielding offers ever since a round of layoffs left him and a hundred colleagues at Playtika’s Montreal game studio suddenly adrift. He almost ignored the follow-up ping from the same person – but the tenacity encouraged him to set up an intro call. The young founder, Alexandre Singer, pitched Bienenstock on a Roblox venture called Voldex. “Hey, Harry, I think you’re perfect for a role we have here,” Singer wrote, detailing a vision for user-generated games on Roblox. We sat down with Bienenstock to learn more about where the journey eventually led.

Watch the full interview below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.

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Key Takeaways

1. Prioritize data to support better, evidence-based decisions. At Voldex, analytics helped bring clarity to what was working, allowed for testing, reduce blind spots, and create shared context for decision-making as the portfolio and team scaled.

2. Partnerships work best when they feel native to the game. The award-winning collaboration between Driving Empire and NASCAR demonstrates how seamless in-game integrations can win industry awards and engage the next generation of fans.
   
   
3. Adopt a growth mindset to navigate evolving industries and unconventional career paths. Bienenstock’s transition from a large public company to a scrappy startup highlights how curiosity and the willingness to take calculated risks are essential for leadership in emerging markets like Roblox.

Betting on a New Platform: Roblox Beckons

Bienenstock cut his teeth at Playtika, managing UA campaigns for World Series of Poker and then working on new games as a Marketing & Monetization Group Manager. However, after Playtika went public in 2021, the company soon shuttered its Montreal office in summer 2022. Facing a blank slate, Bienenstock had to choose between staying in the corporate orbit or trying something radically new.

When Singer’s LinkedIn message landed in his inbox that summer, Bienenstock was already deep into interviews with established gaming firms. Singer’s startup, Voldex, was almost an outlier – a scrappy Roblox game studio with just 35 people and a very young CEO. On paper, it was a risky detour. Yet something about Singer’s vision intrigued him. In their initial call, Singer excitedly outlined Roblox’s explosive growth. Roblox’s user base simply skyrocketed from roughly 32 million daily users in 2020 to over 151 million daily by 2025. “People don’t realize how big it’s gotten,” Bienenstock says, still sounding amazed at the daily active users Roblox now attracts. The growth showed no signs of slowing, and Voldex was positioned squarely in the platform’s sweet spot.

Voldex’s business model was bold and novel: it acquired promising user-generated games on platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, then scaled them up with better features, live ops, and monetization. A decade later, his company was stewarding some of Roblox’s top experiences. By the time Bienenstock came aboard, Voldex was in the midst of acquiring titles like Driving Empire (now Roblox’s #1 driving game) and eyeing bigger prizes. The crown jewel was Brookhaven, a role-playing world that had become the platform’s most-visited game of all time, and Voldex was maneuvering to take it under its wing.

So he made the leap. Bienenstock weighed the risks and upside, speaking with peers and mentors about the opportunity. Voldex was small, yes, but agile and capable of scaling. “Having come from a public company with thousands of employees… I said, you know what, I’ve done that already. If there’s a time to take a risk, it’s now,” he reflects of his mindset. With that, Harry Bienenstock joined Voldex as Head of Marketing & Monetization in late 2022, ready to apply everything he’d learned in mobile to the wild world of Roblox.

Why Voldex Stopped Guessing and Started Measuring

Bienenstock’s first move at Voldex was instrumenting the business. Before spending another dollar on growth, he made sure the team could answer three questions: What changed? Did it work? And should we do it again? If you’re stepping into a new role or inherited a fast-moving product, start by auditing what decisions are being made without data, then build visibility there first.

“They weren’t necessarily looking as deeply into the metrics as I was accustomed to,” Bienenstock recalls. Bienenstock immediately enlisted a former colleague, Rami Hammoud, as Voldex’s first data lead, and together they built an analytics infrastructure from the ground up. Soon, dashboards lit up with real-time stats on user behavior, and post-update meetings shifted from “What do we build next?” to “How did our last update perform?” It was a cultural pivot: the studio began to chase insights, not just ideas.

Data also informed a call Bienenstock made early: slash inefficient marketing spend. His approach was simple: 

• Identify where growth was coming organically
• Measure ROI at the game level
• Cut anything that didn’t pay for itself‍

The results soon validated this approach. The company’s user metrics were strong while marketing spend was low: more than 1 million daily active players across its portfolio and climbing – especially as fan favorites like Driving Empire entered the mix. Voldex’s model of acquiring and improving games was proving so effective that even Roblox itself took notice. As the company scaled, Bienenstock spent more time leading marketing and involved in live operations across the portfolio. Over time, that scope widened to include a focus on brand partnerships.

The Partnership Pivot and Roblox Brand Rush

As Roblox’s demographic broadened beyond its kid-core origins, major brands began sniffing around the platform, eager to reach its now-massive audience. Bienenstock found himself fielding inquiries from Hollywood studios seeking in-game tie-ins; sports leagues eyeing Roblox as the next frontier for fan engagement. “We saw a lot of interest from partners saying, ‘Hey, we know Roblox is a big deal. We want to get on the platform in a meaningful way,’” Bienenstock says.

This partnership push soon transformed Bienenstock’s role. No longer just head of marketing, he earned the broader title Head of Growth, reflecting his expanding purview over both acquiring users and acquiring business. By 2025, as VP of Growth, he was spending as much time with external partners as with internal game teams. The list of collaborations read like a pop culture wish list: NBCUniversal worked with Voldex to drop film franchises into Brookhaven, like the 2025 mega-hit Wicked: For Good. Netflix inked a deal for a limited-time event in NFL Universe Football. The LEGO Group teamed up on a creative mode & vehicles in Driving Empire and Brookhaven. 

One collaboration in particular made waves. In 2025, Voldex’s Driving Empire partnered with NASCAR, bringing stock cars and race-day excitement into the Roblox game. The crossover was a hit: players could collect and race their favorite NASCAR vehicles in Driving Empire, and NASCAR got to court the next generation of fans in a virtual world full of social spaces, vehicles & racetracks. The execution was so seamless and engaging that it won two Roblox Innovation Awards that year for Best Driving Game and Best Collaboration. Bienenstock, who had brokered the deal alongside the Driving Empire team, was ecstatic. “Bringing a Roblox Innovation Award home reflects the work we did…and what we were able to bring to the fans,” he says with pride, crediting both his partners at NASCAR and the developers at Voldex for pulling it off.

Lessons of a Growth Leader

Reflecting on what propelled his whirlwind career, Bienenstock muses “Nothing’s a straight line – that’s for sure.” If there’s a theme, it’s his unwavering growth mindset. Bienenstock firmly believes his early break at Playtika came not from a perfectly padded resume, but from demonstrating curiosity and eagerness to learn. “It’s passion and the ability to grow… that growth mindset,” he says of what he looks for in new hires now. In practice, that means never getting comfortable. 

‍Harry Bienenstock’s story is still being written, but it already offers a blueprint for blending tactical expertise with big-picture thinking. He’s the marketer who can debate backend data pipelines, the growth marketer who balances in-game features & runs A/B tests, the growth marketer who can also close a partnership deal with a Fortune 500 brand. That hybrid skill set has played a meaningful role in Voldex’s rise. Looking back, he grins at the risks he took and the challenges he shouldered. “I’ve enjoyed the ride, that’s for sure,” he says of his Roblox odyssey.