Roll20’s new CEO promises change is on the way for the industry leading virtual tabletop

polygon.com:

Industry-leading virtual tabletop suite Roll20 is under new management. Polygon can reveal that, as of Tuesday, Google veteran Ankit Lal has taken the reins as CEO. In an exclusive interview, he talked about the challenges his organization has experienced over the last two years of the ongoing global pandemic, and how he intends to move the company forward in 2022 and beyond.

Roll20 began in 2012 as a crowdfunding campaign with a novel goal — to enable tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons to be played online. Today it’s a full-featured set of tools, one that allows game masters to spool up a homebrew campaign or a professionally designed module in minutes. Players can join just by clicking a web link. Since launch, the platform has been home to more than 250,000 campaigns, each with a week or more of cumulative online playtime.

In March 2020 the platform became a lifeboat for groups who wanted to continue playing safely during the pandemic. But that influx of new users — more than 5 million of them, according to Lal — put major upgrades to the suite’s core functionality on hold. The company has since tripled in size, growing from just 20 or 25 employees to nearly 60. Lal says that he now has two different groups of employees, one dedicated to users and another to publishers. That flexibility will help him to be more nimble in 2022.

“While I can’t speak to the details of the past,” Lal told Polygon in an interview earlier this month, “I have worked with and run product teams before, and what I think you’re going to see out of me is a very deep focus on our users and publishers.”

As far as users go, Lal said that his primary goal is to help onboard two new kinds of users that Roll20 has