This billionaire CEO was a window cleaner and says the secret is to trust your intuition

While some Gen Z graduates find themselves frozen out of the job market, millions have slipped into the so-called “neither nor” (neither study nor work) status, without knowing when their careers will finally take off. For Roblox CEO David Baszucki, this feeling of professional drift is familiar.

Although he now runs the $60 billion video game platform — and has a $5 billion net worth to go with it — when he graduated from Stanford University in 1985, he says his career prospects were far from clear.

Also read: Opportunities in the confusion: a career map in times of AI

Like many young professionals today, it was tempting for him to lean on advice from mentors, teachers, or friends to figure out how to kickstart his career. But Baszucki warns that this mentality can end up being harmful.

In fact, looking back, he says the best advice he ever received was to stop overvaluing what other people think.

“A lot of my development was trying, over time, to ignore the advice I was getting,” Baszucki recalled to students at his former university. Instead, when you’re going through a difficult time, listen when people say, “Trust your intuition.”

Started as a window cleaner and became a technology billionaire

Even though Stanford has a reputation for being a launching pad for billion-dollar companies — from Snapchat to Databricks — Baszucki came face to face with reality after graduating.

His dream job never came, and his resume was weak: one of the few work experiences he had was cleaning windows with his brother one summer.

“I remember this terrible time right after college, trying to figure out what I was going to do,” Baszucki told an audience of Stanford business students.

“Instead of trusting my intuition, I remember I had a spreadsheet with nine possible careers and various metrics — ‘this is really good for this reason, but not so good for this other reason.’”

“It was a very strange way of trying to decide your career,” he added.

It was then that Baszucki first learned the need to trust his instincts.

After landing a salaried job after graduation, Baszucki spent the next two or three years in what he now calls “the worst jobs in the world,” where he faced “enormous frustration.”

Eventually, he took a step back to listen to his intuition — and the reset paid off. Baszucki went his own way and created Knowledge Revolution, an educational software company that was sold for $20 million in 1998.

After the sale, he expected to be asked to take on a CEO role. When that didn’t happen, he found himself adrift again and needing to once again forge his own path.

“Time after time, you have to participate in creating your own reality,” he told Fortune earlier this year.

A few years later, he began building what would become Roblox, now a global gaming platform with more than 150 million daily active users.

Fortune reached out to Roblox for further comment.

Best Career Advice: Trust Your Own Instincts

In an age where data and data-driven decisions are the big trend in the workplace, relying on intuition may sound misguided. However, many executives still rely on their instincts for even important business decisions.

“Be able to balance different people’s opinions, but in the end, you need to have your own conviction deep down and make decisions on your own,” said LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky when asked about career advice.

“You need to know what’s right, you need to care about what’s right, you need to be passionate about what’s right,” Roslansky added. “And if you’re going to put yourself out there and decide to dive into the crowd, it has to be because you want to, not because someone else is telling you to.”

Skims co-founder and CEO Jens Grede also recently highlighted the importance of trusting your intuition — as long as you exercise it.

“You can feed (intuition) by being a curious person,” Grede said on Aspire, his wife Emma’s podcast. “Your intuition is really your collective memory, your collective experience and learnings… Every book you read, every article, every conversation, every right or wrong decision you make, all of this becomes your intuition.”