Discord

“There were 10% of the users were using, you know, had it on and were interacting with it for 10 hours a day.”

“I mean, I don't know exactly what Fred's been talking about consumer downturn, but I don't, I think there's plenty of space. So, I think most people didn't think there was space for Snapchat a couple years ago. Now, now people do. You used to look at Musical.l…”

“What you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests, and they just have different take on it. Like that's where tick tock is. That's what Instagram is becoming pretty quickly. That's what Reddit obviou…”

“I happened to have the fortune of working with the discord founders last summer. And it was incredible how well they knew their own kind of, like, network and fly rule. Stan, the CTO, was, like, drawing diagrams for me on paper of, like, you know, how, you kno…”

“Everyone is in Discord, by the way, now. I mean, it's so crazy, like, nobody is on Slack that I know in this environment.”

“If you go back five, six years, it was like, AI was made by these, the cathedrals, like Google, and it was like, really serious scientists doing really serious stuff, and now people are hacking and LM models on Discord, and so, so we have this underground that…”

“Based on the retention of Discord at the time, we followed up the next day and offered them a term sheet.”

“So what happened was during COVID, Discord became much more of a mainstream platform. So, and now it's going back to what it was when we invested, which is Really a communications platform and vertical social media platform. I wouldn't say social media. I mean…”

“But I do think that selecting the right problem sets is It is probably more important than the resource allocation to some extent. Like if you have the right problems, but your resource allocation is sort of wrong, you'll notice that and then you can correct i…”

“The short version is that I don't expect them to do any work for the first, like, 60 days. They come in and they just need to learn. I just want them to meet the people, learn what we're doing, figure out why we're doing things, and every day what I expect the…”

“Over a few years sort of following that realized that we kind of went down some dead ends a little bit and that people were not resonating as much with some of the features we were building. So we kind of pulled it back in to refocus on gaming this year.”

“All of those folks are expecting liquidity at some point and I would, and I really want to give it to them. So there will have to be some liquidity situation eventually because people want to get paid rightfully”

“We got 50 users that day from that post. And then that 50 turned into a hundred the next day and it sort of started to snowball.”

“The thesis back in 2012, at the time, my sense was that the way you built a durable company in gaming over time was you actually needed to have some kind of established distribution advantage, and so I kind of put these things together and thought that, like, …”

“In fact, I got an offer I think our series A, I had one other offer for a little bit of a better valuation, but I really wanted to work with Mitch. So I chose to work with him.”

“It was called Fates Forever. But it was not going to be a venture scale business. Like content is tricky. It wasn't a hit and it didn't amass the kind of following that we needed to bootstrap a network.”

“I pick all the projects Very tops down on what the strategy is and how we're allocating resources, how these things are sequencing together over time so it, it's coherent to our users.”

“I now say alignment is a four letter word. Like I don't want alignment. I want highly opinionated people making decisions and then being accountable for them, right?”

“It certainly helps to in a sense that every successful company along its journey gets acquisition offers. And so by having a cushion, it made it easier to turn down offers because we could just go for the big, you know, outcome and try to build a generational …”

“I guess I am a good fundraiser. We've raised almost a billion dollars.”

“That period for us when we went from 200 to a thousand in basically two and a half years was the moment in time when I think I made the most management mistakes at Discord. And a lot of it is, is where basically I hired a lot of people and because it was a new…”

“Microsoft has been a really fantastic partner for us. And there certainly are things that we could have done together with them that we can't do independently, but ultimately it was about You know, controlling your own destiny, I suppose, and really seizing th…”

“The real impact from being a second time founder actually has to do with the levels and how there are a lot of levels I had already played once in my previous company, so there were things about building my second startup, about building discord that were easi…”

“I decided we weren't gonna give, spend the money, you know, the bags of cash on, on, on that title or on any titles, and we shut down the game store. 45 days later, and completely pivoted out of that business, which I had just raised a round of funding off of.”

“And so we released this app, we released this web app, which is not even the full functionality of the Discord bot in November, and it takes five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. Five days.”

“Discord, Jason, I knew for seven years. We were founders together before, before investing in Discord, and also smartly passed I was twice on Discord before investing.”

“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”

“If you're a founder and you like big teams and you like scaling, but you don't want to do the IPO, leaving 12 months before the IPO is the right time, right? The market's not going to be shocked, and you like scaling, you like people, you just don't want to de…”

“With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following.”