The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 29 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Jason Citron calls alignment a 'four-letter word' and demands opinionated decision-makers
“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?”
Jason Citron explains why Discord rejected Microsoft's acquisition offer
“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…”
Lemkin: Founders disliking Wall Street should step down 12 months pre-IPO
“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…”
Jason Citron expects new Discord executives to do zero work for 60 days
“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…”
Jason Citron personally selects all Discord product projects top-down
“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.”
Jason Citron calls scaling Discord to 1,000 employees his biggest management mistake
“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…”
John Lilly disagrees with Fred Wilson's consumer tech downturn thesis
“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…”
Jason Citron admits Discord's non-gaming expansion led to strategic dead ends
“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.”
Jason Citron says building a durable gaming company requires a distribution advantage
“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, …”
Discord rejected a higher Series A valuation to partner with Benchmark's Mitch Lasky
“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.”
Jason Citron shut down Discord's PC game store 45 days after launch
“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.”
Slonimski: Organic Growth Opportunities Lie in Discord, Reddit, and YouTube
“With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following.”
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“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.”
Hyatt: I passed on Discord twice before eventually investing
“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.”
Shulman: 90% of Suno traffic migrated from Discord to web in five days
“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.”
Jason Citron says choosing the right problems is more critical than resource allocation
“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…”
Jason Citron's prior exit cushion allowed Discord to reject early acquisition offers
“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 …”
Jason Citron says the main second-time founder advantage is early-stage experience
“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…”
Danny Rimer: Discord is returning to its core focus on gaming audiences
“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…”
Lanng: AI startups have largely abandoned Slack for Discord
“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.”
Lanng: AI development shifted from corporate labs to Discord developers
“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…”
Sahgal: Social networks are shifting from friend graphs to interest-based communities
“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…”
Elman: 10% of early Discord users spent 10 hours daily on app
“There were 10% of the users were using, you know, had it on and were interacting with it for 10 hours a day.”
Jason Citron says Discord will eventually undergo a liquidity event for staff
“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”
Discord gained its first 50 users from a Final Fantasy subreddit post
“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.”
Jason Citron says Discord has raised nearly $1 billion in total capital
“I guess I am a good fundraiser. We've raised almost a billion dollars.”
Index Ventures offered Discord a term sheet after a two-slide presentation
“Based on the retention of Discord at the time, we followed up the next day and offered them a term sheet.”
Kaba: Discord's founders mapped their own network flywheels before hiring growth
“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…”