Jason Citron
Co-founder & Board Member, Discord. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@jasoncitron ↗LinkedIn ↗discord.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Jason Citron is best known for co-founding Discord and serving as its CEO for a decade, growing the platform to hundreds of millions of users. Previously, he created the mobile social gaming platform OpenFeint, which he sold to GREE in 2011 for $104 million.
2shows
2appearances
52statements
11resolved
9supported
1contradicted
82%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything Jason Citron said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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…”
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 says 20-person synchronous product reviews become performative ceremonies
“Most things don't actually need a lot of participation in discussion. Like the team has done a tremendous amount of work and they're trying to get feedback from me and the forum of the, of a 20 person product review turns it into like this bizarre ceremony.”
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 predicts AI will let 20-person teams build games like Elden Ring
“I mean, I think it's gonna dramatically lower the cost to create incredible content, which means that if you don't, which means you're gonna get, I think you're gonna get games like Elden Ring that are made by teams of, like, 20 people, not 300, and then it's …”
Citron: Discord paused hiring for a quarter to train internal managers
“Rather than bringing in managers from the outside, we created our own manager training program and asked anyone at the company, we said, hey, does anyone want to try and learn management? So we stopped hiring for a quarter. And basically talked about and taugh…”
Jason Citron views 'empowerment' and 'alignment' as symptoms of management mistakes
“Words today that trigger me, which I think are shadows of this, are words like empowerment, alignment.”
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, …”
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.”
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.”
Citron: Discord rejected acquisition offers because the team wanted to keep building
“The interesting thing about the experience we went through earlier this year, you know, I can't comment on any specific companies, but it was a really crystallizing moment because, you know, I was talking to some of the folks on my team about sort of what path…”
Jason Citron says video games are safe sandboxes for learning leadership skills
“Games are such amazing little simulation sandboxes to get to interact with these things that are basically like microcosms of real life. And you can learn these skills in safe places. And my guess is there's something to do with, Being able to do those things …”
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…”
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 says reference checks are far more critical than executive interviews
“Actually interviewing execs and very sort of more senior experienced people is really good for getting a feel for whether I would enjoy working with them. Can we brainstorm? Can we debate? Do I enjoy, you know, being with them? But I rarely find that folks lik…”
Citron: GREE asked him to step aside months after OpenFeint buyout
“After like three or four months, you know, they asked me to step aside and basically like, we're going to take the business in this direction. And so I left.”
Citron: Enduring gaming companies need their own distribution platforms
“Video game businesses that were around for a long time tended to have a distribution mechanism of their own that they could use to kind of Buffer the time between making hit titles, because it's a very hit driven industry.”
Citron: Co-founder Stanislav Vishnevsky pitched the standalone idea that became Discord
“One of the engineers at the company, a guy named Stanislav Vishnevsky, came to me and was like, hey Jason, and we've been talking about this gaming communication thing for a while, and he was like, I have an idea for how we could build a communications app tha…”
Citron: Discord's board thought launching on PC first in 2014 was crazy
“And the real counterintuitive part was, and we should start by doing it on PC.
You know, because in, in 2014, like mobile was exploding.
You know, everyone in Silicon Valley was focused on, on mobile.
And we ended up basically talking about
Launching a communi…”
The other half of the tape: Jason Citron's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Danny Rimer 6Harry Stebbings 3Nabeel Hyatt 1Josh Elman 1
Statements about Jason Citron, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
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20VC 13
2025 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- What Does it Take to Be Good at Series A and B Today? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Nabeel Hyatt, GP @ Spark Capital: To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | E1255 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- TS Anil, CEO @Monzo: From Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS, To $1BN in Revenue | E1254 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 6 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jason's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder & Board Member, Discord | 1 | 30 | 71% 5/7 | full record on How I Built This → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & Board Member, Discord | 1 | 22 | 100% 4/4 | full record on 20VC → |