The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“But we do not track Or read people's messages. We do not, you know, use any of your actual communication data to do anything other than send it to your friends.”

“You have a hundred fifty million people, inevitably, like, you know, we're not reading everyone's messages, like, you can't police all of it”

“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.”

“Part of the challenge today is that it's hard to break through, and it costs two hundred million dollars to make a big game, right?”

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

“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 were one of the first 50 titles on the App Store, and I remember thinking, like, if we get a thousand players in the first, you know, week, that would be incredible, and we got a thousand in the first hour, and I was like, oh, this is something.”

“Very quickly we actually realized that that was not a great business model, and so we just made it free for initially, and we never really figured out how to make money off of it, frankly.”

“We raised money from a couple of strategic investors, but actually no Sandhill VCs invested in that company.”

“Free-to-play games kind of had less of a need for Openfeint. And we were also competing with Apple, and now Google at this point.”

“I think by the end of the first nine months or so, we had maybe almost a million people who had signed up, a couple 100,000 using it every day.”

“So, we built this integration using Twitch's APIs so that you could, if you subscribe on Twitch, you would get access to a Discord server, and if you stop paying, after, like, a grace period, you would just get removed, and it was just automatic, and Discord e…”

“It took us nine months to build it, and then we shut it down after, I think, three months.”

“From what I understand, the vast majority of people on Discord are just in a small group with their friends, just a small group of people they know talking. Jason Citron: That's right. That's right.”

“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 think we covered our spend for maybe one month when we launched the eight dollar version. I think we made like 30,000 dollars on it, and then the next month we made like 15,000 dollars, and the next month we made like 7000 dollars”

“TechCrunch covered it, and we got a couple hundred People who signed up on the mailing list. And so we actually took that mailing list and went out and raised a seed round of funding. And then we spent the next three months building and launching to launch the…”

“And from that post, we got, I think, a couple hundred signups. Maybe 50 people really started using it, and that was the day we say we launched, because, like, people we never knew were now coming and inviting their friends, and yeah.”