Discord

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of the key innovations we had was making Discord work in your web browser. You know, in, in early, this was a time when there was a new capability that was kind of just becoming mainstream in web browsers. Something called WebRTC, which it's basically vide…”

“I knew that I wanted to build a game that was real-time multiplayer, that allowed you to spend time with your friends, and have these really fun experiences to, like, create memories together, and then that would also plant the right kind of seeds to be able t…”

“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…”

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

“I described it as we're going to build a new kind of, Gaming ecosystem on, like, the next generation of computing devices, and it's going to be a combination of things. It's going to be games, it's going to be a communication service, and then it's going to be…”

“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…”

“At that time, the, we did not actually have a business model implemented. Our plan was, you know, to fund it with venture capital for a little while, and then once we got to scale, to build a games distribution business.”

“As an 18 person startup, we can't be betting on these two things at the same time. It's too, too much risk.”

“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…”

“And by the way, there's something like four billion minutes of conversation and six billion messages on Discord every single day.”

“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…”

“We have begun testing native subscriptions in Discord, where you can come directly to a server and buy a subscription, and then earn money as a influencer or a server host, and then, you know, and then we share it in, in a part of that.”

“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”

“With discord, the way that voice chat works is it's like an always on conference call because you invite people into a group space and then create a voice channel. If you and I are talking, You know, our friend can see that we're there and just click the butto…”

“We have no plans to run ads.”

“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…”

“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.”