Mar 7, 2022 · 1h 25m · how-i-built-this
Discord: Jason Citron
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 'How I Built This,' host Guy Raz interviews serial entrepreneur Jason Citron, tracing his journey from self-taught programmer to the creator of OpenFeint and Discord. Citron details how pivoting away from unsuccessful video games, learning from early managerial missteps, and embracing independent ownership led to building one of the world's most ubiquitous social communications platforms.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 34.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.2 Guest teaching 2.2 Guest disagreement 0.3 Guy pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 9:02 Challenging elite university elitism in tech
Jason rejects Guy's premise about the necessity of elite Ivy/Stanford credentials in Silicon Valley, insisting output and ability outweigh pedigree.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 1:15:52 Pushing back against tech founder idealismGuy interrupts the 'make the world better' narrative to challenge unchecked techno-optimism and press on platform toxicity.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:03:23 Explaining the psychology of stream viewersJason corrects Guy's self-described 'old man' confusion over video game streaming by contextualizing it as an age-old desire for micro-community.
Guy holds their own ▶ 48:57 Dissecting the crowded comms marketGuy demonstrates market knowledge by listing existing workarounds like speakerphone conference calls and Slack to pinpoint Discord's distinct moat.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South by Southwest Event Announcement | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory monologue and teaser clip. Host provides introductory narrative context on Discord's market background with no live two-way debate. | |
| Discovering Computer Programming and Early Hustles | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy prompts Jason about his earliest coding projects, and Jason reminisces about QBasic and early web design contracting. | |
| Full Sail University and the Silicon Valley Meritocracy | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Guy notes Silicon Valley prestige bias toward Stanford/Caltech, but Jason gently pushes back, arguing the ecosystem cares far more about execution capability than pedigree. | |
| Early Incubator Experiments and the App Store Opportunity | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason recounts moving into a Berkeley shared house, joining Peter Relan's YouWeb incubator, and capitalizing on the App Store launch announcement. | |
| The Creation and Economic Failure of Aurora Feint | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks about Aurora Feint's mechanics and pricing model, while Jason details their flawed shareware assumption amidst 99-cent app deflation. | |
| Pivoting Game Tech into the OpenFeint Platform | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Guy clarifies how the underlying chat and leaderboard tech was extracted and white-labeled into OpenFeint, which Jason details. | |
| Launching OpenFeint and Building a Consumer Gaming Network | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason explains how Pocket God ignited adoption and how OpenFeint evolved from pure backend middleware to a recognized consumer gaming social network. | |
| Early Leadership Struggles and Technical Debt | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks how Jason managed rapid team scaling at a young age, leading Jason to recount facing technical and management debt. | |
| Selling OpenFeint to GREE and an Abrupt Exit | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy probes the sale to GREE and the ensuing friction; Jason clarifies that strategy misalignment and language barriers prompted his exit rather than personality clashes. | |
| Mid-Show Break: The Next Chapter | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Mid-roll break context where Jason discusses analyzing durable distribution advantages in games businesses and plotting his next venture on tablets. | |
| Founding Hammer and Chisel and Designing Fates Forever | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason details founding Hammer & Chisel, recruiting key art talent, and building the MOBA title Fates Forever. | |
| The Struggles of Fates Forever and Stan’s Epiphany | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Jason explains that tablet gaming failed to become the primary computing platform, leading Stanislav Vishnevsky to pitch an unbundled communication tool on PC. | |
| Developing a Dedicated Communications Platform for Gamers | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Guy presses why existing tools like Skype or phone conference calls were insufficient; Jason explains the always-on drop-in audio mechanics. | |
| The Hard Pivot to Discord and Letting Go of the Art Team | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason describes the pivotal decision in April 2015 to pivot 100% to Discord and lay off the entire art team. | |
| Launching Discord via Reddit and the Server Architecture | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason and Guy discuss the Reddit launch strategy and demystify the user-facing concept of a Discord 'server' and granular channels. | |
| Mid-Show Break: Discord Gaining Steam | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason explains naming the platform Discord based on specific trademark/readability criteria, and discusses utilizing WebRTC browser technology. | |
| Twitch Integration and Viral Growth Among Streamers | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Guy admits confusion over paying to watch streamers; Jason reframes streaming communities as modern social clubs based on shared belonging. | |
| Building a Healthy Workplace and Management Training | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason shares how pausing hiring to conduct internal manager training helped Discord build a sustainable culture unlike his experience at OpenFeint. | |
| Trust, Safety, and Content Moderation Wake-Up Call | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Guy brings up Charlottesville and bad actors; Jason describes how it served as a wake-up call to build dedicated trust & safety infrastructure. | |
| The Discord Store Failure and Pivoting to Nitro | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Jason recounts the painful realization that the Discord Game Store was failing and shifting focus to Discord Nitro subscriptions. | |
| Expanding Beyond Gaming to Foster Belonging for Everyone | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Guy pushes back on generic Silicon Valley techno-optimism; Jason explains Discord's opt-in, non-algorithmic architecture and user moderation tools. | |
| Rejecting Acquisition Offers and Charting an Independent Future | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks about acquisition overtures (e.g. Microsoft); Jason discusses fiduciary duties while emphasizing the team's commitment to remaining independent. | |
| Reflections on Luck, Learning, and Family Roots | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks about skill versus luck, prompting Jason to reflect on humility, entrepreneurial family roots, and the ambiguity of decision-making. |
Statements from this episode (31)
Citron: Platform launches offer outsized distribution opportunities for new gaming studios
“Whenever a new video game console launches, that's the opportunity for a new video game studio to get started. Because There aren't 200 games available. Like, you know, when the PlayStation three claims that comes out or, you know, one of these new systems, it…”
Citron: Aurora Feint was among the first 50 App Store titles
“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.”
Citron: Aurora Feint's paid launch generated $30K before rapidly declining
“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”
Citron: OpenFeint raised seed funding using a waitlist landing page
“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…”
Citron: OpenFeint never figured out how to make money
“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.”
Citron: No Sand Hill Road VCs invested in OpenFeint
“We raised money from a couple of strategic investors, but actually no Sandhill VCs invested in that company.”
Citron: Free-to-play rise and Apple competition squeezed OpenFeint
“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.”
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 pitched Hammer and Chisel as a games and communications ecosystem
“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…”
Citron: Fates Forever was a Trojan horse to seed a communication service
“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…”
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…”
Citron: Discord's always-on voice channels enable spontaneous drop-in calling unlike Skype
“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…”
Citron: An 18-person startup cannot afford to split focus across two products
“As an 18 person startup, we can't be betting on these two things at the same time. It's too, too much risk.”
Citron: Continuing to build games would never have reached massive scale
“Like, I think we could have had a really good small to mid-sized business if we had focused on that game, but from the experience I had building Openfeint, I knew that, like, we, I had these powers that I could use to have positive impact on, like, tens or hun…”
Citron: Discord's initial Reddit post yielded a couple hundred signups
“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.”
Citron: Discord reached nearly one million sign-ups in its first nine months
“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.”
Citron: WebRTC browser support was a key driver of Discord's early growth
“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…”
Citron: Discord originally planned to monetize via a games distribution business
“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.”
Citron: Automating Twitch subscriber perks drove Discord's viral growth among streamers
“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…”
Citron: Discord is testing native server subscriptions with revenue sharing
“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.”
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…”
Citron: Discord does not track, read, or monetize user communication data
“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.”
Citron: Discord killed its game store three months after a nine-month build
“It took us nine months to build it, and then we shut it down after, I think, three months.”
Citron: Vast majority of Discord users talk in small friend groups
“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.”
Citron: Discord has 150 million active users
“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”
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…”