The Exchanges

Q Yeah. And, and I guess after you graduated, you clearly, you wanted to, to go and make video games, and you ended up, I think, first in, in Southern California at a studio there, and, but it wasn't quite clicking, and then eventually you landed in, in Berkeley, right?

A Yeah. The funny story is, so I had, I had moved to Berkeley because I wanted to kind of be in more of a social environment. You know, I was 20 at the time, moved to the Bay Area, basically didn't know anybody. And after living by myself for nine months or something, I was like, I want to go, like, be somewhere where I can make more friends. So since I was kind of the same age as, like, the fourth year students over at Berkeley, I found some, you know, house in Berkeley where there were, like, nine other college kids living, and I got a room in there with them to, like, make friends. And one of the folks who was living there had an uncle who was starting a tech incubator. And, you know, I remember I was like walking to the kitchen to get some cheese or something from the fridge. And he's sitting and talking with another one of the kids on the couch, you know, explaining how his uncle's looking for folks who want to start a company. And I just remember stopping and being like, hi, uh, can I meet your uncle? And so we got to talking and, um, and, and that was kind of how I, Got into Silicon Valley, uh, was another one of these, like, totally accidental situations.

AI assessment note: “I had moved to Berkeley because I wanted to kind of be in more of a social environment.”

Q Did you make any money off of Orofaint at all?

A I think we covered our, our, 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, and, and, you know, by the second month we were like, okay, this isn't working. Like, all the other games in the app store are trending towards 99 cents, and so We actually got to a point where we had about three weeks of runway left, of money left to spend to run our business, and I remember very vividly calling up my dad and being like, hey dad, I think this startup adventure is coming to an end. Can you get my room ready? I'm gonna have to move home before I get my next job. And he's like, okay. I'm like, alright, great.

AI assessment note: “I think we made like 30,000 dollars on it, and then the next month”

Q But what, what, what was the exact idea that, that Stan brought to you? Like, what was the, what was that insight that he had?

A What he, the insight that he really had was kind of putting together a couple of dots, which were kind of counterintuitive, which was, we're seeing our customers cobble together, you know, communication around our own game with all these different apps. And also ourselves, like, we kind of do this when we play, you know, games on PC. And like, maybe we can just solve that problem directly, rather than needing to build a game to get people to use something which we can then focus on. 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 communication service on PC first. Um, our board thought we were kind of nuts, but ultimately, to their credit, they believe that we understood our customers, and as, as individual users, like, we would go home and play games on our PCs and consoles all the time, and so-

AI assessment note: “maybe we can just solve that problem directly... we should start by doing it on PC”

Q other's voices and talk. Slack was out there and there were other ways to communicate. So why did you think that people would, was it, was it just that all of those were disparate and they were all over the place and there just needed to be a simple one-stop shop where you could do all of that in a game? Was that the way you were thinking about it?

A Yeah, there were, there were a couple parts, but having an all-in-one experience was a big part of it. Because, you know, having to coordinate between all these different apps is kind of a pain in the butt. You know, like, if you want to talk to your friends while you're playing a game, you know, people would use one set of apps. And then if you weren't in the game, but you wanted to join, you'd be, like, texting people on a different app. But, like, they're playing the game, so, like, are they checking their phone? Are they checking their, you know, their messages? It's like you're somewhere else. And then when the game is over, If someone leaves, let's say someone drops out of the game, but they want to keep talking. If you're using the built in voice chat in the game, like the person has to keep the game on their computer. They can't go like browse the web. So like it, there's all these little like nuanced behaviors that just made it kind of complicated to use. Whereas 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 button and hop right in without us having to get interrupted. And, and so it's just a magical experience. You can like run into people online in a way that di…

AI assessment note: “having an all-in-one experience was a big part of it.”

Q This is a, this is a game that you launched called Aurora Faint. Um, and it was a, uh, can you describe what it was? It's like a puzzle game, right, for, for iPhones.

A Yeah, so the, the idea was we have a new device in an iPhone, and how could we make a game that takes advantage of the device in a fun and interesting way? And so, like, what was unique about an iPhone is it had an accelerometer so you could turn the device sideways, and it had contactless, so you, like, your friends were already sort of there. So we decided to build essentially a, a puzzle game. Effectively, imagine Tetris, but with a kind of Lord of the Rings aesthetic with some role-playing mechanics so you could level up and unlock characters and compete against other people. And, um, you could turn the phone sideways to kind of change the direction of how the board moved. And it, it was pretty popular. We won a bunch of awards for it, but it, it didn't end up becoming, uh, becoming the business that we thought it would be.

AI assessment note: “imagine Tetris, but with a kind of Lord of the Rings aesthetic”

Q And, and when you say put us on the map, I mean, you were, this is back-end technology. But, but put you on the map among developers, game, game creators, right?

A Yes. It put us on the map for game developers, but the interesting thing about how we, how we built it was it wasn't just backend technology. A big part of it was that end users would have an OpenFain account. They would set up a username. And so when you would go across games, all of your friends and all of that stuff would like come with you. So it actually started to generate a lot of end user awareness. Developers would start to, like, put the logo on their app icons in the corner, so, like, when you were browsing the app store, you'd be able to see, like, oh, this game has OpenFaint, so, like, my friends will be there with me, and it got to a point where, you know, you were scrolling that app store list, like, every other game had, had our logo in the corner, and it was pretty wild.

AI assessment note: “Yes. It put us on the map for game developers, but the interesting thing”

Q You called it Discord, um, which we know means is the opposite of Concord or Harmony. Why did you give it that name?

A Well, the story is kind of funny. You know, the name Discord actually came from, like, a set of criteria that we came up with for what we wanted the name to be. The original name that I had picked was Bonfire, because a bonfire is a place you gather with your friends, it's cozy, you're hanging out, but there were, like, 15 other communication apps called Bonfire, so we couldn't use it. So, the criteria we came up with was basically, we had to be able to get the copyright, We had to be able to get the website. We had to be able to get the app name on the app store, and it had to be a word that you could read it and know how to say it, and if you hear it, you know how to spell it. Um, I wanted it to be one or two syllables, so it was kind of short and snappy, and something that had to do with talking to your friends, and so we ended up making a list of like, I don't know, 20 words, and Discord was the best one that fit all that criteria, and it just kind of felt It felt right, um, you know, and, and we joke, and we say Discord is the problem we're solving when you use our service, like, because you win more, and you have more harmony with your friends.

AI assessment note: “Discord was the best one that fit all that criteria”

Q attract more and more money from investors who saw the potential in this. And one of the things that I read about, and this is, this is like a good year, year and a half in, is you partnered with Twitch, which is a, I think still the biggest streaming platform for, for gamers. How did you get in with them? How did you get them to partner with you?

A You know, with, with Twitch early on, we had this hunch that streamers would benefit from, from using Discord. Like, obviously when they play games with their friends and they're streaming, they can use Discord to talk and chat and keep up. But as we began talking to more streamers, what we started hearing was that they would often have these kind of VIP communities of their fans who they would give access to if they were subscribing to them on Twitch. So if you were A paid subscriber to somebody on Twitch, you would get access to a VIP voice chat experience, usually powered by something called TeamSpeak, which was one of the competitors at the time. And streamers had this interesting problem, which was if you stop paying them on Twitch, they, they wanted to, like, get you out, you had to get removed from the VIP club, but the, but the softwares didn't talk to each other. So they would, like, reset the password and kick everybody out and then send the new password and ask everyone to come back, and, and basically people weren't doing it. 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 ended up kind of going viral amongst Twitch streamers because it was a really easy and,…

AI assessment note: “we built this integration using Twitch's APIs so that you could”

Q couldn't shake games. In 2018, you actually launched a game shop called Discord Store, and, and for people who don't play games, a lot of people get their games from something called Steam now, where you just download a game. The idea, I guess, for the Discord Store was like a Netflix for games type of service. But it, it didn't last very long. What, what happened to Discord Store?

A Yeah, we launched the game store in late, I think it was late, 2018, and this, this was actually one of the first moments that we started to realize that people really wanted to use Discord for things other than playing games or with their gaming friends or gaming communities. So, you know, we launched this game store, and we got a lot of feedback from people that they actually just, like, wanted us to make our communication service better, and that by making it have, like, actual, now you can get video games in it, It made it even harder for them to convince their friends who maybe didn't play video games to come on to their servers to talk and hang out and maybe study homework or work on an art project or something. And, and it also, it ended up not being differentiated enough from the other ways that people buy games. And so we found ourselves in this situation where, well, we had a pretty large user base. We were competing against companies that were like 10 or a hundred times bigger than us in terms of like Capital. And in order to be able to get great games in the store, it was starting to become a situation where you would have to spend a lot of money to offer these upfront guarantees to developers to get them to list your game. And I realized that, like, that was a, a war we were not gonna win. It was another one of those moments where I just had to kind of embrace the …

AI assessment note: “we ended up shutting it down after a couple months”

Q connection, collaboration, friendship, uh, hanging out with friends, et cetera. Um, and, uh, it turns out that in 2017, Discord had been used, what was being used. I don't know how many people, but some, some people who were involved in the, in, in the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, they organized through Discord channel. How did you learn about that? How did you find out that, that, that happened?

A I actually don't really remember how, but, you know, we had taken privacy and safety very seriously from the first day of building Discord. You know, when you, when we launched Discord, like back in May, 2015, every server, you know, had moderation capabilities. You could kick people and ban people. You could enforce a code of conduct in your space. You could decide who could join And what was okay. But what we didn't quite realize was that we also were going to need to think about moderating the kinds of groups and communities that were on Discord themselves. And so when, when the Charlottesville thing happened, this was kind of a wake up call where we realized we were behind the ball in building tools that allowed us to actually moderate the groups as opposed to just allowing the groups to moderate themselves. So we, we took it as a real learning moment. And came up with very clear community guidelines of what's acceptable on our, on our service and built a trust and safety team that relatively in the life cycle of our company was much earlier than most, you know, tech companies tend to do. It's like an important thing for the world that we make sure our technology is used for good, but also like people just don't want to use it if it's, if it, if it doesn't feel safe.

AI assessment note: “I actually don't really remember how”

Q So, but, but you know that by human nature is not flowers and, and, and, you know, fields of, of joy and milk and honey, whatever it is, right? I mean, humans are humans. We behave in, in really bad ways sometimes, especially when we get together. Why do you think that, that couldn't happen on Discord?

A Well, I think, I think what's important, at least the way that we think about this, is 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, but Discord is designed in a way that gives each individual a lot of power over their own experience. You know, every conversation on Discord is opt-in. Like, people can't just show up out of the air and start pinging you like they can on, you know, perhaps other Other services. And then we give the moderators of those servers of those spaces a lot of power to control and enforce, you know, their rules and norms for their space. And then we have very clear community guidelines on what's acceptable. And we have a trust and safety team that does investigate reports. And while we don't proactively read messages, you know, if a group gets reported to us, we will go and investigate and look. And we ban communities if they're, you know, violating our guidelines. Like we just, we do it.

AI assessment note: “Discord is designed in a way that gives each individual a lot of power”

Q game, and then another, uh, Eight million or a little bit more after, but, but I mean, how long does it take for eight people to make a game? I mean, I guess, I guess the answer is a year and a half, right? But, but it, but it's, is it just like crazy intense schedule? Cause it seems so complex and eight people is not a lot of people.

A Yeah. It's complicated making games, but it's interesting cause for the first six months of the company, we were kind of noodling around on different prototypes and different ideas. We had like a tower defense concept. A couple different kind of concepts, and then after about six months, we kind of had this interesting moment where, you know, I, I decided, like, we should reinvent this MOBA concept on tablets, because I, I believed that it was a real, it's a really great game design, and I thought it would be huge on mobile, but, like, a couple of the people at the company time didn't agree, and so actually, two people ended up quitting, and I had to let one, one person go, because they didn't want to work on it, They thought it was, they thought it was a bad idea. I mean, they were kind of right, but it was, it was, it was an interesting formative moment for us, because there were like three of us left, and it was Andy, this fellow that I've mentioned a few times, he ended up joining up, and then Brandon, that first guy that I hired, and we were sitting around thinking, like, do we even want to go do this, or should we just kind of close up shop and go get jobs, you know, somewhere else? Yeah. And we ended up deciding that We didn't want to go get jobs somewhere else, and we wanted to take a shot at building our own games company, because if we could make a great place to work…

AI assessment note: “for the first six months of the company, we were kind of noodling around”