Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
Citron: Discord has no plans to run advertisements on its platform
“We have no plans to run ads.”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
What-if
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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”
Insight
Citron: Being right and wrong feel indistinguishable before knowing the outcome
“One of the biggest lessons that I've learned over my career is that being right and being wrong don't feel that different before you know the answer.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Jason Citron