Discord founder Jason Citron discusses selling his mobile gaming social platform OpenFeint to Japanese gaming giant GREE for $104 million in 2011 and his subsequent abrupt departure.
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…”
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…”