The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 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…”
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'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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 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: 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 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: 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.”
Raz: Discord sees four billion voice minutes and six billion messages daily
“And by the way, there's something like four billion minutes of conversation and six billion messages on Discord every single day.”
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'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: 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: 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.”