Today, I\u2019m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that, and for a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In many ways, Discord represents a significant shift from what we now consider traditional social platforms. It\u2019s not a public-facing network like Facebook or Instagram, and it\u2019s not really a broadcast medium for creators quite like YouTube or TikTok. But it\u2019s also not a forum in the way, say, Reddit is, where you participate in big public threads curated by moderated communities. Instead, as you\u2019ll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hang out with your friends over shared common interests, whether that\u2019s video games, the AI bot Midjourney, or maybe your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the internet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Listen to Decoder<\/em>, a show hosted by The Verge<\/em>\u2019s Nilay Patel about big ideas \u2014 and other problems.\u00a0Subscribe\u00a0here<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jason and I dug into the nuances of how he sees Discord in the landscape of other platforms and how he\u2019s made conscious choices about what he sees as the future of online communication. For Discord, that future is smaller, more intimate, and far from the public eye. We also discussed the inherent tension between the version of Discord that acts as a tool for voice chat and the version of Discord that\u2019s become a social destination mixing public and private in increasingly complex and, at times, legally fraught ways. We also touched on the word \u201cservers\u201d and how it\u2019s played an important role in the kind of IRC-style culture the company was born in and still cultivates.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019ll hear Jason talk about Discord\u2019s evolving business model \u2014 unlike Slack, it never went into enterprise software. Instead, it has a consumer subscription service called Nitro and a growing number of other ways it\u2019s exploring making money, including the platform\u2019s very first ads. Jason also revealed why he ultimately decided not to sell his company to Microsoft for a reported $10 billion and also how the post-pandemic slowdown forced the company into two rounds of layoffs and a major refocusing effort about what Jason thinks the Discord community wants and needs. The short answer: a bigger gaming focus and more outside developers building apps, bots, and games that live exclusively inside of Discord.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, because Discord\u2019s users are so young, it faces some particularly unique content moderation challenges. You\u2019ll hear Jason reflect on his testimony in front of Congress earlier this year around child safety and also why the company has made some pretty major tradeoffs around features like encryption that other platforms have been unwilling to make \u2014 because Jason\u2019s perspective is that they have to make the app safe for teens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This was a fascinating conversation, and Jason\u2019s perspective \u2014 that online life will only continue to move toward private group chats built around the ways we spend our time with friends \u2014 looks more convincing by the day. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay, Discord CEO Jason Citron. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jason Citron, you are the founder and CEO of Discord. Welcome to Decoder<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thanks for having me, Nilay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I am really excited to talk to you. Discord is a seemingly very simple application. It\u2019s also very complicated. It exists in a complicated ecosystem of things. There\u2019s a lot to talk about with Discord all the time. It started as a voice chat for gamers. It grew into a place where people hang out to talk to each other. What do you think Discord is now?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, I think Discord is a place where people talk and hang out with their friends online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A long time ago, I was <\/strong>talking to Stewart Butterfield<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 this is before he sold Slack to Salesforce \u2014 and I said, \u201cDo you think Discord is a competitor to Slack?\u201d He said, \u201cNo. Absolutely not. Slack is enterprise software. We do all these enterprise logins. We have to deal with all this stuff at your company. Discord is over there and that\u2019s different.\u201d I always thought that was interesting.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that\u2019s true. But the idea that one is very enterprise and one is very consumer, that\u2019s gotten a lot blurrier since I\u2019ve had that conversation. I know entire businesses that not only run in Discord but also talk to their communities, to their customers, in Discord. Has that gotten blurrier for you as well?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have always focused on Discord as a service and tool for consumers to come together and talk and hang out. And it is used in many different ways, to your point. A lot of companies use Discord almost as a new way to communicate with their superfans online. We love that and we support that use case. But most people who use Discord are in smaller invite-only groups \u2014 we call them servers \u2014 with people that they know or friends of friends. It\u2019s a place that feels like your dorm common room or your living room, where people are hanging out with people they know.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That server terminology is always really fascinating to me. I\u2019m somebody who came up on IRC. The first tech website I worked for, Engadget<\/em>, actually ran itself on IRC. We had to teach everybody how to use IRC when they got a job with us, which is wild. Everyone\u2019s moved on from that now. But you\u2019ve kept that terminology, that ethos, alive. You\u2019re starting a server. You\u2019re in charge. Talk to me about that. Why keep that old-school terminology in play?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n When we started Discord, our focus was very much on building a text and voice chat app for people who played video games. Back in 2015, the alternative products that people used were, literally, they would host voice servers for their friends. The reason we picked the word server was because, at the time, that was how our customers thought about what the tool was doing for them. It was a server where they could go and bring their friends together.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So we said, \u201cWell, on Discord, you get a free server; whereas, on those other apps, you\u2019re paying for a server.\u201d Now, our service runs in the cloud and doesn\u2019t literally have a server the way that they used to rent computers and get IP addresses. So it just stuck. People understood the concept of a server as a place where you come together, and from 2015 to 2020 or so, Discord\u2019s primary focus was on gaming. Even today, gaming is a huge part of what people do on Discord. So people just get it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I asked that question very specifically because the word server, to me, implies a bunch of control. As you\u2019re saying, you would go out in the world, you would start a server, and it would be your own. But Discord is a platform. There\u2019s an app store built into it. You\u2019re doing a bunch of developer outreach. It is the <\/strong>user interface for some very cutting-edge products like Midjourney<\/strong><\/a>. That control goes back and forth. There\u2019s what Discord the platform wants, there\u2019s what users are doing with it, and there\u2019s what users might do with it that you haven\u2019t even thought of. There\u2019s what they might want to do with it that you don\u2019t want them to do. How do you think about that tension?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our focus is very much on creating tools that give people the capability to design their own space. That was part of the intention from day one. That\u2019s part of the server idea like you\u2019re talking about. We give you these tools to make a server, and then you can choose: what are the text channels, what are the voice channels, what do you want to name it? How do you want to decorate the different people and have them stand out? We have permissions and role capabilities where you can say, \u201cWell, these are admins and these are newbies and they show up differently in chat and they have different powers in chat about who could kick people off and invite people on\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019ve always had this ethos of leaning toward user control of their spaces. Frankly, what\u2019s so cool about that is that it has extended to customizing Discord with our API and bots platform because we knew that people were going to want to customize the service and connect it to other services outside in the world. That user control and open ethos is what enabled things like Midjourney to flourish. There are over half a million apps that people have built on Discord that are used across our user base, so it\u2019s a really intentional posture that creates conditions for exciting things to happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n How much of the evolution of the product itself is guided by what people are doing as they build applications and bots, and how much is guided by what you want from it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We take a mixed approach where we spend a lot of time talking with our customers of all different kinds trying to understand what people are doing with Discord, what they want from it, and what their challenges are with it. Then, we mix that with what excites us as product creators and builders and how we think the world is changing and where it\u2019s going and what we want to create for people. We try to put that all in a pot and shake it up, and then stuff comes out, so in some places, things that our bots community and apps community have built have driven our roadmap. I\u2019ll give you one example. In the early days, we had a hunch that Discord would be used for public communities like some of these we\u2019ve been talking about, but we didn\u2019t actually design that in a first-class way into the product.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When we initially launched, I think the user cap was 30 or 50 people in a server, for example. As people started using it for more public spaces, we kept raising the cap, which was infrastructure work to make the product work better. We had basic moderation tools, but it became clear that when you have thousands of people on a server, you need different kinds of moderation tools. A lot of bots sprung up, and that made us realize we needed to invest in this, so we created AutoMod, which is now built into the platform that allows these communities to moderate in much more advanced ways. Now, we have a whole trust and safety team. That whole effort was really a response to what people were doing with our product that we thought might happen but weren\u2019t really sure, and it wasn\u2019t the original focus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me put that into contrast with, say, Reddit, which is another huge user-generated platform that is really driven by its community. There\u2019s a tension there. There\u2019s what the community wants, the tools it builds for itself, and there\u2019s what Reddit wants. Those things <\/strong>come to a head<\/strong><\/a>. They wax and they wane. Have you had those moments where you know that the platform needs to do something that will make the community mad but you need to do it anyway? Or have you been able to integrate what the community is building in a more healthy or more stable way?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that one thing that\u2019s fundamentally different about Discord from Reddit is that we are much more a group chat app for friends than this public space with moderators and [user-generated content]. We don\u2019t think about Discord as a UGC platform, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think about it as a communications app. It\u2019s a group chat app. If you look at where people are spending their time and what they\u2019re doing most of the time, most people are texting in invite-only group chats with their friends or on voice chat, playing games, talking about their day, cooking dinner separately, falling asleep together. That\u2019s what people do. It\u2019s a place where people talk and hang out with their friends, primarily. And then they do go explore these other spaces in their interests and participate in these big communities. Some people really love that part of the service. But Discord is a communications tool. It\u2019s not a UGC platform in the sense that I think you\u2019re describing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I want to stick with that for one second because I think the difference is pretty finely shaded. It\u2019s a communications platform, but it\u2019s not one to one. It\u2019s one to many by default. You log in to a channel, you\u2019re talking to one person, but you could be talking to lots of people. It\u2019s not encrypted, which I want to come back to. That\u2019s a choice you\u2019ve made to make sure you can monitor what\u2019s going on. And because you\u2019re unencrypted and you can moderate, you do moderate it. You do have a trust and safety function. What is the actual distinction between a communications platform and a user-generated platform like Twitter or Reddit?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, all communications are user-generated, so maybe that\u2019s what you\u2019re getting at. But I think what I was reacting to is more what you were describing trying to make this comparison between Discord and Reddit, which is a great product. People post content on Reddit and the content that people post for other people, usually strangers, is the primary thing that I think people get from Reddit. Discord\u2019s very different. Discord is more like a group chat app where you\u2019re sending messages, frankly, often to one person. Direct messages are very popular. Our servers are also popular. But in that case, it\u2019s like three to 10 friends. If you\u2019re playing a video game, it could be your guildmates or the people you regularly play with or a club that you\u2019re a part of.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not a broadcast medium in the way that a lot of these other more social media-type services are. We do moderate it because we know that there are a lot of teens on the platform. When we do have those public spaces, we treat that more like the public UGC stuff. But most of the time, people are hanging out with their friends in their virtual living room.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s fascinating, and I want to come back to it because Discord is so many things. Like I said at the start, you can look at it through so many different lenses. The idea of it just being a direct small group chat app, I put that right next to the fact that it\u2019s the user interface for Midjourney, which is one of the hottest AI tools out there. And I say, \u201cWell, most AI tools are text-based, they\u2019re prompt-based, and the chat interface is the way we think about using most generative AI tools.\u201d Discord has become that interface for at least one of them. Is that a future that\u2019s in conflict with being a small group chat app, or is that the next extension? Or is that even something that needs to go off in another direction on its own?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that the fact that the chat input box has become the primary way to interact with a lot of these generative AI tools and that we have a really popular and extensible chat input box is great. Midjourney is a really cool product and people love using it. They have one of the largest servers on Discord, if not the largest server on Discord. But a lot of people actually take the Midjourney bot into their invite-only server with their friends, and they\u2019re using it there in a more creative space that is not in the public view or that is a server that you can just go join. I love Midjourney and the things that other generative AI apps are on Discord, but for us, when we think about the service that we\u2019re offering to users, it\u2019s a group communications tool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the things that people do when they\u2019re hanging out with their friends is they play around with these generative AI products. They share their creations with their friends, and they act as conversation pieces, as a shared experience, to do together. From that lens, we love it, and that\u2019s why we encourage and support it, but we really come back to what most people are doing on Discord most of the time, and that\u2019s chilling with their friends and hanging out. Video games continue to be a huge part of what people do every month on Discord.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You add this all up and you get this strikingly different view of what being on the internet should look like. It\u2019s not whatever TikTok is turning into, whatever Home Shopping Network Instagram is turning into. It\u2019s text. You\u2019re typing a lot; you\u2019re looking at photos that are being generated; you\u2019re interacting with other computer systems through text prompts. Discord is a window into that. You\u2019re maybe writing some applications that are inherently text-based inside of Discord. But it\u2019s almost like a command line vision of connecting on the internet. It\u2019s old school. Do you see Discord as being that big, as in this is a different way of thinking about connecting and computing, or are we very focused on it as a chat app?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The way that we think about it and our vision for where we think the future goes in regards to Discord, it really comes back to how people spend their time with their friends. When I started the company back in 2012, the bet that I made was that video games would continue to become a bigger and bigger form of entertainment for people. They would become more and more social. They would be across more and more devices and that there wasn\u2019t a great communications product that was started with your friends around gaming. So that was the original thesis. Even today, when we picked our heads up after covid to reevaluate what was going on in the world and what our customers cared about \u2014 we spent a lot of time last year with folks \u2014 I have more conviction today that [gaming] will continue to become the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you go back over the last 12 years, it\u2019s really played out, and gaming has very much gone mainstream now. I think 93 percent of Gen Z plays video games<\/a>. When I was a kid, I was weird playing multiplayer games by myself or with my friends, but it was a niche thing. Today, it\u2019s quite normal. Our vision for the future is a world where people have really rich shared experiences, and they can spend quality time with their friends no matter where they are in the world. A lot of that is going to be video games that exist just on platforms. Some of those will be video games that we will serve directly through our platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The bots platform, we\u2019re evolving it to include embedded experiences because that\u2019s the part we think will matter. But it\u2019s really about this idea of how I think the internet\u2019s going to evolve. There\u2019s a need for more cozy, intimate spaces where people can spend quality time with their friends away from the broadcast performative stuff that we see a lot of. And we\u2019re very focused on creating those cozy spaces for people to talk and hang out with their friends and deepen their friendships.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is a theme I see everywhere right now that the United States is heading into an election year: what is our social media going to do to us and what is it doing to teenagers? It\u2019s all colliding, and a bunch of these social networks are not ready to take the weight, or they don\u2019t want to. In the case of Meta, I don\u2019t think they want to. You\u2019re not positioned in that fight at all. You\u2019re saying, \u201cLook, the internet should go back to being smaller, more fragmented, more among people you know and less about these giant culture-defining social media platforms.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n How comfortable are you in that bet? I mean that in the big way, not the little way \u2014 you\u2019re the CEO, you have to say you\u2019re comfortable. But is the internet actually moving in that way? Because I know a lot of people who want it to, but I\u2019m not sure that it actually is.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t think it\u2019s an either-or. Over the last 15 years, as we went from the internet being new to Web 2.0 and now the rise of mobile, I think that we saw a lot of this aspirational promise of these broadcast social media services and what they could do for us as people. I actually think they do a lot of really great things. I think, 50 years from now, we\u2019re still going to have something like this. It\u2019s undeniable that all of these services create value for people. I think there are questions we\u2019re working through as a society around some of the negative externalities of those things and how we want to manage through that. But I think we\u2019re going to have public photo sharing and public video sharing apps for the long run.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What we\u2019re seeing on Discord \u2014 and I think this has been a trend for the last five, six, seven years toward group chat messengers in general \u2014 is that people understand that those public spaces are interesting, but there\u2019s something else that they want in their lives, too. That\u2019s more intimate, cozy spaces where you can spend time in a relaxed way with people you know and spend quality time with friends even though you can\u2019t maybe be in the same physical space. I think that that is going to continue to grow, and I think that the social media stuff will grow. I think both of these things will exist in big ways in the world if you go 20 years in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you look at Discord right now, what part of it is growing faster? Is it the small cozy spaces part, or is it the place where a bunch of crypto startups talk to their customers? That was a big growth moment for Discord, but that\u2019s the big public broadcast version of it. So is it the smaller cozy part that\u2019s growing faster, or is it the more public part?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s the smaller cozy part. In fact, that\u2019s the part that\u2019s always been growing the fastest. The thing that we find that\u2019s interesting is, because it\u2019s not publicly out there, people don\u2019t really know about it so much. The crypto thing was big and now the AI thing is big, and those things did bring a lot of people to our service. But at the end of the day, the people who come to our service and love it the most are the ones who come with their friends or find their friends and it ends up becoming this place where they hang out online and keep in touch with the people that they care about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That brings me to the Decoder<\/em> questions. You\u2019ve described a lot of things Discord could be, a sense that you need to focus, and the main thing that it always has been and should be in the future. I want to ask you how the company\u2019s structured, but there\u2019s a little bit of context here. You did recently <\/strong>have some layoffs<\/strong><\/a>. You cited the economic slowdown and your headcount was growing too fast, so you cut 170 people, which is 17 percent of the company. You <\/strong>cut 4 percent previous to that<\/strong><\/a>. How is Discord structured now? Did these cuts change that structure?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The way that we\u2019re structured and those cuts come back to, \u201cWhat are we trying to accomplish and what are we trying to build for the world and for people?\u201d Over the last year in particular, I mentioned we spent a bunch of time going back into the market and talking to customers in a way we hadn\u2019t over the last few years through covid to really refresh our mental model of what people are doing [on Discord] and what they want from us. What we really clicked in on was this insight that while we were focused on being more mass market through covid, gaming actually went mass market at the same time as people grew up.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Because our service is so good for playing games with your friends, while people do lots of things on Discord, what we realized was that gaming actually is still one of the main ways that people spend a lot of time with their friends on Discord. I think it was like 95 percent of our users play video games. Last month, 1.5 billion hours were spent playing games across Discord on 60,000 titles, so people spend a lot of time playing video games.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What that made me realize was that we should really focus on gaming because it\u2019s a huge thing that people do on our service, and there are a few billion people that play video games in the world. It\u2019s the largest form of entertainment that\u2019s growing the fastest. I think we have a very unique role to play there, and we love it. Me, my co-founder [Stanislav Vishnevskiy], and a lot of the people at the company grew up playing games, and games are such a core part of our social lives and our best relationships. With that insight of saying, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re going to focus in on gaming,\u201d we realized that we had too many people at the company, and we were not focused on the right stuff. We went through a reevaluation of what the next chapter of Discord was going to be, and through that, we realized we needed to shrink the company a little bit and shift our focus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Going forward, we are very focused on gaming as our core use case \u2014 group chat around gaming. But we\u2019re continuing to enable other things because people who play games do lots of other stuff, and that\u2019s how we got here in the first place. As a result of that, we are organized as a functional company, meaning we have engineering, product management, marketing, finance, and talent. We organize functionally because Discord is one product. We essentially have one product. So we need to organize and coordinate in a way that it comes out as a coherent experience for people. I talk about it like a symphony. Our people hear it as one song. Even though we have a hundred people playing instruments, we have to coordinate it effectively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A functional organization allows us to do that, and then we break it into three different types of work that we organize against. We call them our foundational initiatives. This is the stuff that is the bread and butter of what we need to deliver on for our users, like performance, trust and safety, and core messaging and communication features. We have cross-functional teams dedicated to each of those with a design leader, a product leader, and an engine leader, and they have a roadmap.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then, we have what we call our core priorities. These are the step function things that we\u2019re betting on. We have a few of these, and notably one of them is our new Quests feature<\/a>, which we announced. We\u2019re getting into how we help game developers bring their games to life and build their businesses. Another one is our embedded activities platform that I mentioned, and then there are a couple of other things in there.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then, we have a much smaller\u2026 I call it a venture initiatives team. It\u2019s a team of six people that report directly to me, and this is the crazy innovation lab where we\u2019re trying stuff that may never come to life, but it\u2019s the bigger swings to see what we could create and innovate on for folks. So that\u2019s how we organize the company, and we run it in an interesting way, too, with Loom videos. I\u2019m happy to get into that if you want, but I\u2019ll pause.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, two things. I definitely want you to get into Loom videos. That\u2019s the first time anyone\u2019s ever said that on the show, which is wild. How do you run the company with something called a Loom video?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Loom is actually a specific product that makes it really easy to do video, like screencap and camera recording. But basically what we do is we run the company hybrid. We use Discord to run Discord. So we\u2019re all over the country in America. We\u2019ll get groups of people together to look at marketing plans or review creative assets or product strategies or product demos. I found there was a lot of coordination overhead around how to get a meeting together with all the people that want to be in the conversation. It was this chaotic thing. And we had this idea, \u201cWell, what if they recorded the presentation ahead of time and sent it to me, and then I could just watch it in my free time? And then I could respond with a video as well, so they could see my excitement around the feature and I could have their presentation up and be clicking through it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That gets the initial presentation and reaction out of the way, and it turned out that we started doing this in just a couple of spots, and now it\u2019s becoming this thing across the whole company where people record video of them doing a presentation. Usually it\u2019s five, 10 minutes long, and then folks can watch it. I often watch these things at 2x, sometimes when I\u2019m brushing my teeth. I always have free time, but I don\u2019t always have an hour to have a meeting, and then sometimes I\u2019ll watch it two, three times, let it marinate in my head, and then I will always have 10 or 15 minutes to just respond or react. I essentially make a response video and send it to them. Then a hundred people can watch it. They don\u2019t have to be in the meeting, and most of the time then, we don\u2019t need a meeting. The communication happened and they can go.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sometimes, if we do need a meeting, we can get folks together. But we\u2019ve already basically had a full brain dump back and forth, and it\u2019s just really accelerated our product development and creativity. I think it\u2019s also created a more human connection between our employees because now we\u2019re seeing each other in video in these ways that is much more natural and casual that sometimes is missing when you\u2019re hybrid. So it\u2019s been really cool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Alright. You can\u2019t tell me about your crazy six-person renegade crazy idea squad without telling me a crazy idea. What are some crazy ideas that you\u2019ve tried?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I put the chip on the table so that y\u2019all know it\u2019s there, but the challenge with talking about this stuff is that most of it is not going to see the light of day. Our users will be listening to this and they\u2019re going to hold me to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Oh, yeah. If I say anything, they\u2019re going to hold me to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think my idea on my team is to have the worst ideas so that everyone else can have slightly better ideas. What\u2019s one of your worst ideas that you would just never do that\u2019s obviously a bad idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t know. I\u2019m sure I have a lot of bad ideas. I just don\u2019t know which ones are bad before I try them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The creative process is an interesting thing. We find this a lot at the company when we build features. If you\u2019re trying to innovate, a lot of the time, things that end up working seem like bad ideas upfront, and oftentimes, they seem like bad ideas to people who are even really good at innovating. I tell this story that, when we were originally building Discord back in 2015, we were a team of maybe 12 people at the time. Half of the people working on it thought Discord was a bad idea in a 12-person startup. It turned out to be a good idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s really hard to tell beforehand whether innovation is going to work. It\u2019s really important to have space to try things, react to it, and innovate and iterate to see where it takes you. Sometimes magic comes out the other end, and a lot of times, you just get duds. But we don\u2019t ship those. We try not to ship them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re 870 employees at the company. We have a little over 200 million monthly active users all around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One thing I think about all the time is when The Verge<\/em> was small, we were able to try things and get rid of them really fast. We had a small team, everyone knew we were trying something, the vibes were shared, and we had a small audience, so we could get rid of things and only three people would ever know. Now, we\u2019re big and we have a big team. Some people are really committed to some ideas; some people aren\u2019t. Some people can\u2019t tell from a Zoom call that I\u2019m on that I just want to see what happens. And then we have a big audience that\u2019s paying a lot of attention to us, and it gets much harder to take risks and shut things down. Discord is in that spot. You have a big team. You have a huge audience of people who care a lot. You won\u2019t even mention a bad idea because they will hold you to it. How do you think about taking risks?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a unique situation. Part of the reason I didn\u2019t say anything is because we take an incremental approach toward exposing users to risk or to ideas based on how confident we are in them. Practically speaking, what we tend to do is launch features to very small segments of our user base and see how they respond. But that even comes after what we call a closed beta or closed alpha, where we just recruit 50 people who sign an NDA to try something. Before that, we use our employees. A lot of them are customers, so that\u2019s a free couple hundred users to test something. And before that, the team has to be confident in it. So there are these gates that things go through.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not a highly structured process because it depends on the thing. But we frequently will eventually get to a point where we might, let\u2019s say, launch something to 50,000 people in our customer base and then let them try it, send them a survey, see how they interact with it, and then, based on that, decide which way to go. While it can be frustrating for those folks if we, let\u2019s say, remove something from the product, we usually only remove something if it\u2019s not actually that popular or useful. The funny thing about it is when we remove something, some people care, but most people don\u2019t, and that\u2019s why we removed it. So it works. We don\u2019t remove something that a lot of people love because, if a lot of people loved it, we wouldn\u2019t remove it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you ever foresee Discord having the Microsoft Excel problem where someone has built an entire business around one button in the toolbar and you can never take it out?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We do have a lot of developers who build apps on Discord, and so we do think about this around companies that have built these products and depend on Discord to deliver their service and as a user interface for their service. We really value that. To some extent, we already have this dynamic where people rely on us. Users rely on us, too, and this is one of the places where we get a lot of friction with our users when sometimes we realize that a certain segment of people really like the way something has been designed. Maybe it\u2019s tens of millions of people who love it. Then, we realize that there are 50 million people or hundreds of millions of people who want something different.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Managing that tension can be quite challenging because that\u2019s a case where maybe we ship something that people loved, and now, it\u2019s years later and our customer base has grown. The dynamics have changed. Managing all of those competing interests is not easy, and sometimes we get it wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This brings me to the<\/em> Decoder<\/em> question. You have a lot of decisions to make spinning stuff up, spinning it down, growing, focusing. How do you make decisions? What\u2019s your framework?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We always just focus on our customers. We try to prioritize our customers \u2014 \u201cwhat can we do to better serve people today than we did yesterday?\u201d Then we try to mix that with \u201cwhat do we want to do\u201d and \u201cwhat are we excited about?\u201d Because great things only come if the people who are making it are excited and passionate about it. We actually put a lot of stock in that, and then it\u2019s like, \u201cHow do we build a great business and make money and do all that stuff?\u201d Obviously, we\u2019re a company, so that\u2019s part of it. But I really do believe that over the long term, the best way to build a great business is to serve your customers really well. We just keep coming back to our customers and try to figure out how we best serve the most of them. That really guides everything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is that the tiebreaker in every scenario, or do you sometimes say, \u201cLook, I\u2019m the CEO. I\u2019m just making this decision\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sometimes the way actual decisions get made is, \u201cWell, we think 30 percent of our customers want this and 40 percent of our customers want that and 15 percent want this, and how do you figure out which ones to listen to? How do you even know if that\u2019s the right breakdown of what customers want?\u201d Sometimes we look at data and we\u2019re like, \u201cWell, people don\u2019t interact with this, but they tell us that they love it.\u201d So there\u2019s a lot of judgment that goes into making these decisions. We\u2019ve evolved this over time, but there are different models that people have around how to do this.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We essentially try to pick a single person who is the owner of making a particular decision, and it\u2019s up to them to farm for dissent in the company and collect the insights that they have from customers. Depending on the decision, sometimes if I\u2019m not happy with it, I\u2019ll pull the veto card as CEO. But I try not to do that because great people want to have autonomy and make great decisions and want to collaborate with other great people. So I like to participate in that collaborative process. But from time to time, it\u2019s like, \u201cOkay, Jason, what do you think we should do?\u201d I apply my judgment and make a call and we see what happens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One big call in 2021: you decided <\/strong>not to sell the company to Microsoft<\/strong><\/a>. Can you walk us through that decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Every great company along its life will get acquisition offers. It\u2019s just a fact of life because, if a company is great, someone\u2019s going to want to buy it. That was not the first offer we\u2019ve gotten, and it wasn\u2019t the last one we\u2019ve gotten. It was just the one that became most public. Whenever we get into any of these situations, I try to ask myself a question around where we are as a business. What\u2019s the best thing for our customers? What\u2019s the best thing for our shareholders? What do I want? What does my team want? And how do we work through that?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So far, every time, it\u2019s fallen out on the \u201cLet\u2019s stay independent. Let\u2019s keep building. Let\u2019s keep growing. We\u2019re having a blast. There\u2019s a ton of opportunity in front of us.\u201d So that was all it was. It came back to our customers and what we think we could build and what we wanted to do, and then we made a call.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I just <\/strong>talked to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston<\/strong><\/a>, who told me every company tried to buy Dropbox at the beginning. They would say, \u201cLook, this is a feature. It\u2019s not a whole product.\u201d But Dropbox has managed to survive because it is cross-platform, because it works with everything, because they prioritize working with everything well, because you can use it without being sucked into some other ecosystem and locked in. Discord is like that. You just use it and then you\u2019re playing a game over here, wherever you\u2019re playing a game.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you think about that \u2014 that if you\u2019d sold to Microsoft, they would\u2019ve pulled more people into that ecosystem and that would\u2019ve constrained you in some way? I\u2019m sure Sony has talked to you at some point \u2014 or Nintendo or whoever<\/em>. Is it that actually being cross-platform is the thing that lets you be successful?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that the thing that lets us be successful is it is cross-platform, but it\u2019s also our focus as a business on building communications tools. There are a lot of other gaming companies that have communication services as part of their offerings. Most major game publishers have something. But it\u2019s not their priority. Whenever they\u2019re forced to make a tradeoff around, \u201cWhere do we put our best engineers and our best creative people?\u201d they focus on the gameplay, as they should, but we focus on communications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That business structure combined with cross-platform, combined with the macro trends around gaming becoming more cross-platform and more device-agnostic, I think that is really a big factor in what\u2019s helped us get here. But at this point, a lot of people are on Discord, and we\u2019ve become known as the place to talk and hang out with your friends, so there\u2019s a lot of momentum around that that I think we appreciate and seek to cultivate. I think that\u2019s what really makes us successful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you think about how many fronts of competition you have with the big game companies? Microsoft has Xbox Live. They also obviously make video games. You are slowly starting to make some actual games as part of the Discord platform. That\u2019s another front of competition. Is that something you think about \u2014 how many ways you\u2019re competing with those companies and the many ways you might stand apart?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our focus is very much on communications tools. We have a very small games team. They\u2019re mostly to help us figure out how our platform should work so we can open it up to other folks, which we did just before the Game Developers Conference<\/a> a couple of weeks ago. So, right now, anyone can come to Discord and opt in to the developer preview and build an HTML5 game embedded right in Discord. That exists because we\u2019ve built some stuff ourselves to figure out how it should work. When I think about competition, I don\u2019t think we\u2019re competing with the gaming companies. In our earlier days \u2014 like the 2016 to 2017 era \u2014 all of them tried to launch competing Discord services, and I don\u2019t think any of us know too much about them anymore. I think we won that battle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At this point, most game developers use Discord as some part of their go-to-market and development process. This is one of the other things that we learned over the last year as we were talking to customers and game developers, too, was how essential Discord is today and our community capability as part of development. We heard from a lot of folks that they bring in early playtesters into smaller private Discords and hop on with the developers, and they\u2019ll do nightly playtests to get feedback to guide development of the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lot of that informed our roadmap for this year and really trying to elevate game developers and make them our customers and really collaborate with them. We got a lot of positive excitement from folks around Quests and our HTML5 platform and some other things we\u2019re doing. I very much think that we are helping game developers with the services that we provide, not really competing with them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In terms of revenue and where you\u2019re growing, it seems like Nitro, the subscription service, that\u2019s where the focus is. How\u2019s that going? Are you getting a lot of consumers actually paying for yet another subscription service?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nitro is doing very well. People really enjoy the features that they get: higher game streaming; animated custom emoji; being able to give their friends benefits through server boosts. I haven\u2019t publicly shared how much revenue it\u2019s making, although you could Google it and figure it out<\/a>, but it\u2019s doing very well.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We recently launched another consumer revenue line, which we call our avatar decorations, in our shop<\/a>. Just a couple of weeks ago, we launched a partnership with Valorant<\/em><\/a>, which is one of the big FPS titles, and you can buy Valorant<\/em> decorations for your profile, and players love that. That\u2019s going incredibly well. I\u2019m really excited about what could come next for us through our sponsored Quests format where we\u2019re helping game developers reach their audience on Discord to help them build better businesses. Of course, we\u2019ll make some money. And then players will get free rewards in their games that they love. And then there\u2019s our platform, where we can help support games and other things like Midjourney build businesses and create new shared experiences for people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Those are some pretty direct revenue models. You have a subscription service. You buy some cosmetic items for an avatar. Those are some microtransactions. Some developers come on the platform. You monetize those developers directly. You\u2019re also poking at ads. You\u2019ve launched some gamified ads inside of Quests. Is that the bigger revenue opportunity, or is that something you\u2019re trying out?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re just trying it out right now. It\u2019s hard to say how big it will be. What we have heard from game developers and game publishers is that they know that their players are on Discord, and they really want to be able to reach them. When we talk to players, and we\u2019ve run some of these Quests experiments, players really love getting free rewards in games they like.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n People love free stuff. That\u2019s a universal truth.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, I\u2019m like, \u201cPlease give me free Magic: The Gathering<\/em> packs. Just send them right there.\u201d I think it\u2019s possible that at some point every game will be running Quests on Discord, and if you like to play games, there\u2019ll be free stuff you can get in every game that you care about. I\u2019m excited for that. I think it could be a big business, but we just started it like a week ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the things I think about when I think about a platform like Discord, ads, and games is that a huge market for ads around games is app install ads. Download this game \u2014 that was a huge market for Facebook and Instagram <\/strong>before Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency<\/strong><\/a>. It seems pretty clear Apple wants a piece of that. But you\u2019ve got a whole community of gamers who like video games, and you could show them ads to download video games. That could be a big business. Is that something you would do?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the context of Quests, we\u2019ve explored showing a quest for a game that you haven\u2019t played yet but is similar to something that you\u2019ve liked to play before, maybe that your friends are playing, and people respond quite positively to it. At the end of the day, people who play games like to play games, they like to try new games, and then developers want to build games and create these businesses and reach players. I think there\u2019s a really interesting win-win-win type of product experience that we can create to matchmake players and developers, and Quests is our starting point. I\u2019m not exactly sure where it\u2019s going to go, but so far, the response from players and developers has been quite positive. I\u2019m optimistic about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One thing that happens to every company that goes from straight direct-to-consumer subscriptions and direct monetization to ads is they realize the companies that buy ads have vastly more money and will just keep spending money. It just happened to Netflix. People like free stuff. People run ads on Netflix. That ad-supported tier is <\/strong>growing really fast<\/strong><\/a>, much faster than the pure subscription tier. You can see that they\u2019re monkeying with the prices to get more people onto the ad tier and double-dip on the revenue. Are you worried about that, that you\u2019re going to open Pandora\u2019s box here and just start shoving ads over the platform?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, I\u2019m not worried about that. Our decision-making always comes back to what the best thing is for our customers, for our users. Over the long term \u2014 and the long term is a series of short-terms, right? \u2014 prioritizing the end-user experience is what\u2019s going to build a durable business for us. That is our frame in which we think about, if we\u2019re going to have sponsored content, what is the product experience and how does that show up in a way that is tasteful that users enjoy? That is our focus. I don\u2019t think that we\u2019re going to open Pandora\u2019s box. We\u2019re making the calls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Fair enough. I had to ask \u2014 there are a lot of Discord users who really wanted me to ask that question, so I had to do it. You have said you want Discord to finally become profitable this year. Are you on track to do that with all of these new revenue streams?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. It\u2019s looking good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Which one of these revenue streams do you think will most help you get to profitability?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We haven\u2019t really broken this out, but I think that we don\u2019t need anything dramatically different to happen to become profitable. Most of our revenue comes from Nitro. I think that that can continue to be the case, and Discord\u2019s going to be in a great spot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Alright. So I\u2019ve asked you the hard questions about money. Let\u2019s ask the even harder questions about content moderation. Every CEO gets a question on content moderation on Decoder<\/em>. It\u2019s just the way of the world. You\u2019ve described Discord a few times now as a communications tool, which is really interesting. We think of communications tools as having much less moderation and much less acceptable kinds of moderation. I would not want anyone looking at my iMessage conversations. I would not want anyone looking at my Signal messages. It\u2019s not allowed.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But with social media companies and user-generated content companies, we want a lot of moderation. Discord is obviously somewhere in the middle of those things. You have a lot of moderation. You have a big trust and safety team, but you think of it as a communication tool, even though it\u2019s not encrypted. How do you land on what an acceptable amount of moderation is on Discord?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our priority when we think about this is keeping teens safe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s the priority when we think about how we approach Discord as a company doing moderation. That\u2019s one. The second pillar of that is giving people tools to moderate their own spaces so they can decide what the rules and norms are for their spaces. This is the fact that every server can have admins who can kick off and ban users and delete messages and enforce rules and norms. That is also something that\u2019s been built into Discord from day zero.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The way that we think about it is to keep teens safe, give people tools to moderate their own spaces, and then really focus on those public spaces and make sure we\u2019re applying moderation there. So if you join the Midjourney server or the Minecraft<\/em> server, we have expectations of the moderators there, and we have systems in place to make sure that that is a good experience when people join. Because that is a little bit more like a social media experience, even though it\u2019s a chat surface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Whereas, when you\u2019re in your DMs, the level of the things that we do are actually very standard. I think many other messaging apps do these kinds of things like scan image uploads for CSAM [child sexual abuse material], for example. That\u2019s the stuff that we do there. Now, in the case of teens, we have a product we call Teen Safety Assist<\/a>. Other companies have stuff like this in messaging services where, when a teen is, let\u2019s say, interacting with someone, maybe sending photos or doing something, they have a sidekick that\u2019s checking out the conversation, seeing what they\u2019re doing, and giving them tips on how to keep themselves safe or report things. That\u2019s how we think about that because it\u2019s really important to us that people feel comfortable and safe using Discord, and adults are more equipped to manage their own stuff. We think teens need some more help. But sometimes adults don\u2019t want to manage their space, and that\u2019s where our teams come in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Have you ever thought about launching Boomer Safety Assist? Just putting that out there as an idea for you. I think a lot of what Gen Z needs and a lot of what the older folks need turn out to be the same thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Anyone can turn on Teen Safety Assist, if you really want to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just an idea for you. Just putting it out there. No bad ideas, right? That\u2019s interesting. Earlier, I talked about this idea that this is a different way of thinking about connecting and using the internet. You have these different tools. You have these different expectations. Do you think this is a place where you\u2019re going to increase the level of moderation over time, or are you at a steady state?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that as a society, our priority is to get all the bad experiences, the bad crap, off of Discord. If I could wave a magic wand, there\u2019d be none of that stuff there today. But at the scale that we operate, we basically have a city or a country of people on our service. There\u2019s a lot going on, and human nature kicks in. So how do you manage in that kind of an environment? What we found is that, as a society, we\u2019re all still working through the expectations we have of companies in this kind of a world. I think that there will probably be more regulation that comes that will require us to do different things, which may cause us to moderate more. But really, what drives us from a first-principle standpoint is giving individual users control with our moderation capabilities and then making sure teens are safe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We will launch more things for Teen Safety Assist to help teens be safe, and we will probably launch more moderation tools for people. A couple of years ago, we launched something called Slow Mode. So if people are spamming, you can turn that off. We do have a whole team working on anti-spam, which is a different version of this where people are just annoyingly sending messages. It\u2019s a continual investment for us. The problem continues to persist, so we continue to have people at our company working to make Discord a safe place for folks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The idea that teen safety is the first-order bit, and you\u2019re just going to keep focused on that, our Congress seems very interested in this idea. It is the <\/strong>skeleton key that unlocks speech regulations for them in a lot of ways<\/strong><\/a>. You just testified in Congress for the first time in January. You talked about protecting children. That\u2019s where you said you <\/strong>