How Discord Became a Developer Platform

**Jason Citron** (0:00)
That's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanities, like people build these tools, which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems.

**Anjney Midha** (0:13)
Just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform, and that's generating four billion minutes of using interaction per day. The scale is sort of mind-boggling. What's going on?

**Jason Citron** (0:26)
I think something like 93 percent of Gen Z plays games where back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games.

**Anjney Midha** (0:34)
We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord.

**Steph Smith** (0:41)
Bill Gates once said that a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it.
That definition does set a pretty high bar for the few companies that surpass it. But one company does come to mind, and that is Discord.
What officially started in 2015 can really be traced back to 2009, when Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron started building tools and infrastructure for games. Fast forward to today, and Discord now has over 200 million monthly active users. Some might even argue that the metaverse is actually here, it just doesn't quite look like The Sims.
Now, in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason alongside a16z general partner Anjney Midha, who actually sold his company, Ubiquiti 6, to Discord in 2021 There, Anj set up and ran Discord's first dedicated developer platform, including launching its partnership with Mid Journey, all before joining a16z last year. You can probably very quickly tell that Jason and Anj have this shared history, especially because they got to sit down together in our San Francisco studio to discuss how Discord became such a thriving platform. But what did Discord really do differently here? Together they discussed community-driven product development, how Jason himself went from player to developer, and their focus on extensibility since the very beginning. So with Discord's recent release of embeddable apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for a developer to build?

**Jason Citron** (2:15)
If I was to go back when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, like none of that stuff existed. I mean, I built games back then and it was like firing up C++ and like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it.

**Steph Smith** (2:30)
Prior to this release, there was, of course, already a flurry of new applications built on the back of Discord, like Mid Journey or Leonardo. So let's find out what's next.
As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Anjney Midha** (3:14)
I am so excited for this episode. Thank you for joining us, Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, and dear friend, former colleague, and probably the person who I know who's tried to start game studios the most number of times.
And ended up building several successful platforms along the way. So today we're going to talk about all kinds of things focused on developers, infrastructure, the future of the Discord platform. But before we get to that, for folks who might not be as familiar with the crazy story that led to here, why don't we go back in history. Let's start at the very beginning. What was the vision for Discord when you first started out?

**Jason Citron** (3:52)
So way back in 2012, I was sitting around trying to think about what could be an exciting business to build.
And having spent most of my career, in fact all of my career and my childhood, steeped in video games and multiplayer games, I had this hunch that multiplayer gaming and gaming in general was going to become much bigger than it already was at that time. And back in 2012, gaming was pretty big. But it was kind of at the early innings of mobile and still trying to figure out where was gaming going to go.
And I thought that there'd be an opportunity to build a communications app for people who play games that would span all the platforms and all the devices as gaming would become bigger and more cross-platform. But largely has played out that way. Today in 2024, gaming is the largest form of entertainment, bigger than music and movies combined, growing fast and people love to play games. It's gone mainstream. And I think something like 93% of Gen Z plays games where back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games. So that was kind of where it started.