Jason Citron - Building the Third Place - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.4]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founders Field Guide. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:56)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:19)
My guest today is Jason Citron, the founder and CEO of Discord. Discord is one of the largest and fastest growing social networks in the world. It started as a place where gamers come to congregate online, but thanks to how easy it makes it to create a community of any type and its offering of text, audio and video as means of communication, it has expanded far beyond gaming. It has the potential to become the default digital third place that we go to find belonging in a variety of online communities. With over 100 million active monthly users, it's also one of the most interesting social network businesses since the original social networks rose to power.
Our conversation focuses on his background prior to Discord, Discord's founding and growth, its business model and how it has evolved over the past eight years and what the future holds for Discord. As we talked, I had the sense that I'd be willing to go work for Jason and I think you'll see why. I hope you enjoy our wide-ranging conversation.
So Jason, I was wondering how I should begin this conversation and I'm curious how you sort of made the leap from a video game player into someone in the video game ecosystem as a creator. I know you spent the first part of your career building games or as a game developer before starting Open Faint in 2008 I want to learn a little bit about what you learned or picked up at each of those first two stops before Discord. So starting with the years as a game developer, what are the major lessons that you take away from that work?

**Jason Citron** (3:42)
Well, I fell into that. Fell into is not even the right way to say it. I ran into it because just loved playing video games as a kid because of all that they offered. And at my 13th birthday sleepover party, everyone fell asleep and me and one other guy were up and we were having a conversation and he was like, I know how to make video games. And I was just like, no, you don't. They're like this magical dark art. He's like, no, it's this thing called computer programming. I was like, what? We booted up my Pentium One computer at the time and fired up this thing called QBasic, which is a very rudimentary programming environment. And he showed me how to draw circles on the screen. I was just like, holy crap, I have to learn how to do this. And I just became obsessed with learning how to program and make games. And all through high school and college, I just worked on side projects and made games and screwed around making like tools for the internet and things that would make using AOL as a messenger more fun. And then I became a game developer. Working professionally in the video game industry was both thrilling and kind of disheartening. It was thrilling because I got to work on video games. I was working on titles for like PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 era, which was really fun, but also like how the entertainment industry and the video game industry really works and the economics behind it. Working at independent developers for a couple of years, it was tough to be in an environment where as a company, you were really dependent on this sort of like hit driven nature of the industry. That was challenging. And so I ended up basically going to a studio that I was like, if I'm gonna work in one place, I had three jobs in three years. So I changed studios pretty frequently because I was so frustrated with it. And the last place that I ended up was a fantastic experience.