Why Discord is Betting Big on Devs w/ Anjney Midha VP of Platform Ecosystem at Discord

**Anjney Midha** (0:00)
We think the future of Discord, as a company, as a product, as a community, is in supporting developers.
And so we think there's never been a better time to develop on Discord, becoming much more open, and we're committing to the financial sustainability of developers who are building. If I was a developer, I'm hoping that folks hearing this would see that there's just an incredible new frontier for them to start expressing their creativity on. And we're pretty serious about helping folks get started and growing as developers on the platform.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
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**Dan Lines** (1:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today we're joined by Anj Midha, VP of Platform Ecosystem at Discord.
Anj, welcome to the show.

**Anjney Midha** (1:24)
Thank you for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:26)
Yeah, awesome to have you here.
You obviously have an unbelievable background, lots of accomplishments. You're a founder, investor, you've been named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, little small accomplishment there, and you found your way to Discord as previously you were the CEO of Ubiquiti 6, which was acquired by Discord in 2021 So first off, congrats on that acquisition, huge milestone for any founder.

**Anjney Midha** (1:59)
Thank you.

**Dan Lines** (2:00)
Unbelievable, really cool stuff.

**Anjney Midha** (2:03)
It was a roller coaster for sure, and I'm sure we'll have a chance to get into it today.

**Dan Lines** (2:07)
Yeah, absolutely.
And also, your title, VP of Platform Ecosystem, definitely like an intriguing title, you don't see that every day. We're gonna dive into that in your role as well, a little bit later, we'll talk about Discord's future. And in fact, Discord had a huge announcement yesterday, which you let us attend as special guests. So thank you, by the way, great event. Everybody had fun. And you've got big plans for the future that involve developers, which is what we're all about on this pod. Really exciting stuff. We love it when companies think like, serious about building these amazing communities, especially for dev. So we're gonna get into all of that.
But before we do that, first definitely want to know a little bit more about you. So you have a background as a VC.
How did you get into this? Is that what you always wanted to do? Or what's your career story?

**Anjney Midha** (3:04)
Look, the dots are always easy to connect in hindsight. And so take all this with a pinch of salt. But the North Star, which I don't think has changed, was always to be a product builder. I just think it's the cool, like being a developer is one of the coolest things in the world where you've got an idea and you get to turn that into reality. And so that was the dream. At the time, a mentor, I was kicking around a few ideas post grad school on the products I wanted to build as a developer. And a mentor said, look, you keep talking about being a good developer as sort of equivalent to just engineering.
But you know, there's a hell of a lot that goes into bringing your product to life and getting lots of people to understand its value. That's not just the engineering side of things. There's the talking to customers and there's the shaping of the product to make sure it actually meets and does what people expect it to. And then there's the whole commercial side of building a business around it. And so you may want to spend maybe half a year or a year somewhere where you actually can see what that's like. And so I got introduced to Venture Capital through him.
And I went in largely thinking I'd spend a little bit of time understanding how developers were thinking about building their businesses, right? So if you're building an application or a company as a dev, I wanted to understand how they were thinking about turning products into companies or businesses.