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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
50 min read · 9,530 words- 0:00 – 2:30
Introduction
- JCJason Citron
That's the story of, of our kind of creative progress as a s- as, as humanity is like people build these tools which enables the next group of people to s- to focus on a higher level set of problems.
- AMAnjney Midha
Just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform that's generating four billion minutes of user interaction per day. The, the scale is sort of mind-boggling.
- JCJason Citron
[laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
What's going on?
- JCJason Citron
I think something like 93% of Gen Z plays games where, you know, back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games.
- AMAnjney Midha
We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord.
- SPSpeaker
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. This definition sets a pretty high bar for the few companies that surpass it, but one company that does come to mind 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, and some even argue that the metaverse may actually be here. It just doesn't quite look like The Sims. So in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason alongside a16z General Partner Anjney Midha, who actually sold his company, Ubiquity6, to Discord in 2021. So what did Discord do differently to build such a thriving platform? They discuss everything from community-driven product development, how Jason himself went from player to developer, and also the focus on extensibility since the very beginning. With Discord's recent release of embeddable apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for developers to build?
- JCJason Citron
If I was to go back, you know, when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, like, none of that stuff existed, and it was like, you know, firing up C++ and, and, like, reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it.
- SPSpeaker
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.
- 2:30 – 7:45
From Player to Developer: Building Game Infrastructure and Early Projects
- AMAnjney Midha
I am so excited. Thank you for joining us, Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, former colleague, current friend, and the person who I know who's star- tried to start game studios the most number of times-
- JCJason Citron
[laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
... and ended up building insanely successful platforms along the way. Today, we're gonna talk about all kinds of things, um, focused on developers, infrastructure, the future of the Discord platform. But before we get to that, maybe we, for folks who are, 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?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. So way back in 2012, um, I was sitting around trying to think about what could be an exciting business to build. And, um, 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, uh, multiplayer gaming and gaming in general was gonna become much bigger than it already was at that time. And back in 2012, it was-- gaming was pretty big.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
But it was kind of at the, the early innings of mobile, um, and still, you know, trying to figure out, like, where was gaming gonna go. And I thought that there'd be an opportunity to build, um, a communications app for people who play games, uh, that would span, you know, all the platforms and all the devices as gaming would become bigger and more cross-platform. You know, it largely has played out that way. Today, in, in 2024, gaming is the largest form of entertainment, bigger than, uh, music and movies combined, growing fast, and, uh, people love to play games. It's gone mainstream. And I think something like 93% of Gen Z plays games where, you know, back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games.
- AMAnjney Midha
What were the moments where you, you were playing games and you went from being a player and a consumer of games as a product to going, "You know what? The, the tools I'm using here, um, could be better."
- JCJason Citron
Mm.
- AMAnjney Midha
When you started... W-What was the moment where you shifted from being player to developer?
- JCJason Citron
Mm. Well, I fell in love with games when I was a little kid because I... they were a way for me to connect and spend quality time with people in my life. And I remember, um, sitting with my dad, I don't know, I must've been four or five years old, this was like late '80s, um, and he introduced me to this game called Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, uh, on his old-
- AMAnjney Midha
Yep
- JCJason Citron
... it was like a Packard Bell computer. And I just remember being so excited about being able to sit with my dad and spend some quality time with him, exploring this world and trying to find this crazy lady. And, and over the years, growing up playing multiplayer games, um, on consoles and then on the internet as, um, as that became a thing in the late '90s. And, um, along the way, I, um, I met someone who, [lips smack] who basically was like, "Yo, I know how to make video games." A, a friend of mine, I was like 13 at the time. I was like, "No, you don't. Like, you can't just make video games." And he was like, "No, no, check it out." We went to my computer, and he, like, fired up this thing called QBasic and showed me how to draw a circle on the screen.
- AMAnjney Midha
Yeah.
- JCJason Citron
And I was like, "Oh, my God. That's amazing. I could make video games." [chuckles] And so that was sort of when I became an engineer and a, and a programmer, and I learned how to code. And, um, and then, uh, fast-forward, you know, I went to school, grew up, and, um, got into an o- an opportunity where I was able to start a company. And through the process of building a game on the iPhone, we actually launched a game, um, the day the App Store opened in 2008. We were one of the first 50 titles on the, the App Store. And that kinda took off like crazy. As we now know, you know, mobile has been the biggest computing platform in the world. And through that journey- Um, realized that while making-- I had made a, a fun game. It was called Aurora Feint. Um, the technology that we had built, which was kind of like leaderboards, chat rooms, login, um, was, was something that other developers really wanted, and at the time, many game developers didn't know how to build, um, infrastructure. And I had learned how to do infrastructure and also how to make games. So we kinda spun out the back-end tech and built this social network for mobile gaming. This was probably 2009. It was called Open Feint. We opened up Aurora Feint. Um, lesson about branding from that. No one knows how to spell that thing. So that was kinda the first moment when I started building, um, tools and infrastructure for games, and that company did pretty well. [lip smack] And then in 2012, um, after I had kinda moved on from that, uh, started again building another game. But we began as a game studio as well in 2012 called Hammer&Chisel. And we started as a game because I thought that the path to building the communications app would be to start with a multiplayer game. I had this hunch that core, sort of core long-form gaming was gonna come to mobile in a big way. Um, and so we started building a team-based competitive multiplayer game on iPad at the time in 2012. And, uh, one thing led to another. The game didn't really work out, but through the process, in late 2014, we started talking about, what if we just went to market directly with a chat app for gaming? And, um, my co-founder, Stan, kinda had the insight for what that concept could look like, and we started building it in January 2015 and then brought it to market in May 2015. And that was kinda how, how it all started.
- 7:45 – 11:33
The Evolution of Discord: The Vision for Discord in 2012 and Its Rapid Growth
- AMAnjney Midha
There's a theme emerging here [chuckles] right where at least t-twice now you, you kind of, uh, approached building a, a product as an application developer. You can think of a game as an app. And you discovered along the way that there's a bunch of really hard infrastructure, especially when it comes to real-time multiplayer gaming. The history of computing is such that, like, usually real-time gaming is one of the most demanding infrastructure environments. Um, and then you discovered that there were a ton of infrastructure problems along the way, and then you ended up actually building those tools for other people to use and, and have since built one of the fastest-growing, biggest, um, real-time communication platforms in the world, which is sort of insane to think about, you know, the scale of Discord. But when you kind of play forward from that moment in 2015 when, when Discord came out, um, and, and today, how has the community on Discord helped shape the roadmap, the, the people actually using the infrastructure, whether those are users or, or developers?
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our, you know, our, our community, our user base has been part of the, the kind of conversation of what we're making from the first day. You know, when we started talking about building Discord, of course, we were-- we played a lot of multiplayer games ourselves, so we had a, a good sense for what the product, um, should be and how it should work. But as anyone who is building a startup knows or building products, y- like you need to make things for, um, for people. You had to bu- you know, you were building products in service of other people. And so when we showed it to them, even just mock-ups, like what parts got them excited, which parts seemed confusing? And very quickly, once we got a prototype off the ground, um, we started giving it to our friends and having them try it and seeing what they liked and what they didn't like. And, oh, crap, this-- we had to rebuild, you know, the voice tech three times, and we, you know, li- missed an important f- set of features that we thought maybe was not important, but turns out it was. And so that was kinda part of the ethos for how we built, you know, from the beginning. And then over the years, we've, we've continued to build products that way in a sense that we always try to come back to what are we hearing from our customers, from our users, and the different types of people who use our products, and then how do we kind of mux that with what are, what are we excited to, to, to build for ourselves? And then, of course, you know, what do we think will be great for us as a business 'cause we are, we are a company. So, um, you know, along the way, there have been many, many, many moments when, um, large shifts have happened in our roadmap because of customers. So, like, I'll give you an example. Um, initially, when we built Discord, it was very focused on being a voice and text chat app for guilds, people who play games in groups of, like, 15 people. And actually, um, the max group size on Discord, I think, was, like, 30 people, maybe 50. It was, it was pretty, pretty low. And we realized pretty quickly from talking to, to people that they wanted to use Discord as almost like an IRC, like Internet Relay Chat, kind of public chat room replacement. And in that context, what we saw was people were filling their servers up with 50 people, and then they were like, "I can't add more people. What's going on?" It's like, oh, crap, we gotta make this work for folks. So we, we invested in raising the cap and adding more infrastructure to support that. And then, um, and then developers started building moderation bots and extending these Discord servers with other capabilities that we never even imagined that was made possible because we had an open kind of API powering the platform. So along the way, many of these things happened, like these communities got big. Um, generative AI became a big thing on Discord. Um, uh, the crypto community was pretty big for a season on Discord. Um, but throughout all of it, gaming and playing games with your friends and hanging out with your friends was always the main thing that people were doing, even if they would go spend time in a public community or, you know, futzing around with generative AI or something like that.
- 11:33 – 15:40
How the Discord Community Shapes the Product
- AMAnjney Midha
Yeah. I, I think one of the most underappreciated things about Discord is that it's-- the, the product has found a way to do two things at once that almost no other companies are able to do and businesses and teams are able to do at scale, which is have a s-singular focus on a particular type of user, um, and their need. In this case, what you said was allowing friends to spend time together while playing games, um, while also making the platform and the product so extensible for other people to bring their own use cases to the platform. And I remember seeing the homepage, um, a, a couple of years ago. Um, I, I was, I was talking to Stan and He brought up a screenshot of the first version of the homepage you guys had put together, and on the f- on the front page, on day one, you had a call-out for, for integrations and SDKs-
- JCJason Citron
Yeah
- AMAnjney Midha
... on the pl-- You, you had an open API on day one as part of the hero marketing. And so clearly you were thinking about making the platform extensible for all other kinds of use cases 10 years ago.
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
Where did that come from? And, um, can you talk a little bit about the challenges of both building a delightful product for users first, while also maintaining this extensibility for other kinds of use cases that you may not have designed for ex-explicitly?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. The extensibility was, was built in from the beginning, and it, it's cool that you, you saw that, that you went back and looked at that. I think if you go to the WayBack Machine or the WayBack Archive, whatever it's called, you can find it still, um, from, like, 2015. You know, the, the idea was that we knew that people were gonna want to, um, build custom integrations with different games as part of thinking about, like, what's a group chat for gaming look like. So we were imagining, like, an EVE Online corporation, which is, like, a group of people playing this s- you know, outer space, uh, massively multiplayer game. Or, um, you were playing, you know, Final Fantasy, um, Online, which is a fantasy adventure game. These different games have, um, things that you might-- data and, and things that you might wanna kinda pull into your group chat experience.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
But we knew we were not gonna build all of these things for, you know, the hundreds or thousands of games that people might care about. So that was kinda one thing, where, like, we've gotta make it so other folks can integrate their custom stuff from their games into Discord. [lip smack] And then related to that was this insight that I, um, I had from, from just being observer in the gaming business for so long, which is that in games, there's this concept of modding, where people can mod games. And what that basically means is people-- Like, a, a developer will create a game, and then oftentimes ship with it the tools they use to make the game. I think id Software popularized this in the early days with Doom. It's kinda the first one I really remember getting big. They called-- They had-- I think they called them WAD files, this whole scene online-
- AMAnjney Midha
Yep
- JCJason Citron
... where you could go download WAD files and, and then they started packaging up and selling them, and, and it added a ton of life to the game. And, and today now, when we look at the top titles that people play, a lot of them actually became as-- be- uh, began as community-driven mods, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, League of Legends, GTA, you know, role-playing. Um, gosh, the list just goes on.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
So many of the top ga- Fortnite began, it, you know, is version four of a mod that I think came from a game called ARMA 3 many years ago. So this idea that, like, give your community tools to create and customize and extend your, your, your game or your software, and they're gonna surprise you and take it in places that you never would've expected, was just kinda like-- just to me seemed how, like, that's how you make good software. [chuckles]
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
So when we built Discord, it sorta seemed obvious to us that we wanted to create an API that allowed developers to extend Discord, to, to be more creative with it, to do things with it we never would've, um, expected. Some of the things that we expected were, like, you know, connecting to the EVE Online, you know, backend so you could have your own forum, or connect-- or, or pulling in, you know, world boss spawns into-- as notifications. But the stuff we never expected was, like, generative AI. You know, who, who could've, who could've
- 15:40 – 16:59
The Importance of an Open API and Developer Tools
- JCJason Citron
guessed that?
- AMAnjney Midha
Right. Yeah, I mean, now we're seeing, many years after you made those investments in the craft of, of designing a delightful API, fantastic tutorials, uh, you know, a, a great developer experience for people to mod Discord itself, we're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord. You know, the, the, the Discord platform has 200 million monthly active users, and that's led to entirely new companies being built on top with the open architecture you described. People may be familiar with Midjourney.
- JCJason Citron
And there's a few other ones too. Midjourney's the, the most famous one. It's like a canonical example of how this stuff happens. Like, we have this open platform where we're allowing people, developers, to customize it and extend it. And, and I think the Midjourney folks had, you know, been, been work-- obviously working on their model for a while. I think they tried bringing it to market in a few other ways, and then they just tried a Discord server and a Discord bot, and then this was an example of exactly what I was talking about. I never would have predicted that you would have, A, generative AI in the first place. Like, what a crazy thing that we've created computers that can do these things. And then, two, that, that someone would figure out how to take advantage of the magic of a Discord server and our platform and build this s- such a cool experience. And there's a, there's, you know, a handful of these now. Um, so yeah, it's just, it's, it's been a pretty cool
- 16:59 – 18:48
The Rise of Generative AI on Discord
- JCJason Citron
thing to see.
- AMAnjney Midha
Um, you know, Midjourney is one example of, of a generative model. It's a text-to-image model tool. Um, we've also seen an explo- an explosion of text-to-music tools-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... as an example of how extensible Discord is. What, what other kinds of use cases are you seeing emerge on the platform that, that you're excited about?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. The, the generative AI sorta category is exciting for us. But, you know, we really come back to this idea of, of, of, of people mostly on Discord spend their time hanging out with their friends in these kind of smaller invite-only spaces with, like, you know, less than 15 people per se. So in that context, when I think about generative AI tools and using our platform, I really think about what are developers creating that give groups of friends more fun things to do. And so one really cool thing we see with the generative AI stuff is people take the, the bots and bring them into their, their kind of invite-only servers, and then they can use them to create and explore and work on projects with their friends in a more kinda private setting, as opposed to being in the sort of the public chaos, frankly, of some of these large servers. Um, but other really cool experiences we see are things like, um, ways to listen to music together. SoundCloud has a really cool bot that you can, you can use to play music when you're in voice chats, for example, and we're working with some other partners to, to try to bring, um, you know, more music to, to the, to the platform. Um, there's a bunch of games that people have made that are pretty cool and, and many more are coming. You know, we just actually launched, a couple weeks ago Um, a new kind of set of capabilities for the platform that will allow developers to go kind of beyond the text box and build these rich kind of, um, visual interactive experiences powered by HTML5. So you could build a web app and essentially, you know, deploy it into the context of Discord. And so we're seeing lots of really exciting, um, stuff getting... starting to get built.
- 18:48 – 21:01
Discord’s Embeddable Apps
- AMAnjney Midha
Let's spend a couple minutes on that. This is something you and I spent years working on together.
- JCJason Citron
Yes, we did. We did, Anj. [laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
Uh, let's, let's, let's take people a little bit behind the curtain of, like, what it took to actually go from the moment where we realized that developers, um, wanted to express their creativity beyond just a command line like interface, which was what bots were, uh, initially designed-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... uh, around as a form factor, and the moment... and, and going from there to expanding the entire canvas for them to the, the whole screen really with web apps.
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. Well, you know, years ago when our plat- the, when the bots platform started to get popular, there was actually a, um, um, a Hack Week project at our company. So we do this thing every year called Hack Week where we basically stop our normal work and everyone gets together and we have like a little kind of creativity festival. [laughs] That's the best way to describe it. And back when, I think this year was the tw... I think it was 2018 was the year that I'm thinking about. We actually had like tents in our office.
- AMAnjney Midha
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Citron
It was like, it was like a whole cool kind with food and stuff, and, um, one of the groups that year, um, had the idea of, "Wouldn't it be cool if we added an HTML5 canvas to our apps platform, and then people could like make games and do other interesting stuff?" And so there was a team that built this, and I was always like, "That's a really cool idea, and we've gotta explore that." But as, as company building goes, you have a long list of ideas, and you have to prioritize when you get to them. So a couple years later, um, it, uh, the, the time was right to look at the idea, and, um, that's when we met.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
You were actually working on your own startup, um, at the time, and were kind of building this as a standalone project. And, and I, and we, after some conversation, was like, "Man, we should just do this together." So we acquired your, your company. And, uh, and then we, we created a team and really formalized this idea of like, how do we take our platform from kind of the text-based era into the visual rich interactive experience era? Rather than just opening it up, we actually, um, built a few games ourselves to, to really test the platform, make sure that it was designed well, that it worked for players, that the, the interaction loops were good. Um, and that, you know, took a couple years to kind of sort that all out, and now we're at the point where, okay, we're ready to open it up. So it's in developer preview. So it's, it's been a journey.
- AMAnjney Midha
Yeah.
- JCJason Citron
And it's been a fun journey. Um, yeah.
- 21:01 – 34:16
The Future of Apps on Discord: New Genres in Gaming and Apps
- AMAnjney Midha
Okay. We're gonna, we're gonna go a little bit deeper there.
- JCJason Citron
Okay, okay.
- AMAnjney Midha
So, so I remember one of the most exciting parts of working, you know, at Discord was the respect for infrastructure.
- JCJason Citron
Mm.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right? Um, the company had built, uh, its own WebRTC streaming service.
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
Uh, had, had built its own voice and, and video infra, um, its own real-time, um, comms infra. Uh, we built a bunch of serverless networking, and I, I remember there are these moments in the product engineering cycle when you're building infrastructure that it... you inevitably have to ask yourself, "Well, what is this gonna be used for?"
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
And, and I remember having debates with you about how to answer that question and prioritize the most important features. And so we came up with this ritual of jam sessions, if you remember. [laughs]
- JCJason Citron
[laughs] Yeah, right. Yeah.
- AMAnjney Midha
Where, where the team that was working on tools and infra and SDKs for the developers would come in and, and jam with you, where you were, you were, um, you would often role-play the developer.
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
And you'd come up with ideas for what the, what could be possible in the platform. And then, you know, we'd leave the, we'd leave the jam session, we'd go back to building the tools and the infra. But so today, if we go fast-forward, I'm gonna ask you to, to pretend we're in a jam session.
- JCJason Citron
[laughs] Okay.
- AMAnjney Midha
Um, and, and I... we just launched the Activities SDK, the Embedded Apps SDK, and now you're a developer. Um, and I'm gonna ask you now, what would you like to go build with this entirely new set of capabilities that you've been handed by Discord?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. So I guess the way that I think about this is like, first, if I... like, what am I gonna build? I try to think about, like, what do I as a consumer want, right? It's almost like two steps even past the infrastructure. It's like the developers are sort of thinking like they're serving their customers. So you gotta... They, they have to take their hat off, right, and then put on their consumer hat. And so, you know, uh, for me it's, it's, it's sort of like, um, start to think about what kind of, you know, games I might wanna play and, um, how they could fit into my Discord servers in fun ways. And, you know, for me, I really would love someone to build, um, some, like, multiplayer titles that don't require a lot of time investment but have, um, sort of really cool moments of storytelling that you can interact with your friends asynchronously around that sort of weaves into the Discord experience through text and with the visuals as well. I have, I have, like, a small side project I'm working on right now, which is a game kind of like this. It's like a, it's like a, uh, arcade shooter that has kind of a leaderboard mechanic, but with sort of like a modern kind of roguelike vibe on it.
- AMAnjney Midha
Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. I see.
- JCJason Citron
Anyway, it's, it's, it's just like random stuff that I'm making as, as a side... b-both to, to sort of dog food and test our platform and, and... But part of this is how I get myself in the mind space of like, what do our developers want? What might their customers want? So that I can give good feedback to our team who, uh, is also doing this, um, so we can serve people effectively.
- AMAnjney Midha
You know, one of the things that I think you've always been pretty good at doing is asking the question of what is possible on, on Discord that isn't possible elsewhere.
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
And you're often able to laser in and hone in on the specific capabilities that are p- ultimately technology, sort of technical computing primitives, but exposed to users in a way that allows them to do something with their friends they couldn't do before-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... in a way that's easier or faster or better or more convenient. And that's, you know, that's how things like, um, persistent stage channels happened, right?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah, sure.
- AMAnjney Midha
And that's how forum channels happened, and that's how the Embedded App SDK happened. And so as you're working on crafting your, your side project right now, um, what in your mind are the top two or three things that the Discord Embedded- ... platform that you just launched really shines at-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... that's hard to do e-elsewhere?
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm. The magic, I think, is the fact that you have the social context of the space you're in.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
Right. So, so it's really, really easy for someone to pick up a title, and then that game can depend on the fact that there's a group of people that are connected to the person playing it, and you have access to that data in a privacy, safe way.
- 34:16 – 36:39
Launch of the Embedded App SDK
- AMAnjney Midha
surprised.
- JCJason Citron
Yeah, yeah.
- AMAnjney Midha
You-- The Discord team finally launched, in full general availability, um, after years of crafting and honing the, the developer experience, the embedded app SDK on March 18th. And if I get my, if I have my numbers right, just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform that are-- and f- that's generating four billion minutes of user interaction per day. The, the scale is sort of mind-boggling.
- JCJason Citron
[laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
What's going on? Why is this resonating so, so, like, strongly right now, and what are the top emergent behaviors you are seeing in the, in the first few weeks?
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. Well, I think it's resonating because developers, um, intuitively understand a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. They're looking for, uh, distribution channels with captive audiences on the other side, with low production costs that they can, you know, ex- so they can explore their own creativity and build products for themselves and their friends and bring those to market.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
And, um, you know, the games industry, I think, is in an interesting situation right now in particular. Um, so the, the, this new channel, you know, we thought people were gonna be excited about it, and then at, at Game Developers Conference a couple weeks ago when we announced it, I was actually surprised at how much people, um, how much it resonated with developers. You know, we had a couple talks there, and the lines were, like, out the door. Um, so, you know, as far as, like, what people are building, um, you know, a lot of the things that I know folks are working on, um, have not actually released yet since that, since, since we opened that up, so I, I don't wanna to, to say anything that hasn't come to market yet. But, um, I think the, the, that 20,000 number sounds big, and it's exciting, but, but I think in, in reality, there's, um... It, it, what it sh- it signals to me is a lot of excitement and curiosity.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
And we'll sort of see, you know, how many of those come to market and what that'll be. I suspect that there are probably, you know, 20,000 people poking around. I think there's thousands of them that are, like, actually really making something. And so, you know, I expect we'll probably see hundreds of those things come to market over the next six or eight months. Um, but without getting into specifics, some of them are, like, interesting new ways to stream games, and some of them are new games, and some of them are just interactive experiences, like ways to enjoy different types of entertainment together, and some of them are, like, silly things like comic book-related, you know, projects and, and then there's a lot of stuff in there that I'm, actually haven't even seen 'cause there's so much. [laughs]
- 36:39 – 44:01
Building Sustainable Businesses on Discord
- AMAnjney Midha
Uh, you know, I was talking to a developer at GDC who is working on, um, on d- on a Discord embedded activity that, um, is, is tinkering with some of these new generative models that you were describing. And one of the things he crystallized for me, which, you know, I, I, I think r- kinda maps the experience we had in the early days of, of, uh, Midjourney, you know, launching on the platform, was this idea that, uh, game development and sort of AI app development have this very, uh, this very strong similarity in the development process, which is you pre-train a model, and then you put it out with your community. And then what the community does with the early days of the model and what, what outputs of the model they prefer-
- JCJason Citron
Hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... helps you then sort of run a reinforcement learning loop to then improve the model-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... at giving users what they like. And that's very similar to the game sort of process, right, where you put out a soft launch title-
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... usually with Liveops in, in soft launch, and then w- you start seeing which parts of the multiplayer experience your community likes.
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
And then you, you basically pipe that into future Liveops releases, right?
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- AMAnjney Midha
Um, if you had to describe why, why this, the Dis- uh, the Discord platform has found so much success with generative AI developers. Is there fundamentally something similar about the game development production process and AI app development that, that is s- so similar that that's resulted in, you know, Discord basically hosting the world's most successful consumer AI business right now, which is, which is Midjourney?
- JCJason Citron
Both of those things make sense, but I actually think if you zoom out a little bit, there's, there's another interesting trend that this is kind of part of, which I think is this idea of consumers wanting to be closer to the people creating the things that they use in their lives.
- AMAnjney Midha
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Citron
And it's actually kind of a broader, I think, dynamic of co-creation with consumers as you're building products.
- AMAnjney Midha
Right.
- JCJason Citron
So I, I think in, in the case of AI, there's quite literally, like, a direct feedback loop where I think a lot of these models are using, you know, thumbs up and thumbs down type reactions on the outputs to directly feedback and improve, um, the model. I think in the g- in the case of games, it's a little more-- It, it's like a little one-step remove where perhaps the players are talking with the developers, and they're using the products, and they're giving them feedback, and I know a lot of devs use Discord to do early play tests, and they hop on voice chat, and they show off builds, and they spend time with their, with their users. But I also hear just, like, r- r- startups doing it and other companies doing it too-
- AMAnjney Midha
Right
- JCJason Citron
... not just games. I think the, the, you know, gaming and AI is kind of at the forefront of this, but we see lots of other tools. Um, there's, like, a command line app that I use as an engineer, um, uh, called Warp that has a Discord server, and they hang out with their community in there and talk about feature improvements and how to make their product better. And, like, it just goes on and on and on. And, and so it's-- I think the trend is actually that consumers wanna have say and influence over the products they build, and it actually turns out as a, as a, as a product creator, having that direct line of feedback with a tight feedback loop with your early adopters really helps you shape what you're building and make it better. So it, it ends up being, I think, this really powerful kind of back and forth-
- AMAnjney Midha
Right
- JCJason Citron
... um, where you can improve your product. People get excited about it. You build evangelists. And then when you do go to market and sort of launch, you have this sort of built-in community energy that can help spread the word around. Um, and sometimes those things will lead into, like, Kickstarters-
- AMAnjney Midha
Right
- JCJason Citron
... and Patreons and other stuff. So there's this whole sort of, like, community-driven product development thing that I think, um, Discord is part of or maybe helping drive in some way. But it's another one of those interesting emergent things, you know, coming back to, to the topic of, like, you build these, you-- platforms and these tools with something in mind, and then other interesting things can happen with it. You know, we-- Again, we really started focused on being a place for people to come together and play games with their friends, and that is still the bulk of what people do today. But all these other interesting things happen-
- AMAnjney Midha
Right
- JCJason Citron
... like companies setting up servers to do co-development with their consumers. Like, wow, that's super cool.
- AMAnjney Midha
Yeah. There, there's, there's this company that I've-- I had the chance to work with as an investor called Luma. It's a generative AI model that allows people to create 3D assets, and before they even had a website or a mobile app, they launched as a Discord app. And I think what that r- resulted in was, like, I think in, in three or four days, they had 30,000, 40,000 people in the community show up-
- JCJason Citron
[laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
... half of whom were, were from the games industry and half who weren't-
- JCJason Citron
Hmm
- AMAnjney Midha
... and started using the model in ways that they didn't expect and allowed them to realize that there was a much broader set of uses for their, for their tool. And then that began a dialectic that allowed them to then change the focus or tweak the priority of, of what-- uh, the list of priorities on... in their product development roadmap, then ship that to that Discord user base. And what I s- When I saw that happening, I realized, you know, there's this art in, in software development of finding product market fit early on, right?
- JCJason Citron
Mm-hmm.
- 44:01 – 46:19
Future Outlook and Developer Aspirations
- AMAnjney Midha
You know, I, I think looking back over the 10 years that, that, you know, Discord has been around for, the story of Discord has been consistently observing what the biggest pain points are o- of, of people trying to communicate and do things they love with their friends, um, and making it just 10 times easier. And, and this craft of, of, of giving people a way to do what they're already trying to do by sort of duct, duct taping or, or combining different tools all in one place while making sure Discord doesn't get, become bloated, doesn't become, uh, uh, slower, doesn't become, um, more expensive, has been, has been this remarkable journey of, of kind of ruthlessly making what people are trying to do already easier and easier in one place.
- JCJason Citron
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the journey of, of, I think, most great, um, products. Like, how do you make it so that whatever someone's trying to do is better, faster, and cheaper? [laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
Right. Right.
- JCJason Citron
I mean, that's, that's, that's how you... That's, that's the journey. So, you know, we often talk about removing objections or reducing friction-
- AMAnjney Midha
Right
- JCJason Citron
... in the process for, you know, a person who's trying to accomplish something. And whether that's a, um, you know, an end user who wants to open their app and be able to quickly message their friends, or whether that's, um, a developer who's looking to build and deploy their app or, you know, some creat- creative project they're working on, um, to people. So, um, we just, you know, love that we get the opportunity to wake up every, every day and help people spend time with their friends and, um, you know, play games and en- enjoy life. I mean, that's, that's what it's about.
- AMAnjney Midha
I can't wait to see what people build-
- JCJason Citron
Me too
- AMAnjney Midha
... with, with the new platform. And maybe, you know, we'll check in a year from today, and instead of 20,000 apps, it's, it's gonna be 200,000 apps.
- JCJason Citron
[laughs]
- AMAnjney Midha
We'll see.
- JCJason Citron
We'll see.
- AMAnjney Midha
But you've got some pretty, you know, pretty amazing stuff already on the platform, and, and I'm so excited for, uh, personally as a developer, to get started on my, my side project this weekend.
- JCJason Citron
Cool. Well, thanks for having me on.
- AMAnjney Midha
Thanks, Jason. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 46:19
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Transcript of episode CHvUp1rynek
