Jason Citron, Co-Founder/CEO @Discord: The Untold Story Behind Scaling to 200M Users | E1230

That period for us when we went from 200 to 1,000 in basically two and a half years was the moment in time when I think I made the most management mistakes at Discord. I hired a bunch of executives and, and set the vision and delegated that work to them, and everything ground to a halt. Words today that trigger me, which I think are shadows of this, are words like empowerment, alignment.

Ready to go? Jason, I am so excited for this, man. It is such a pleasure. I've heard so many good things from Danny Rimer at Index for many years, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Harry. Great to be here.

Uh, not at all. But listen, I have interviewed 800 of the best CEOs of the last probably 10 years, and a commonality amongst many of them is they excelled at gaming, ironically, in the early years of their life. And I wanted to ask you, why do you think gaming is such good preparation for CEO-ship?

You know, game, games are like these little sandboxes of life, right? And you know, you think about what you're doing when you're playing games. You're, um, you're, you're encountering challenges. You're trying to figure out how to solve them. You're failing. You're thinking about what mistakes you made, how you could do it better. You do it again, and you keep doing this over and over until you, you have overcome your challenge. Like, that's growth mindset, right? Like, isn't that incredible? Like, we're... Like, kids are, are experiencing this, you know, just by playing games. Or you think about, um, playing games w- with your friends and against other people, and what do you need to do? You have to learn how to cooperate. How do you divide up tasks? Who steps into a leadership role? How do you be a good, a good follower? When do you trade those places? How do you learn how to be a good, you know, not a sore loser, not a sore winner? Like, these things all happen when you play Fortnite. (laughs) So like, games are such amazing, um, little simulation sandboxes to get to ex- to, to interact with these things that are basically like microcosms of real life, and you can learn these skills in safe places. And my guess is there's something to do with being able to, to do those things over and over and over and over and over again in a way where you don't even realize you're, you're learning those skills 'cause you're just having fun, that may translate to the kind of things you need to do to run a company. I, I don't know. I mean, c- certainly I did.

You mentioned levels there. Uh, in games you have levels, it gets harder, generally the way that games work. If we align that parallel to company building, which level of company building was the hardest? And what was the cheat code that you used to break it?