How Discord Became a Developer Platform

0:00That's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity is like people build these tools which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems. Just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20 ,000 new activities on the platform and that's generating 4 billion minutes of using interaction per day. The scale is sort of mind -boggling. What's going on? And I think something like 93 % of Gen Z plays games were back when we were kids. It was super weird to be playing games. We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord.

0:41Bill 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 that 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.

1:21Now, in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason, alongside A16Z General Partner, Anjane Mita, who actually sold his company, Ubiqui 6, to Discord in 2021. There, on set up in 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 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.

2:07So with Discord's recent release of Invitable Apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for a developer to build? If I were 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. 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.

2:44As 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 company's disgust in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see A16z .com slash Disclosures.

3:14I'm so excited for this episode. Thank you for joining us Jason Citrancy 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 asked familiar with the crazy story that led to here, when we go back in history, let's start at the very beginning. What was the vision for Discord when you first started out?

3:52So 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 would 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.

4:37But 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 were back when we were kids. It was super weird to be playing games. So that was kind of where it started. What were the moments where 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 tools I'm using here could be better. What was the moment where you shifted from being player to developer?

5:14Well, I fell in love with games when I was a little kid because they were away from me to connect and spend quality time with people in my life. And I remember sitting with my dad, I don't know, I must have been four or five years old, this was like late 80s. And he introduced me to this game called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on his old, it was like a Packard Bell computer. And I just remember being so excited about coming home at the end of the day and 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 Over the years growing up playing multiplayer games on consoles and then on the internet as that became a thing in the late 90s and Along the way I met someone who basically was like You know, I know how to make video games a friend of mine.

5:59I was like 13 at the time I was like no you don't think you can't just make video games and he was like No, no, check it out. We went to my computer and he fired up this thing called QBASIC and showed me how to draw a circle on the screen. I was like, oh my god, that's amazing. I could make video games. That was when I became an engineer and a programmer and I learned how to code. Then fast forward, I went to school, grew up, and got into an opportunity where I was able to start a company and through the process of building a game on the iPhone, actually launched a game the day the App Store opened in 2008.

6:29We were the first 50 titles on the App Store. That That kind of took off like crazy as we now know, mobile has been the biggest computing platform in the world. And through that journey, realized that I had made a fun game, it was called Aurora Faint. The technology that we had built, which was kind of like leaderboards, chat rooms, login, was something that other developers really wanted. And at the time, many game developers didn't know how to build infrastructure. And I had learned how to do infrastructure and also how to make games. So we kind of spun out the backend tech and built this social network for mobile gaming.

7:00This was probably 2009. It was called OpenFaint. We opened up the word of paint. Lesson about branding from that. No one knows how to spell that thing. So that was kind of the first moment when I started building tools and infrastructure for games. And that company did pretty well. And then in 2012, after I had kind of moved on from that, started again building another game. But we began as a game studio as well in 2012 called Hammer and 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 long -form gaming was going to come to mobile in a big way.

7:36So we started building a team -based competitive multiplayer game on iPad at the time in 2012. 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 the chat app for gaming. My co -founder Stan had the insight for what that concept could look like, and we started a building in January 2015 and then brought it to market in May 2015. And that was kind of how it all started. There's a theme emerging here, right? Where at least twice now you approached building a product as an application developer.

8:13You could think of a game as an app. And you discovered along the way that there's a bunch of really hard infrastructure that needs to be built first, especially when it comes to real -time multiplayer gaming. The history of computing is such that usually real -time gaming is one of the most demanding infrastructure environments. 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 have since built one of the fastest growing biggest real -time communication platforms in the world, which is sort of insane to think about the scale of Discord.

8:43But when you play forward from that moment in 2015 when Discord came out and today how has the community on Discord helped shape the roadmap? The people actually using the infrastructure whether those are users or developers? Our community, our user base, has been part of the conversation of what we're making from the first day. When we started talking about building Discord, of course, we played a lot of multiplayer games ourselves, so we had a good sense for what the product should be and how it should work. But as anyone who is building a startup knows or building products, we're building products and service of other people.

9:17So, we immediately from the beginning started talking to our friends and their friends. When we showed it to them, even just mock -ups, like what parts got them excited, which part seemed confusing. And very quickly, once we got a prototype off the ground, 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, we had to rebuild the voice tech three times. And we missed an important set of features that we thought maybe was not important, but turns out it was. And so that was kind of part of the ethos for how we built from the beginning.

9:46And then over the years, 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 mucks that with, what are we excited to build for ourselves? And then of course, what do we think will be great for us as a business because we are a company? So along the way, there have been many, many, many moments when large shifts have happened in our roadmap because of customers. So I'll give you an example. 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.

10:24And actually the max group size on Discord, I think was like 30 people, maybe 50 was pretty low. And we realized pretty quickly from talking 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 have more people what's going on. Like, oh crap, we got to make this work for folks. So we invested in raising the cap and adding more infrastructure to support that. 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.

11:06So along the way, many of these things happened like these communities got big, January of the eye became a big thing on Discord. The crypto community was pretty big for a season on Discord. 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 fudging around with January of the eye or something like that. Yeah, I think one of the most underappreciated things about Discord is that the product has found a way to do two things at once that almost no other companies are able to do at scale, which is have a singular focus on a particular type of user and their need.

11:50In this case, what you said was allowing friends to spend time together while playing games, 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 a couple of years ago, I was talking to Stan and he brought up a screenshot of the first version of the home page you guys had put together. And on the front page on day one, you had a call out for integrations and SDKs. 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.

12:27Where did that come from? And 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 explicitly? Yeah, the extensibility was built in from the beginning. And it's cool that you went back and looked at that. I think if you go to the way back machine, you can find it still from like 2015. The idea was that we knew that people were going to want to build custom integrations with different games as part of thinking about what's a group chat for gaming look like.

13:01So we were imagining if you have, let's say, an Eve Online Corporation, which is like a group of people playing this outer space massively multiplayer game, or you were playing Final Fantasy Online, which is a fantasy adventure game. These different games have data and things that you might want to pull into your group chat experience. But we knew we were not going to build all of these things for the hundreds or thousands of games that people might care about. So, that was kind of one thing where we got to make it so other folks can integrate their custom stuff from their games into Discord. And then related to that was this insight that I had from 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.

13:44And what that basically means is a developer will create a game. and then oftentimes ship with it the tools they use to make the game. I think it's software popular as this in the early days with Doom. It's kind of the first one I really remember getting big. I think they call them Wad files, this whole scene online where you could go download Wad files and then they started packaging up and selling them and it added a ton of life to the game. And today, now when we look at the top titles that people play, a lot of them actually began as community driven mods like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, League of Legends, GTA, role -playing, gosh, the list just goes on.

14:19Fortnite began as version four of a mod that I think came from a game called ARMA -3 many years ago. So this idea that give your community tools to create and customize and extend your game or your software, and they're gonna surprise you and take it in places that you never would have expected, it was just kind of like, to me, seemed how that's how you make good software. So when we built Discord, it sort of seemed obvious to us that we wanted to create an API that allowed developers to extend discord, to be more creative with it, to do things with it we never would have expected. Some of the things that we expected were like connecting to the eVon line back and so you could have your own forum or pulling in world boss spawns as notifications.

14:59But the stuff we never expected was like, generative AI, who could have guessed that? Right, I mean, now we're seeing many years after you made those investments in the craft of designing a delightfully API, fantastic tutorials, 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. 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 Mid -Journey as one example.

15:32Yeah, and there's a few other ones too. Mid -Journey is the most famous one. It's like a canonical example of how this stuff happens. We have this open platform where we're allowing people developers to customize and extend it. I think the mid -Jerney folks had 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.

16:03And then two, that someone would figure out how to take advantage of the magic of a discord server and our platform and build such a cool experience. And there's a handful of these now. So yeah, it's been a pretty cool thing to see. Majority is one example of a generative model. It's a text to image model. We've also seen an explosion of text to music tools as an example of how extensible discord is. What other kinds of use cases are you seeing emerge on the platform that you're excited about? The generative AI category is exciting for us, but we really come back to this idea of people mostly on Discord spend their time hanging out with their friends in these smaller invite -only spaces with less than 15 people per say.

16:46In 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. One really cool thing we see with the generative AI stuff is These people take the bots and bring them into their invite only servers. Then they can use them to create and explore and work on projects with their friends in a more private setting, as opposed to being in the public chaos, frankly, of some of these large servers. But other really cool experiences we see are things like ways to listen to music together.

17:17SoundCloud has a really cool bot that you can use to play music when you're in voice chats, for example. We're working with some other partners to try to bring more music to the platform. There's a bunch of games that people have made that are pretty cool. and many more are coming, we just actually launched a couple weeks ago, 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 visual interactive experiences powered by HTML5. So you can build a web app and essentially deploy it into the context of Discord.

17:47And so we're seeing lots of really exciting stuff starting to get built that I think will give people a lot of really fun things to do with their friends. Let's spend a couple minutes on that. This is something you and I spent years working on together. Yes, we did. We did, huh? 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 wanted to express their creativity beyond just a command line like interface, which was what bots were initially designed around as a form factor and going from there to expanding the entire canvas for them to the whole screen really with web apps.

18:22Yeah, well years ago when the bots platform started to get popular, there's actually 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 We haven't like a little kind of creativity festival That's the way to describe it and I think it was 2018 was the year that I'm thinking about We actually had like tents in our office. It was like a whole cool kind of with food and stuff and one of the groups that year 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?

18:55And so there was a team that built this, and I was always like, that's a really cool idea. And we've got to explore that. But as company building goes, you have a long list of ideas, and you have to prioritize when you get to them. So a couple of years later, the time was right to look at the idea, and that's when we met, you were actually working on your own startup at the time and we're kind of building this as a standalone project. And we, after some conversations, I was like, man, we should just do this together. So we acquired your company. And then 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?

19:34And to start, rather than just opening it up, we actually built a few games ourselves to really test the platform, make sure that it was designed well, that it worked for players, that the interaction loops were good, and that 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 previews. It's been a journey. It's been a fun journey. Yeah. Okay, we're gonna go a little bit deeper there. Okay. I remember one of the most exciting parts of working at Discord was that we had this incredible respect for infrastructure.

20:05Right? The company had built its own WebRTC streaming service. I had built its own voice and video infrastructure. We built a bunch of serverless networking in for developers for the apps SDK. And I remember there are these moments in the product engineering cycle when you're building infrastructure that you inevitably have to ask yourself, well, what is this going to be used for? And I remember having debates with you about how to answer that that question and prioritize the most important features. And so we came up with this ritual of jam sessions, if you remember. Where the team that was working on tools and inferred SDKs for the developers would come in and jam with you where you were often roleplay the developer.

20:43So today, fast forward, I'm going to ask you to pretend we're in a jam session. And we just launched the activities SDK, the embedded apps SDK, and now you're a developer. And I'm going to ask you now, what would you like to go build with this entirely new set of capabilities that you've been handed by Discord? So I guess the way that I think about this is first, like, what am I going to build? I try to think about what do I as a consumer want? 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 they have to take their hat off, right?

21:13And then put on their consumer hat. And so for me, it started to think about what kind of games I might want to play and how they could fit into my discord servers in fun ways. And for me, I really would love someone to build some multiplayer titles that don't require a lot of time investment, but have really cool moments of storytelling that you can interact with your friends asynchronously around that sort of weaves into the Discord experience through texts and with the visuals as well. I have a small site project I'm working on right now, which is a game kind of like this. It's like an arcade shooter that has kind of a leaderboard mechanic, but with a modern kind of rogue -like vibe on it.

21:53Anyway, it's just random stuff that I'm making as a side, both to sort of dog food and test our platform. But part of this is how I get myself in the mind space. So what are our developers want? What might their customers want? So that I can give good feedback to our team who is also doing this. So we can serve people effectively. One of the things that I think you've always been pretty good at doing is asking the question of what is possible on Discord that isn't possible elsewhere. And you're often able to laser in and hone in on the specific capabilities that are ultimately technical primitives, but exposed to users in a way that allows them to do something with their friends they couldn't do before in a way that's easier or faster or better or more convenient.

22:31And that's how things like persistent stage channels happen, right? And that's how forum channels happen. And that's how the embedded app SDK happened. And so as you're working and crafting your side project right now, what in your mind at the top do a three things that the Discord embedded platform that you just launched really shines at that's hard to do elsewhere? I mean, the magic, I think, is the fact that you have the social context of the space you're in. Right? 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.

23:10Unlike, let's say, other games, or maybe you log in, or you got a user to come into your game, and then you have to get them to maybe build a friend's list or to invite their friends to play. in the context of Discord because of the way the games work, their instant and they have the social context, you could build a game loop where one person plays, and then immediately the result of that play session is other people get exposed to the game and they can play it, and they don't have to go do anything to be able to really set that up, because the friend brought it into the server. Right. So I think about cool mechanics like leaderboards and challenges, and these kind of things that really, really depend on on having this group of people that have access to this shared space both synchronously.

23:55Right. And then also on the go in bite size ways. So it's a different kind of interaction model. So I could open my phone play game, and then when I get back to my computer, I could pick it up, and then you could play from your phone when you're somewhere else if you want to come and compete with me when you have a few minutes in your spare time. So this is the kind of model that I'm playing around with with this title. But part of what I'm so excited about with these tools is to see the creativity that other people bring. I know what would be interesting to me, but much like when we design the platform for discord in the beginning, so many of the cool things that happened with it, I would never have predicted.