# Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? · Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users 20VC · Nov 25, 2024 · 51 min · 11,019 words Speakers: Jason Citron, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-5e81b651/ ## Cold open **Jason Citron** [0:00]: That period for us when we went from 200 to a thousand in basically two and a half years was the moment in time when I think I made the the most management mistakes at Discord. I hired a bunch of executives and and set the vision and delegated that work to them. Everything ground to a halt. Words today that trigger me, which I think are shadows of this, are words like empowerment, alignment. **Harry Stebbings** [0:22]: This is 20 VC ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:23]: with me, Harry Stebbings. 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And I wanted to ask you, why do you think gaming is such good preparation for CEO ship? **Jason Citron** [4:13]: Games are like these little sandboxes of life. And, you know, you think about what you're doing when you play games. You're encountering challenges. You're trying to figure 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. That's growth mindset. Right? Like, isn't that incredible? You like, we're like, kids are are experiencing this by playing games. Or you think about playing games with 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 in the 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 not a sore loser and not a sore winner? Like, these things all happen when you play Fortnite. So, like, games are such amazing little simulation sandboxes to get 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 because you're just having fun that may translate to the kind of things you need to do to run a company. Certainly, did. **Harry Stebbings** [5:20]: You mentioned levels there. 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? Oh, wow. The Swahili's like, what the fuck? This wasn't in the schedule. **Jason Citron** [5:39]: No. It's it's a great question. Each level brings about different challenges, you know, and I think one of the hard things about being a CEO is, like, you know, each time you get to that next level, like, you haven't done it before. So by definition, you're just, like, constantly figuring out how do you work through these new challenging dynamics. It's always hard. But the the one thing that I I have confidence in myself and my team is that we can figure things out. Comes back to that growth mindset. When I'm faced with a challenge that I don't know how to solve, I can usually figure it out if I work hard enough. That's just kind of my mentality with everything is like, we're just gonna figure it out. **Harry Stebbings** [6:16]: I think that that mindset is helped when you're not existentially worrying about rent. And I've thought a lot about how money influences an investor's mindset. I'm interested. You sold your prior company for a $104,000,000 to be precise. I love the the 4. Like, a 100 wasn't quite right. Yeah. Well done for pushing that one. My question to you was, do richer founders make better founders? And how do you think about the financial cushion benefits? **Jason Citron** [6:42]: It certainly helps to every successful company along its journey gets acquisition offers. And so by having a cushion, it made it easier to turn down offers because we could go for the big, you know, outcome. But I think the real the real impact from being a second time founder actually has to do with the levels and how there are a lot of levels I had already played once in my previous company. So there were things about building Discord that were easier in the beginning because I had done them before. What's harder the second time around? Fundraising is easier, hiring is easier. What's harder? The second time around, what was hard was still cracking product market fit. We had an insight around the shape of the business that we that that I wanted to build and the types of products we would make, but getting the specifics right are just hard. Even when you know what you wanna make, it's just hard. And so I don't know that it was harder, but it was hard. And I was able to focus more on it because I wasn't so overwhelmed by, like, how do you manage 25 people? **Harry Stebbings** [7:37]: What was the first unique insight that you have with Discord? I always believe that when you go into an investment, you have to have a thesis which can be proved or disproved. When you go into founding Discord, what's the thesis? **Jason Citron** [7:47]: Back in 2012, at the time, my my sense was that the way you built a durable company in gaming over time was you actually needed to have some kind of established distribution advantage. I kinda put these things together and thought that, like, the shape of the company in the future would be a group chat app focused on gaming, you know, that helped developers bring their content to life. **Harry Stebbings** [8:06]: When you went out to speak to investors in the early days, what was the number one reason why they said no? **Jason Citron** [8:11]: Well, in the very early days, we started the the path that I sort of took us on, had some twists and turns. And at the very beginning, what I thought we needed to do and the approach we took was actually we started by building a multiplayer game, like a team based competitive game on mobile. My thought was that we needed to build this game to kind of bootstrap the the network of the group chat app. So a lot of investors said no because they didn't think the game was gonna be successful. And I suppose they were right. Like, the game had had a really nice following. I was very proud of it. It was called Fates Forever, but it was not gonna be a venture scale business. Like, content is tricky. It it wasn't a hit, and it didn't amass the kind of following that we needed to bootstrap a network. But by going through the process of building the game, we identified a path to market with a group chat app that didn't need a game to bootstrap it. And then so we built Discord actually in 2015. The journey, it it's one of those funny things where we were, like, stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details, it and all sort of worked out over time. And, you know, as we keep talking, that that's kind of the theme of the story. **Harry Stebbings** [9:06]: Did you have **Jason Citron** [9:07]: immediate product market fit when you launched the group chat app v one? It was pretty fast. I I wouldn't say immediate, but it was pretty fast. You know, we started working on it January 2015. Within, I'd say, two months, some of our friends were very excited about it. We didn't really have any users, but it was pretty clear they wanted to use it. It just, like, wasn't exactly correct. So we but I'd say within three or four months, we had, like, 20 DAU that weren't us. So pretty quickly. But 20 small. So do you **Harry Stebbings** [9:33]: agree with the principle of build it and they will come? No. I do not. Why not? **Jason Citron** [9:39]: And I'd love your thoughts around that. So I think the Discord story was actually a perfect example of how build and they will come may not always work. You know, when we got to this place where we had 20 DAU, we actually were having a hard time figuring out how to get more people to use the product. We were like, how do we get the word out? Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would would say this is the dumbest idea ever, like, no one's gonna use this. And even people who played games, many of them thought, like, why would I want this? I already have, you know, whatever app I'm using. And so we were having a hard time getting other people to try it, but we ended up figuring out a way to get the word out that people responded to positively that caused them to start trying it and then it started to grow on its own. But there was like a period of three or four weeks where I remember we were sitting around thinking like, well, we like this but maybe no one else does. Like, had built the product and we just hadn't figured out how to get the word out. What was the unlock? The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app. As opposed to saying like, try this thing out, like, we're selling it to you. What we actually did is we went to, the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit on Reddit where there was a new expansion coming out for this game and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, hey, I'm trying out this new voice over IP app, what do y'all think about it? And we went into that thread on Reddit and posted a link to a Discord server, which is like the group chat, we call them servers, where me and my cofounder were hanging out. And people would, like, found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. And they went back to the subreddit and we're like, hey. This is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool. We got 50 users that day from that post, and then that 50 turned into a 100 the next day, and it and it sort of started to snowball. And then we kind of did this playbook a little bit for, like, six months, and and and that was basically the beginning of how how it started growing. **Harry Stebbings** [11:26]: Did you ever have a plateauing of growth where it slowed? **Jason Citron** [11:30]: Yeah. It it it's not all been been up into the right. What **Harry Stebbings** [11:33]: do you do then, Jason? Like, do you go back to the drawing board and go, what features can we do to supercharge this? **Jason Citron** [11:38]: Yeah. It's a combination of thinking about how do you continue to make the existing product more useful and better for the people who are using it today for what they're trying to do. And then you gotta try to think about, like, how do you make it, you know, more approachable for people that aren't using it today? And these are some of the areas where during the COVID years, kind of branched out in a way to try to help be more useful to so many people because of what was going on during COVID. And over a few years sort of following that, realized that we kind of went down some dead ends and that people were not resonating as much with some of the features we were building. So we kind of pulled it back in to refocus on gaming this year. **Harry Stebbings** [12:14]: Do you regret the expansion into more verticals to attract more people? And did you learn anything from that, like, audience creep? **Jason Citron** [12:21]: I do not regret it. It introduced Discord to a lot of people. Many of those people continue to use to use Discord today. So we we went in a bunch of different directions to try to be useful to all those folks that didn't yield as much of a business impact that I was hoping. We certainly, our business grew tremendously during that period and I learned a lot about how do you manage your company at the next level. You know, we went from 200 to a thousand employees in that time period which was like totally crazy. The whole founder mode thing is interesting. I kinda went through my own experience of that and now realizing, you know, other people had similar experiences was kind of interesting. **Harry Stebbings** [12:55]: I I have to touch on that. 200 to a thousand, the scaling there, incredible. PG, obviously, famed for many things, but, you know, this blog post has been incredibly viral. How do you reflect and think about founder mode when you reflect on the journey with Discord and the 200 to a thousand? **Jason Citron** [13:11]: Yeah. That period for us when we went from 200 to a thousand in basically two and a half years was the moment in time when I think I made the the most management mistakes at Discord. A lot of it is basically, I hired a lot of people and because it was a new level that I hadn't really, you know, dealt with before and it was hyperscaling and all this craziness, I kind of followed the best practices and hired a bunch of executives and and set the vision and delegated that work to them. Everything ground to a halt. We did a lot of things that didn't end up resonating with our customers. I kind of realized this maybe almost two years ago and and went on this journey to try to fix it, but it was hard because I was essentially trying to undo all of the best practices that everyone thinks that you should be doing when you're running a company. Those **Harry Stebbings** [13:56]: being delegation, hiring execs, you've seen it before. **Jason Citron** [13:59]: Anything else? Words today that trigger me, which I think are shadows of this, are words like empowerment, alignment. **Harry Stebbings** [14:06]: My team have a drinking game where the more the person says alignment, the worse the CEO they are. I now say alignment is a four letter word. **Jason Citron** [14:13]: Like, I don't want alignment. Want I want highly opinionated people making decisions and then being accountable for them. Right? So this is like, you know, some of this stuff that I think people get caught up in. **Harry Stebbings** [14:22]: And so was there a realization moment for you, oh, shit. I've become manager mode. I need to go back to founder mode? **Jason Citron** [14:28]: The realization for me was, like, we are not shipping great products anymore. It's not coherent. The stories we're telling don't make sense. I feel like it's hard to get things done. I feel like I'm fighting against the company, not with the people trying to achieve something. So it just like felt broken. **Harry Stebbings** [14:42]: Breaking them down, delegation, something that's like told for years that to gain scale, leverage. How do you approach delegation today? What do you delegate? What don't you? **Jason Citron** [14:53]: Yeah. So so delegation is still very important. And this is why this stuff is a little bit tricky is it it doesn't mean micro manage everything, don't delegate anything, don't give people space to be creative, and make like, it's it's not that you shouldn't do any of these things, it's that you need to be careful at how you do it. I'll like, I'll give you an example. So today, I have a process where the way I manage the work is I essentially when we do our our our sort of plan for the year, instead of me sort of giving a high level, you know, vision of, like, here's the kind of outcome I wanna have next year, I will tell my teams, like, these are the problem spaces that I wanna I want you to focus on. These are the the kinds of solutions I'm I'm expecting to see. And then they come back to me, and I literally pick all the projects now. Like, I'm literally like, okay. We're gonna we're gonna work on improving reactions like that, and we're not gonna work on on well, I'm not gonna say we're not gonna work on I don't wanna leak any features. But I will literally go through and pick all the all of the all of the projects now. Whereas, like, a couple years ago, my team was like, oh, we have to be empowered to pick the projects. Just tell us what metric you wanna move. And I was like, okay. I guess that's how you run a company. But now, no. I'm like, I pick all the projects. I'm very tops down on what the strategy is and how we're allocating resources, how these things are sequencing together over time so it it's coherent to our users. **Harry Stebbings** [16:05]: How do you think about creating an environment of ownership when one is told bluntly direction like that and then Yeah. **Jason Citron** [16:12]: Making choices? Well, I think that the mistake was pushing those decisions to the wrong elevation in the company. So, like, when I when I go to a team and I say, hey, guys. I want you to think about how reactions work and how we can make this better for people. And here's some specific ideas for how to make it better. What I'm actually saying to them is, like, I now want you to use your incredible creativity and energy to try to explore this part of our of our sandbox. So they have extreme ownership over these are two or three ideas that Jason has that he really wants us to do. They can tell me they think I'm crazy and then we'll argue about it. Maybe they're right. Sometimes I'm wrong. I mean, I'm not I'm not right all the time. But also there's a problem space there, and they can explore and ideate and think within that problem space. But then they're gonna pitch those ideas back to me and I'm gonna pick the ones that they're gonna do. So they still get to have ownership and accountability and creativity on, like, what the work is, but they're not, you know, accountable necessarily for should we even work on reactions now. Like, that's that's somewhere else in the organization. You know, that might be me or that might be me with the VP or something, and and the VP's advocating for me. And I'm like, yeah. Okay. That's good. Let's go do that. But the the mistake was that I made was was delegating decisions to the wrong level of the organization. How many direct reports do you have today, Jason? I have seven today. We're a functional organization, so I have, like, engineering. I have, like, Epad, which is, you know, engineering and design and analytics and then marketing and finance and that sort of thing. But I work with the directors and the ICs. So when we do these product reviews, I have the frontline like, the the people doing the work actually prepare Loom recordings, like video recordings, and they send them to me. And I will watch, like, a fifteen or twenty minute walk through of a feature, and then I'll go look at the Figma, for example, or read the strategy doc after they talk me through it in a video. And then I often respond with a video recording, and I'll talk for, like, twenty minutes and give them feedback. And then only if there are questions do we have a meeting. It's incredible. I I have so much free time and I'm able to give feedback on so many things because I, you know, watch the videos at two x. I can always find time to watch a video. I can respond to the to the video. And then these meetings where you you know, I used to have these meetings with, like, 20 people and we'd walk through a product. It was forty five minute meeting. And then, like, everyone wants to talk. If I give feedback, people are defensive. Oh, the CEO's being, you know, giving feedback. They wanna respond to it. It's like this whole ceremony. It's ridiculous. And so now, like, we just cut all that out, and it's been transformative. **Harry Stebbings** [18:29]: Do you lose participation and discussion with that Loom async response response response? **Jason Citron** [18:35]: Yes. But that's kind of by design. Like, most things don't actually need a lot of participation and discussion. Like, the team has done a tremendous amount of work and they're trying to get feedback from me, and the forum of the of a 20 person product review turns it into, like, this bizarre ceremony. I actually don't want everyone to talk. I wanna give them my feedback. And I wanna be direct, I wanna give them the feedback. And some of it is just questions, some of it is try harder here, some of it is like, I wanna see another version of this. So some of that is like, this is amazing. Here's the 10 reasons why I love it. But the other amazing thing about that is those videos are all public. So if you're not in the meeting, anyone can watch like, there's a archive of me giving feedback on stuff that anyone can watch at any point. So if you miss the meeting, you're sick, everyone on the team can can hear that feedback from me without having to be in the meeting, which improves the the coordination cost. It's just it goes down. **Harry Stebbings** [19:21]: What is the meeting that is most required for the discussion, for the engagement, and could not be done in that way? **Jason Citron** [19:28]: Sometimes there'll be there'll be situations where you need to have, like, an expansive brainstorm, where it's like, we are gonna explore something together. And it's not a presentation. It's not necessarily a decision to be made. It's like, we're gonna explore something together. So we'll get in a room and the creativity and the back and forth, the result of the meeting is like 15 options or or a wide open idea. Those are good discussions. And then sometimes there are discussions where there's different points of view, and it's clear that from, like, sort of the initial sort of presentation and the reaction, there's still things to be hashed out. And then you get in the room and you have the debate, but you've already had everyone's already done this back and forth. So you you come in fully loaded up on the context, and you can have a really rich conversation and figure it out in, you know, thirty, forty five minutes. **Harry Stebbings** [20:13]: Toby at Shopify says the job of the CEO is to inject chaos into the organization. And I like that because I fucking do that, but I don't like it because I'm also like, hey, guys, we're gonna do this crazy batshit idea. And then it's like, oh, that's a load of distraction. Which side do you fall on? **Jason Citron** [20:30]: I don't think of my job as injecting chaos. I think my job is to make sure that we're creating amazing products for people. And if the chaos helps the organization do that, then I suppose I will do I will inject chaos. But I think on balance, for me at least, I have not found chaos gets us closer. Do you **Harry Stebbings** [20:47]: think the best CEOs are the best resource allocators? **Jason Citron** [20:50]: Resource allocation is certainly important for as being a CEO because, you know, if you have a a large group of people, the first thing you need to do is figure out, like, how you wanna organize them together against what problem sets. But I do think that selecting the right problem sets is probably more important than the resource allocation to some extent. Like, if you have the right problems but your resource allocation is sort of wrong, you'll notice that and then you can correct it later. But if you have the wrong problems, then the resource allocation can't be right. So **Harry Stebbings** [21:20]: Problem selection is down to you. It's also down to your execs. You mentioned kind of some challenges in terms of scaling exec teams there. It's a really hard thing to scale an exec team. When you think back to mishires on exec teams, what are some of the biggest lessons for you on that element? **Jason Citron** [21:36]: The biggest lessons for me on exec hiring there's two things that come to mind. One is that hiring execs is a bit tricky because by the time someone's an executive and they're interviewing for a role at that level, they're probably very good at communicating. And they're very good at talking about the work. And so I have found that actually interviewing execs, sort of more senior ex people, is really good for getting a feel for whether I would enjoy working with them. Can we brainstorm? Can we debate? Do I enjoy, you know, being with them? But I rarely find that folks fail the the sort of capabilities test in those kind of interviews. I mean, sometimes they do, of course. But but I find by the time, like, you know, if someone gets to me, like, they're sort of qualified for the job. So the thing is you have to reference check the heck out of executives. It's really hard to fake it for, like, three years if you work at a company. What I have basically, what I do when I hire execs now is I meet them to get a sense for, like, do I enjoy being with this person? Can we debate and and have a good conversation? And then I call, like, everybody I know who who has ever worked with them to try to figure out what what they're actually like to work with, and that's where you get the real insights. And since I started doing that, my success rate of hiring executives has has gone up a lot. The second thing is then once you get them into a company, I have, like, a whole process that I've sort of come up with for how to integrate them in. **Harry Stebbings** [22:57]: How do you do that? That's very hard to do. **Jason Citron** [22:59]: Yeah. The the short version is that I don't expect them to do any work for the first, like, sixty days. They come in and they just need to learn. I just want them to meet the people, learn what we're doing, figure out why we're doing things. And every day, what I expect them to do, I have a meeting. I I'll set a thirty minute meeting with them every day for, like, the first forty five days, and I want them to ask me questions about the business. Like, they need to learn. There's so much context. They need to learn and develop a point of view on their talent, on the projects for their area, and then sort of in the second month, to express some of that viewpoint with me. And then by the end of the third month, like, they take over and they're running their team. And I have found this, like, learning transition really sets them up for success. Because if you expect someone to come in on day one and, like, run it, they don't know what's going on. What **Harry Stebbings** [23:43]: are the biggest reasons why execs become exec mishires? **Jason Citron** [23:47]: Well, the the mistakes that I've made are actually they come in and they start changing things right away. And then the people in the team around the company are like, why is this person making this decision? I don't understand why they're doing this. And, like, if it's wrong, then they lose credibility, and then it's really hard for them to to get that credibility back. Right? **Harry Stebbings** [24:03]: How long do you give someone? Because in those cases, it's really hard. So I come in, thanks for hiring me, Jason. Thrilled to join. I make a load of changes, and the team's like, who is this guy, and why is he making all these changes? And it's like, well, Jason, you hired me. Back me. I'm making these changes. And then the culture just gets worse beneath me. I just continue to make Titanic worse inside the company, but you should back me for a while. How do you think about, like, how long to give versus cut it straight out? **Jason Citron** [24:31]: This is one of the other things that I came to learn, which is, you know, when we went through that period of hyperscaling, I did a lot of, like when the executive told me this is how something was supposed to be done, I would always try I'm a curious person, so I try to understand why. And if I really couldn't figure it out and my intuition said this doesn't make sense, I would actually let them do it anyway. Inevitably, I'd say more often than not, it didn't work and I was right. And so now what I've come to learn is that executives and other people are they're experts in their craft, and we should trust them. But if my intuition says that this doesn't make sense, I now trust my intuition and I won't I won't support them in whatever they're doing. And I'll be like, I want you to it my way and I need you to trust me. And more often than not now, that has actually worked out well because it turns out that the context of the company is so important, and I have the context of the company. And the executive is the expert in the craft. And the context of the company, the reasons for why you do things should be the beginning point to derive how you run a team or how what products you build or what stories you tell. Right? You think about sort of first principles. Like, what are we trying to accomplish is what where you start, not like what are the tools for some, you know, some function or some craft. **Harry Stebbings** [25:35]: Did you have the strongest intuition **Jason Citron** [25:37]: that turned out to be wrong? At Discord late two thousand eighteen, we built a PC game store, which I ended up shutting down after, like, four months. That didn't work. Yeah. I I there's a long list of things where I have made the wrong calls, but the thing that I've come to learn is that I am still more right than a new executive joining my company. Like, I still have more context than most people who join, given the nature of how long I've been doing this. And I I also learn over time, and I think this is the trick. One of the challenges with, like, trust your intuition, trust your gut as advice is, like, you don't know where your gut is right and wrong. One of the things I've come to learn over the years is the kinds of things where my intuition tends to be right and the kinds of things where my intuition tends to be wrong. And so when it's one of those things, I discount myself a little bit. **Harry Stebbings** [26:26]: I spoke to many of our mutual friends. I'm pretty much at all of your cap table. After 2,800 shows, you'd expect me to, so it's at least they said, and I hope it's okay for me to say, they said that, you know, there's so many incredible things about you, but they said you trust more experienced people's recommendations sometimes more than your own, and that was a weakness. Do you think that's fair? And how would you reflect on that? **Jason Citron** [26:49]: I think there was definitely a period of time where that was true. And, you know, we talked about this little bit. It's this sort of bringing in the executive, delegating the the outcome to them, but also the the approach to the outcome. That was one of the hard lessons that I learned over the last few years that I I stopped listening to my intuition on some of these things. As a result, you know, lot of things at the company went sideways. In terms of gut **Harry Stebbings** [27:09]: and tough decisions, it's a tough decision. You mentioned earlier, like, actually, it's helpful when you have a little bit of money because you're not tempted to sell early. You had a decision to sell the company for $12,000,000,000. First off, how does that feel, Jason? **Unknown** [27:22]: It was pretty crazy Yeah. **Jason Citron** [27:25]: To be in that situation. Yeah. Do you remember where you were? It was not a short process, and there was a lot of things going on at the time. So, you know, it was one of those situations where we and I have always been very focused on trying to make amazing products, tell amazing stories, and build a great company. Along the way over the years from time to time, you know, we get interest from people and, you know, sometimes we engage with it. Because, like, okay. Like, what what's what's happening here? And this was it it actually began as just another one of those where it was just like, okay. But ultimately, we decided that we really just wanted to focus on creating what we're creating. You know, I I love creating software and I love solving problems for people around gaming and, you know, having fun with their friends and and that was the path that we chose to to stand because we thought it has so much opportunity ahead of us. **Harry Stebbings** [28:08]: The reason you sell is because you believe there's more strategic benefit to be had from the acquirer and what it does to your position as a company. Say, Instagram with Facebook. Say, YouTube with Google. Did you not feel that was the case here? **Jason Citron** [28:21]: Microsoft has been a a really fantastic partner for us. There certainly are things that we could have done together with them that we can't do independently. But ultimately, it it was about controlling our own destiny, I suppose, and and really seizing the opportunity in front of us. **Harry Stebbings** [28:38]: What does no one see or think about the gaming industry in the future that everyone should be thinking about or speaking about? **Jason Citron** [28:45]: We're in we're in kind of a tough period in the games industry right now where after COVID, it's kinda contracting, and there's a lot of consolidation. Yet it's as big it's it's really, really large if you think about how much, you know, money consumers are spending and how much time people are spending and how important games are in people's lives. And I think that while it seems it's both large and also feels kind of like we're in a slump, I think in ten years from now, it's gonna be so much bigger, so much more important, and so much more pervasive than it is today. Yet if you think games games just kind of follow the trajectory of digital technology. And it seems like in ten years from now, there's gonna be more digital technology, more people using devices, crazy new ways that we interact with this stuff. And games are always at the leading edge of how people take advantage of and harness technologies. And so you think about, like, how is AI gonna change the creative side of of game development and the interactive side of game development? **Harry Stebbings** [29:36]: How does AI change the creative side first? Before we I've seen many tools addressing different elements of the creation process. In your mind, succinctly, how does AI change the creation process for gaming products? **Jason Citron** [29:48]: I mean, I think it's gonna dramatically lower the cost to create incredible content, which means you're gonna get get I think you're gonna get games like Elden Ring that are made by teams of, like, 20 people, not 300. And then it's also gonna mean you're gonna be able to have someone who you know, an individual person, a solo creator who will be able to make games that they can't make today because it it takes either five years or it's just too hard. And so I I think we're gonna find Do you worry that **Harry Stebbings** [30:13]: about what that does to discovery? I think that's amazing, the democratization, but with democratization comes a massive increase in supply. Mhmm. And with that increase in supply, discovery just becomes a war. Often in that case, it's just a game of who has the most dollars. Do you worry about discovery being that problem? **Jason Citron** [30:31]: I think discovery is already a problem for developers. It's gonna get harder to break through. It's really hard for me to predict how the world will be if there's, like, 10 times more games and they're all high quality. Because you can imagine when the cost drops so dramatically, the whole business model changes. The whole dynamics change. Right? Part of the challenge today is that it's hard to break through and it costs $200,000,000 to make a big game. Right? If the costs were much lower, then you could have games where the subject matter is much more niche. And then in that world, what happens? Like, imagine if you had 20 Eldon Rings and they all had different themes and they were all as good. You don't need to make $7,000,000,000 from making Eldon Ring. You could make $10,000,000 or $50,000,000. Maybe it's a great business. So I think that consumers are gonna have so much more choice and so much **Harry Stebbings** [31:14]: lead to this, like, incredible unbundling of gaming, this immense personalization. It could lead to a **Jason Citron** [31:20]: lot of personalization in gaming. People still like to play games in community, so I think you're still gonna have situations where, like, maybe groups of friends will try certain titles or, yeah, I I think we see potentially echoes of this if you look at, how video entertainment happens today, like, on the streaming services. Like, there are shows that are really popular that no one's heard of because there there's so many people who watch these things that you can have these kind of more niche subject matter shows. I think that you're gonna start to see, you know, something like that. Music is kind of even more like this if you think about the music industry, how much content there is. It's amazing for consumers, but it is harder for the creative side. **Harry Stebbings** [31:57]: What is the biggest misnomer or mistake that people have or think about how AI will impact the future of creation of gaming products? **Jason Citron** [32:06]: It's really hard to predict what's gonna happen. We're in this world where the in in gaming, there's this there's this concept of a fog of war, which is like, you know, when you're playing a game like Starcraft, you can't see what's going on on the other side of the map until you've been there. And so you have to kinda plan without knowing what's happening in the future. And I feel like we're in a moment in technology and and because of the nature of AI, it's sort of challenging us to reinvent so much about how we do things in our lives that when I think about where where are the capabilities of AI gonna be in ten years, it's just, like, so hard to reason through to reason through what are the implications of that. Like, if we actually get AGI, then what happens? I don't know. There there's like a tech tree, and you can imagine different paths through it that could result in so many different outcomes that it's just very hard to predict. So anyone who's really certain about what happens is probably wrong. **Harry Stebbings** [32:52]: How does AI change the interaction side? How we engage with these games as consumers? **Jason Citron** [32:58]: Again, don't know. But but some things that I think about which could be pretty compelling are you could imagine how today, you know, you you might play a game, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, for example, or Tears of the Kingdom. One of these big open world adventure games where you're a character and you're in this fantasy land and there's people and adventures to go on. That gets handcrafted by a team of people. And because the nature of it it's an amazing game, but there's a lot of repetition for how this sort of structures play out because you just can't make bespoke content for ninety hours in a game like that. But you could imagine if you have AI that, like, every one of those characters can have a complete backstory, can respond to you in in in in the totality of all the decisions you've made inside of a game world, And you could have literally hundreds of hours of bespoke content customized to your experience that just never ends as long as you want it to go. And I think that being able to explore and play in a in a in a game world that you're passionate about forever could be really compelling. You think about, like, watching TV shows and how it's always bittersweet when a when a when a series ends because you're like, I'm done being in that world. Terrible. You get to **Harry Stebbings** [34:00]: point where you, like, ration it out so it lasts longer. **Jason Citron** [34:03]: Yeah. I mean, I've watched Game of Thrones the whole like, four times over because I enjoy it so much. Imagine if it, like, could never end and it was always great. Does that change the business model of games? How does the business model change in that world? Again, I don't really know, but you could You imagine **Harry Stebbings** [34:20]: would be a terror I've got to interrupt you. You'd be a terrible venture capitalist. We know the future. I will tell you the future, and you will listen and write it in your Wall Street Journal article. **Jason Citron** [34:31]: You know, if you think about the the nature of AI and how one of the key differences with it is if this kind of technology could run, like, on a device, like, a console or on a phone, then the business model might be different than if it than if it has to use so much compute that it, like, runs in a in a server, for example. So, like, these these details matter, but you could imagine a game like that being more of a subscription service where you subscribe to the game kind of like, know, World of Warcraft is. It's this never ending story that you participate in. And by paying a little bit every month, you get to continue to explore and be part of that world. That to me feels like it could be an approach. You know, the microtransaction model probably has a place you could potentially imagine microtransactions working there. But when everything is AI generated, you know, if all the microtransaction content is AI generated, you know, how will people react to that? If it's effectively free, you know, will some enterprising creator figure out a different way to monetize it that makes all the content free so you don't have to worry about that? My guess is probably. So, yeah, it's it's hard to say. Jason, what did you believe that you now no longer believe? One thing we've talked about that I certainly believe that I no longer believe is, you know, a lot of the advice out there for how you run a company. Do politics have a place in the workforce? I think that each CEO and each leader needs to decide for themselves how much they want to talk about politics in their workplace. The the one thing that seems clear is that we are in a very kinda heated divided time in the world. I think it's up to each person to make that call. **Harry Stebbings** [35:54]: I spoke to Danny Rimer before this show, and he said that his first encounter with you was probably his most memorable first founder encounter ever. He I think he described it as an interrogation, to be quite blunt. So take me to the first Danny Rimer meeting. Meeting. Where Where was was it? It? What did you do? How did it go? **Jason Citron** [36:13]: It's funny he calls it an an interrogation. I remember I was meeting with him, and I had just read an article maybe the day before about a company that he had invested in that I think kind of went bankrupt or something. I wasn't raising money, but I was like, oh, I'll go meet with this guy. People say he's he knows what he's doing and he's and so we met at a coffee shop somewhere in the Mission in San Francisco, I forget which one. I'm a pretty curious person, I love to learn from people. Like, there's two ways to learn in life. You learn from your own mistakes or from other people's mistakes. And so I love to read books and and and talk to other people to learn about, like, what are their mistakes and what can I learn from? So I'm meeting with Danny and I'm like, well, I don't what to talk about. I just read this thing. It was really interesting to hear about a company that just went bankrupt. I was so I was just really curious about it. So I just start asking him questions about the experience and what happened and what did he learn from it and what did he take away from it. And and and, you know, I have to be honest, I don't even remember what he said at this I mean, it was so long ago. But I remember **Unknown** [37:05]: the conversation, and it and I know it really stood out to him. **Harry Stebbings** [37:08]: Do you think you're a good fundraiser? And with the benefits of the many rounds you've done, what have been your biggest lessons on how to fundraise successfully? **Jason Citron** [37:16]: I guess I am a good fundraiser. We've raised almost a billion dollars. At some level, I think raising money when you're building a business that is growing really fast and has a lot of consumer love, it's kind of easy. I I don't disagree **Harry Stebbings** [37:29]: with you. **Jason Citron** [37:29]: Which was the hardest round? We definitely had hard rounds. Our series a was actually pretty hard because a lot of investor this was before we had Discord. So when we were working on our game title, this was I think maybe 2013. And at the time, what I was fundraising on was this vision to build a a big gaming business around a group chat app starting with a game. And most people said no because they thought the game wasn't gonna wasn't gonna get there. So we got a lot of no's in that round. And Mitch Lasky from Benchmark said yes. And he thought the vision was exciting and he thought we would figure it out. And so that was a hard round, but I'm very grateful to Mitch for seeing what I saw and supporting us in that. Once we got to Discord and, you know, the charts were all up and to the right, it was much easier. **Harry Stebbings** [38:10]: Should you always take the highest price? **Jason Citron** [38:12]: No. In fact, I got an offer. Think I our Series A, I had one other offer for a little bit of a better valuation, but I really wanted to work with Mitch. **Harry Stebbings** [38:20]: Is it a needle mover having benchmark as an investor? **Jason Citron** [38:23]: Mitch has been very helpful. You know, I I haven't spent a ton of time with the other partners. So one thing that I have learned working with so many investors over the years is that it's not really always about the firm, it's about the person. My sense is the other folks at Benchmark are are great, but I haven't worked with them, so I don't know. But working with Mitch has been great. **Harry Stebbings** [38:39]: I heard another story I had to discuss was Rockstar Games, where apparently you walked in feeling pretty confident with bags of cash, expecting to buy a ton of IP. What happened there, Jason? **Jason Citron** [38:52]: Yeah. So we went to New York. This was around the time when we were building our PC game store in late twenty eighteen, and I went to to go visit with the Rockstar folks to talk to them about whether they would list their upcoming title on our store. They were very gracious folks, and we chatted with them and discussed a lot about, like, what their priorities were and, you know, tried to do the normal BD thing of like, what's going on over here? And what I realized as we were coming back was that the game store business was such that they only wanted basically, what I realized was that we were gonna have to spend a lot of money and minimum guarantees to get developers to put their games on our store. And it it wasn't just Rockstar, but but that trip to New York was, like, one of the moments where I realized that the best games are gonna cost us a lot of money. In that moment in time, other people had just launched game stores as well. You know, the PC game store industry was kind of slow moving for a while. And in that window, like, Epic launched theirs. We launched one. Microsoft was coming. And I realized that to compete in this business, we were gonna have to spend a lot of money on minimum guarantees on a lot of titles, and I didn't feel like it was gonna really be worth it. I decided we weren't gonna spend the money, you know, the bags of cash on that title or on any titles, and we shut down the game store forty five days later and completely pivoted out of that business, which I had just raised the round of funding off of. So I remember calling the investor who had put the money in, and I was like, hey. Which round was this? I don't know. We've we've done a lot of rounds. I forget the I forget the I forget the letter. But in any case, I remember calling them and telling them that we were gonna do this, and I was like, do you do you want the money back? They were like, no. Keep keep going. We think you'll figure something out. And they were right. **Harry Stebbings** [40:29]: I have to ask a question that is top of mind for me. I I think there's a generation of incredible private companies. Your stripes, like your Starlinks, your Discords. The question that I have is, what is the ultimate destiny for this? Does it go public? Does it get bought? Does it run as an independent private company for years and years and years? I'm not saying to make predictions, any teasers, spoilers. Just what would you most like? **Jason Citron** [40:54]: Well, there's a couple ways to answer this. You know, what I like is creating software for people that is useful and having fun doing it with, like, a team of great of great folks. Like, that's what I enjoy. Like, I enjoy waking up every day, coming to work, and, like, talking about the features we're building and talking to my customers and and trying to figure how to solve problems for them and then telling our story. So that's what I would like to keep doing. And then the question isn't what's the context around that? And, of course, we've raised a lot of money and the business exists, you know, because we've had amazing investors, a lot of wonderful employees who give us their time. So all of those folks are expecting liquidity at some point, and I would and I really want to give it to them. So there will have to be some liquidity liquidity situation eventually because people wanna get paid. But, you know, when and how and what, you know, that will be we'll we'll figure that out as we move on. Would you like to be a public company CEO? Like, does that hold any desire or interest for you? It's an intriguing mode of operation, but I'll do it. But it's I I don't wake up and go, like, I cannot wait to be a public company and have do do an earnings call. Like, that's not the reason why I started the company. I started the company because I'm passionate about our customers and their problems, and and I wanna solve them. **Harry Stebbings** [42:01]: Listen. I would love to move into a quick fire round. So I will say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yes. So what book written before 1965 would you most recommend? Winnie the Pooh. Because it's just such a wonderful book. It's a story of friendship and fun. Yeah. Can see why you're not an investor. Yeah. **Unknown** [42:21]: Were were you were **Harry Stebbings** [42:22]: you **Unknown** [42:22]: looking for, like, Benjamin Graham or something? **Harry Stebbings** [42:25]: Do do you what my takeaway from this episode is, honestly? I think you are freaking great. You are such a lovely human being, but we also could not be more like other ends of the spectrum. I I had a great conversation the other day, they was like, hey. How faith impacts how you act in the world. And I responded, I I have faith. I believe in liquidity. **Unknown** [42:45]: Capitalism is a well, yes. Okay. Don't say anything that purges you. Don't say anything. Yeah. I'm like, I'm gonna that's not a sound bite. We're gonna we're gonna **Harry Stebbings** [42:52]: sound No. What's the most what blog post written post 2,000 other than founder mode is your favorite? **Jason Citron** [43:00]: Yeah. I really enjoyed a series of posts by Marc Shuster. He used to write in the late two thousands. He had a blog called Both Sides of the Table where he would share his experience, and I really, really learned a lot from him. What's the most contrarian or unorthodox advice you'd have for founders listening today? Yeah. I think it's that if you're building a consumer product, you have to build it for yourself. It's really hard to build consumer products if you are not the customer. **Harry Stebbings** [43:22]: Is it wrong to do it for the money? No. Do it for whatever reason you want. What concerns you most in the world today, Jason? **Jason Citron** [43:29]: I'm I'm worried about our institutions and, like, civic engagement, future of education. There's things about the world that seem to be getting worse, and I'm worried that we may not figure out how to fix them. So I'm trying to think about how to help fix them. **Harry Stebbings** [43:44]: If you were to reshape parts of education in any way, how would you change education? **Jason Citron** [43:49]: Well, I think that I would try to redesign the school experience to be more about hands on problem solving that is engaging and less about memorization. Because I think people I think, you know, hard to think about games, like, people learn better by doing and through experience and repetition. So much of what you learn in school about recalling facts is, like, just not actually that useful. Like, even today, we have Google. And with AIs in the future, like, it's gonna be more about creative problem solving and critical thinking and judgment. These are soft skills that you do learn in school, but they're not they don't really seem to necessarily always be the focus. So I think that's one. On a smaller scale, I think, like, access to higher education for people in America, least, is something that is a problem. So there's there's a there's a a really cool startup that I'm involved in. It's actually the only other company I'm on the board of called Campus. They're an accredited online university where any where students in America can get go join like, apply to get accepted and take online classes taught by adjunct professors from Ivy League schools and get a two year degree that they can then transfer to, a regular school. And it's it's such a cool company run by this amazing founder. **Harry Stebbings** [45:00]: Unless it is mission critical degrees, do you think university is worth the hugely inflated cost anymore? **Jason Citron** [45:06]: I do think it's too expensive. **Harry Stebbings** [45:08]: So if I were 18 and I said I have this offer from this great school, should I take it, or should I go and work at a start up and learn? **Jason Citron** [45:16]: If you're turning down a you know, an acceptance letter to an Ivy League school, that means you've already figured out a bunch of things about, like, how to about some of the stuff I talked about. Like, you probably have figured out some level of critical thinking and follow through and and, you know, focus and you're probably quite smart. Maybe you should actually not go to Harvard and and go work at a company and start, you know, doing something. But if you're not that person, there may be value in going to a higher education to learn some of those more structured skills. **Harry Stebbings** [45:44]: You can change anything about the internal workings of Discord today. What would you change, forgetting difficulties in logistics? I've changed pretty much everything. Do you have recurring meetings? **Jason Citron** [45:57]: I I have meeting slots, but I have very few actual recurring meetings. Do you like them? The ones that I have now, I like. The ones that I I used to have a lot of them, but I no longer have those. That was **Harry Stebbings** [46:07]: elegantly done. I like that. Yeah. Strong. Final one. In other words, I fucking hated the old ones. Final one. No. I said it. As long as I said it, it's fine. Final one for you. What is the most underrated piece of technology or advancement that not enough people discuss today that you're excited about? **Jason Citron** [46:26]: I don't know why we don't have more nuclear power plants. Energy is such an important factor in our society, and, like, we have this amazing technology that we have, for some reason, like, at least in America, like, regulated essentially out of usefulness. And wouldn't it be amazing if we just had kept building them over the last fifty years? Like, wow. Wouldn't that be pretty amazing? There's something there. **Harry Stebbings** [46:46]: I think it's the mass potential harm to surrounding areas that could be caused to prevent it. No? **Jason Citron** [46:54]: My understanding from the little research that I've done is that there's actually just a lot of misinformation and fear mongering around it. It's actually, like, much safer than people think, and that, like, living next to a coal plant is actually more harmful to your health than living next to a nuclear power plant, and that they're quite safe. **Harry Stebbings** [47:08]: You have been fantastic. Thank you so much for putting up with my prying, and I so appreciate it. **Jason Citron** [47:12]: Yeah. Thanks, Harry. Really great questions. It's been fun. **Harry Stebbings** [47:16]: I absolutely love shows like that. For me, shows which are a real reflection on the lessons taken to build a $14,500,000,000 business, just an incredible opportunity. If you wanna watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [47:33]: what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation. 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