Pivoting To Survive: Stan Vishnevskiy's Journey on Founding Discord

I could tell you stories of uh me uh being the only backend engineer for the first like six months and me doing everything and like since we would position ourselves as anti-DOS for your computer and we are the target we would get DOS non-stop and I would constantly be running from lunch to the computer like oh no they took down all the servers we got to we got to bring them back up because we didn't have like sophisticated systems back then. Um, so like there was a lot of like, hey, it's less of like can we add more machines. It's more like the ways users would find a way to abuse our systems, especially in the ways we promote that they couldn't, right? So you make a target on your back, people will try to do it. Welcome to the Gaming Founders Podcast, a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry. I'm Eden, the CEO of Pragma. We build tools for studios to connect with their players and essential services, including First Look, our player relationship platform. Connect and Engine are cloud and source-based backends that power many of the world's best studios today. If you have an

interest in getting exclusive access to the game industry's best early access games, sign up at playtest.fverlook.gg. And I'm Kevin Zayn, partner at Upfront Ventures. We're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco. I lead game investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work, including Pragma. We interview founders on their origin stories, the tactics that helped them survive and thrive, and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies. Learn more and subscribe today at pragma.gg/gaming founders. Stan is the founder of Discord and someone I view as a friend and mentor as a builder in the games industry. Discord has over 200 million monthly active users and is one of the most influential companies in games today. In this conversation, we talked through Discord's pivot from a game company to a social platform, how they went from nearly shutting down the company at launch to growing, how to think through speed with large technical

decisions, the distractions during co that led to a now renewed focus on games, their latest initiatives in quests and their SDK, and the future of Discord. This is only Stan's second recorded podcast, so there are so many fresh nuggets of wisdom throughout this episode. I hope you enjoy this episode with Stan Vishneski. Stan, how are you?
Welcome to the show.
Oh, I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, really, really excited for this conversation. I've been a longtime Discord user. Was a old Ventrillo user growing up and uh was very very excited when you guys uh when you guys launched a better web tool uh for us us players. Maybe we can start with like early days, early background. um like where are you from? How did you get into software engineering, games, that side of things?
So, where am I from? Uh originally, um I was born in the Ukraine, but uh I immigrated here really early with my

parents when I was five to Los Angeles. And most of my childhood was growing up in Los Angeles. Um that's it's kind of related to ultimately like why I'm into games I think because uh you know uh immigrants coming to the US American dream working really hard that really meant my parents had no time for me to take me to my friends or to hang out and um like uh and as many people know LA is very large so I really got online really early um back when the internet was still the wild west days and got online on chat rooms and then Then I got um like I think this like early n like early 90s I think and then I got on uh then I found online games and that was like a big game changer for me of like wow like I can meet people online I can make friends and then I can like do things with them and like to me that was like kind of revolutionary as a as a really young kid. Um and at the same time and like some of us remember before the dotcom boom everyone wanted to be a software engineer. I was obviously too

young for that. my but my parents were very excited to try their hand at it. Very not successful but it gave me the opportunity to go to the classes with them as a really young kid and I I started like reading the books and I was like how do I apply this? I was just like enamored by I can build stuff and uh of course I tried to make some games myself but ultimately I was more making websites on like game guides and stuff like that. Um, and that's what got me into programming. And then like as I started playing games more and more, I got kind of really uh the like my true origin story got really deep into Final Fantasy 11, the MMO, and played that really really really hardcore and built tools around that that help people come together. You like bridging Ventrillo and Team Speak and message boards and that's how I kind of married my love of gaming and community at the same time. you still playing any Final Fantasies these days or
I was playing Final Fantasy 14 during the pandemic quite a bit with really helped really come same purpose as before couldn't be around friends really

great way to come together really a lot of bonding moments now I had to come from patch to patch but not as much
I had read somewhere about moving partly to the US on a like a heart condition kind of thing was that uh how did that whole thing go down
yeah I mean that was a big part of like we came from the Ukraine like my parents grew up in the Soviet Union and when the Soviet Union collapsed like like you couldn't really get the medical help you needed anymore really easily and my parents found their way to the US to um find a a cure for my heart condition which I was born it was a birth defect just valves weren't working and they came to the US like in search of like finding a solution to that and luckily around I I'm like trying to remember when it was I think when I was nine I finally got the surgery uh and uh permanently solve something that I would have not lived long if it wasn't solved. Um fun fact though the this you know the world is all connected right the week I had to wear a monitor to prove to

basically prove to my doctors I was fully like well past all of this was early in my early teens and that was the week Final Fantasy 11 came out. So the week I did not have to go to school. So it's all intertwined. Right. If
it wasn't for that week, where would we be?
Discord.
Okay. So, you went to school for software engineering or what did you
Yeah. I mean, um I going back to the immigrant thing like I like my parents, it was very important for my parents that said I went to college, but at that point I already had spent so much time building things and like knowing how to write code. Um but I did end up going to college um to Cal State Northridge. was really close to where we lived and it was just honestly convenient. Um um I didn't end up finishing. I did drop out because I was in instead trying to work on my own thing which was guilt work which we probably end up talking about.
Yeah. So I Yeah. So good good segue into guild work. What was the sort of thesis? How did you how did that come about?

Well, it was kind of my first attempt at becoming an entrepreneur, right? Uh I going back to what I mentioned earlier. I was building all of these tools to automate my guild and like make it easier to come together chat more like we're doing all these tools like voice chat message boards all this stuff and funny enough like all these other guild leaders would come to me like can I buy this from you and I ended up selling it a couple times to people because like oh cool like a teenager making money off writing software like like this and then when I was in college I was like is there like a way to make this easier make this more ubiquous not not like literally giving people like a file with a bunch of PH PHP files and hand it to them. Um, and so I was like, what if this was like a real product where you just go online, you just set it up and it just works. And Gilwork was the my first attempt. I I had a friend with me in college at the time that I met at college in software engineering classes and he was also passionate about this stuff and we tried to build it together and it was very much like a

we kind of tried to merge social networks with running a guild and that's what guild work teamwork that was the the name for it. Um it actually was fairly successful in the community it was in uh like Final F the Final Fantasies basically but that's a very small group of people. Um, and we did uh apply to Y Combinator. And while we did get a call back, we did not get accepted. And uh that's actually what drove me to be like, "Oh, I think I need to go learn more from people who've done this before and not like and I just like dropped everything and moved to the Bay Area." Um like um in hopes to meet people that I could learn from because like that's the main thing that you want to do. just learn, absorb, and like figure out how to do the things you want to accomplish.
Is that when you met Jason and their crew, or is that earlier?
Not exactly. I mean, uh that that's um you know, like everything is connected. So, I I luckily the there was people on some message boards that saw what I was

working on. They're like, "Hey, I'm working at a company." Uh at the time was Kabam. They were working at Kabam, which is um uh I think at the time they were a Facebook game company, not even mobile yet. And they were like, "I can get you a job tomorrow. I think you should come up here. And I got a call the next day from Kabam. I flew up. They gave me an offer and I told my parents, I'm like, I don't think I need to finish college. I think I can safely move up there and they were like very supportive. Uh, and I just moved up. I worked in the social game space for like about two years. Uh, and then at one point I was agree, which is another uh at that point more mobile social game company. And I met some people that Jason knew because Jason had sold his company to Gree his previous company Open Faint.
Mhm.
And one day like after a while I got a call uh from um from PE from Jason's like someone says I need to meet you and that's how I met Jason.
Wow.
What year was that?
Uh 2013 I think it was like two years

before Discord.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you you didn't raise any money for guild work. It was like you bootstrapped it. It sounds like
Yeah, that it was totally like uh blood, sweat, and tears uh between classes and not sleeping that much and like just like pouring all the passion, learning all the things and overbuilding like there's so many things that I did wrong, built too many features, learned too many things that I didn't need to learn at that scale, but it all paid off later. Like, so it's such a I feel like such a great lesson on getting a job for a young person. I feel like it's I mean I I'm like the same way. I if I saw someone that was just hustling and built something that was like high taste, high product market fit, even if it was for a really small number of users, I'd be like that person's got tons of potential, you know, and for like we carry that forward here. Like I some of our best uh employees at the company, especially earlier ones, they didn't really even have resumes their names. All we could we looked at is like what was your side project? What was your GitHub like? What what did you passion

about? And like that translates to like just insane passion especially they're excited about the space which we're fortunate in the gaming space to really have that.
All right so moving on to Discord. I know it was more of a game company to start right you guys.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It was actually I think called Phoenix Guild for a week
before I joined then Hammer and Chisel after and then eventually Discord. Um yeah, I mean uh Jason, as I mentioned, Jason called me and uh we met we met up and he literally he wanted me to join as a engineer on a game. Um because the the company's mission was connecting people through games, which really was my personal mission. That's what I was trying to do with Guild Work. That's what I was trying to do with all the tools I made before. And like this was like the perfect opportunity to join a successful founder that's done something before that with awesome people that I can learn from. It's why I moved up to the Bay Area. Right. Right. and um he showed me this game and while the company's mission was connecting people

through games, the uh the idea was hey the the iPad just came out and it's like basically a computer like what if we made PC quality games on these mobile devices rather than like the traditional mobile games that were currently the norm at the time. And they showed me the game and it was a moa, like a a two-lane moa. Uh, and it looked kind of gorgeous and it ran and looked like a PC game. And I'm like, "Wow, you guys built this with five people. This is super I forget what the exact number was. It was but it was super impressive." Like I think at the time I was still very skeptical whether people want to sit on a tablet for that long,
but like the people were smart, the the mission was correct, and you know, that's those are the most important things. Um, so
it was the mobile boom then too. League.
Exactly. Like it was a mobile boom. It was a it was a great game. It was a great genre to be in. Um, but and luckily, but you know, then you join a startup and you're like you join for

some role you were hired for. But a startup there's no roles really, right? If it's really small, it's like whatever you're willing to do and learn and like pick your put your head on. So, like I spent the next year and a half working on this game, doing many roles from building the infrastructure to helping hire designers to brainstorming with Jason on the product. And the game was um honestly we're very proud of it. It was a critical success. People were like, I can't believe you made this. But it was a commercial failure like we didn't get enough players and the retention wasn't good enough. and we had to take a step back and that was like the moment where I I had like a reflection on everything I've been trying to build and what the company's true north was of to create a social platform for gaming because the the thesis was build a game use that and then make a platform off of it
and uh reflecting all the stuff that I built extra with guild work I kind of came to Jason like I think this is the core of what really enables um how people hang out around games and what we were trying to facilitate with the game with some of the stuff we built in and out of the game and uh he like got

excited, took a bet on it and like dis like kind of said let's go work on Discord and kind of pivoted the company to it fully many months later but it was really this bet of like oh there's this opportunity that we just saw that kind of felt counterintuitive in 2015 because a lot of it was PCcentric it wasn't just mobile and people in 2015 is like aren't it's like isn't desktop aren't computers like the thing of the past and we were like don't think so. So
well so you were how many year is it is it two years in at this point and how many people and well what's what was the state of the company
before the discord part I think the Jason and the team had already been added from maybe a year and a half or a year or so and then I think I I was part of the game for another another year and a half
three years in total. because I think I joined around early 2013. Uh and then um the earliest conversations about Discord

started in December 20 2020 2014. So
what would you say were like the biggest challenges then at that time you know over that whatever multi-month period to fully decide hey let's go after Discord 100%.
There's two answers to this question. There's the let's go try to build discord and then there's a let's focus on discord and we had this game studio we had people whose expertise was art and game design and it's not just platform building and that's what people were signed up to do and uh we that was the company's thesis that's what we raised Jason raised money on and we kept on that track at the same time we carved out me and a couple other people eventually more people to start building Discord starting like immediately in like January 2015 and a couple months in it became pretty I mean this is just good advice for anyone if you are that early and you don't have something that has product market fit yet doing it two things at

once with a small and scrappy team even if the company's pretty well funded is probably not focus is king focus is always king and once discord was coming to life and people were getting more excited about it and it felt like really believable that this is going to work. Even Jason made the really tough call um to really pivot the company towards it and part ways like with with the people that could not contribute to that part of the company. And to me that was very heartbreaking. I'm like at the time because Discord wasn't fully like like successful yet like we haven't get got the momentum in motion that we needed to really feel that way. I kind of was like oh man I hope like I just didn't cost people their jobs. It was like a really honestly it was a very painful moment for Jason to to make that call but defin but but as well as for me because I felt responsible for it. Luckily made 10 years later I they they all are probably happy that happened because of Discord and the uh and and the like their

ownership in it. So
what was the team size for the game and then did it go do you remember like what it went down from? I don't have the exact numbers unfortunately but it was like late late teens was the number of people we had okay between game development and engineers and I think it roughly cut about in half because of
really the people building the platform and the core fundamentals of the game were re could contribute to Discord.
Got it. Yeah. I was trying to get a sense of like how big of a company pivot it was. I mean I feel like that's very common. It felt massive at the time cuz like each individual that's their life livelihood and any decision like that is really tough.
That makes sense.
Um so when did you guys go from there to launch then? How long did it take?
It's really hard to think about all this type like but like our official launch date that we talk about is I think May 15th or 13th. It's one of those dates. Uh someone is nodding in the room so it's it's probably that. Um, so from the

first lines of code written in January to launch, it was about 5 months.
Jeez.
Yeah. So it was very much like I I was personally thinking about this problem for a long time. So I was like I was ready to go once we said let's do this.
Yeah.
And uh the the reason we called that our launch day was not because that was our launch day. Like the reason we called that our launch day is because that was the moment it started working in practice because uh until that point we had this functionally correct product roughly what we wanted to be like we were taking the opportunity to leverage WebRTC which was like the magic moment like you could use this in a browser back then that was like unthinkable right
um and we had this like the desktop client but like we could not even get our friends to use it more than the day we asked them to try it like they would just lapse and like if you can't get your friends that are literally the target demographic for your product to use it, then you probably don't have a product. And um we whittle that down largely to a couple of missing features,

but also the voice chat didn't work sometimes for one person. And if one person can't use it or having trouble, they're all going to go back to whatever they can rely on. Once we figured that out, we're like, "Okay, we can get them to do this, but like how do we actually get others to care?" And we that wasn't really happening. And we at a certain point we were like worried like maybe people don't care. Maybe our friends just use it because we kept nagging them. Right. Right.
Uh and the the reason the May timeline is our launch date is it was kind of to an extent a Hail Mary to be honest. It was like one I the night before I went to a friend of mine and someone that used guild work actually. Um that's why they were a friend that used guild work for their guild. I was like, "Hey, I kind of got you to use this thing, but no one else seems to care. Um, can you just go and like post on Reddit like like your thoughts and ask if anyone else has checked it out?" Kind of like an instigating kind of thing. And he he did it. Uh, and uh you can find that

post today on Reddit. It's I there's a comment for me after with typos it is that I'm embarrassed about. Um, but he did it the night before the night before, which probably not a great time to post because it's when people's going to sleep. Uh, it was on the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit. And I went to sleep, woke up, I looked at it, and it was still on the front page of that Reddit because it's not a that popular of a Reddit. And it but it was at the bottom with no replies. No one cared. And I'm like, and I'm just sitting there. I'm like, "Oh, no one cares." I'm like, "Did we just do all these decisions and no one cares?" And I did this another hail Mary here. I was like, "I'm gonna post." like, "Hey, I'm one of the creators of this. Here's a link with the what you know today is a Discord invite link. If you click this, you you can come talk to me and you can ask any questions about this product."
Oh, yeah.
Um, and it was directly into a voice channel. So, people click it and they hear my voice. Uh, and there's something magical hearing a human voice, especially in browser. It's like, what what just happened? And people would

were started clicking it and they're like and I say hi and they're they're like almost jump scared like whoa. And then like we start talking and and they start asking questions and they're like, "Wow, this is super cool." They go they go to back to the Reddit, they reply, "Oh, I just spoke to the devs. This is cool." Like an hour or two later, Jason woke up. He joined me. And we just sat there all day just convincing one by one
to try this product. And all of them would go back to the Reddit and they would uh just say like, "I had this conversation. This is dope. I'm gonna try it." And that day, I think we ended up with a hundred new users just from that. And then we woke up the next day and there was like more than that. And then the next day was more than that. And then it was like, "Oh crap, this is working." And it was like this moment of like, "Oh, thank God we were right." And it kind of goes to show you like you can do everything right and it's people still won't care. And like there's so many things that have to come together. So
is it a persistence that I'm trying to think is like obviously you already had some product market fit um but no one

really knew about the product. Yeah, but like sometimes you can be diluted with product market fit if you can con you can force your friends into using it or people that will just do it because you ask them to. It's really when people will start recommending to others, right? And uh I think there's a balance cuz like you can work on something for a while because you believe in it and like often that's how great things get created. But there's probably some point where you've grinded so long it actually probably isn't working. And the trick and if there was an answer to this, people would know the answer. The trick is to know when to stop and pivot. Um, and honestly that's the kind of point we were at. We were like, "Okay, maybe this is not working." Yeah.
And that last attempt at getting to people to care and getting people to understand and help shape our strategy cuz our our go to market strategy was literally shaped by the success of that moment because after that we we we
invite link.
Well, it's the invite link, but it was also how do we leverage super fans? Because if you think about what we did is we made people feel special
by actually caring and showing that we

care about the same things
to make to make them our evangelists like they would go and recruit others for us. Then we that's we didn't repeated that like we started doing AMAs. We started talking to them
respond and we had to take Jason's Twitter away at one point because he just could not stop replying to people right um and it wasn't scaling. We just kept doing that and then we repeated the same strategy with influencers with Twitch streamers of like what are your problems? How do we help you? And then they became evangelists. We created a Discord partner program. It was just like fully rolled into how we built our product and interacted with our users. Did you guys try to position against some of the you know like the team speaks the ventrrell Skypes or or was that is that not not a helpful strategy? It definitely worked for us early on like we we don't do this now because we are very much our own thing at this point right but at the time like one important thing was that we went talking to people like what are their actual pain points
obviously for venture teamspeak our
our vision was like hey these are

amazing primitives of how people hang out but they're hard to set up they cost money which most games games especially with freeto-play games being a thing people aren't spending on these things anymore how do we make sure we can make this more accessible easier to use That was definitely a point. But as we did this and uh we started to realize other pain points. So for example, we noticed with Skype people a lot of people were using Skype for League of Legends. Um because it's free to play that was the easiest way to jump in on get on voice chat with your friends. Um but a bunch of users would when they get triggered they would just do each other because Skype was peer-to-peer and like they would take down their internet. And then this would happen to streamers and then we re we realized oh because of our client to server architecture like you can only do discord and we have the capacity to eat the DOS. So we started positioning of like how we're less resource intensive, how we can protect you from a uh from DOS and that really like identifying these pain points that you might not know at the time of

building your product but you once you realize why people are choosing you as add additional benefit you just lean into that and we would often do that. So that's what caused us to lean into um some anti-positioning with teams because it also helped contextualize like what we are. I don't remember too. Was there a server concept at the time or was it just Yeah,
there was. Okay.
Funny enough, actually, we didn't have f We didn't have a friend list for the first year. We only have servers.
Yeah. That's why I was so confused early on. I remember cuz Skype it was always one just Yeah.
Yeah.
But we made a bet that the server primitive and hanging out in a voice channel and not calling was something magical to gaming.
That really wasn't. We didn't invent it. We just made it more mass market, right? and we doubled down and made it even better over the years, but we really believed that was a much more gaming centric experience than just calling someone. So,
how did sort of scaling technically work with that? I mean, I imagine that was

probably an engineering challenge that was pretty considerable given like I how did it inlect and how did did you guys run into any like massive scaling issues?
Um, for sure. Um, so I I think like I can tell you stories of uh me uh being the only backend engineer for the first like six months and me doing everything and like since we would position ourselves as anti-DOS for your computer and we are the target we would get DOS non-stop and I would constantly be running from lunch to the computer of like oh no they took down all the servers we got to we got to bring them back up because we didn't have like sophisticated systems back then.
Yeah. Um, so like there was a lot of like, hey, it's less of like can we add more machines? It's more like the ways users would find a way to abuse our systems, right?
Especially in the ways we promote that they couldn't, right? So you make a target on your back, people will try to do it.
Um,
so that was like the main thing. The other thing is like we we are primarily

a chat app in the west. How many chat apps in the west do you know that are successful businesses? And while we had a vision for how we might monetize game distribution, which we can get into later, like we were many years away from that and we had to build a very costefficient, highly scalable service that we could provide and not run out of money. And so making it fish and making it scalable was just a so like that was just built into it. It's more how people would abuse the systems. thing that came next which was super interesting is how people began to use Discord beyond what it was originally designed to do because originally it was designed to replace a a Skype call of ventrillo server. So I was like oh this is like oh we need to make sure it works for like 25 50 people and then like two months in like um these Reddits just started adopting us and like putting a thousand people in them and we're like oh it's kind of working but not really. Um, and to be honest, that's been like a multi-year journey because someone has been has been able to find a new new ceiling. Um,

the most recently would be Marvel Rivals or Mid Journey, which now have like 25 million people in their servers.
Gez,
how many chat products do you know they can have 25 million people in a chat room? So, it's actually a unique thing we have, but that's been the the thing that's been a from a technical perspective, one of the most challenging to scale. So
I mean one of the things I feel like our team always struggles with is like trying to understand
which decisions are like immutable or like that have
you know really long-term ramifications versus how you move fast um and get you know obviously you guys got discord out quite quickly but you had some architectural
decision. I can comment on that. I mean like we we are very fortunate like I don't like some of it is luck maybe some of it is intuition. A lot of technology we chose, we chose really early and it's still probably the best thing you can choose today. And it's really paid off for us. But early on, we actually made choices that were temporarily but intentionally. And you can actually go on our engineering blog post by me of like here's how we chose X, but we knew

we were going to move to Y and this is how we paved the path. And then there's posts like seven years later and like here's what we finally got to that final state of what we said we would do and it was like seven years apart. Um, one of our most famous blog posts is um how Discord stores billions of messages um because we store we allow allow messages to live forever for free. Um and there was a journey of how we built on top of MongoDB which we knew would not be how we would build Discord long term but it was so flexible at iterating quickly. We like this is what we're going to use for the first year or so and then we're going to move to Cassandra. Like we we knew that like we knew that was our path and at the time we also knew that sila even faster Cassandra variant was just nent. We're like oh by the time we run the road with Cassandra because we knew what his limitations would be uh with like Java and all this stuff. We knew that we were betting that Sila would be mature and today most of Discord runs on Silo. That was actually you can read a

blog post I think from like 2016 2017 of laying this out to where we are today and it's literally the road map. So um so it's it's just don't take oneway doors whenever you take a make a decision. Understand what the two-way is. What is your next step if you're making a technical compromise? We try to ingra in a lot of decisions we make today cuz like I want people to not be afraid to move quickly but don't but don't but be thoughtful while you do it like
yeah because it seems to me that like a database decision would be quite um foundational. Um, so, so that would almost feel like, oh, if you knew you were going to switch to Cassandra, then you shouldn't, you know, it's like that's a really hard, you know, thing to, especially after you have so many people. But that, but it obviously you guys were able to make that transition. It seems like,
but it goes to show like just like know what your pathways are, know what your options are. Don't like make a decision and not know how you might

um, move past that decision. And this is hard to do even today. people sometimes make decisions and they they they really move fast and they have make something impactful, but then we're like, "Oh, how do we actually roll this out beyond experiment? This is not cost-effective." Yeah.
Um um and then we get stuck in this loop of like, do we ship this even though we know it could be impactful and how do we do it? And
I think that's been the biggest trap sometimes for us. So,
were you involved in the fundraising stuff at all? Um I'm kind of curious like as you guys move to the next phase how that happened.
That's the that's the honestly the beauty and exciting part of my role as a co-founder has been largely in helping build the product and help partner with Jason to build the vision. Yeah.
Luckily he was uh he previously had an exit. So he was already like
much easier time fundraising and we we he already raised money for the game which we ultimately transformed into Discord. And once Discord was kind of taken off, I he handled all the

fundraising and it often was a much easier activity due to the time period and to the curve of the user chart. So I don't I didn't really have to participate in that.
I I was just thinking like maybe the narrative of like the you guys are growing user base fast, but that kind of what you mentioned like oh no one's going to monetize this stuff. Like how are you actually going to make money? And
I guess at the time it just maybe it was just so fast that people figured out.
I I mean we had we had a vision of how a plausible vision of how we were going to make money and we had the runway to get there which was we're like hey if we make an amazing product for people to hang out with friends like we do believe we have an opportunity to help those friends play different games uh and like discover more games. And at the time Steam had been so dominant.
Yeah. And we're like, hey, what if there was more competition? Like, so if you have the user base, you could compete.
Obviously, looking back on not us, but other people that is not a strategy that's worked out. Steam has an amazing product that's works really well.

Yeah.
But like we had a very plausible path on what we thought we would do and people believed in that. We believed in it and people believed in it. Um, funny enough, today we're showing that we can help people play more games with their friends just through our Quest product. So, we are good at that. It's just uh in a different way.
Well, I'm curious about that store product because I remember when that came out. I don't remember what year it was, but um you know, I had always been like, "Oh, obviously this is going to make sense." And it seemed like it was rolled out for a really short amount of time uh and then you guys pulled it out. Um what what happened there? like what why did you guys decide not to keep going as opposed to
I'll say it was both one of the toughest times at the company but also one of the most ones we're proud of and we still reference to this day and I give so much credit to Jason as well on like having the conviction to do this like we've been we were on this path to build this game store and in the beginning of 2018 on when January rolled over like we we

are large enough we believe this is the time to pivot not pivot but focus attention of the company to do this next stage and we like we're launching in nine months a full game store like from we're starting today to we're going to build all the APIs that are needed we're going to build all the infrastructure it is needed we're going to get all the partners and we're doing this in nine months it was a crazy thing we and I think at the time we were still subund okay
and it was a fun year we we did build it we built like all the things you need to run a game store all the things you need to power a game if it was on our game store. We actually did a test um in a country and it honestly did not look that good, but we were like, oh, like it's one country people are like, I'm not going to trust this as long as if it's not a global thing. So, we we then made some tweaks based on feedback and we did our official launch in October and it was it didn't go as we had planned. Like people were like we were what we were seeing is people largely

don't want to buy an alternative game store, one that they don't fully trust. And we were actually driving more sales probably to Steam because people like see something on our store and be like, "Oh, this is a dope game. We're going to go buy it on Steam."
That's like a discovery thing. Yeah.
And then at the same time, that was the year Fortnite took off, right? And Epic decided, "Oh, we're going to use this money to help game developers by lowering fees and competing in the storm space. We didn't have that level of capital because now exclusive ca exclusives came to the PC. They didn't exist before. So now it's like a capital war and we were like we don't have that.
Yeah.
We didn't have the right early results
and as painful as it was like how we been talking about it for years. This is where we're headed
right
Jason was like we just launched this. We just spent nine months basically focusing almost solely on this.
Yeah.
We have to shut it down and because this is not the path to success as tough as it is. And that's what we did. we like in like just a couple months we were like we're going to shut it all down and we're going to focus the company on

alternative path. Um that's what took us to really doubling down on Nitro and all the things which worked out phenomenally well. So
So what what was the I imagine the store was the sort of northstar for a long time.
Yeah. like after you shut it down, what was the was the new Northstar mainly like build continue to build this like the social component of things to be the greatest experience or like how did that
or going beyond games or Yeah. So I think this is the time where we had to really reflect because we already had Nitro at the time but it was like a very small like nent product uh product that like our super fans are using. But when we like double we like took a step back and we're like this thing is making a lot more money than we ever thought it would. And we like we were basically building a couple features into it once a year around the holidays and just like moving on. And we were like wow this is making this is covering a good chunk of our burn and like we don't really invest in it. What if this became the thing? Because like when we and when we talk to

our users like they were paying for it because Discord meant so much for to them and like Nitro was just not only a way to support us but also make Discord even better for themselves and they felt comfortable paying for it because Discord provides them so much value. And so we surveyed our users and talked to a lot of people and we're like clearly that we can probably monetize the chat product itself because our user base and the way it's their home. It's so important to them. Like if we make keep investing in the product and have a premium version of it, people will people will will will spend. And if we actually invest in the premium version and not just once a year, we can there's a lot more opportunity here. At the same time, we also got like a lot of of feedback and research from our users where like Discord is so much more than gaming for me. And to us like oh this is like the perfect the perfect opportunity. Not everyone will pay for Nitro, but if we had a larger TAM and more people were using Discord because we were seeing it for for open source communities for just people like running their families and all this random stuff, that's more people that could

convert to Nitro. So that's when we started our journey of how do we make Discord more approachable to more than gaming. Um this was right before the pandemic and shelter in place that just like happened as we were doing this and kind of just turbocharged everything. Um, but at the same time, and this is really important, like like having a clear vision of who your actual customer is, like what I just described is like, well, Discord is for everyone, right? Uh, even if you say for a certain type of need, it's it's like it sounds like it's for everyone. And that really really loses the focus of um who you're building for like, and it really makes it harder for the team, the a larger company as a whole to make localized decisions that are all aligned in one direction. And while we benefited greatly from shelter uh the pandemic and people playing more games and hang out online
like it really kind of distracted us quite a bit and like took us in many directions. Um um but Nitro stayed focused on the core and grew into a

pretty large business. So that was the one place we like truly stayed focused in a in a great way. Yeah, that that feels like a narrative that made that that jives with what I felt like was going on within Discord, but I never like knew because like in my mind I especially with all the web 3 stuff happening in, you know, post pandemic. It kind of felt like Discord was kind of like for a second just all over the place in terms of like everyone was using Discord for web 3 stuff, guild management, all that. and it seemed to have gotten away from games like and now it seems like it's pulled back
and yeah and there's an interesting thing there because we've always had this philosophy even during we're 100% gaming focused which is gaming is really usually first to a lot of behaviors and things that other people in industry adopt. So the best thing we could do is optimize our decision- making for gaming and what game people the people who play games need. Like we deeply understand them

because we are those customers.
Y
but we should never do that in a way that is alienating to other use cases because people who play games do other things. So if they could use Discord for slightly more like like than their gaming needs,
it actually makes the product more valuable to them.
And that's why all these things are
thrive on Discord. What the re what we really reflected on is during this period we just talked about we we didn't we we kind of flipped the script. We just like focused on what helps the use case that we were focusing on at the time. And what's important right now is people still use Discord for a lot more than gaming. But as a company about a year and a half ago we decided we're going back to our primary customer is gaming but we're still going to build in a way that's not alienating. And now we took that one click up because if you look at the way we position the way we talk about ourselves, you don't see the word gamer on our websites. You do you do see player hanging out,
but people who play games actually don't like being called gamers largely and actually that itself is alienating. So like the way we talk about ourselves is

inclusive of these other use cases, but our core focus is gaming.
Yeah. No, it's I I just have felt that as a whatever a player even like the refocus on.
How does it feel now as a user?
Well, yeah. No, I I I could feel that. I mean it's really that that's such a cool top down story because I could feel the shift I feel like and so like in terms of even your your focus as a as a company I I guess which leads us into kind of the evolution of Discord and what you're doing today. Um you guys recently um I I I know I spoke to um Joe Tong at TheoryCraft uh over at GDC and he had mentioned quests being um one of the highest ROI um activities that they had uh participated in um during uh their launch. So I'm curious sort of like how both Quest and SDK which are are new products for you guys. How did they come about? um what was the vision for them? What what are you kind of seeing in early phases of that?
Yeah, I mean great question and I think

it really goes back to like when when you know who your customers are and um things fall into perspective of how you might view them differently. Um so one major change for us as we decided we're going to refocus on gaming is also that our customer was not this time not just going to be the player because before it was largely the player except for the game store period. Um, and this time like what Discord has grown into is it's really the center of like you could think all stakeholders in the gaming ecosystem meet on Discord. Like people built their games on Discord, they talk with their fans on Discord. They literally build the super fan strategy on Discord similar to the way we did it when we built Discord ourselves. Um, and then players hang out with their friends. So like how do we think about the player and the developer side? And one thing that was clear to us as players um is like games are increasingly more social, more and more social. Like it's so cool to see more co-op games coming out as well, not just PvP games.

It's it's harder than ever to build a game. Um games are more crossplay. So like it's and like platforms are so fragmented.
It's like how do we like solve that problem? because we think because of our neutrality as like a platform that sits across everything, we were felt we were best positioned to solve that. And at the same time, while hopefully we can erase um like how long people play, how people play, how they make friends on games, how do people discover games? Because like right now it's like there's so many games being built, it's really hard for games to get like to get players to get reached and the games to be discovered. How can we also help with that? So like these two products came out of that. But the f uh the interesting part about uh Quest is actually it started as a way to help people stream more together because we wanted people to have more game time and help game developers.
Well, maybe walk people walk people through what Quest is. Uh
okay, great great question. So quest like the at the simplest form is it's a rewarded app product because it's very

building for players uh is like you have to be careful because like it's a it's an audience that really you have to know you can't you can't just advertise to them because like it it just doesn't work. So how do we create like a win-win-win scenario? Like we always talk about win-win-win at the company. Um like the SDK is win-winwin. The the Quest product is win-winwin. And what that means to us is like how do all parties involved get a benefit from this interaction? Like game developers gets more players, the player gets some kind of reward whether it's an in-game skin or a or a like currency on Discord for a decoration. And Discord obviously in this case makes money off promoting. Um so Quest is a reward product where a developer can uh can say they want to target certain types of players uh for their game. It could be um u returning to a game. It could be a brand new game and as a result for the player participating in that quest they get something whether it's in-game that that is what quest is at a whole currently we have play quests and and video quests. So play quest is great for hey play this

game for 15 minutes stream this game for 15 minutes to your friends and you get a reward. Um great for re-engagement or stuff like or you the game just launched. And then we have video quests which there's like watch this video before um and then you get the reward. And this is great for trailers like like early access announcements stuff like that where people can't play the game yet and um like people have found them to be remarkably great because like the audience is so engaged and they are the content is so direct what they actually care about they're also getting rewarded for it. So like every party involved has been like happy to the point where it is an advertising product. But if you go on a Reddit, people are often mad because a Quest did not target them because they actually wanted the reward. So people are like, "Why is this ad not targeting me?" And that that just means
we made a product, not just an ad, that people actually love
and like
and we could only build it this way because we knew which audiences we were serving and how game developers and

players want to interact together.
That's that's great. And then on the SDK front, um, you announced it at GDC. What, uh, well, I guess what is it and what does like uptake look like so far?
We're calling it the social SDK now. You used to have a different code name, which is a little bit cool, but not not a not a great name for external. Like our vision has been like we are really good at building social products and infrastructure. We just talked about the the scaling and all of that. These really hard problems. Mo most players spend time on on Discord, but not all. And the question is like, could we give our infrastructure to game developers to really power their social features? And we don't mean like an SDK like put Discord in your game. It's more like could we actually power your um your f uh your your friend list, your your your chat, your voice chat, like all these social components. Those are the main things. And these things need to work without Discord because like you can't gate it without you can't gate this

product on disc on a Discord account because not everyone uses Discord. But the beauty of the SDK is like for people who do use Discord if they link their account they bring Discord into the game and bridge the game and Discord. So like we're basically at no cost allowing use our infrastructure to power all the social features that some of them have to be operate high scale free of charge and then discord users can actually enrich their experience in game and then bridge the two. The beauty of this is now that people that meet in game and want to have durable relationships even if they don't meet on discord they can now talk and often when a game session ends people turn off the game and the social features of the game are gone until people come back. Now if the player one of the players is offline and the someone else is in game, they can message that player to play and their their discord their discord mobile app will basically pop up saying hey want to play and it really you know is increasing uh in early partners is really increasing game time both for

Discord and and uh and and the some of the developers. So it's been really exciting to see. We have a lot of uptake um and we have a lot of games in the pipeline. Uh we we announced some early early ones like PAX day and supervive uh and uh um 1047 split K2 is coming soon. There's many more. Um so we're very very excited about like just the interest in it.
I might be misremembering but wasn't there at some point in history you guys also were building a similarish SDK product. I'm just curious sort of what's what's different this time and it seems to be working now.
Yeah. So I think what you're remembering is this is like probably 2016. We were very new to the space like one we didn't have the credibility to do this at the time. It was called Gamebridge and the vision was very similar
but it was just a voice chat SDK. It was like can you use our voice chat tech in your game. The real problem we saw is like a lot of games didn't want to partner with us because we were seen as like a new entity potentially as someone

they don't understand yet. Who are we going to become? Who are we going to be? So it's the right place right time. Like people didn't people didn't know if they should trust us with this core infrastructure. At the same time, it wasn't we didn't have a clear vision of how this is nothing anything more than middleware because of what I just what powering voice chat in a game that's just middleware. It's not act it's it helps the game developer with getting a free thing, but it doesn't actually enrich the experience for both the game and Discord. And in this case, we're both providing infrastructure and middleware, but we're also enriching the experience for the players who want an enriched experience. So it's kind of and now we are known entity where really we just talked about where we're where all stakeholders meet. People know what we stand for and know whether they can trust us or not provide this both from a technical level but also who we are.
We're uh making a big bet on both first look onboarding people onto Discord and our cloud product onboarding people onto your SDK.
Absolutely.
There you go. So, no, it's it's it's

been fun to chat a lot more with your team and see what you guys I mean, we've been working in the developer space for a long time, which is, you know, different than the player space and I I think it's very welcome, you know, that more folks are coming in to help developers ship games cuz, you know, we we we were talking right before this podcast started about how hard making games is right now for for people. Um, and yeah, anybody that can help make that discovery process better, building process cheaper and faster, player experience better. It's
cheaper and faster. But also just moving the things away that actually don't differentiate games to be honest. Like
the creativity is what differentiates games. The unique experiences
often the social components are are solved problems. There's no reason to recreate them. There's no reason to do that.
And we we wake up every day trying to make the best social product. That's what we care about. And so how do we just um enable that?
Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts a bit, Stan. You know, what's in store for the next not just, you know, year or

two, but how you think about this vision for Discord for the next many years.
We're a bit more pragmatic uh about like where we want to go. We don't like we don't usually do like grandiose statements, but if you pull the thread of what we just talked about, like um we we are really today, I would argue we're very good at helping people hang out with their friends while playing games. And we can always make that more approachable, like innovate in ways how you do that. And we are going to continue doing that. But if you pull the thread on how we're also working with developers and like helping with game discovery and helping them build games, like we're like just at the beginning of that like in the next couple years, maybe some of it at the end of this year, you'll start seeing Discord appearing in much larger, more established games as a as a way that it connects in and out of the game. And that's really going to enable to not to really create out ofgame experiences of how the game shows up on Discord, how people can represent themselves, how people show up, how people interact with the game and their friends when they're on a game. Like I'm really excited about

all the opportunities that facilitates because people hang out, they care about their identity as players. How can we make that better? How we can make that easier? Um, I'm just excited for you all to see that. I can't really share the full details of it, but you'll see the beginnings of it and and then how do we double down on that? Like like um and then something that we really care about is how about helping developers? There's a lot of things that developers do today, building their communities on Discord, engaging with players, how do we partner with all the people in the ecosystem that are trying to make that easier and like work together with them to do that like such as like your first looks of the world, right? um really excited how we can make that all better and more seamless and again how can the SDK provide make that even better because it will be bridging between the game and Discord. Um and then we're just really excited about the Quest business and how it's going to evolve. Like you just mentioned Joe was like this is the best campaign they've ever run. Um before Quest was a product and we ran it as more of a incentive thing for

streaming on Discord. That's the same answer we got. And it just goes to show that we're we have something that's already magical and just how it's going to expand, how we can help. Um like today, you see we're we're working with a lot of game large game publishers and some smaller ones. The the true north is how we make this available to all game developers, no matter what size, and just make it really good at bringing the right games to the right people in a way that that makes sense for each type of game developer. And I'm just it's going to be a journey to get there, but I'm so excited about it because it's just so tough to find the right people to play your games.
Yeah. No, it's good. I wonder it's like almost like a always it almost feels like there's some reincarnation of the Steam idea. I not in the same obviously not in the same form factor but um seems like going back to you know game bridge and then also like you guys obviously launched that side of things but

I mean if you think it's right place right time we have no desire to be a distribution business like we are we are not going to do that again
but some of the things we mentioned like while trying to be a distribution business we realized we could we actually are really good at pointing people at content they care about uh and so like how can we help really bridge that and then the the SDK is the same thing. Right place, right time. Like we have the infrastructure. We have we have a deeper understanding what our users care about, what developers care about. Like we joke about this internally. We're just like rewinded back six years. But that's just kind of life is just a journey of events that kind of make up the current moment. And like just because it's possible today doesn't mean it was possible before. And we're really excited that some of the things we dreamed of back then are possible now.
Makes sense. All right. So, uh moving on to the lightning round. We'll start with uh what is something you consumed recently that you really like? Could be like media or book or like that.
Uh I beat Blueprints yesterday. Um which everyone was like, "This is a great game." I normally don't I'll be honest,

in general, I don't like Rogue Lights, but in in the last two weeks I've played multiple. Uh so maybe I'm like on a new kick. Um but Blueprints was a very unique experience that like I've definitely told other friends to play. Uh,
what about something outside games?
I'll be honest, I'm playing a lot more games recently because we're like integrating games. So, I'm like, I got to play more games.
I really understand. Um,
it's nothing else.
I got to watch shows and stuff, but it's not worth it. Games like the most top of mind thing right now to be honest. So,
amazing.
Do you have a uh productivity hack uh that you recommend? I don't know if it's it's a real productivity hack, but it's something that's like um I just like started doing I like every every Sunday night I just lay out a to-do list for the week. I just like look at the week and I plan for it. Um this is more maybe like when you have a lot of going on. Uh at certain point I'm like I don't know what I need to make sure I get done this week because just so much. So now I just every night I just every Sunday night I

just sit down and like this is my plan for the week and it really helps focus me and like say no to other things.
Do you literally do it on like paper or is there any tools you use?
Uh I used to use uh just like to-do apps but uh now that I have an executive assistant who's in the room with me uh we just use a sauna because that way sometimes I can assign some of them to him.
Yeah.
Most of them are for me though. Uh, so
what about the opposite? Is there is there sort of a best way for you to relax and wind down a bit?
Best way for me to relax. I mean, I'm always thinking and always working. The best way I found to relax is to force myself to actually go on a vacation and then wait two days until I finally disconnect. Uh, so
um, so like I and I'm one of those people that actually hates the idea of going on a vacation cuz I'm like, "Oh, all this that I'm not going to finish." Um but uh I kind of forced myself to disconnect and after two days.

All right. Biggest lesson from a mentor. I think you mentioned you had a coach before. Uh
yeah.
Anything? Yeah.
I still have a coach. I mean I don't know if this is the biggest lesson from a from a from a mentor coach thing. Like the the the the toughest thing for me was the core. I was like I was a builder. I was an IC. But I was like I always like I'm in a role that like is running large teams and like not knowing whether I would be good at that. even though in retrospect running large guilds is not that different in video games. Um but um doing 360s with this coach and help helping him help me think through what I was good at, what I was bad at, what people valued, how I might approach things was a really fundamentally important thing. The reason that was important is one thing I've done that actually I would recommend any founder do especially with imposter syndrome which a lot of founders have especially technical founders don't get into your own head find peers to talk to and ask what their problems are because you might find that one it

gives you some confidence like oh I've dealt with some of these problems and I did them well and I can help this person or they might help you and you just start realizing like what you're good at what you're not good at and it really helps build that confidence in like being in a role that might not have the same feedback loop loop as like writing code or getting a game prototype. Uh, and that's been important. I'll tag on to that. Uh, I forget who said this to me. They were like a executive at some big social media company, but I was talking about imposter syndrome in like in the role. This was like two years in. So, this is before like Discord was that big. And I was like, I just always worried that I'm doing the wrong things and I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. And they said to me, it's like, you are where you are now because of the decisions you have made and you've made them because of the unique way you look at the world and that's already valuable. Like don't take that for granted.
And that helped me doubt my decisions a little less and feel more confidence in saying things and saying no to things

that someone who looks like they have more experience than me might say because normally I would just defer to them. So that was very valuable.
Um, and we always end with this cornerstone question. If you could go back, you know, in this case the founding of really kind of that discord, you know, product idea and give yourself one piece of advice, what would that be?
Uh, this is like a this is a tricky question because what I will say is like my immediate reaction is like don't get distracted during co or during shelter. But I hesitate to say that because like what I said earlier because like those events are probably what shaped where we are now. And there's no guarantee that we'd be in a better place if we didn't go through those moments. So like that's what I'd want to say, but I'm not sure I would say it.
Right.
Awesome. Well, uh it's a it's an amazing success story. Uh, I think millions and millions of people have benefited from from the Discord product. Uh, and uh,

yeah, I'm really, I mean, just as a fan, like as a personal fan, uh, excited to see what you guys do next. So, thank you. Thank you for for joining us.
Awesome.
Thanks a lot, Dan.
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. And, uh, have a great rest of your day.