The Real Reason Why Discord Replaced Their Beloved CEO

[Music] Chris, you want to talk about Discord? Speaking more of ads, right? So, Jason Citroen is stepping down as CEO of Discord after 13 years. I did forget that he was actually the CEO of Hammer and Chisel, which was another MOA failure in gaming. I forgot about that. So, they have appointed this guy uh Humam Sakini. He's a former Activision Blizzard vice chairman as new CEO. Citroen was known for starting open faint and building discord from an earlier venture as I said on hammer and chisel. He has basically guided this company to over 200 million active users and they tried to expand beyond gaming and go broad more broad than also try to monetize and try to distribute games. They've done tried a lot of different bucket things in order to generate revenue over the years but have actually failed. So, so just to be clear, right, Zucchini, this is what's so crazy. He

helped scale King's operating income at the time with a lot of changes in in terms of how they delivered their game. He worked on Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, and he's expected to lead Discord to this next growth phase, right? They say that they have no plans for his IPO, which is complete [ __ ] but they are basically hiring Zakini as a step towards that possibility. plans because Jason came out in an interview and said like obviously this is what it means but there's no immediate plans. It's all this legal [ __ ] like you know they just can't talk about it. Right. Right. Okay. So here's my take on this really quick. So this is a [ __ ] coup to top right ultimately. Right. So Hamom is a [ __ ] animal. Right. Like he is ex McKenzie. He's trained by the best of the best Bobby Cotch, right? He's replacing this entrepreneur founder to help drive monetization and microtransactions and every other [ __ ] thing they could do to make money on this company in order to do make an IPO. Right? Period. End of

sentence. This is that's it. Right? And so this guy is out because he spent the last 15 years building an amazing product, amazing product. I don't want to discount that at all. But he never was able to actually generate revenue. Right? So this has been a money losing money pit for years and years. They have raised almost a billion dollars of funding over the years. Like a billion, right? The last valuation was $15 billion. The investors are basically saying enough is enough. We need to make some [ __ ] money and we need an exit, right? This is the type of [ __ ] that these [ __ ] VCs are after, right? We want a [ __ ] exit. 15 bill, you know, and that's it. And so they just hired this guy because they are generating profits. And so as we talked about a few weeks ago, they are starting to do advertising, which is something that this guy as well as like Bachinsky or whatever the guy's name from Roblox is, they were adamantly against. Yeah. Ads from the very beginning, right? That

this is never happening on our platform. Twitch, same thing, right? But as Eric Seafford once said and continues to say and one of the only things that guy has gotten right, no, I'm just kidding. Is everything is a [ __ ] ad network when you run out of ideas on something else to do to make money, right? And so yes, this is an ad network and that's what it should have been all along and now they have the right guy to fight the good fight, I suppose. Yeah. No, I I hear you. It is actually Did you I use it a lot more on, you know, because I'm staring at my screen all day on my computer. I use a Mac and I was starting to see ads pop up. I guess I was in some sort of testing group. So, Last of Us, you know, for the show popped up on my computer. It was really cool. I was like, "Oh, look at this. I'm in the test group." Super excited. And then, you know, like I said earlier, mobile's coming in June. Actually, they had a press kit that went out. They had a really cool kind of, you know, video using Brawl Stars, our favorite Brawl Stars. And so I think that this is something that everyone, every marketer

is looking for a channel. Where else? Because all of you, you know, money types and all Phil does is yell at me and say, "Jen, how do you attribute anything here?" I heard that this the pilot was completely sold out. Like within a week or not even that long of them announcing the pilot, everyone was like, "I want in. I can get my ad in front of gamers who love this stuff. I can target like specific kinds of other competitive games. So, my prediction is it's going to be insanely expensive, but hopefully they've got the hooks in place where, you know, you're going to be able to go whale hunting like the old days. So, I'm excited about this. Let's see what happens in June. I know that Jules is over there from EA. I don't know. She is a rockstar. She's the CRO. So, I think Julie Yes. Yes. CF CRO. CRO. She joined a couple months ago. So you've got like an advertising gaming ninja. She left Unity to go here.

And so I'm excited for them. I want to see what happens. Yeah, this is hugely important. I mean, we talk about ads all the time. We need more inventory. Like mobile lives or dies on advertising, which we'll talk about later. And not only that, like Discord has these quests features, which is very similar to a lot of what's happening in the web 3 meta, which I know everyone's really excited about, but how can I get more engagement through an ad? You know, how can I reactivate people? How can I give them currencies or resources? Like a bunch of people have been playing with this. You know, if you're familiar with Pride Gaming, they've done a lot of this kind of giveaway type stuff. But the type of ad units you can have on Discord are really unique and really engaging. And I think the thing that's going to be fantastic for Discord is that they have a lot of data, right? They know what your preferences are when it comes to games. The only thing they don't have is your spending profile, which is the most important thing when it comes to targeting is where you're spending money. But I think if they're still able to get what Discord servers you're on, I think there's an opportunity here for some pretty good targeting. Let's see. I mean, it was Reddit's coming along as well. We don't often talk about Reddit.

It's the same idea. Back in the day, you know, when I've tested Reddit, it's just so expensive. It was never worth it in terms of rorowass. However, if they can figure that out and get better, they IPOed and they are on fire. When you search on Google and everyone searches now and says on Reddit, so much of the traffic is coming from Google's change in search. That's another one. If they can get the CPMs and CPIs down, another channel for people to check out. I just I haven't seen it resonate yet. This was really disappointing to me because Jason, the founder, being able to take this company to IPO, I think would have given gaming a seat at the tech table. So, right now you've got, you know, Airbnb, Facebook, like a lot of these tech companies still have their founder CEOs with them. Stripe, you know, the Stripe brothers is another example. And I thought this was an opportunity for us to get a seat at that table as one of these influential techies. And not only that, it's becoming more and more important when we think about public policy. like these guys are flexing

their public policy muscles more and more frequently and I think us having a seat at that table was really important. The fact we're not going to have that I think is really disappointing. Like we still don't have I think a good figurehead for this industry in the same way that that Zach or the Coulson brothers are for their respective industries. Like Bobby Kodc not a founder but not someone I think he wanted to be the head of the industry. Chip Hawkins left though you know he doesn't count. David Lazuki from Roblox he's a founder but he doesn't give a [ __ ] about gaming. didn't start the company for gaming to begin with. Physicists, education, experiences. Remember, they didn't even they don't even call it games anymore, right? On Roblox, it's experiences. And of course, it's tied up in all the app store rules, but I don't think they were against that anyways. I don't think they've ever cared about gaming. And then, of course, we have Gabe, right? Gabe should be our figurehead. Gabe should be the one going out and batting for us and hanging out with all these techies. By the end of the day, he's just in New Zealand hanging out on his yacht. And so, I'm still waiting for us to figure out how we're going to get to seat the table and have more influence broadly. But like we're excluded from all these techy conversations. Like Silicon Valley

exists in a different sphere than we do. And I'm just bummed because Jason was a real one, right? As you mentioned, Eric, like he was into MOBAs. He was launching MOA studios left and right and pivoted Discord and then repivoted Discord back to gaming, right? And so I'm just I'm really bummed because we continue to kind of not have I think a good figurehead and have more influence, I would say, in culture and policy. What about Tim? Yeah, I don't think they go public with Tim Sweeney at the helm. That's just Oh, you think they're going to bring in someone new, Mr. Crest? If they ever go public? Yeah. Oh, of course they're going to go public. They got the Disney C. He is definitely not a CEO of a publicly traded company. Like, yeah. Yeah. I think that what we're seeing is the market wants more business operators for these game companies that have traditionally been very creativeled. And I think just in general, you're starting to see founders be moved aside into the aloha suite of the board and the advisor slot for operators to come in and really

run the things. I don't know, that's what I feels like is going on in the space, but Chris, you would know more than me just in general, right? I mean, didn't we talk about this with Supercell when they brought in the CFO who was the indicator that they wanted to go and be a grown-up company? Look, I'm very flippant and very obnoxious about these type of things and I'm just I'm half joking really. Like I think it's sad that Jason's not can't bring this thing to the light, right? Like you lose a lot when you get rid of these founders that you lose the core of what the companies are, but when you become a publicly traded company, it is a completely different skill set required and a different mindset even. [Music]