62 | FORBES ASIA AUGUST 2017
The tantalizing prospect of becoming a leading pick-and-
shovel vendor to the gaming gold rush has helped Citron, 32,
and cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, 28, raise near-
ly $100 million from a list of marquee venture investors that
also includes Spark Capital and Index Ventures. The compa-
ny won’t disclose revenue, which comes mostly from $4.99
monthly subscriptions for extra features like animated avatars,
custom emojis and larger file-upload limits. But a $50 million
cash infusion in June valued Discord, which has just 65 em-
ployees, at about $770 million. Investors know gaming fans are
a lucrative audience. Industry revenue, which includes PC and
mobile games, will top $94 billion this year, according to New-
zoo. The firm estimates that growth will continue as PC gam-
ers, already at 1.2 billion globally, reach 1.4 billion in 2020.
Citron and Vishnevskiy began their gaming careers as
5-year-olds playing Nintendo on Long Island and in Los An-
geles, respectively. They were programming for money by their
teenage years and further honed their computer skills in col-
lege—Citron at Full Sail University in Florida and Vishnevs-
kiy at Cal State Northridge. After graduating, Citron worked
for gaming studios for a few years before launching his own
Tetris-like game on the day Apple’s App Store opened. When
he couldn’t monetize the game, he took the social features he
had built and turned them into a service for game developers.
He expanded the company, OpenFeint, to 100 employees and
sold it to the Japanese media company GREE for $104 million
in 2011. Citron left a few months later and, after unwinding
through three straight weeks of playing Final Fantasy IV, de-
cided his work wasn’t done. “I had this itch, and still have the
itch, to build something enduring and important,” Citron says.
At the time, iPads were booming in popularity, and Cit-
ron thought Apple’s tablet could become the next blockbuster
device for gamers. He founded his next company, Hammer &
Chisel, in 2012 to develop a multiplayer iPad game, recruiting
Vishnevskiy, who had worked at GREE. The game won acco-
lades for its design, but when it struggled to gain an audience,
Vishnevskiy pushed Citron to consider an idea he had shelved:
a text and voice chat service for gamers. Citron was intrigued
and assigned half his 18-person staff to work on what would
become Discord. Eventually, Citron made the wrenching deci-
sion to stop development of his iPad game—and lay off about
half the workers—to focus on Discord. “It wasn’t even clear
Discord was going to work, but I knew we couldn’t do two
things at once,” he says.
(Interestingly, Slack, which is worth an estimated $9 bil-
lion, also emerged from a failed gaming experiment: It was
developed as an incidental internal tool for a team of coders
building a computer game that was later scrapped.)
Discord launched two years ago into a market dominat-
ed by a handful of rival services. But most had failed to inno-
vate or adapt to rapidly changing gaming behavior, leaving
them vulnerable to an upstart with a better mousetrap, says
Lauren Foye, an analyst at Juniper Research. Discord seized
the opportunity with a more seamless experience. While most
rival apps have to be installed, Discord can run inside a Web
browser, meaning users need only click an invite link and cre-
ate a user name to get started. (Players who stick with Dis-
cord typically install the desktop version later for better per-
formance.) Discord also caused fewer game-play delays than
competitors, eliminated the typical monthly usage fee and re-
moved the need for gamers to toggle between programs. “The
social group moves from a fragmented messaging experience
with TeamSpeak and maybe WhatsApp or Messenger, and
then they just all use Discord,” Citron says. “There’s no waiting
to call into chats. It’s like an always-on conference call.” Gam-
ers also appreciate its security, which protects their IP address-
es and prevents them from getting kicked offline. Meanwhile,
Millennials are drawn to Discord’s visual messaging, which
supports GIFs and graphics tied to internet memes.
Discord’s first spurt of users followed a fan’s rave review on
Reddit. Citron and Vishnevskiy shared links to invite users to
the ensuing discussion thread, and usage took off. The found-
ers still message with users every day, and Citron, who is
more extroverted than Vishnevskiy, is known to spend hours
at gaming events like TwitchCon handing out swag.
Meanwhile, a customer-care team of 15 employees
and 20 contractors works to prevent abuse and as-
sist—and banter with—users. “It’s a lot of little subtle
things that make a big difference,” Citron says.
For now, Discord’s moneymaking potential is
hemmed in by the founders’ promises to users: The core ser-
vice will remain free, and they won’t run ads or sell user data.
And as the company grows, the monthly subscriptions for
extra services aren’t likely to pay the bills. But Nabeel Hyatt, a
partner at Spark Capital, says Discord’s user base should lend
itself to plenty of monetization opportunities over time. Sell-
ing games and merchandise could be an option, analysts say.
The company may also sell tools and services to developers
who create games with Discord’s chat features and come up
with bots for the service.
Discord is already being used by nongamers inside some
businesses, and some analysts see another potential oppor-
tunity there. “Discord very much has its roots in gaming, but
you could see it branch out more broadly,” Juniper’s Foye says.
Citron and Vishnevskiy say they prefer to remain firm-
ly grounded in the fantasy world of games. They’ve built Dis-
cord’s headquarters into a child’s idea of what a workplace
should be. There’s a handful of arcade games lining the en-
trance, and meeting rooms equipped with comfy recliners,
antiquated televisions and gaming consoles could easily dou-
ble as playrooms. Groups of couches offer seating for monthly
game nights. Plushies, particularly Pokémon, decorate desks.
“That’s why Stan and I wake up every day and do this,” Citron
says. “Bringing people together around games is really the
lightning rod we connect to.” And who’s to say fun and games
can’t turn into real profits?Technology DISCORD
“That’s why Stan and I do this. Bringing
people together around games is really
the lightning rod we connect to.”
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