How Discord stretched its gamer roots to become the chat app for 150 million users (and a LinkedIn Top Startup)

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit France last year, university instructor Florent Le Néchet decided to implement remote instruction via Zoom and Microsoft Teams. His students, however, had a different idea.?

“Let’s try Discord!” they told him.?

Le Néchet was flabbergasted at first. To his mind, Discord was just a rogue chat service for video gamers and e-sports enthusiasts. “My teenage nephews use it all the time,” he says with a grimace. “I never imagined I’d use it for a class.”

But in the chaotic teaching conditions of 2020, Le Néchet was willing to try anything to keep his students engaged. To his surprise, Discord mostly came through. Gamer-built features -- such as the ability to spin up multiple breakout rooms in a hurry -- proved well-suited for the more scholarly demands of analyzing urban policy.?

Across the world, Discord is winning engagement from people like Le Néchet. While game-related chatter still accounts for a substantial majority of the chat service’s activity, other popular topics range from philosophy to Frisbees. All told, six-year-old Discord now has 150 million active users, comparable to Twitter’s total at the same stage in its history, in 2012.

Discord debuts this month at No. 4 on LinkedIn’s annual list of the top 50 U.S. startups, competing nimbly in a crowded field. “There are a bunch of ways [aside from Discord] to do video, voice and text chat,” says 37-year-old co-founder and chief executive Jason Citron. “But what makes Discord really special is that it’s an invite-only place where you can bring your friends together.”?

“Discord feels like a cafe or bar or dorm room,” Citron maintains. A huge swath of Discord’s users are in the 14-25 age band, with 80% of them outside the United States. For them, the site’s well-engineered whimsy suits them just fine. Animated mascots like Nelly, a robot hamster, are Discord mainstays. During our video interview (on Discord, of course), Citron couldn't resist showing off plush-toy versions that he keeps within a few feet of his desk.

Supremely efficient, Discord has just 570 employees, yet this past March it attracted acquisition overtures topping $10 billion from suitors including Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn). Choosing to walk away, Discord continues to thrive with private venture support. As Bloomberg reported this month, the company raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation.?

Not everything is going Discord’s way. Keeping the platform free of hate speech and potentially criminal conduct is “a very hard problem,” Citron concedes. Discord’s image was sullied in 2017, when white supremacists associated with violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., were found to have shared their schemes on Discord.

Since then, Discord has repeatedly expanded its trust and safety team. (An additional crew in Amsterdam will start work soon.) The company has ramped up the role of moderators on prominent meeting points, or servers, with powers that include kicking out the most problematic users. Conversations on Discord are “private but not secret,” Citron says, adding that the company’s safety team is empowered to “identify bad actors and get them off the platform.”???

Meanwhile, Discord’s monetization strategy is still in flux. The company doesn’t accept ads on its free-to-use platform, based on the belief that an advertising focus wouldn’t benefit the user experience.?

So Discord relies on other sources -- chiefly selling premium services such as better video capacity and a huge library of whacky emojis to millions of its most ardent users. (Why finish a message with a smiley face when you can dazzle everyone with a spinning frog?) Other revenue ideas may follow, Citron says. The startup wasn’t profitable in 2020 but its revenue tripled that year, to $135 million.

Educated in Florida in the 1990s, Citron battled asthma that crimped his ability to play outdoor sports with other children. He found his sanctuary at age eight playing Super Mario Brothers, which he later recalled as “the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.” The gamer’s journey had begun.

Once he earned a digital design degree from Florida’s Full Sail University in 2004, Citron moved to California and tried his luck as a for-hire game designer. In 2011, at age 26, he scored his first big win, selling for $104 million a mobile-game platform that he had built.?

Citron was wealthy enough to try building ambitious games of his own, but he couldn’t quite engineer a hit. In 2015, he made what he now describes as “the hardest decision I ever had to make.” He laid off eight of the 20 people at his tiny game company, Hammer & Chisel, and decided to bet everything on the team’s messaging service -- which had a mere 10 active users at the time.

“We knew there were a lot of rough edges and missing features,” Citron recalls. “But we could tell it would grow up to be something great.” Their goal: a chat and voice-based system that all gamers could use to communicate, no matter what they were playing.?

(If you’re thinking this echoes the career journey of Slack founder and unsuccessful game designer Stewart Butterfield, you’re absolutely right.)

Bonfire seemed like a nice name for the new venture, but other businesses had already claimed it. So Citron and cofounder Stan Vishnevskiy veered in a different direction. Steeped in gamers’ irony, they decided that if this new service would make gamer-to-gamer contact more enjoyable, they should pick a name that signaled the opposite. Thus, Discord.

Discord’s early users were hard-core gamers who went by names such as Lirik and Gold Glove. Dissatisfied with Skype’s clunkier service, they rapidly gravitated to this new platform with smooth, simple interfaces -- and refreshingly fast connections. A year after launch, in 2016, Discord’s user count had rocketed to more than 1 million.?

Since then Discord has perfected a blend of cutting-edge engineering and a jaunty tone that keeps users’ endorphins running. Click around on the site, and you’ll eventually meet a lonely little monster called Wumpus. There’s digital confetti if you want -- or even if it catches you by surprise.?

Overall, Discord’s designers get a lot of freedom to use what Citron calls “the bedazzling pen,” so long as new flourishes help define the platform as reliable, safe and fun. A sign of their success: Verto Analytics in January calculated that the average Discord user spends 282 minutes a month on the site -- more than any social site except Facebook.

“We’re growing at an explosive pace at every part of our organization,” adds Heather Sullivan, Discord’s chief people officer. Roles such as engineering, product, data science and analytics are seeing especially rapid growth, she adds.?

Unlike most social sites, Discord doesn’t rely on a central news feed that blasts algorithmically chosen content at users. Instead, people with like-minded interests can connect on what are essentially private pages, or “servers,” to chat about whatever they choose. That means hardly anything goes viral. Meanwhile, all sorts of niche communities -- ranging from Boy Scout troupes to open-source software developers -- enjoy their own private spaces.

Discord’s growth curve is best understood through the user journey of people like Sabrina Wong. Four years ago, she was a college student, running the e-sports club at the University of California, Riverside. Discord became her No. 1 way of keeping up with gamer friends everywhere from New York to China.?

Now, Wong is working full-time as a college-relations specialist at Evil Geniuses, a West Coast e-sports organization. It’s much more of a “grown-up job,” and one of her key projects is to provide career coaching to the next generation of college students. That calls for a webinar tool that lets her slide easily from voice to text, while pulling up individual resumes. Her choice: Discord.

Discord wasn’t built to be a workplace productivity tool. Even so, users such as Debbie O’Brien, a developer advocate at software-tools company Bit, say that in the past year, Discord has become surprisingly useful as a way of connecting far-flung colleagues in the current work-from-anywhere environment.?

One of O’Brien’s favorite features, which she highlights in this blog post, is the ability to set up always accessible voice channels that approximate the way people would interact if they were all in the same place. Her company favors names like “Big Meeting Room.” Discord itself is experimenting with something similar, using names such as “Water cooler” and “Lunchroom.”?

What’s next for Discord? “I have a very long list of things we haven’t done yet,” Citron confides. “Remember, my cofounder Stan and I are both product engineers at heart. We probably have a multi-year roadmap right now. That’s the beauty of being in a consumer business.?

“You know, belonging and friendship is a fundamental human need," Citron adds. "That’s never going to change. There’s just so much to do.”