 Welcome Stan. Thank you for having me. This is wild. This is so great I'm so delighted that Slush enabled me to convince Stan to leave the Bay Area and join us here in Helsinki On stage to chat about the journey of being the co-founder of Discord How many of you folks in the audience use Discord just before we start are familiar with Discord? It's quite a bit of people. It was also kind of cool yesterday. I was tweeted at Are you still allowed to say that? Whoever's operating the lasers is like sitting on Discord at the same time. It was kind of cool All right. No wonder it's doing so well Well cool, so really happy to have you. I think one of the most interesting aspects to talk about I mean Discord today has 150 million active users on a monthly basis It has 900 folks working there I think 75% plus of the folks are overseas who use Discord It was a journey to get to Discord Yeah, so it would be great to start off with how you became co-founder of Discord how this all came about Yeah, it's kind of a wild journey like some of you may not know this but Discord We're like is a Combination of pivots to be honest and originally Discord came out of a company called hammer and chisel which was actually originally founded by my co-founder Jason and it was originally set up as like a right when the iPad came out and the thesis was Like how do we connect more people around games and like how do we bring like PC quality games to the iPad? and it was it was like and I wasn't juice Jason through like Mutual friend and they showed me what they were working on and it was kind of really impressive but they got done on an iPad with a very tiny team and I just joined the company because it was kind of similar to my mission like playing games with people and connecting It's like really quarter my life and like how I grew up and I've always been trying to make that easier for people So I joined The game was extremely fun to work on and like all the challenges of getting all that working on on an iPad When you joined hammer and chisel, did you think that the iPad was a very good platform for gaming or was it more the challenge that? Yeah, I'll be honest I was skeptical But the team was really cool and it was really impressive and like the mission really is what really when people joining early You care more about the mission than the individuals and the exact thing because it's a windy road right us, right? But but yeah, like though we worked on the game It was a critical success, but a commercial failure of making hit games It's hard and the company's thesis was build this really successful game that has really social and then take that social layer and like use it to build more games and distribute more games and Sorry Stan, I'm not gonna let you go just just yet So you said it was a critical it critically acclaimed but not a success Why wasn't it a success? Well, what were the reasons that you think it it failed from a commercial standpoint? Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot of reasons one it was an iPad game not an iPhone game Yeah, but I think it was also like ahead of its time on some level Today you see some of our games like the game was originally like a mobile kind of like League of Legends for for iPad Yeah, you've seen since some of those games be successful But really they started being successful more like like in 2018 as a more like more kind of hardcore games It became more viable on on mobile. So maybe we're just ahead of our time. Okay Yeah, so doesn't help time it, you know timing is so helpful that yeah, you just got to nail that Okay, sorry for the interruption. Please carry on. Yeah. Yeah, so the thesis was we could we could do this and build a social layer and As we were trying to figure out what to do next like different types of games or what else I like kind of took that moment I'm gonna be honest like to shoot my shot basically because like I've been really obsessed with building social products for people Who play games and connecting them and I kind of went to Jason and I kind of pitched them on like Hey, we could probably skip building this game because if the thing is like build like a social platform that for people who play games The like there's there's an opportunity here But there's a catch. I was like if it's 2015. It's probably gonna be desktop first to start and Like it was kind of like What are you saying in 2015 everything is mobile? Yeah, but like the reality is like as someone who use these products for a long time myself, I think it was like really clear like there was like Something missing the products haven't really been updated in like almost 15 years like no one's really making them better like you have to go and like People were like having to go and like rent like servers and sharing IP addresses, right? And this art was just in excess of this type of hanging out was just inaccessible and organizing and then people were like sharing the SMS numbers with people online and like in 2015 that felt unacceptable and the other observation was like WebRTC at the time was really taking its stride and becoming viable to build on top of and I was like And you could just make it work every year you can make it one click on a browser like that would be magical like it's like it was a unique opportunity to effectively disrupt a very saturated market just by actually being able to next to 10x and make this really cohesive beautiful experience So yeah, and I mean talking to Jason and talking to you a lot of the youth's fun parts Developing the best Relationships that you had were online playing games. Yeah, so the the social component of Gameplay around it wasn't that wasn't that different from the actual playing of the game. It was totally integrated Yeah, I mean because like people play games to like a lot of people just do like some just to on wine But a lot to build relationships like I grew up in LA in like in Los Angeles and like in the Valley far away from all My friends and like getting online very young like getting on IRC getting on like all yeah Like MMORPGs was just a way to connect with people that couldn't and that like really built like really long-term Relationships for me. Some of those people literally work at discord today. Just that I met like 25 years ago on these online games Like making that easier for everyone because it's just the place to hang out in games Or just a vehicle for that and how was it pitching Jason that this should be a radically different? Pivot yeah, well the beauty was it was still aligned to the mission It was the same connecting people through games. Yeah, it's still a potentially distribute that didn't really work out of us later So that's like a different pivot, but yes, we'll get to that Yeah, we can get to that but at the end of the day like the real tricky part was Okay Like he had to go and like do his own research to really validate what I was kind of telling him But the tricky part was like it's desktop like we had to convince ourselves like how it also work on mobile and like to really Honestly even tell the board this is what we want to do But luckily the board invested in the people not the idea because like there's so many pivots along the way But he did come back like after a couple days. I think of researching He's like this just feels like if you ask is that does this need to exist? Like it feels like it has to exist and he's like, okay, just go start working on it So cool and so we're doing we were hearing from Ricardo Zaccone earlier who was talking about how essentially At before it was king it was my display or they basically divvied up the team Part of the team was doing the sort of tactical stuff to stay alive And then there were all these SWAT teams working on on new ventures which ended up being candy crush Is that akin to what happened or you weren't in that position like you needed to a radical pivot no matter what? Yeah, we needed a radical pivot, but we it was hard to make that decision We were a company making games we had employees dedicated right through the craft and making games Yeah, and I think that at first the company tried to do two things at once and when you're a startup You kind of don't want and you haven't found what you were gonna be successful at You kind of don't want to do that with limited resources So we were like working on a new iPhone game this time Uh-huh and at the same time like there was like me and a couple in our car designer and a couple others working on What would become discord, but we were slowly siphoning people I eventually I siphoned Jason onto the discord project because he's also an engineer and then Jason's like Jason like rightfully like Made the tough call. He's like this feels like it's gonna work I'm gonna just kind of bet on it and he pivoted the company to discord cool And we're all the developers on board because because some of them, you know At least in my experience are pretty dedicated. Like I want to be in in gaming I want to develop games if I wanted to develop a communication platform. I'd probably not be joining. Yeah. Yeah, well Luckily, I don't think like no one was like I wouldn't work on this Yeah, but just with any time when you try to make a drastic change people were like very very like Like this is really gonna work does the world really need this like Like one of our employees who's still with us today Famously like kept his ventrilo server the old product running for a year after we launched this court He's like no one's gonna switch to this and he was doing amazing work on the product, but he was just very contrary in So that's amazing. And by the way in terms of timing of slack, you know, because obviously Slack also was a radical pivot to a communications platform How did you think of that at all? Did were you folks aware of that? So The thing that's probably lesser known is like like before I ever pitched this to Jason like a year prior is when I made the first prototype But what would become discord on the side? Okay before slack existed It was actually inspired by our product called flow dock if anyone ever remembers that and I was like I don't It was it was pre-slack You know, but I when I we were using it at had hammer and chisel and I was like wow This would be so great if it was like really gaming centric and had voice chat Then slack came out. It was a little demotivating because a very polished product that I highly respect. Yeah, so and yeah, okay But it wasn't it wasn't close enough for you to sort of it's a different like it's like you win by like really hyper Like delivering for specific customer and the slack is really focused on like the work with a workspace And we're really focused on like the unique needs of people who play games And there's things that discord does people were really weird and people are like, why are you doing this? I'm like, well, here's the reason to make sense for people play games And like you can only do that if you really focus and win over specific customer. And so then it was like many Years of coding for you Yeah When did you start? When did you as a team realize okay discord truly is finding product market fit? Oh Oh So I like it depends like you can always like find product market fit as like earlier stages But like that can you get to the next stage like the cost in the chasm thing? I mean when we were building it we did the the usual thing of like can we get our friends to use it? Yeah, that was the first milestone like yeah, because it was hard they get they've our friends kept churning and then we Once we got them to use it through like iterating on feedback for them We got like like extended people to use it like people that I knew from my like gaming career and Then really when it really felt like it had product market fit is like when we did this reddit post and we kind of Got people to try it en masse and from that I was like I think it was in May 2015 in that point like Like we would talk to people they would try it out and then they would go and use it with their friends and every day after that the chart went up into the right and like Organically like we've of course learned to how to fuel it and all this other stuff But like people were spreading it they knew they loved it and it was just like how do you just throw more fuel on this fire? Right, so so what's pretty amazing is that actually that reddit post mm-hmm was the marketing budget Yeah, I mean that's really what started it like it before the post it was like Does anyone care like we got our friends to use it But how do we actually promote this and it was very like grassroots like I actually I posted the I had a friend post the post It's like oh has anyone tried this right and then I no one actually cared actually so I dropped a discord link I was like what if they click on it and they get a voice and they hear me in a browser because back then that was kind of Novel still and like oh I make this and then Jason joined and then that was the marketing thing and that actually seated how we Built our marketing as well as our customer experience like our whole strategy became around super fans how do we create super fans because if we can like touch people and delight them and like show them that we care they will Go tell their friends and that's like the most scalable marketing Yeah I mean what's always been so cool about working with you folks is the things that you intuitively do Yeah, turn out to be the things that you know most companies Through a lot of analysis Realize that they need to do so like the reddit post and then wait, how do we make it magical once you land on this novel thing? Yeah, my next question would be what What demonstrated super fan value like was it the number of hours or the number of friends that they brought You yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then I'll talk about like how index decide to invest okay, okay So for that one, I think early on before we had our own fancy and analytics systems that we ended up building We were using mix panel at the time and one metric we would just log is how many people for each user We had in in analytics how many invites Generate a registration for those users and we would basically just like track like were we generating more users that were like Virally adding more users we internally we used to call them super nodes like because like if we get someone who's like a Tastemaker to like invite a group or two groups those groups eventually invite more groups you get this kind of spread factor So right so right but that wasn't a natural to you because you guys were game developers rather than studying Yeah, social networks or viral You know like how to how to acquire customers on a viral or users on a viral basis on a viral loop Yeah, but like luckily like when we were starting out at this point like there's been a lot of social products And luckily in this industry just stick this event people kind of share how they get stuff done right and That's actually the remarkable part as long as you go out there and look and even reach out and talk to people even a Competitive company's they'll talk to you about it. They'll help you and it's kind of awesome. Had you hired at this stage anyone who had worked for Facebook or for you know like some of the Some of the more social Skype's communication apps. No, I think at this point we didn't have anyone I mean some of us worked on like social mobile games and they have very similar dynamics, especially the multiplayer ones like Like the cost of acquisition is always high So how do you get it down to something that and usually like the social dynamics are the best way to do that? One of the I mean Discord for us we met you guys around that time That you're talking about 2016 so we didn't invest in the first in the first iteration But had been trying to get in front of you guys and you know no surprise that none of the VCs wanted to make any intro So finally got one of our One of our Entrepreneurs who had who had built Playfish to make the intro and that's how we got to see you and I remember Meeting you but sitting down with Jason and the first it was supposed to be a 15-minute coffee and it ended up being a 90-minute Conversation actually it was an inquisition by him Making me explain why Basically one of the worst investments I ever made nasty gal was a disaster Yeah, and at every point he was asking so what did you do then and how did you end up with the team? And how did you how did you stay in the game or did you guys? And it was it was quite uncomfortable but he agreed the following day to have dinner with us and he presented two slides and the two slides were around Your cohort retention Yeah, and the amount of time that folks were spending yeah on the platform and those two slides that basically made us Invest in one of the largest rounds we ever invested in because we had literally never seen Numbers like that the the level of what you're calling superfans, but like the level of commitment loyalty and the way that discord was being viewed as a Core part of people's lives was unprecedented from our perspective. Yeah, okay, so then we invested and And then things are going well and then you continued to grow and then you raised a lot more money on the basis of Another idea that you folks had on how to take advantage of the fact that discord was growing so well and you had so many Natural gamers on the platform. Can you walk us through that part? Yeah, I mean it was kind of seated in almost the beginning of the company even from the game of like yeah once you have These people who really love your product and spend all this time on it like you can help them with the other experiences They want to have discovered games by more games So that was like our whole thing like we could do this so around like I think 20 the beginning of 2018 We're like we think we're large enough where we can like compete with the incumbents Let's do this and we took the whole company where like this is the year and we built everything from the game as the case the store to that was actually the first time I came to Helsinki because I was meeting all the game developers here that are super awesome just to get them to like come to our store We we worked so hard on this we like the whole company like this is what we wouldn't building towards for many years and Which was a steam alternative basically it was effectively a steam alternative Yeah, like we we believe like like maybe here with some hubris that we like we built great products And we can build a better game store and we can help people discover things in this in the social network that we have but In retrospect we didn't have the 10x product that we did with the with discord itself and when we ultimately launched the store It just it didn't work almost in days We're like yeah, this is not gonna work and it was also the like you know everything is timing And this is also the year that for a night blew up and an epic had all this money to also launch a game store And we're like well that that's like not great now That's not we're not just competing with trying to compete with steam We're also trying to compete with that with epic and we kind of had to step back and be like like is this really where we Want to keep digging like and like that's something I think it's the proudest moment and anything in the company like internally viewed as like Most companies would have just grinded for another year and we were like this is not something we continue Like let's step back with things for first principles What is our home turf? How do we win and this is also where we had this reflection of like people like really love discord and we had this Subscription product on the side that we built called nitro, which is my more premium discord with just like cosmetics and stuff And it was doing pretty well. I'm like, what if we just kind of doubled down on that and it was kind of crazy We had to convince everyone that was a good idea, but it's totally worked out for us. Yeah. Yeah I mean there are so many lessons there. I mean the first is you know, I Remember the development path to build the steam alternative. Yeah, literally did happen in a year Yeah, and I was blown away by how much you delivered within a year Yeah, and we should talk about that because that was just incredible execution Yeah, and then you raised all this money to go after it and the premise of the money raising was to go after it Yeah, and just after a few months as you mentioned. Yeah, you folks took the tough decision of like no We're actually not going to do this which 99% of the companies out there and entrepreneurs Would have said like well, we raised the money on this basis. We have to follow through But and and it was a lot of money and it's not like you couldn't have Sorry, that's embarrassing. It's all good. You couldn't have carried on for at least a little while You have the money to do it, but you folks decided to call the VCs to call the investor say we're not going down this path We still want your money because we we're pivoting again and we're going after something else Which which actually made us feel as investors that you were phenomenal stewards Yeah of our investment because you were acting as it was your money. Yeah, not not Investor money coming in and you've always acted that way, which is so appreciate it And I do remember the night row was really it was almost like you guys were shocked at how many people Yeah, we're using night row and then you decided actually we should totally commit to that so anyway, those were those were my Those my my memories, but I did want to talk about how you've been able to just Create this environment of crisis in order to get results on it in a very short period of time like very important Development product development in a very short period of time How do you build that into the to the development and engineering culture of the company? Yes, so there's a couple things go they've been going into this stuff I will say part of it does come from Jason like the game store built in the the game SDK and everything Built in a year. I remember we in January 2018. He's like we're shipping this by August. I'm like what? Even I thought it was kind of insane but like from the very beginning we we had this mantra of Small and mighty teams like let's buy us really higher slowly intentionally and just really people who are here for the right reasons but also like it's better to have less people that are like we're really good than like a lot of people and And if people are also here for the right reason, they're like you will get like Multiplicative output from them just because they're super passionate. So like we like and then at the same time we've been very I'm gonna say lucky with the technology choices. We've made that kind of allow us to move quickly as well like Like we we don't have to build on multiple platforms. Of course, we reuse a lot of code We have a lot of systems to test and get stuff into into production super quickly And we're just not afraid to take risks like for example The example I'll give for the fur building the game SDK like we were a company full of like Honestly front-end and back-end distributed systems people We had some people that knew C++ for our audio video tech But they were really hard to hire and the thing that game developers need an SDK is like it doesn't take any resources and we're like Well, we don't have enough C++ people to get this done in nine months. What if we took a risk and on the language rust because it seems like it would be much easier to learn for People who are not like really deep in C++ and we just took that risk and we had front-end engineers like writing rust And they were just like cool. I guess that's what we're doing now Which is very much for very different like mentality that that's what we hard for like do whatever it takes So just learn new things. Don't be afraid really growth mindset. So and how because you're 900 people now So like how has it been to maintain that level of urgency and that level of? quality as as you've grown I'm gonna be honest. It's been a lot harder and especially does it happening during the pandemic like yeah right before the pandemic? I believe we had about 250 employees. Yeah, and we're over 900 right now. Yeah, and like higher We are you service exploded and we didn't want people overworking that wasn't fair to them So we immediately went into higher mode but like many companies made the same mistake even though we said we wouldn't of Really not checking our hires over time and like not doing the due diligence so like was a successful hire and We kind of slowed down we kind of lost a lot of that edge and like about a year ago where we kind of Kind of went back to the team and said look this is not like what we originally said to do This is actually our expectations We reset them all and actually told people like this is not for you like it's okay like that is totally okay and just made that people's choice, but like and Since then the velocity has increased quite a bit, but we've also also flattened the company a little bit Yeah, we were we were Scaling for the next version when we didn't really need to so stepping back and like thinking through like what do we actually need? What is most important right? Just to change the topic a bit It's all it's it's been interesting to see how discord is so culturally relevant for a lot of new Themes like web 3 so much of it so much of that discourse or conversation was happening on discord No, and now with AI and mid-journey Why do you think that's a case like why why is discord so relevant for those for those new and those like new? cultural movements Yeah, it's it's I was like It's it's a very interesting thing like if you step back to like what we built like we we built for people Who play games online with people? Yeah, and like what there's certain things that they needed and they needed Student enmity when you're playing with you online you usually have a different identity But it also is a way to keep yourself feel safer and more comfortable needed tools to control like who's in your allowed in your spaces And you needed it to like work like in a web browser be super accessible And there's a couple other things if you really kind of step back like well Like that's very similar to like organizing online to do something like collaborate on like a web 3 project or or player Or collaborate on like a new like AI model or playing with mid-journey And actually like we didn't really realize we were doing this when we were building discord And the other part was we made our platform extensible because people who play games Typically needs very specific needs for their gaming groups, and they usually have someone that knows to code in their group So we just was extensible so like if you take all that it's like the perfect It's like the same need and the other thing is that a lot of the people that love these things and spring up Guess what they do in their spare time? They play games, right? What we found with our users overall is They play games on discord, but they love other things and they just kind of take discord to those things So this court if where else online can you really get to the place with a couple hundred people and talk in real-time? Like just in a moment like in real-time chat and really have a conversation. I remember when I was a Back before the world of discord I would get on IRC to ask a programming question and like People would reply like a day later Like it was not great, but because people are always on discord and you ask a question in one of these communities Right, there's always someone reply. It's kind of magical and sometimes you can even find like the person who created the thing So so I waited for times up to make sure that it's a short Question a short answer because this could last a long time But I would love to get your sense of AI and games and how you think about that like how how important is that? Going to be in game creation Oh I'm super excited about this like I've met with a bunch of people who are already working on this like the Velocity for concepting and like Creating a lot more content creating a dynamic content is just going to be it's really going to create experiences Like we've never seen before and like first you'll see it and you're already seeing it with like how do we concept faster? Like and then turn it into models. How do we get into playtest and playing stuff? And then it will probably turn into fully dynamic worlds There are some of them are a little cringe right now, but if you think about it's the worst It's ever going to be at this very moment. It's already impressive So awesome great way to end. Yeah, thank you so much stand. Thank you for having a trip and for sharing all this with us No problem. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you sir. That was awesome