About Jason Citron
In a July 2026 interview, Jason Citron discussed his early career, describing how he stepped away from two stalled businesses and pivoted to create Discord. He recalled discovering at age 13 that he could make his own video games, and noted that his first video game company later became a social platform for gamers. After selling that company, he launched another business that failed to gain traction, which he then re-imagined as a digital space for gamers, leading to the launch of Discord in 2015. Citron also mentioned that there are approximately 4 billion minutes of conversation and 6 billion messages on Discord every day, and that some of the largest servers are dedicated to video games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox, as well as other interest groups.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jason Citron's recent appearances.
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Transcript (3 segments)
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Jason Citron0:00
We started working on it January 2015, and within I'd say two months some of our friends were very excited about it, but we didn't really have any users. It was pretty clear they wanted to use it, it just wasn't exactly correct. So we rebuilt the voice chat engine three times, for example. But I'd say within three or four months we had like 20 daily active users that weren't us. When we got to this place where we had 20 DAU, we actually were having a hard time figuring out how to get more people to use the product. We were like, how do we get the word out? Because everyone was actually very skeptical about a group chat app for gaming. People would say, 'This is the dumbest idea ever. No one's going to use this.' And even people who played games, many of them thought, 'Why would I want this? I already have whatever app I'm using.' So we were having a hard time getting other people to try it. But we ended up figuring out a way to get the word out that people responded to positively, that caused them to start trying it, and then it started to grow on its own. But there was a period of three or four weeks where I remember we were sitting around thinking, 'We like this, but maybe no one else does.' We had built the product and we just hadn't figured out how to get the word out.
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Interviewer1:10
What was the unlock?
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Jason Citron1:12
The unlock for us was inviting people to give feedback on the app, as opposed to saying, 'Try this thing out, we're selling it to you.' What we actually did is we went to the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit on Reddit where there was a new expansion coming out for this game, and we got one of our friends to make a post on the subreddit basically saying, 'Hey, I'm trying out this new voice over IP app. What do y'all think about it?' And then they basically said, 'I found this thing called Discord. What does anyone think about it?' And we went into that thread on Reddit and posted a link to a Discord server, which is like the group chat we call them the servers, where me and my co-founder were hanging out. People found it on Reddit, clicked on that link, went into the server, and then they were talking to us and trying it out. They went back to the subreddit and were like, 'Hey, this is pretty cool. I met the devs. They seem pretty cool.' We got 50 users that day from that post, and then that 50 turned into 100 the next day, and it started to snowball. Then we kind of did this playbook a little bit for like six months, and that was basically the beginning of how it started growing.
