The a16z Show - How Discord Became a Developer Platform

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

In 2009 Discord cofounder and CEO, Jason Citron, started building tools and infrastructure for games. Fast forward to today and the platform has over 200 million monthly active users. In this episode, Jason, alongside a16z General Partner Anjney Midha—who merged his company Ubiquity6 with Discord in 2021—shares insights on the nuances of community-driven product development, the shift from gamer to developer, and Discord’s longstanding commitment to platform extensibility. Now, with Discord's recent release of embeddable apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for developers to build? Resources: Find Jason on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasoncitronFind Anjney on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnjneyMidha Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.  Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

That's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity, is like people build these tools, which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems. Just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform, and that's generating 4 billion minutes of user interaction per day. The scale is sort of mind-boggling.

What's going on? I think something like 93% of Gen Z plays games, games where back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games. We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord. Bill Gates once said that a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That definition does set a pretty high bar for the few companies that surpass it. But one company does come to mind, and that is Discord. What officially started in 2015 can really be traced back to 2009

when Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron started building tools and infrastructure for games. Fast forward to today, and Discord now has over 200 million monthly active users. Some might even argue that the Metaverse is actually here. It just doesn't quite look like the Sims. Now, in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason, alongside A16Z general partner, Anjane Mehta, who actually sold his company Ubikoury 6 to Discord in 2021. There, Ange set up and ran Discord's first dedicated developer platform,

including launching its partnership with Mid Journey, all before joining A16Z last year. You can probably very quickly tell that Jason and Ong have this shared history, especially because they got to sit down together in our San Francisco studio to discuss how Discord became such a thriving platform. But what did Discord really do differently here? Together, they discussed community-driven product development, how Jason himself went from player to developer,

and their focus on extensibility since the very beginning. So with Discord's recent release of embeddable apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for a developer to build? If I was to go back when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, like none of that stuff existed. I mean, I built games back then, and it was like firing up C++ and like reading the DirectX APIs

and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it. Prior to this release, there was, of course, already a flurry of new applications built on the back of Discord, like Mid Journey or Leonardo. So, let's find out what's next. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16C fund. please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16C.com slash Disclosures.

I am so excited for this episode. Thank you for joining us, Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, and dear friend, former colleague, and probably the person who I know who's tried to start game studios the most number of times and ended up building several successful platforms along the way. So today we're going to talk about all kinds of things focused on developers, infrastructure, the future of the Discord platform. But before we get to that,

for folks who might not be as familiar with the crazy story that led to here, why don't we go back in history, that started at the very beginning. What was the vision for Discord when you first started out? So way back in 2012, I was sitting around trying to think about what could be an exciting business to build.

And having spent most of my career, in fact, all of my career and my childhood, steeped in video games and multiplayer games, I had this hunch that multiplayer gaming and gaming in general was going to become much bigger than it already was at that time. And back in 2012, gaming was pretty big. But it was kind of at the early innings of mobile and still trying to figure out, like, where was gaming going to go? And I thought that there would be an opportunity,

to build a communications app for people who play games that would span all the platforms and all the devices as gaming would become bigger and more cross-platform. But largely has played out that way. Today, in 2024, gaming is the largest form of entertainment, bigger than music and movies combined, growing fast, and people love to play games. It's gone mainstream.

I think something like 93% of Gen Z plays games where back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games. So that was kind of where it started. What were the moments where you were playing games and you went from being a player and a consumer of games as a product to going, you know what, the tools I'm using here

could be better? What was the moment where you shifted from being player to a developer? Well, I fell in love with games when I was a little kid because they were a way for me to connect and spend quality time with people in my life. And I remember sitting with my dad,

I don't know, I must have been four or five years old. was like late 80s. And he introduced me to this game called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on his old... It was like a Packard Bell computer. And I just remember being so excited about coming home at the end of the day

and being able to sit with my dad and spend some quality time with him exploring this world and trying to find this crazy lady. And over the years, growing up, playing multiplayer games on consoles and then on the internet as that became a thing in the late 90s. And along the way,

I met someone who basically was like, yo, I know how to make video games. A friend of mine, I was like 13 at the time. I was like, no, you don't. You can't just make video games. And he was like, no, no, check it out. We went to my computer and he, like, fired up his thing called QBASIC and showed me how to draw a circle on the screen.

And I was like, oh, my God, that's amazing. I could make video games. And so that was kind of when I became an engineer and a programmer, and I learned how to code. And then fast forward, I went to school, grew up, and got into an opportunity where I was able to start a company. And through the process of building a game on the iPhone, We actually launched a game the day the App Store opened in 2008,

one of the first 50 titles on the App Store. And that kind of took off like crazy. As we now know, mobile has been the biggest computing platform in the world. And through that journey, realized that I had made a fun game. It was called Aurora Faint. The technology that we had built, which was kind of like leaderboards, chat rooms, login, was something that other developers really wanted. And at the time, many game developers didn't know how to build infrastructure.

And I had learned how to do infrastructure and also how to make games. So we kind of spun out the backend tech and built this social network for mobile gaming. This was probably 2009. It was called OpenFaFaint. We opened up Aurora Faint. Lesson about branding from that. No one knows how to spell that thing.

So that was kind of the first moment when I started building tools and infrastructure for games. And that company did pretty well. And then in 2012, after I had kind of moved on from that, started again building another game. But we began as a game studio as well in 2012 called Hammer and Chisel. And we started as a game because I thought that the path to building the communications app would be to start with the multiplayer game.

I had this hunch that core long-form gaming was going to come to mobile in a big way. And so we started building a team-based competitive multiplayer game on iPad at the time in 2012. And one thing led to another. The game didn't really work out. But through the process, in late 2014, we started talking about what if we just went to market directly with a chat app for gaming. and my co-founder Stan kind of had the insight for what that concept could look like and we started building it in January 2015

and then brought it to market in May 2015 and that was kind of how it all started. There's a theme emerging here where at least twice now you approached building a product as an application developer you can think of a game as an app and you discovered along the way that there's a bunch of really hard infrastructure

that needs to be built first especially when it comes to real-time multiplayer gaming The history of computing is such that usually real-time gaming is one of the most demanding infrastructure environments. And then you discovered that there were a ton of infrastructure problems along the way. And then you ended up actually building those tools for other people to use and have since built one of the fastest-growing biggest real-time communication platforms in the world, which is sort of insane to think about the scale of Discord. But when you play forward from that moment in 2015 when Discord came out and today,

how has the community on Discord helped shape the roadmap, the people actually using the infrastructure, whether those are users or developers? Our community, our user base, has been part of the conversation of what we're making from the first day. When we started talking about building Discord,

of course, we played a lot of multiplayer games ourselves, so we had a good sense for what the product should be and how it should work. But as anyone who is building a startup knows or building products, we're building products and service of other people. And so we immediately from the beginning started talking to our friends and their friends. When we showed it to them, even just mock-ups, like what parts got them excited, which parts seemed confusing.

And very quickly, once we got a prototype off the ground, we started giving it to our friends and having them try it and seeing what they liked and what they didn't like. And oh, crap, we had to rebuild the voice tech three times. And we missed an important set of features that we thought maybe was not important, but turns out it was. And so that was kind of part of the ethos for how we built from the beginning. And then over the years, we've continued to build products that way in a sense that we always try to come back to what are we hearing from our customers, from our users, and the different types of people who use our products. And then how do we kind of mux that with what are we excited to build for ourselves? And then, of course, what do we think will be great for us as a business because we are a company? So along the way, there have been many, many, many moments when large shifts have happened in our roadmap because of customers.

So I'll give you an example. initially when we built Discord, it was very focused on being a voice and text chat app for guilds, people who play games in groups of like 15 people. And actually, the max group size on Discord, I think, was like 30 people, maybe 50. It was pretty low. And we realized pretty quickly from talking to people that they wanted to use Discord as almost like an IRC, like Internet Relay Chat kind of public chat room replacement. And in that context, what we saw was people were filling their servers up with 50 people.

And then they were like, I can't add more people. What's going on? Like, oh, crap, we got to make this work for folks. So we invested in raising the cap and adding more infrastructure to support that. And then developers started building moderation bots and extending these Discord servers with other capabilities that we never even imagined that was made possible because we had an open kind of API powering the platform.

So along the way, many of these things happened, like these communities got big. Generative AI became a big thing on Discord. The crypto community was pretty big for a season on Discord. But throughout all of it, gaming and playing games with your friends and hanging out with your friends was always the main thing that people were doing, even if they would go spend time in a public community or futzing around with generative AI or something like that. Yeah, I think one of the most underappreciated things about Discord is that the product has found a way to do two things at once that almost no other companies are able to do at scale. which is have a singular focus on a particular type of user and their need.

In this case, what you said was allowing friends to spend time together while playing games, while also making the platform and the product so extensible for other people to bring their own use cases to the platform. And I remember a couple of years ago, I was talking to Stan, and he brought up a screenshot of the first version of the homepage you guys had put together. and on the front page on day one, you had a callout for integrations and SDKs. You had an open API on day one as part of the hero marketing.

And so clearly you were thinking about making the platform extensible for all other kinds of use cases 10 years ago. Where did that come from? And can you talk a little bit about the challenges of both building a delightful product for users first while also maintaining this extensibility for other kinds of use cases

that you may not have designed for explicitly? Yeah, the extensibility was built in from the beginning. And it's cool that you went back and looked at that. I think if you go to the Wayback Machine, you can find it still from like 2015. The idea was that we knew that people were going to want to build custom integrations with different games as part of thinking about what's a group chat for gaming look like.

So we were imagining if you have, let's say, like an Eve Online corporation, which is like a group people playing this outer space massively multiplayer game, or you were playing Final Fantasy Online, which is a fan. fantasy adventure game. These different games have data and things that you might want to pull into your group chat experience. But we knew we were not going to build all of these things for the hundreds or thousands of games that people might care about. So that was kind of one thing where we've got to make it so other folks can integrate their custom stuff from their games into Discord. And then related to that was this insight that I had from being observer in the

gaming business for so long, which is that in games, there's this concept of modding where people can mod games. And what that basically means is a developer will create a game and then oftentimes ship with it the tools they use to make the game. I think it's software popularized this in the early days with Doom. It's kind of the first one I really remember getting big. I think they call them Wad files, this whole scene online where you go download Wad files. And then they started packaging up and selling them.

And it added a ton of life to the game. And today, now, when we look at the top titles that people play, a lot of them actually began as community-driven mods like CounterStrike, Team Fortress, League of Legends, GTA, role-playing, gosh, the list just goes on. Fortnite began with version 4 of a mod that I think came from a game called Arma 3 many years ago. So this idea that give your community tools to create and customize and extend your game or your software, and they're going to surprise you and take it in places that you never would have expected, it was just kind of like, to me, seemed how that's how you make good

software. Right. So when we built Discord, it sort of seemed obvious to us that we wanted to create an API that allowed developers to extend Discord to be more creative with it, to do things with it we never would have expected. Some of the things that we expected were like connecting to the EVE Online back in so you can have your own forum or pulling in World Boss spawns as notifications. But the stuff we never expected was like generative AI. Who could have guessed that? Right. Yeah.

I mean, now we're seeing many years after you made those investments in the craft of designing. a delightful API, fantastic tutorials, a great developer experience for people to mod Discord itself, we're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord. The Discord platform has 200 million monthly active users, and that's led to entirely new companies being built on top with the open architecture you described. People may be familiar with Mid Journey as one example. Yeah, and there's a few other ones too. Mid Journey is the most famous one. It's like a canonical example of how this stuff happens. Like we have this open platform where we're allowing people, developers to customize it and extend it. And I think

the Mid Journey folks had obviously working on their model for a while. I think they tried bringing it to market in a few other ways. And then they just tried a Discord server and a Discord bot. And then this was an example of exactly what I was talking about. I never would have predicted that you would have, A, generative AI in the first place. Like, what a crazy thing that we've created computers that can do these things. And then two, that someone would figure out how to take advantage of the magic of a Discord server and our platform and build such a cool experience. And there's a handful of these now.

So, yeah, it's been a pretty cool thing to see. My Journey is one example of a generative model. It's a text-to-image model. We've also seen an explosion of text-to-music tools as an example of how extensible Discord is. What other kinds of use cases are you seeing emerge on the platform that you're excited about? The generative AI sort of category is exciting for us.

But, you know, we really come back to the, this idea of people mostly on Discord spend their time hanging out with their friends in these kind of smaller invite-only spaces with less than 15 people per se. So in that context, when I think about generative AI tools and using our platform, I really think about what are developers creating that give groups of friends more fun things to do? And so one really cool thing we see with the generative AI stuff is people take the bots and bring them into their invite-only servers, and then they can use them to create and explore and work on projects with their friends

in a more kind of private setting, as opposed to being in the sort of the public chaos, frankly, of some of these large servers. But other really cool experiences we see are things like ways to listen to music together. SoundCloud has a really cool bot that you can use to play music when you're in voice chats, for example,

and we're working with some other partners to try to bring more music to the platform. There's a bunch of games that people have made that are pretty cool and many more are coming. We just actually launched a couple weeks ago a new kind of set of capabilities for the platform that will allow developers to go kind of beyond the text box and build these rich kind of visual interactive experiences

powered by HTML5 so you could build a web app and essentially deploy it into the context of Discord. And so we're seeing lots of really exciting stuff starting to get built that I think will give people a lot of really fun things to do with their friends. Let's spend a couple minutes on that. This is something you and I spent yours working on together. Yes, we did. We did, 100.

Let's take people a little bit behind the curtain of what it took to actually go from the moment where we realized that developers wanted to express their creativity beyond just a command line like interface, which was what bots were initially designed around as a form factor. And going from there to expanding the entire canvas for them to the whole screen really with web apps. Yeah, well, years ago, when the bots platform started to get popular, there was actually a Hackweek project at our company. So we do this thing every year called Hackweek, where we basically stop our normal work. and everyone gets together and we have like a little kind of creativity festival that's the best way to describe it.

And I think it was 2018 was the year that I'm thinking about. We actually had like tents in our office. It was like a whole cool kind of with food and stuff. And one of the groups that year had the idea of wouldn't it be cool if we added an HTML5 canvas to our app's platform

and then people could like make games and do other interesting stuff. And so there was a team that built this. And I was always like, that's a really cool idea. And we've got to explore that. but as company building goes, you have a long list of ideas

and you have to prioritize when you get to them. So a couple of years later, the time was right to look at the idea and that's when we met. You were actually working on your own startup at the time, and we're kind of building this

as a standalone project. And after some conversations, I was like, man, we should just do this together. So we acquired your company. And then we created a team and really formalized this idea of like, how do we take our platform from kind of the text-based era

into the visual, rich, interactive experience era. And to start, rather than just opening it up, we actually built a few games ourselves to really test the platform, make sure that it was designed well, that it worked for players, that the interaction loops were good, and that took a couple years

to kind of sort that all out. And now we're at the point where, okay, we're ready to open it up, so it's in developer previews. It's been a journey. Yeah. Okay, we're going to go a little bit deeper there. Okay, okay.

I remember one of the most exciting parts of working at Discord was that we had this incredible respect for infrastructure, right? The company had built its own WebRTC streaming service, had built its own voice and video infra. We built a bunch of serverless networking info developers for the apps SDK. And I remember there are these moments in the product engineering cycle when you're building infrastructure that you inevitably have to ask yourself, well, what is this going to be used for?

And I remember having debates with you about how to answer that question and prioritize the most important features. And so we came up with this ritual of jam sessions, if you remember, where the team that was working on tools and infra and SDKs for the developers would come in and jam with you where you would often role play the developer. So today, fast forward, I'm going to ask you to pretend we're in a jam session. Okay. And we just launched the activities SDK, the embedded apps SDK, and now you're a developer.

And I'm going to ask you now, what would you like to go build with this entirely new set of capabilities that you've been handed by Discord? So I guess the way that I think about this is first, like, what am I going to build? I try to think about what do I as a consumer want. It's almost like two steps even past the infrastructure. It's like the developers are sort of thinking like they're serving their customers. So they have to take their hat off, right, and then put on their consumer hat. And so for me, it's starting to think about what kind of, you know, games I might want to play

and how they could fit into my Discord servers in fun ways. And for me, I really would love someone to build some multiplayer titles. that don't require a lot of time investment, but have really cool moments of storytelling that you can interact with your friends asynchronously around that sort of weaves into the Discord experience through text and with the visuals as well. I have a small side project I'm working on right now,

which is a game kind of like this. It's like an arcade shooter that has kind of a leaderboard mechanic, but with the modern kind of rogue-like vibe on it. Anyway, it's just like random stuff that I'm making as a side, both to sort of dog food and test our platform. But part of this is how I get myself in the mind space of what do our developers want, what might their customers want, so that I can give good feedback to our team who is also doing

this so we can serve people effectively. One of the things that I think you've always been pretty good at doing is asking the question of what is possible on Discord that isn't possible elsewhere? And you're often able to laser in and hone in on these specific capabilities that are ultimately technical primitives, but exposed to users in a way that allows them to do something with their friends they couldn't do before in a way that's easier or faster or better or more convenient. And that's how persistent stage channels happened. And that's how forum channels happen. And that's how the embedded app SDK happened. And so as you're working

and crafting your side project right now, what in your mind of the top two or three things that the Discord embedded platform that you just launched really shines at that's hard to do elsewhere? I mean, the magic, I think, is the fact that you have the social context of the space you're in. Right. Right. So it's really. really easy for someone to pick up a title. And then that game can depend on the fact that there's a group of people that are connected to the person playing it and you have access to that data in a privacy safe way. Unlike, let's say, other games where maybe you log in or you get a user to come into your game and then you have to get them to maybe build a friends list or to

invite their friends to play. In the context of Discord, because of the way the games work, they're instant and they have the social context. You could build a game loop where, one person plays, and then immediately the result of that play session is other people get exposed to the game and they can play it, and they don't have to go do anything to be able to really set that up because the friend brought it into the server. So I think about cool mechanics like leaderboards and challenges, and these kind of things that really, really depend on having this group of people that have access to this shared space both synchronously.

Right. and then also on the go in bite-sized ways. So it's a different kind of interaction model. So I could open my phone, play a game, and then when I get back to my computer, I could pick it up, and then you could play from your phone when you're somewhere else

if you want to come and compete with me when you have a few minutes in your spare time. So this is the kind of model that I'm playing around with this title. But part of what I'm so excited about with these tools is to see the creativity that other people bring. I know what would be interesting to me, but much like when we designed the platform

for Discord in the beginning, so many of the cool things that happened with it, I would never have predicted. Right. So I'm most excited to see what people do that I don't even think about.

I think it's worth taking a beat there to just recap what you just said. Up until now, for a developer to build in a cross-platform experience like that, it takes yours. And the end result, I think, is what you're describing

is that a product or an app, whether it's a game, like the one you're building, or a non-game like Mid-Journey, can literally go from zero to, I think Mid-Journey now at more than 20 million users in the server or about there.

Yeah, I think their public server is, yeah, it's about that size. It's pretty large. Okay, there we go. In about, in essentially, less than a year. Yeah, you should write the marketing brief. Yes. Well, I mean, you did.

I guess, actually, you did. I mean, you're spot on. You know, I mean, I think that's what's so magical about it is the trends that entertainment and gaming in particular have been on for the last decade are cross-platform. Like, people are more and more expecting games to not be tethered to devices.

It's just a screen. Like, you should be able to switch screens and play the same experience. You want your content and your progress to go across those screens. You want your friends and your social graph to go across those screens. You want the things you bought to go across those screens.

Right. And these trends are happening sort of in the world broadly in gaming too, but what we're trying to do is package that all together in a really easy to pick up way. Right. Where not only do the games have all those things, but we also bring the social graph to the game.

We manage off for you because it's built into Discord. It gets deployed on every platform that we're on, which is most of them. We have payments built in on the platforms where the platforms don't and discovery and all this stuff. So, yeah, I'm just excited to see what people can make. That's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity.

It's like people build these tools, which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems. So we've abstracted out some of this infrastructure for folks so people can spend more time on their gameplay and the creativity of that than, futsing around with off and building social graphs and all this kind of stuff.

One of the most amazing things about building in an openly extensible way is that you get the combinatorial creativity, the explosion of your primitives, your platform with other tools that may be coming online or maturing at that moment in time. And sitting here in 2024,

if you just contrasted to the version of Jason in college who was building his own games, right? And you hand him all the open infra of Discord's developer platform and the recent kind of explosion and these creative generative models that can allow you to turn text into images and text into audio

and allow code generation and so on. When you look at how the production pipeline of building an entire experience like a game has changed with generative models and you combine that with the Lego blocks of Discord, what are the kinds of new game formats or new types of interactive entertainment that you think are possible today

that just weren't possible maybe when you were in college? I mean, there's so much that has changed. It's kind of amazing. Like, you think about it. And today, between, like you said, the generative AI tools, social and distribution infrastructure like app stores and something like Discord, plus the modern game engines, we can't leave those out. The kind of game engine you can get off the shelf today,

whether it's Unity, Unreal, Godot, Phaser, all these things, they're just incredible. I mean, if I was to go back when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, like none of that stuff existed. I mean, I built games back then, and it was like firing up C++, and like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it.

Like I think what ends up happening is because people can be so much more productive and the markets are so much bigger. Right. I think we're going to start to see more and more games that are focused on more and more kind of niche topics and niche mechanics.

Because if you think about it, big games get big budgets, so they tend to be less risky. Right. Smaller games can be more risky. because the budget dynamics are different. So you could imagine a world where one developer could build an entire game like Stardu Valley,

which was one developer, but I think it took him like five or six years. The next Stardu Valley might be built by one guy in a year. And if you imagine what that means is you may get 10 Stardue Valleys and they may all have different themes and topics. So we may all just get more entertainment that's customized to art particular sort of proclivities

because so many more people are making, games and so the cost is down and then the markets are bigger so there's more people than ever who are looking for this stuff. Yeah, this is also I think one of the most underappreciated parts of Discord, right, which is it has unlocked paradoxically niche at scale. Right, through the server context, there are now thousands and thousands of niche communities on Discord who have then found people who love each of those niches globally. And what always struck me when we were looking at the activity in these servers and what kinds of apps and bots they were. using is the extensibility of the platform allows those niches to do things with the platform

and build a bot or an app that's custom design for that niche community's use case. I think there's one you told me about a while ago, which was the Harry Potter fan fiction server, right, which had an app that that community had built for the friends who were huge Harry Potter fans to role play being at Hogwarts. If you remember that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I'm asking you to channel your inner Willwright, for example, you know, one of the most successful game genres of all time has been simulation, right? The Sims, all the tycoon games

that allow people to express this world-building desire where they're able to almost use games as a tool for creativity, where the game is itself building and creating with other people. Roblox, of course, has done a phenomenal job at doing that in a pre-sort of generative AI world. Minecraft? Right. There's Minecraft, Roblox, there's the Sims. Given how massive those genres were in a pre-generative world, when you give the generative market, to a developer plus the insane distribution of Discord, 200 million people on day one. Do you think we're going to see a new kind of genre there

of something that blends simulation, kind of like the Sims with real life, with your real friends group? I mean, it's entirely possible. I think that these things are really hard to predict. And as someone who makes more on the tools side of things, what I think is definitely going to happen is that because it's going to be so much easier to create,

we're going to see more random stuff. So the chances of something interesting happening, I think are going up. But the things that sort of cause new kinds of games genres to emerge are oftentimes changes in distribution, business model, or production capabilities. And so I think in this moment, we're seeing some of these things change,

like Discord is offering a different kind of distribution mechanism with different context. Generative AI is definitely changing the landscape for how people produce games today. And so I think we're probably going to see something interesting happen. But yeah, I don't know. It's hard to predict. This is the most fun part by working on dev platforms, right?

You get surprised. Yeah. Okay. Just to take a step back for context, the Discord team finally launched in full general availability after years of crafting and honing the developer experience, the embedded app SDK on March 18th. And if I have my numbers, right, just in the last three weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform. And that's generating 4 billion minutes of user interaction per day. The scale is sort of mind-boggling.

What's going on? Why is this resonating so strongly right now? And what are the top emergent behaviors you were seeing in the first few weeks? I think it's resonating because developers intuitively understand a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. They're looking for distribution channels with captive audiences on the other side, with low production costs. So they can explore their own creativity and build products for themselves and their friends and bring those to market. And the games industry, I think, is in an interesting situation right now in particular. So this new channel, we thought people were going to be excited about it.

And then at Game Developers Conference a couple weeks ago when we announced it, I was actually surprised at how much it resonated with developers. We had a couple talks there and the lines were like out the door. So as far as what people are building, a lot of the things that I know folks are working on have not actually released yet since we opened that up. So I don't want to say anything that hasn't come to market yet. But I think that 20,000 number sounds big and it's exciting.

But I think in reality, what it signals to me is a lot of excitement and curiosity. And we'll sort of see how many of those come to market and what that'll be. I suspect that there are probably 20,000 people poking around. I think there's thousands of them that are actually really making something. And so I expect we'll probably see hundreds of those things come to market over the next six or eight months. But without getting into specific, some of them are like interesting new ways to stream games. And some of them are new games. And some of them are just interactive experiences, like ways to enjoy different types of entertainment together.

And some of them are like silly things like comic book related projects. And then there's a lot of stuff in there that actually haven't even seen because there's so much. I was talking to a developer at GDC who is working on a Discord embedded activity that is tinkering with some of these new generative models that we're describing. And one of the things he crystallized for me, which I think kind of maps the experience we had in the early days of Mid Journey launching on the platform, was this idea that game development and sort of AI app development have this very strong similarity in the early days. development process, which is you pre-train a model and then you put it out with your community. And then what the community does with the early days of the model and what outputs of the model they prefer helps you then sort of run a reinforcement learning loop to then improve the model at giving users what they like. And that's very similar to the game sort of process, right,

where you put out a soft launch title, usually with live ops in soft launch. And then you start seeing which parts of the multiplayer experience your community likes. and then you basically pipe that into future live-ops releases, right? If you had to describe why the Discord platform has found so much success with generative AI developers, is there fundamentally something similar about the game development production process and AI app development that is so similar, that's resulted in Discord basically hosting one of the world's most successful consumer AI business right now, which is a mid-journey. This is an interesting point. I think both of those things make sense, but I actually think if you zoom out a little bit,

there's another interesting trend that this is kind of part of, which I think is this idea of consumers wanting to be closer to the people creating the things that they use in their lives. And it's actually kind of a broader, I think, dynamic of co-creation with consumers as you're building products. So I think in the case of AI, there's quite literally like a direct feedback loop where I think a lot of these models are using

thumbs up and thumbs down type reactions on the outputs to directly feedback and improve the model. In the case of games, it's like a little one-step remove where perhaps the players were talking with the developers and they're using the products and they're giving them feedback. And I know a lot of devs use Discord to do early playtests and they hop on voice chat and they show off builds and they spend time with their users.

But I also hear startups doing it and other companies doing that too, not just games. I think gaming and AI is kind of at the forefront of this, but we see lots of other tools. There's like a command line app that I use as an engineer called Warp that has a Discord server. And they hang out with their community in there and talk about feature improvements and how to make their product better. And it just goes

on and on and on. I think the trend is actually that consumers want to have say and influence over the products they build. And it actually turns out as a product creator, having that direct line of feedback with a tight feedback loop with your early adopters really helps you shape what you're building and make it better. So it ends up being, I think, this really powerful kind of back and forth where you can improve your product. People get excited about it. You build evangelists. then when you do go to market and sort of launch, you have this sort of built-in community energy that can help spread the word around. And sometimes those things will lead into like Kickstarter and Patrions and other stuff. So there's this whole sort of like community driven

product development thing that I think Discord is part of or maybe helping drive in some way. But it's another one of those interesting emergent things, you know, coming back to the topic of like you build these platforms and these tools with something in mind and then other interesting things can happen with it. You know, we, again, we really started focused on being a place for people to come together and play games with their friends. And that is still the bulk of what people do today. But all these other interesting things happen, like companies setting up servers to do co-development with their consumers. Wow, that's super cool. There's this company that I have the chance to work with as an investor called Luma. It's a generative AI model. And before they even had

a website or a mobile app, they launched as a Discord app. And I think what that resulted in was in three or four days. They had 30, 40,000 people in the community show up, half of whom were from the games industry and half who weren't and started using the model in ways that they didn't expect and allowed them to realize that there was a much broader set of uses for their tool. And then that began a dialectic that allowed them to then change the focus or tweak the list of priorities and their product development roadmap, then ship that to that Discord user base. And when I saw that happening, I realized, there's this art in software development

of finding product market fit early on, right? We used to talk about this concept, if you remember, of the highest expectation user, the HXC. And it is remarkably hard to find HXCs to take time of the day to get attention of users today early on. But Discord is such a phenomenal tool

at aggregating these people in one place who care about what you're building, that then the speed at which you can iterate with them is unbelievable. Well, the app development process has three steps. You ideate with your community, then you launch, and then you find a way to actually monetize and turn that into sustainable business. You've solved the first two parts of that journey. What do you think the last mile looks like on Discord?

So our focus really right now, starting with this embedded apps launch a few weeks ago, is to bring to market the full loop of how do you, as a developer, build a sustainable growing business on Discord. Right. And so right now we have all the parts, and much of it is in developer preview, and it's going to be rolling out over the next few months. and that we'll begin with how do you get your game listed in our app directory and in our app launcher, which sees millions and millions and millions of people every day coming there to find fun things to do with their friends and ways to customize their server.

And then once they have added your app, how do you make money? And so we have in our own titles, we're running payments, and we have payments available to some apps today. So you'll be able to directly monetize. If Discord's on a phone that will run through the phone payment systems on desktop, we have our own stuff that we've built that you'll be able to plug into. so you'll get sort of the expected monetization hooks that you'd want out of the box and then re-engagement through there and then all the back-end dashboards and reporting and stuff that you'd expect. So you'll be able to build and launch and monetize and do that whole loop as a developer on Discord

and your apps will work. And this is another one of those things where when we went and talked to a lot of the people who make apps and bots on Discord today, many of them have been over the years using off-platform payment mechanisms to try to cobble this together, whether it's just setting up their website and implementing something like Stripe or trying to get people to go to Patreon or whatever. But all of these things are super high friction for customers

where they've got to go off platform, log in, do a whole bunch of nonsense, and then you have to build all this stuff and manage it. So what we've done is we've created an easy one-click solution inside a Discord that works just like you'd expect any app store to work where a consumer can either purchase a one-time transaction in your app or make a subscription so you can kind of decide how you want to monetize your service

for whatever makes sense for you. looking back over the 10 years that Discord has been around for, the story of Discord has been consistently observing what the biggest pain points are of people trying to communicate and do things they love with their friends and making it just 10 times easier. And this craft of giving people a way to do what they're already trying to do by duct-tapping or combining different tools all in one place while making sure Discord doesn't become bloated,

doesn't become slower, doesn't become more expensive, has been this remarkable journey of kind of ruthlessly making what people are trying to do already easier and easier in one place. Yeah, that's the journey of, I think, most great products and services are like, how do you make it

so that whatever someone's trying to do is better, faster, and cheaper. Right. I mean, that's the journey. So we often talk about removing objections or reducing friction in the process for a person who's trying to accomplish something and whether that's a user who wants to open their app

and be able to quickly message their friends or whether that's a developer who's looking to build and deploy their app or some creative project they're working on to people. So we just love that we get the opportunity to wake up every day and help people spend time with their friends and play games and enjoy life.

I mean, that's what it's about. I can't wait to see what people build and maybe we'll check in a year from today and instead of 20,000 apps, it's going to be 200,000 apps. We'll see. But you've got some pretty amazing stuff already on the platform, and I'm so excited for, personally, as a developer, to get started

on my side project this weekend. Cool. Well, thanks for having me, Ange. Thanks for coming. If you like this episode, if you made it this far, help us grow the show. Share with a friend, or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at rate this podcast.com slash A16c. You know, candidly, producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking into a void. And so if you did like this episode, if you liked any of our episodes, Please let us know. We'll see you next time.