Jason Citron : A Video Game Lover and the Founder of the Digital Distribution Platform Discord

The video game industry is vast and is growing even more through online gaming and live game streaming. Over a decade ago, people could only play games on the desktops or gaming consoles. But now, they can play games online with other gamers as well. While playing, they can even talk to each other in real-time. This is called the real evolution of technology. Earlier, the gamers made the use of other expensive chat apps, like TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Ventrilo to communicate through chat at the time, they played games. But soon, they got their hands on more convenient and a lighter platform, i.e. Discord.

Discord is a VoIP application that Jason Citron, an American developer and entrepreneur, developed for the video gaming community. With Discord, the gamers are capable of sending and receiving texts, images, videos and communicate, while playing a game using the internet in real-time.

Early Life

Jason Citron, the founder and CEO of Discord, had always been a video game lover. His father, and his grandfather, both were businessmen. His first encounter with video games was through one of his childhood friends, who introduced him to NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). Later, when in middle school, in Florida, he opted for computers as one of his subjects in school. One of his friends at school was good at fundamentals of QBASIC and taught him the basics of programming.

Inspired by his father, he also aspired to be an entrepreneur. By the time he was 13, he had learned a lot about computers and started teaching the basics of computers to people older than him and charged them a small amount of fee. When he was sixteen, he started part-time freelancing and wrote codes for different companies.

Since, he had always been into gaming and coding, after completing his graduation from the Full Sail University in Florida, he started working for a game company, where he worked on a gaming console in San Rafael. Meanwhile, he moved to a new apartment where he lived with the students of the University of California, Berkeley, where he got to meet Rohan Relan. Rohan’s uncle, Peter, was the owner of an incubator called YouWeb that supported mobile and gaming-focused businesses.

Building Aurora Feint; The First Startup

As Citron was into starting his own business, he met Peter and joined his company as one of the developers. At the incubator, he started working on a new iPhone game and built a company named Aurora Feint along with a fellow developer Danielle Cassley.

With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Jason Citron got the opportunity to build new games that would work with the small screens. He focussed on creating games based on RPG and puzzles. The company launched the first version of Aurora Feint for free to use for iOS during the Christmas in 2008. The game was a success but was not making any revenues. Citron was looking for a better business model but had no clue how to work with newly built iPhones.

After just a few months the game reached one million people, but still, there was nothing that would pay back Citron and his company.

Founding OpenFeint

One day, while discussing with the YouWeb Owner Peter, Citron realised that the iPhone did not have Xbox live in it, but their Aurora Feint 2 did have a similar feature. It was the kind of first asynchronous MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). So they decided to build a separate SDK that other platform could integrate and use.

In February 2009, Citron launched the beta version of the software at TechCrunch, where he got to showcase it in front of hundreds of developers. This way, the software also got hundreds of signups, and thus, he was able to raise the money to produce the next version of the product. The software was free, but the company monetize the sale through revenue sharing, mobile storefronts, and game features.

The company carried out its first round of funding at the end of 2009, which was led by DeNA in Japan and raised $6 million. In the second round of funding, the company raised $5 million. By 2010, the company had more than 10 million users registered on the network. In October 2010, Intel Capital also invested a $3 million in the company. The next year, Japanese company GREE, Inc. acquired OpenFeint for a whopping amount of US$104 million.

The Journey from Hammer and Chisel to Discord

After selling the company, Jason Citron started another startup named Hammer and Chisel, a game development company, that launched its first game named Fates Forever, in 2014. Citron tried to launch the game as the Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), but due to the lack of good communication methods, it could not be commercially successful. This led Cistron to develop a new chat service, that would help people to chat in real-time while playing video games online.

Citron was able to get a sufficient amount of funding from YouWeb, Benchmark capital and Tencent for the development. Finally, he launched the first version of the product in May 2015, with the name Discord. Soon, the platform was famous and was used by the esports, LAN tournament gamers, and by the Twitch.tv streamers. In January 2016, the company received an investment of worth $20 million. In the same year, the growth rate for the software had reached a million users per month. By the end of the year, the software had registered 25 million users worldwide, and in December 2017, it recognised a total 90 million users, subscribed to the platform and raised $50 million by December.

By the end of 2018, the company valued at $2 billion and raised an additional $150 million, in a round of funding, led by Greenoaks Capital. In May 2019, the company announced that it has more than 250 million users across the world, who use the software.

The reason behind the success of Discord has been the consistent hard work of Jason Citron, and the skills, as an entrepreneur he possessed in his genes.