How Discord Became a Developer Platform
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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 built over twenty thousand new activities on the platform, and that's generating four billion minutes of use, interaction per day scale, sort of bugling what's going on.

I think something like ninety three percent of Jenny plays games were 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 ly on discord.

Bill gates, one said that a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses IT exceeds the value of the company that create IT. That definition does that? A pretty high bar for a few companies that surpassed, but one company does come to mind and that is discard.

But officially started in twenty fifteen can really be traced back to two thousand nine, when discord cofounder and C. E. O Jason cron started building tools and infrastructure for games.

Fast forward to today, and disco now has over two hundred million monthly active visors. Some might even argue that the metaverse is actually here. IT just doesn't quite look like this seems. Now in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason along side central partner who actually sold this company. You make resets to discord in twenty twenty one there on set up in red discords first dedicated value platform, including launching its partnership with my journey all before draining a sixteen year last year.

You can probably very quickly tell that Jason and ann have this shared history, especially because they got to sit down together in our 3 ference to school studio to discuss how disco became such a thriving platform。 But what did discord really do differently here? Together they discuss community driven product development, how dice himself went from player to develop, and they are focus on extensive service since the very big inning. So with discords recent release of inevitable apps, what can we expect now is easier than ever for a developer to build.

If I was to go back when I was in college, which was almost twenty years ago now, like none of that stuff existed, I mean, I built games back then and I was like firing up sea plus plus and like reading the direct X A P, I and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a trial.

Prior to this release, there was, of course, already a flurry of new applications built on the back of discord like my 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 exigency fund. Please note that a six, sixty and a sophisticates may also maintain investments in the companies is discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to wm investments, please see a sixty six outcome slash disclosure.

I am so excited for this episode. Thank you for joining us. Jason stancy of discord and their 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 disco platform. But before we get to that for focus, who might not be familiar with a crazy story that LED to hear when we go back in history, let's started at the very beginning, what was the vision for discord when you first started about.

So way back in two thousand and twelve, I was sitting around trying to think about what could be an exciting business to build. And having spent most of my career, if I all of my career and my childhood steeped in video games and multiplayer games, I had this hunch that multiple er gaming and gaming in general was going to become much bigger than IT already was at that time.

And back to l the top 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 gonna. And I thought that they're be an opportunity to build a communications APP for people who play games that would spend all the platforms and all the devices as gaming would become bigger and more a cross platform, but largely has played out that way today in twenty twenty four. Gaming is the largest form of entertainment, bigger than music and movies combined.

Growing fast and people love to play games has gone mainstream. I think something like ninety three percent of Jenny plays games where back when we were kids, IT was super weird to be playing games. So that was kind of where I 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 am using here could be Better. What was the one way shifted from being player to develop?

Well, I fell in love with games when I was a little kid because they were away for me to connect and spend quality time with people in my life. And I remember sitting with my dad. I know I must have been for five years old.

This is like late eighties. And he introduce me to this game called where in the worlds common. Sandy ago, on his old was like a packer bell computer.

And I just remember being so excited about coming home at the end of the day and being a lassiter 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 multiple games on consoles and then on the internet, as that became a thing in the late nineties. And along the way, I admit someone who basically was like, you, I know how to make video games.

The front of I was like at the time, I was like, no, you don't, you can't just make video gays and he was like, no check IT out. We went to my computer and you, like, fired up to think, called you basic and showing had a draw circle on the screen. And I was like, all my god, that's amazing.

I could make video games. And so that was of when I became an engineer and a programmer, and I learned how to code. And then fast forward, I went school, grew up and gotten to an opportunity where is able to start a company.

And through the process of building a game on the iphone actually launched a game the day the apps are open, two thousand and eight, one of the first fifty titles on the APP store, and kind of took off like crazy. As we know know, mobile has been the biggest computing platform in the world. And through that journey, realized that I had made in a fun game, was called a fan.

The technology that we had built, which was kind of like leaderboards chat rooms log in, was something that other developer really wanted. And at the time, any 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 point out the back contact and built this social network for mobile gaming. This is probably thousand and nine called open faint. We opened up the world lesson about branding from that.

No one had to spell that thing. So so that was kind of the first moment when I started building tools and infrastructure for games and that company to pretty well. And then in two thousand and twelve, after I had kind of moved on from that, started again building another game.

But we began the game studio as well in two thousand and twelve, called hammer chisel. And we started the game because I thought that the past to building the communications up would be to start with a multiple game. I had this huge, that core long form gaming was going to come to mobile a big way.

And so we started building a team based competitive multiplayer game on ipad at the time in two thousand twelve. And one thing left to another, the game didn't really work out. But through the process in late twenty fourteen, we started talking about what if we just went to market directly with a ChatApp for gaming.

And I could understand kind of had the insight for what that concept could look like. We started building in, in january thousand fifteen and then brought IT to market in may twenty fifteen. And that was kind of how how we all started.

There's a theme and margin here right where at least twice now you approached building a product as an application development. You can think of a game as an APP. And you discovered along the way that there is a bunch of really hard infrastructure that needs to be built first, especially when IT comes to real time.

While if they are among the history of computing is such that usually real time gaming as well, that was demanding infrastructure environments. And then you discovered that they were done of instruction cure problems on the way. And then you ended up actually building those rules 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 discord. But when you play forward from that moment in two thousand and fifteen, when this court came out and today, how has the community on discord helped shape the road map? The people actually using the infrastructure, whether those the users or or developers.

our community, our user base, has been part of the conversation of what we're making from the first day. And when we started talking about building discord, of course, we played a lot of multiple games ourselves. So we had a good sense for what the product should be in how should work.

But as anyone who is building a start up knows, we're building products. We're building products and service of other people. And so we immediately from the beginning, started talking our friends and their friends when we showed IT to them, even just mock ups like what parts got them excited, which part seems confusing.

And very quickly, once we got a prototype of 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 in old crap. We had to rebuild the voice tax three times, and we missed an important set of features that we thought maybe he was not important, but turns out I 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 will 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 our company. So along the way, there have been many, many, many moments when large shifts have happened in our road map because of customers.

So i'll give you an example, initially won't be built. Disco IT was very focused on being a voice and text chat up for gills, people who play games in groups of like fifteen people. And actually the max group size on discord, I think, was like thirty people.

Maybe fifty years. IT was pretty low. And we realize pretty quickly from talking about people that they wanted to use discord as almost like an irc, like not really ate check kind of public chat room replacement.

And in that context, what we saw with people were filling their servers up with fifty people. And then they're like, I can add more people what's going on? Like, oh, crap.

We got to to make this work for folks. So we've invested in raising the cap, in adding our infrastructure to support that. And then developer started building moderation bots and extending these discord servers with other capabilities that we never even imagine.

That was made possible because we had an open kind of A P. I. Power in the platform.

So along the way, many of these things happen like these communities got big generates. I 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 are doing, even if they would go spend time in a public community or thoughts in around with generally I or something like that yeah.

I think one of the most unappreciated 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 stands ble for other people to bring their own news cases to the platform. And I remember a couple years ago I was stocking to stand, and he brought up a screen shot of the first version of the home page you guys put together. And on the front page, on day one, you had a call out for integrations and S.

D. case. You had an open A P. I on day one to Spark the hero marketing. And so clearly, you are thinking about making the platform extensible for all other kinds of use cases ten years ago. Where did that come from? And can you talk a little about the chAllenges of what building a delightful product for users first, while also maintaining this extensively for other kinds of use cases that you may not have designed for explicit.

Yeah, the extensively was built in from the beginning and it's called that. You went back and looked at that. I think if you go to the way back machine, you can find IT still from like twenty and fifteen. The idea was that we knew that people we're gona want to build customer immigrations with different games is part of thinking about like what's the group for gaming look like.

So we imagining if you have, let's say, like an evil online corporation, which like a group, people playing this outer space massively multi er game, or you're playing final fantasy online, which is a fantasy adventure game, these different games have data and things 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 of thousands of games that people might care about. So that was kind of one thing.

Or like 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 moving where people can mod games. And what that basically means is a developable created game and then often times ship with IT the tools they use to make the game.

I think its software are popular as this in the early days with doom kind of the first one I really remember getting big, think they call them wide files whole seen online, we could go download wide files. And then they started packaging up and selling them. And I 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 modes like counter strike, team fortress, league of legends gt. A role playing cosh. The list just goes on. Fortnight began this version four of a mod that I think came from a ginko arma three many years ago.

So this idea that give your community tools to create and customized and extend your game or your software, and they had a surprise you and take IT in places that you never would have expected IT was just kind like to me, seen held at how you make good software. So when we build discord, it's sort seemed obvious to us that we wanted to create an API that allow developers to extend discord, to be more creative with that, to do things with that. We never would have expected some of the things that we expect IT. We're like connecting to the evil online back and you can have your own forum or pulling in world boss sponge and as notifications. But the stuff we never was like generate A I who could have guess that right?

yeah. I mean, now we're seeing many years after you made those investments in the craft of designing a delightful, a fantastic ideals, a great developer experience for people to mod d itself. We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on discord. The disco platform has two hundred million monthly active users, and that's LED to entirely new companies being built on top. With the open architectural described, people may be familiar with mid journey as one example yeah .

and there is a few other ones to major nees. The most famous one. It's like a canonical example of how this still happens, like we have this open platform where we're allowing people, developers to customize and an extended and I think the major any folks had obviously working on their model for a while while they try bring IT to market.

If you are the ways and then they just tried a discord server and a discord bot. And then this was an example of exactly what talking about. I never wonder, have predicted that you would have a general Y I in the first place.

Like what a crazy thing that we've creative computers that can do these things. And then to 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 ool thing to see.

Majority is one example of a general model. Let's a text image model. We've also seen an explosion of text music tools as an example. How extensible disport is what other kinds of use cases are you seeing emerge on the platform that you are excited about?

The general vi category is exciting for us, but you know, we really come back to this idea of people, mostly on discord, spend their time hanging out with their friends and these kind of smaller invite only spaces with less than fifteen people per say. So in that context, when I think about general ols and using our platform, I really think about what are developers creating that give groups of friends more fun things to do.

So one really cool thing we see with the generated eyes stuff is people take the bots and bring them into their invite only servers, and then they can use them to create, expLoring, work on projects with their friends and 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 cool experiences we see are things like ways to listen to music together. Sound cloud has a really cool bot that you can use to play music when you're in a voice chats, for example.

And we're working with some other partners to try to bring more music to the platform. There's a bit of games that people of me 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 is powered by chell five, so you could build a web back 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 we will give people a lot really fun things to do with their friends.

Let's spend a minutes on that. This is something you and .

I spent years working on.

Yes, let's take people a little IT behind the garden of like what I took to actually go from the moment where we realize that developers wanted to express their creativity beyond just a command line like interface, which is 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 box platform started to get popular, there is actually a hackery project at our company. So we do this thing every year called hacky k, where we basically stop our Normal work and everyone gets together. We have like a little kind of creativity festival.

Best way to describe IT, and I think was twenty eighteen, was the year that i'm thinking about. We actually had like tense in our office. IT was like a whole cool kind of with food and stuff.

And one of the groups that you, we had the idea of wouldn't IT be cool if we added an H T M L five canvas to our apps platform. And 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 paradise when you get to them. So a couple years later, the time was right to look at the idea. And that's when we met.

You were actually working on your own start up at the time. And we're kind of building this as a standing alone project. And we after some conversations, I was like, we should just do this together. So we required 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 for good. And that took a couple years to kind of start that all out. And now we at the point where, okay, ready opened up. So it's developed. It's been a journey and it's .

been a fun journey we're going. I remember one of the most exciting parts of working at this score was that we had this incredible respect for infrastructure, right? The company had built its own web R, T, C streaming service, had built a own voice and video info.

We built a bunch of server list networking. And for developers, for the apps, S, D, K. 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 paradise, the most important features. And so we came up with this rural of jams sessions, if you remember, where are the team that was working on tools and infer S, D case for the developers would come in and and jam with where you often rolled the developer. So today, fast forward, i'm gonna you to pretend in a damp session.

okay. And we just launched the activities, S, D K, the embedded S, S, D K. And now you're developer, and i'm going to ask you, what would you like to go build with this entirely new set of capabilities even handed by disco?

So I guess the way that I think about this is, first like, what am I gna build? I try to think about what why is the consumer want? It's almost like two steps, even past the infrastructure.

It's like the developers are sort of thinking like they're storing their customers so they have to take their hat off, right, and then put on their consumer hat. And so for me, it's started to think about what kind of, you know, games I want to play, how they could finit to my discrete series in fun ways. And for me, I really would love some one to build some multiplayer titles that don't require lot of time investment, but have really cool moments of storytelling that you can interact with your friends.

He's thinker, ously around the inside of weaves into the discord experience through text and with the visuals as well. I have a small sight project of working on right now, which is a game kind of like this. It's like a arcade shooter that has kind of a leader board mechanic, but with a modern kind of look like vibe on IT.

Anyway, it's just like one random stuff that are making as decide both to sort a dog food and test star platform. But part of this is how I get myself in. 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 this score that isn't possible elsewhere. And you're often able to laser in home and on the specific capabilities that are ultimately technical primitives, but exposed to users in a way that allows them to do something with their friends they could do before in a way that easier or faster, Better, more venial. That's how things like perfect stay channels, and that's how form channels embedded up SDK happened. And so as you're working and crafting your side project right now, what in your mind that the top do or three things that the discord embedded platform that you just launched really shines that.

that hard to do elsewhere? I mean, the magic, I think, is the fact that you have the social context of the space. So it's really, really easy for someone to pick up a title. And then that game can depend on the fact that there is a group of people that are connected to the person playing IT and you have access to that data in a privacy safeway.

Unlike, let's say, other games for 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 friend's less or to invite their friends to play in the context of discord because of the way the games work, their incident and they have the social context. You could build a game loop where at 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 like go do anything to be able to really set that up because the friend brought IT into the server. 对。

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 by size ways. So it's a different kind of interaction model. So I could of my phone playing, 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 planning around with 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 will be entering to me, but much like when we design the platform for discord the beginning, so many of the cool things that happened with IT, I would never have predicted. So i'm most excited to see what people do that I don't even think about.

I think, is what they going to beat there to just break out what you just said up until now for developing the building across platform experience like that IT takes years. And the end result, I think, is what you're describing, is that a product or an up whether to game like the one you're building or a non game like me, journey can literally go from zero to I think majority is now with more than twenty million users in the server or about there.

I think their public server is yes, about that size .

is pretty large OK there about essentially less than a year.

Yeah, you should read the marketing prefer 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 so magical about IT is the trends that entertainment and gaming in particular have been on for the last decade. Cross platform, like people are more and more expecting games to not be tethered to devices. It's just a screen like you should to switch screens and play the same experience.

You want your content in your progress to go across the 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 where not only do the games have all those things, that we also bring the social graph to the game. We manage off for you because IT built into discord, right? IT gets deployed on every platform that were on, which is most of them.

We have payments building on the platforms where the platforms to home and discovering and other stuff. So yeah, i'm just excited as you people can make you know, that's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity is like people build these tools, which enables the next group of of people to focus on a higher level set of problems. So we've abstracted out some of the infrastructure for folks so people can spend more time on their game play. And the creativity of that then putten around with auth and building social graphs and all this kind of stuff.

one of the most amazing things about building in an openly extensible ways that you get the combination al creativity, the explosion of your primitives, your platform with other tools that may be coming online or matching at that moment in time. And sitting here in twenty twenty four, if you just contracted to the version of Jason in college who is building his own games, right, and you hand him all the open and of discourse developed platform and the recent kind of explosion in these creative general models that can allow you to turn text into images and text into audio, and allow for generation and so on. When you look at how the production pipline of building an entire experience, like a game, has changed with general models in the new, combine that with the legal 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 want impossible? Maybe when you were in college.

I mean, there's so much that has changed. Its kind of amazing, like you think about IT in today between, like you said, the generate A I tools, social and distribution infrastructure like APP stores and something like disco ord, right, 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, guo facer, all these things, they're just incredible. I know if I was to go back when I was in college, which was almost twenty years ago now, like none of that stuff existed. I mean, I built games back then.

And I was like firing up sea plus plus, and like reading the direct X, A, P I and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle like, I think what is 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 focus 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 annamite are difference.

So you could imagine a world, one developer could build an entire game like starting valley, which was one developed, but I think IT took like five, six years. The next started valley might be built by one guy in a year. And if you imagine what that means is you may get ten started valleys and they may all have different things in topics.

So we may all just get like more entertainment that customize to our particular sort of proclivities because so many more people are making games. And so the costs is down and the Marks are bigger. So there's more people than ever who are looking for this stuff.

yeah. This is also, I think, one of under appreciated parts of disco, right, which is IT has unlocked, paradoxically, niche at scale, right? To the server context, there are now thousands and thousands of niche communities on discord who then found the people who love each of those niche globally. And what always struck me when we were looking at the activity in these servers and what kinds of apps and both they were using as the extension ability of the platform allows those nisha to do things with the platform and build boat or an APP that's custom designed for that niche communities use case. I think there's one you'd told me about a while ago, which was the Harry potter fan fiction server, right, which had an an APP that that community had built for the friends who were huge Harry potter's ans to role play .

being at hot words. Member.

so if I ask you to channel, you're like inner wild, right? For example, the most successful game around all time has been simulation, right? The seems all the tycoon games that allow people to express this world building desire, where they are able to almost use games as a tool for creativity, where the game is itself building and creating without the people. Robo ks, of course, has done a anoma job at doing that in a press of craft, right? This minecraft, rob locks, there's the sims. If given how massive those owners were in a preventive world, when you give the general models to a developer, plus the insane distribution of discord, two hundred million people one day one, do you think we're going to see a new kind of honor 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 really hard to protect as someone who makes more on the tool side of things. What I think is definitely going to happen is that because it's gonna so much easier to create, we're going to see more round of stuff.

So the chances of something actually happening, I think, going up, but like the things that could sort of cause new kinds of games generous to emerge or often times changes and distribution, this this model or production capabilities, right? And so I think in this moment, we're seeing some of these things change, like discourse offering a different kind of distribution mechanism with different context. General ee is definitely in the landscape for how people produce games today.

And so I think we're probably gonna something interesting happen. But yeah, I don't know. It's hard to predict.

This is the most fun part by working on death platforms, right? You get surprised. yeah. okay. Just to take a step back for context, the discounting finally launched in full general availability after years of crafting and honing the developer experience, the eb ddp S D K on march and if five my numbers right, just in the last three weeks since launch.

Developers about over twenty thousand new activities on the platform, and that's generating four billion minutes of use interaction per day that the scale is sort of my body what's going on? Why is this resonating so like strongly right now? And what of the top emergent behaviors you are seeing in the first few weeks?

I think it's because developers intuitively understand a lot of the stuff we have been talking about. They're looking for distribution channels with captive audience in other side with low production costs, so they can explore their own creativity and build products for themselves in their friends and bring those to market. And the gaming industry, I think, is an an interesting situation right now in particular.

So this new channel, we thought people were going to be excited about IT. And then at gaining the first conference, couple of people when we announce, I was actually surprised at how much you resonated with developers. Know we had a couple talks there in the lines were like out the door.

So you know, 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 open them up. So I don't want to say anything that hasn't come to market yet, but I think that twenty thousand member sounds big and it's exciting. But I think in reality, what is signals to me is a lot of excitement and curiosity and also try to see how many people come to market.

And with that will be, I suspect that there are probably twenty thousand people poking around. I think there are thousands of them that are like actually really making something. And so I expect will probably see hundreds of those things come to market over the next six, eight months.

But without getting in a 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 entertainment together. And some of them were like silly things, like comic book related projects. And and then there's a lot of stuff now that I actually haven't even think as there so much.

I was talking to develop a gdc who is working on a discord embedded activity that is tinkling with some of these new generated models that you we're describing. And one of the things he Christians ed for me, which I think kind of maps experience we had in the early days of my journey launching on the platform, was this idea that game development and sort of A I APP development have this very strong similarity in the development process, which is you re 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 and getting 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 ups in soft launch, and then you would started seeing which parts of the multiple experience your community likes, and then you basically wiped that into future live option cases, right? If you have to describe why the platform is found so much success with gender of AI developers is fundamentally something similar about the game development production process and A I APP development that is so similar that resulted in this court basically hosting one of the world's most successful consumer, A I business right now. Which the this .

interesting point, I think both of those things make sense, but I actually think you use you 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 your building products.

So I think in the case of A I, there is quite literally like a direct feedback loop. I think a lot of these models are using thumbs and thus s dawn type reactions on the outputs to directly feedback and improve the model. In the case of gains, it's like a little one step removed where perhaps the players were talking with to the developers.

They're using the products, they're giving them feedback. And I know a lot of dev use discord, do early play test and they hope on voice chat and they show up builds and they spend time their you. But I also hear startup s doing IT and other companies doing to not just games, I think gaming and A I is kind of at the four front of this, but we see lots of other tools.

There's like a command line APP that I uses, an engineer called work that has a discourse server. And they hang out with their community and there and talk about future improvements and how to make their product Better. And IT just goes on and on and on.

Yes, I think the trend is actually that consumers want to have, say and influence over the products they build. And actually turns out as a product creator, having that direct line of feedback with a tight feedback loop with your early adopters really help 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, right where you can improve your product.

People get excited about that. You build of Angela s. And then when you do go to market and turn a, once you have this sort of building community energy that can help spread the world around, and sometimes the things will lead into like kick starters, patrons and other stuff.

So this this whole start like community driven product to development thing that I think discord is part of, of what 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 your 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 where 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, right? Company is setting observers to do code development with their consumers. Well, that's super cool.

There's this company that I have the chance to work with as an investor called luma. It's a general AI model. And before they even had a website or a mobile APP, they launched as a discount APP.

And I think what that resulted in was in three or four days, they are thirty, forty thousand people in the community, up half of whom were from the games industry and half who weren't. And started using the model in ways that data expect and allow them to realize that there was a much broader set of users for their tool. And then that began a dialectic that allow them to then change the focus or tweet the list of priorities and their product MLB n roadmap, then shift 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, remember of the highest expectation user, the H, X, C. And IT is remarkably hard to find H, X, C to take time of the day to get attention of users today early on.

But this court is such a phenomenal tool that aggregating these people in one place who care about what you're building, that then the speed at which you can generate with them is unbelievable. Well, the up development process has three steps. You idea with your community, then you launch, and then you find a way to actually monetized and turn them to sustainable business.

Saw the first two parts. That journey. What do you think the last man looks like on discord?

So our focus really right now, starting with this embedded unch 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. And so right now, we have all the parts and much of IT isn't developed preview. And this can be rolling out over the next few months.

And that will begin with how do you get your game listed in our up directory and in our up launcher, which sees millions and millions and millions of people everyday coming there to find fun things to do with their friends and in 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 running payments, and we have payments available to some apps today.

You'll be able to directly on tize if discourse on a phone that will run through the phone payment systems on on destocking have our own stuff that we have built that you'll be able to plug in to see you'll get any of the expected moniz ation constitute one out of the box and then reengagement through there and then all the back and dashboards and reporting instead of that you'd expect. So you'll be able to build and launch and monotoned into the whole loop as a developer on disco and your up for work. And this is another one of those things where when we went in, talk to a lot of the people who make apps and boats on disco 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 to our website and implementing something like stripe or trying to get people to go to picture on and whatever. But all of these things are super high friction for customers where they got to go off platform, log in, do a whole bunch and on sense, and then you have to build all the stuff and manage IT. So what we've done is we've created an easy one solution inside a discord that works just like you'd expect any upstart to work where consumer can either purchase a one time transaction in your APP is making subscription so you can have to decide how you want to monitor ze your service for whatever makes sense for you.

Looking back over the ten years that distort has been around for the story of discord, has been consistently observing what the bigger pain points are of people trying to communicate and do things they love with their friends and make them just ten times you. And this craft of giving people a way to do what they're already trying to do by dark taping or combining different tools all in one place while making sure discord doesn't get become ploid, doesn't become slower, doesn't become more expensive, has been this remarkable journey of kind of ruthlessly making where 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 trying to do is Better, faster and cheaper? I think that's the journey.

So we often talk about removing objections or reducing friction in the process for a person is trying to accomplish something and whether that's a then user who wants to open their APP and be little quickly message their friends or whether that's a developer who is looking to build, 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 in enjoy life. I mean.

that's what's about I can wait to see what people build and maybe we'll check a year from today. And instead of twenty thousand s it's gonna two hundred thousand apps. We will see you see where you've got some pretty amazing stuff already on the platform.

And i'm so excited for peruna developed to get start on my site project. We can well, thanks for our match. Thanks for comment. If you like .

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