Jason Citron
Co-founder 2015Background
Jason Citron founded OpenFeint in 2009, a mobile gaming social network that he sold to GREE for $104 million in 2011, providing the capital and experience to found Hammer & Chisel and subsequently pivot to create Discord. His decision to abandon a funded mobile game when the chat tool showed higher engagement demonstrated a rare strategic agility that defined Discord's entire trajectory.
Role at Discord Inc.
Discord was founded in 2015 by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, emerging from the failure of a mobile gaming studio and built upon a deep, foundational frustration with the terrible communication tools available to hardcore gamers. Jason Citron was a brilliant, successful entrepreneur in the gaming space; he had previously founded OpenFeint (a social platform for mobile games) and sold it to GREE for $104 million in 2011. Utilizing this capital, Citron founded Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, to build a complex multiplayer iPad game called Fates Forever. The game, however, was a commercial failure and failed to attract an audience. During the development process, Citron and Vishnevskiy (a brilliant systems engineer) realized that the communication tools gamers used to coordinate tactics (like Skype or TeamSpeak) were clunky, resource-intensive (slowing down the games), and prone to security flaws (IP leaking). In a desperate pivot to save their failing startup, they abandoned game development. They took the internal chat tool they had built for their own development team, refined the voice-over-IP (VoIP) architecture to make it lightweight, and released it to the public as 'Discord.' The tool was an instantaneous success within the demanding PC gaming community, specifically among World of Warcraft and League of Legends players. What began as a desperate pivot from a failure transformed into the foundational communication infrastructure for global gaming culture.