It was reported that a $ 10 billion bid from Microsoft for the Discord gaming platform was falling apart. Discord CEO and co-founder Jason Citron can’t talk about it – it’s under nondisclosure agreements – but he told CNBC on Tuesday that there is more than one offering for its internet chat start-up that turns into a Offer transforms much larger communication phenomena for speech, video and text.
“We received a lot of offers,” said Citron. “Our business is doing very well and we believe we will be able to build a next generation communications service.”
Citron and its Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy started the business as a platform for gamers, like Citron himself, frustrated with Internet communications technology, which, in his opinion, could not keep up with the pace of change. Many used services like Microsoft’s Skype to communicate, and six years ago the company focused on providing a way for people who played video games to hang out and talk better.
But a lot has changed.
“We’ve seen people take up our service and use it in all these new ways,” Citron said of the company, which ranked 3rd on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2021.
More coverage of the 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50
Users talk about TV shows on Discord, and many other interest groups, from photography enthusiasts to people focused on learning a foreign language, are on the platform.
That won’t slow down, Citron says, even as the pandemic ends and people return to more open, active lives.
“Last year was quite an outlier for a lot of tech companies and … all of humanity,” Citron said, adding that it doubled its user base and tripled its revenue. However, he says the longer-term growth trend of people spending more time online will continue. “At the end of the day, the school day, the work day … people will still want to spend time with friends and communities learning, playing video games or talking about ‘The Bachelor’.”
“We see tremendous opportunities to expand our business model,” he added.
The San Francisco-based company claims about 150 million monthly active users and doesn’t make any money off of advertising. Discord sells subscriptions to a premium service that enables custom profiles and high-resolution images and videos at levels that are charged $ 4.99 or $ 9.99 per month or $ 99.99 per year.
The Discord app can be seen on an iPhone in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on April 3, 2021.
Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto | Getty Images
The Discord CEO anticipates that the future will be one in which he continues to win by creating a better user interface for the equivalent of physical spaces on the internet, not just messaging technology. This space could be an auditorium, library, dormitory, café or restaurant, and in the future this space will be created and experienced virtually – by merging language, video and text in a way that creates new “spaces” and in addition conducts different user behavior depending on the area in which they are located.
Discord names its newest Stage channels and isn’t the only company looking for new techniques for connecting to social media. Twitter has its Spaces platform, and the clubhouse, 33rd on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, is also creating a new kind of audio app experience and growing rapidly. Facebook is also preparing its live audio product.
According to Citron, many Discord users these days experience it in smaller groups of friends, say six to ten people. However, the larger communities around interesting topics – which can be as specific as people who like to photograph trains – are a major focus of development efforts.
“For many years people have been hosting big panels and Q&A and trying to use our service to make it work, and it’s been a little difficult,” Citron said.
The company has incorporated a new user interface and there will be more to improve the community for conducting conversations, which will improve discovery on the platform. “Here’s how to find the public conversations around Discord. And we’re going to allow communities to monetize it,” Citron said.
SIGN IN for our weekly original newsletter that goes beyond the list and offers a closer look at CNBC Disruptor 50 companies and the founders who continue to innovate in all sectors of the economy.
