00:00 Speaker A
We just got to talk about the state of the gaming industry right now, as you’re seeing it through your lens.
00:08 Speaker B
Yeah, I mean, the gaming industry these days is it’s kind of in an interesting uh uh mixture of places where the amount of choice that consumers have of what to play, where to play, and how to play it has has never before had so many possibilities. Like you think about the amount of games you could play or or your choices, it’s just it’s just crazy. But then on the flip side from the industry side, you know, this week is the game developers conference in San Francisco and we’re talking to lots of developers and hearing from them about how hard it is to bring new titles to market and to find success as they’re building and launching their games. So it’s this interesting place where consumers have a lot of choice and it’s getting harder and harder for the industry side to find success and and in a repeatable way.
00:58 Speaker A
Talk about this evolution of Discord for us. I mean, you think back over the past decade for yourself, how mind-blowing is it to go from game developer to operator of this global chat application that everyone is using?
01:21 Speaker B
It’s been a wild journey to to to go from from that, you know, humble beginnings of just you know, building games to becoming this place where people talk and and spend time with their friends around games. But it’s really rewarding because you know, now we’re in a position where you know, we have over 200 million people that use our service every month. And uh we get to to innovate on behalf of players. We’re now, you know, over the last year and a half really thinking about how we can help developers, you know, bring their games to life. And just it’s just this week at at the game developers conference, we announced our new social SDK, which takes the infrastructure from Discord, the chat, voice chat, um friends list features that are kind of these social components that we have, you know, uh perfected in our app and we are giving them now to game developers so they can bring our tools into their games to to help them get to market faster and give them more space to focus on what uniquely differentiates their games instead of repeating this stuff across titles.
02:54 Speaker A
So thinking about the past and also thinking about the future here too. I mean, your company is one of the most talked about and hotly anticipated 2025 potential IPOs. In recent weeks you have rumors and reports swirling about the company working with underwriters and bankers. We have to know, is there truth to the rumors, to the reports, is Discord preparing to go public?
03:27 Speaker B
Well, I I can’t comment on on any speculation, but we are we’re very focused on building an amazing product, an amazing service, an amazing company. Um and that’s just that’s what gets us, you know, up out of bed every day and just thinking how we can innovate on behalf of our players and create new cool ways for them to talk and hang out with their friends.
03:57 Speaker A
I I imagine there are much more core business projects that you would like to get everyone’s attention back to, but if you were to go public even in an environment like this, how soon would you like to get that done, get that dusted, and be able to focus the team squarely back on what you do best?
04:25 Speaker B
Well, we we are very focused on what what we do best, which is building our service and that’s really the thing that we do every day. You know, on on the the the journey of any company that has raised in you know, venture capital and has shareholders, obviously, you know, these kinds of things um are talked about and potentially in the future. But we’re very focused on just making an amazing product and showing up every day to to help people talk and hang out with their friends.
05:01 Speaker A
Certainly. And you know, just lastly in that vein here. I mean, I got to give you a lot of props here, 200 million monthly active users. We know that for companies that have gone public in the past, Wall Street is focused on average revenue per user for businesses like yours. What strategic levers do you think that Discord can use to its advantage to continue to scale the business even as you one day perhaps make that journey and that foray into be publicly traded and and having that kind of sequential or more cadence reporting?
05:43 Speaker B
Well, you know, today our uh, well, I’ll start by saying we haven’t shared our revenue figures and I’m not I’m not going to share anything today. But you know, our core our core business is actually a consumer subscription service that we offer within within Discord. And what I love about that is you know, people choose to to to spend money on our service when we’re creating a lot of value for them. And so we’re we’re continuing to invest tremendously in our Discord Nitro offering and think about how we can continue to delight folks as we, you know, um make that better and better and more useful for people. And then in addition to that on the industry side, we’ve been thinking about how we can help developers bring their games to market. So last year we launched um something we call we call Discord Quests, which is a way for developers to reach players and for players to get rewards for for playing games and and um experiencing you know, trailers around those titles. And so that is early, but we’re really excited about it. Um and our and our our consumers are very excited about it too.