Full Sail Stories

The gamer-focused messaging platform Discord has grown to 200 million active monthly users since launching in 2015. But if you talk to CEO and Co-Founder Jason Citron, you’ll find it’s not the platform’s rapid user growth that he uses to measure his success. Instead, it’s the satisfaction of the people behind the code.

“When I look at the people that I work with on my team…they spend eight hours a day with us. And I'm just really proud that we've managed to create an environment where people are excited to come to work,” he says.

Currently leading nearly 900 employees as Discord’s CEO, Jason knew from his early career experiences with game companies what kind of company he would want to run. “I really wanted to create an environment where people could just have a more enjoyable experience serving others through their games and software,” Jason shares.

“And I really wanted to create a place where people who are dedicated to their craft could focus on making amazing things and not have to feel stressed out about deadlines and pressure that didn't have to be there.”

Enter Discord. Born out of an idea to create a gaming business around a chat app, Jason and co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy developed Discord as a solution to their own barriers in communication while gaming.

“Half the people thought it was the dumbest idea ever, like, ‘Oh, no one's going to switch, [they] already use this other app.’ And it taught me a really interesting lesson about innovation and how if you're going to build something new in the world, most people are going to think it's a bad idea,” he says.

“But, we knew pretty early that it was probably going to work because we just saw how much better it made playing games with your friends.”

Through a commitment to collaboration, solution-based workflows, and a strong employee culture, Jason and his team have been able to grow the multi-functional chat platform into a must-have tool for every gamer.

“The way that we’ve made sure Discord has stayed true to its core values over the years is by really focusing on hiring people who already embody and value the things that we care about because, ultimately, all the things that we create are just the result of people we have working on them,” shares Jason.

Discovering his passion for games in his youth, Jason was subsequently introduced to coding in his early teens and never looked back. “[Programming] turned into a pretty intense hobby where I was teaching myself to code, and then I was finding jobs on the internet. It became such an interesting and exciting thing for me because not only was I able to make video games with it, but I was able to help create software for people and solve problems for people that I got paid for, which I could then use to go buy games,” Jason jokes.

Thinking he knew all there was to development, Jason enrolled in Full Sail’s Computer Animation degree program. “I was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to go to Full Sail and I'm going to study Computer Animation because then I can make websites and I can make video games. I could do it all myself.’ And I went, and I really quickly realized that I was in the wrong program. By day three, I was like, ‘Wait, I just want to code all the time.'"

Switching to the Game Development program, Jason found his time at the university helped him hone the focus he would later apply to his startup endeavors, saying, “It was so amazing to be able to be in a program where I really had just one thing to think about… so I got to be just obsessively focused.

“And the environment encouraged that. What I found was that over the time that I was there, I was able to just immerse myself in this craft of learning, programming, and creating video games that really made a difference.”