Discord CEO discusses IPO rumors, Nitro subscriber growth, and 'device agnostic' future of gaming
Discord CEO Jason Citron acknowledged that going public could be a future possibility but maintained that the team is focused on building the product and company.
"You know, on the journey of any company that has raised venture capital and has shareholders, obviously, these kinds of things are talked about — and potentially in the future [it will happen]," Citron said about the company's IPO plans in a Yahoo Finance video interview (see video above). "But we're very focused on just making an amazing product and showing up every day to help people talk and hang out with their friends."
In early March, the New York Times reported that the social chat startup met with bankers to explore an IPO. Meanwhile, several other tech companies, including AI play CoreWeave and the buy now, pay later app Klarna, are planning to test the public markets.
Citron discussed his evolution from a game designer to his current role leading the virtual chat application, which reaches hundreds of millions of people.
"It's been a wild journey to go from that ... humble beginnings of building games to becoming this place where people talk and spend time with their friends around games," Citron told Yahoo Finance. "But it's really rewarding because now we're in a position where we have over 200 million people that use our service every month, and we get to innovate on behalf of players."
According to data provided by the company, Discord's monthly active users and daily active users have grown roughly 20% since mid-2021, the same year Discord was engaged in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) to be acquired for $10 billion.
Though the deal was called off, the interest from one of the world's largest software companies highlighted the strength of the product, which was built in six years amid supercharged video game industry growth.
"You know, our core business is actually a consumer subscription service that we offer within Discord," Citron said. "And what I love about that is people choose to spend money on our service when we're creating a lot of value for them."
In an effort to create value for users, Discord is investing further into its Nitro subscription offering and rolling out additional tools for developers to bring their games to market. Most recently, it announced a new software development kit called Discord Social SDK.
These investments aim to play into robust growth in the gaming industry. From 2011 through 2021, video game industry revenue grew by 150%, from $80 billion to $200 billion, according to data compiled by Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF co-operator Matthew Ball. That growth rate is 3.4 times more than the rise of global real GDP.
As part of his gaming industry outlook, Citron noted how Discord can expand its core service.
"I think that what we're going to see is over the next couple of years, ... we're going to be lowering the barriers to people playing different games with their friends, adopting new titles, and especially doing it across different platforms as more and more of the world becomes device agnostic," he said.
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