Discord CEO discusses IPO rumors, Nitro subscriber growth, and 'device agnostic' future of gaming
Investors and gamers are awaiting any announcement from Discord amid speculation that the video game chat company may be seeking an initial public offering (IPO).
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.
Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
If You Invested $10K In AvalonBay Communities Stock 10 Years Ago, How Much Would You Have Now?
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. AvalonBay Communities Inc. (NYSE:AVB) is a multifamily real estate investment trust, which develops, redevelops, acquires, and manages distinctive communities in select U.S. markets. The company's stock traded at approximately $161.01 per share 10 years ago. If you had invested $10,000, you could have bought roughly 62 shares. Currently, shares trade at $203.96, meaning your investment's value could have grown to $12,668 from stock price appreciation alone. However, AvalonBay Communities also paid dividends during these 10 years. Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Invest Where It Hurts — And Help Millions Heal: AvalonBay Communities' dividend yield is currently 3.43%. Over the last 10 years, it has paid about $64.02 in dividends per share, which means you could have made $3,976 from dividends alone. Summing up $12,668 and $3,976, we end up with the final value of your investment, which is $16,644. This is how much you could have made if you had invested $10,000 in AvalonBay Communities stock 10 years ago. This means a total return of 66.44%. However, this figure is significantly less than the S&P 500 total return for the same period, which was 238.30%. AvalonBay Communities has a consensus rating of "Neutral" and a price target of $221.59 based on the ratings of 25 analysts. The price target implies more than 8% potential upside from the current stock price. Trending: If there was a new fund backed by Jeff Bezos offering a ? On April 30, the company announced its Q1 2025, posting FFO of $2.83, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.81, and revenues of $745.88 million, compared to the consensus of $743.17 million, as reported by Benzinga. The company provided its Q2 2025 guidance, expecting core FFO per share in the range of $2.72 to $2.82, and EPS of $1.78 to $1.88. Check out this article by Benzinga for eight analysts' insights on AvalonBay Communities. Given the expected upside potential, growth-focused investors may find AvalonBay Communities stock attractive. Furthermore, they can benefit from the company's solid dividend yield of 3.43%. Read Next: Maximize saving for your retirement and cut down on taxes: . , which provides access to a pool of short-term loans backed by residential real estate with just a $100 minimum. Image: Shutterstock This article If You Invested $10K In AvalonBay Communities Stock 10 Years Ago, How Much Would You Have Now? originally appeared on Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Klarna CEO warns AI may cause a recession as the technology comes for white-collar jobs
The CEO of payments company Klarna has warned that AI could lead to job cuts and a recession. Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he believed AI would increasingly replace white-collar jobs. Klarna previously said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The CEO of the Swedish payments company Klarna says that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to a recession as the technology replaces white-collar jobs. Speaking on The Times Tech podcast, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there would be "an implication for white-collar jobs," which he said "usually leads to at least a recession in the short term." "Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he continued. Siemiatkowski, who has long been candid about his belief that AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that the firm's workforce had shrunk from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result. It's not the first time the exec and Klarna have made headlines along these lines. In February 2024, Klarna boasted that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The company, most famous for its "buy now, pay later" service, was one of the first firms to partner with Sam Altman's company. Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed AI was already capable of doing "all of the jobs" that humans do and that Klarna had enacted a hiring freeze since 2023 as it looked to slim down and focus on adopting the technology. However, Siemiatkowski has since dialed back his all-in stance on AI, telling an audience at the firm's Stockholm headquarters in May that his AI-driven customer service cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to now recruit, according to Bloomberg. "From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want," he said. In the interview with The Times, Siemiatkowski said he felt that many people in the tech industry, particularly CEOs, tended to "downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular." "I don't want to be one of them," he said. "I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations." Some of the top leaders in AI, however, have been ringing the alarm lately, too. Anthropic's leadership has been particularly outspoken about the threat AI poses to the human labor market. The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. "I don't think this is on people's radar." Similarly, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said he is hesitant to hire entry-level software engineers over more experienced ones who can also leverage AI tools. The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of better and more fulfilling work, Krieger said. Humans, he said, should focus on "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that's probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced." Read the original article on Business Insider Sign in to access your portfolio
CNBC
7 hours ago
- CNBC
Sam Altman brings his eye-scanning identity verification startup to the UK
LONDON — World, the biometric identity verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is set to launch in the U.K. this week. The venture, which uses a spherical eye-scanning device called the Orb to scan people's eyes, will become available in London from Thursday and is planning to roll out to several other major U.K. cities — including Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, and Glasgow — in the coming months. The project aims to authenticate the identity of humans with its Orb device and prevent the fraudulent abuse of artificial intelligence systems like deep fakes. It works by scanning a person's face and iris and then creating a unique code to verify that the individual is a human and not an AI. Once someone has created their iris code, they are then gifted some of World's WLD cryptocurrency and can use an anonymous identifier called World ID to sign into various applications. It currently works with the likes of Minecraft, Reddit and Discord. Adrian Ludwig, chief architect of Tools for Humanity, which is a core contributor to World, told CNBC on a call that the project is seeing significant demand from both enterprise users and governments as the threat of AI to defraud various services — from banking to online gaming — grows. "The idea is no longer just something that's theoretical. It's something that's real and affecting them every single day," he said, adding that World is now transitioning "from science project to a real network." The venture recently opened up shop in the U.S. with six flagship retail locations including Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami and San Francisco. Ludwig said that looking ahead, the plan is to "increase the number of people who can be verified by an order of magnitude over the next few months." Ever since its initial launch as "Worldcoin" in 2021, Altman's World has been plagued by concerns over how it could affect users' privacy. The startup says it addresses these concerns by encrypting the biometric data collected and ensuring the original data is deleted. On top of that, World's verification system also depends on a decentralized network of users' smartphones rather than the cloud to carry out individual identity checks. Still, this becomes harder to do in a network with billions of users like Facebook or TikTok, for example. For now, World has 13 million verified users and is planning to scale that up. Ludwig argues World is a scalable network as all of the computation and storage is processed locally on a user's device — it's only the infrastructure for confirming someone's uniqueness that is handled by third-party providers. Ludwig says the way technology is evolving means it's getting much easier for new AI systems to bypass currently available authentication methods such as facial recognition and CAPTCHA bot prevention measures. He sees World serving a pertinent need in the transition from physical to digital identity systems. Governments are exploring digital ID schemes to move away from physical cards. However, so far, these attempts have been far from perfect. One example of a major digital identity system is India's Aadhaar. Although the initiative has seen widespread adoption, it has also been the target of criticisms for lax security and allegedly worsening social inequality for Indians. "We're beginning to see governments now more interested in how can we use this as a mechanism to improve our identity infrastructure," Ludwig told CNBC. "Mechanisms to identify and reduce fraud is of interest to governments." The technologist added that World has been talking to various regulators about its identity verification solution — including the Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees data protection in the U.K. "We've been having lots of conversations with regulators," Ludwig told CNBC. "In general, there's been lots of questions: how do we make sure this works? How do we protect privacy? If we engage with this, does it expose us to risks?" "All of those questions we've been able to answer," he added. "It's been a while since we've had a question asked we didn't have an answer to."
