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Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation
- jmspring 8y agoMaybe they can use some of that money to add multiple email account support.
- hnauz 8y agoI don't understand. Why would anybody want that?
- noobiemcfoob 8y agoDifferent emails associated with different groups?
- jmspring 8y agoYes
- westoque 8y agoI'm happy for Discord since I know they're a big user of Elixir [0]. I'm sure it will make the Elixir language stronger and will make it a strong candidate for apps in the future. Much like how Twitter/GitHub did for Rails. [0]: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
- ohiovr 8y agoI'm not a user of it but I'm wondering how they make money?
- thekyle 8y agoIt doesn't make them much but I believe they sell a premium version with access to stickers and other stuff for chatting, and they have a video game store for PC now.
- mburst 8y agoGame market, animated avatars, extra emojis, etc https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro
- echeese 8y agoDiscord Nitro, their premium service, and they opened a game store this year.
- herval 8y agoIt’s in the article... (and also what they’re expanding into)
- detaro 8y agoThey launched a game store this year, and they sell pro accounts ("Nitro") with extras like animated avatars, higher streaming quality and free access to some games from the store.
- MayorMonty 8y agoThey have a premium service, but I can't imagine they're making enough off of that. From what I can tell, they aren't making money, and are just spending investor capital
- hnauz 8y agoI'm sure they don't. You can pay to use an animated gif as your avatar and some other useless gimmicks, and as you can imagine, the % of users who pay is abysmal.
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- z_open 8y agoSelling user data.
- Pfhreak 8y agoDo you have a citation for this?
- 6cd6beb 8y agoSame way slack and moviepass do: Not really. Unless you consider taking VC captial "making money"
- arvidkahl 8y agoThe close proximity to very lucrative services like Twitch makes this an extremely interesting company. With eSports breaking into mainstream media outlets like ESPN, having a fully fledged community gathering place with all the trimmings, voice chat, raffles appears to be marketing heaven for a generation raised on YouTube and gaming streams. I wonder what's in store for Discord next. Integration into games? Digital currencies blending the virtual worlds with reality?
- judge2020 8y agoThey did recently launch their game store, so they'll be taking on the liked of Steam but as a $10/month service to access (almost) all available games.
- starshadowx2 8y agoDiscord is now imo the best positioned competitor to Steam based on their latest updates. They're launching a full self-service game publishing platform and only taking 10% revenue, instead of Steam's 30%. Discord already has the gaming focused community and their store has already been doing very well and is super easy to use. If Discord broke into the streaming market there would be no reason to ever leave it for some people. Buy your game, talk to friends and join their games, watch streamed games - all from one client. Discord does already have some integration into games with the rich presence stuff and some games you can even jump into from a chat. The overlay also works like as if it's chat within a game.
- Pfhreak 8y agoI might argue that Epic is also positioned to take on Steam. Small cut of proceeds, and they have a HUGE audience of kids about to age into the gaming market who have only ever played Fortnite (and don't have the baggage of a huge Steam library.) I love Discord though, and I generally agree with your analysis.
- VectorLock 8y ago>they have a HUGE audience of kids about to age into the gaming market who have only ever played Fortnite (and don't have the baggage of a huge Steam library.) This never occurred to me before. When you put it like that it really does make me think they could be an extremely strong rival to Steam.
- dvt 8y agoI'm bearish on Discord. Unlike Slack, it targets a price-averse demographic and is attempting to enter spaces that are very saturated (Steam, Origin, Epic, Ubisoft are already crushing the digital distribution medium), so then it's basically an IRC replacement for gamers. I understand Slack's valuation as it targets huge companies with up to decades-long contracts and has projected revenues > $1B for this year, but I just don't see Discord making money the same way. I use it daily with my friends, but none of us have Nitro (although the features are pretty neat). The only way I see it moving to profitability is doing targeted ads (which will significantly hinder user experience). I see it going the way of Xfire[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire
- Pfhreak 8y agoDiscord, however, is a bit of a lifestyle brand like Twitch. It's where conversations happen, and it's incredibly useful to the gaming community. If they can get even a toehold with their subscription services and store, I think they have a very serious chance of turning towards something valuable.
- dvt 8y agoDiscord is as valuable to the gaming community as IRC was, or as Ventrilo was, or as Skype was (for a while). In other words, not very (as all those tools were easily replaced). Twitch built a marketplace of creators and consumers (like YouTube) -- that's why it's hard to replace. Discord, on the other hand, is a chat program.
- Pfhreak 8y agoI disagree. It's more connected to communities than IRC/Vent/Skype. Right now I hang out in multiple alpha dev game discords, speedrunning discords, a personal game friends discord, a queer gaming discord, and a tabletop game development discord. The degree to which I'm connected to communities is much stronger than in something like IRC or Vent.
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- rawrmaan 8y agoSweet. I appreciate Discord. It’s like a much less bloated, simpler version of Slack that still has all the features basic communities need.
- orliesaurus 8y agoI have been using Discord since the very beginning, as a replacement for TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and the occasional Mumble ( friends and onlinr friends). Also it replaced entirely Skype. And IRC for pugs and finding opponents to "fight". Discord is great and free. I would have never expected them to try and take a bite off Steam. Steam has a lot of issues but it's also the king of the hill and will be extremely hard to take a seizable chunk of their cake away. With the Netflix for videogames approach Discord enters another unsustainable model, with the first one being unlimited chat and voice-chat for everyone. I wish them the best, it would suck if Discord disappeared, but they're throwing a lot stones into the gaming well. And we all know how the gaming world is...
- universe_lol 8y agoWhat Are Some Staggering Certainties About Material Science? https://www.universelol.com/what-are-some-staggering-certainties-about-material-science https://www.universelol.com/what-are-some-staggering-certain...
- shshhdhs 8y agoI never understood these ~13.3x valuations. If I invest $5 in a lemonade stand, what makes it valued at $66.50?
- burtonator 8y agoPotential future revenues and value...
- nahtnam 8y agoDoesn't this just mean that Discord received 150 million in return for 7.5% stake at the company?
- munchbunny 8y agoMore or less, with the very big caveat that the specific terms of the deal means it's almost never actually a straight exchange of money for share of equity.
- shampto3 8y agoIt's based on the equity the investor is purchasing in the investment. Here's an easy math example: I invest $10 in a lemonade stand and get 10% equity in the company. That means that I can theoretically buy the company at $100 to get 100% of the equity. So when investors put $150M into a company, they are purchasing equity/stock/shares/whatever and the company can then be valued based on the percentage of equity they get for their investment.
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- Clever321 8y agoI would venture it's the huge amount of monthly active users. 200M users at just $1 a year (or month) is a lot of money compared to the $150M they just picked up in debt.
- mahgnous 8y agoI'll just go back to Mumble when it goes to hell.
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- crocodiletears 8y agoDiscord isn't just for gamers. Though that's where it started, its robust community management features have made it's a go-to for online creators looking to engage with their audiences. It's especially prominent among Youtubers, and is increasingly becoming seen in some circles as a safer alternative to public forums like Reddit for topical discourse. This is, in my opinion because there's no formal discoverability mechanism, and the invite feature lets server admins make their communities as inclusive, or exclusive as they want them to be. Discord has a lot of appeal outside of its target audience, and its growth in other areas is largely automatic since a lot of subcultures online exist in parallel or close proximity to hardcore gaming demographics. That's where I see its future being the brightest, so long as the service doesn't get too cluttered with unnecessary 'community' features.
- zacharycohn 8y ago> Discord isn't just for gamers. That's true! It's also very popular among neo nazis.
- nv-vn 8y agoYep. All 3 of them
- hnauz 8y ago"Zachary Cohen", what would be your incentives to pretend a popular Internet platform has a neo Nazi problem when it doesn't?
- dang 8y agoWe've banned this account.
- hannasanarion 8y agoAnd LGBT communities. The reason discord attracts both crowds is that they can safely and easily exclude each other. Sure, /r/the_donald is in discord and uses it to coordinate raids and harassment, but they perform those raids on Reddit and Twitter, where making a sockpuppet takes five seconds and you can instantly yell and vote at anyone on the whole site. You can't target a discord like that, you need an invite that mods can revoke or stop issuing at any time, or use hierarchical user privileges to hinder new accounts, or any number of other moderation steps.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoI just managed to get trought the techcrunch ad choice page and tell them my choices: took about an hour. I think someone could make a performance art piece about scrolling throught the ebay ad choices: that was a quiet half an hour spent contemplating the online ad industry.
- revskill 8y agoDiscord invitation system is stupid. I couldn't reuse my account with the same email on different machines. Horrible system.
- aquova 8y agoI'm curious to see how Discord fairs in the long run. I've been a daily user of Discord for nearly 2 years now, and I think their core text-and-voice service is the best on the market (for now). However, whenever I hear about Discord's financials, it is always with regards to additional secured funding, and very little discussed about their userbase revenue. I see a notable number of "regular" users with Nitro, but very few so far seem interested in their game market. I'd be interested in seeing how well their cash input is fairing, especially with regards to Nitro. A few days ago, they gave away a large number of free Nitro benefits for a month, so I imagine that many users who had never tried it before (like myself) are being additionally tempted. We'll see if it pays off.
- Insanity 8y agoWhat I find quite strange in Discord (gamers) vs Slack (business/software) is that Discord has syntax highlighting in code snippets, but Slack does not..
- Barrin92 8y agoI've found discord to be a very reasonable alternative to slack and I think their branding as a 'gaming service' is more of an effort to carve out a niche than related to functionality. It actually works pretty well as a generic chat / collaboration tool.
- manigandham 8y agoSlack does do syntax highlighting. Enter a code snippet and select the language.
- Insanity 8y agoYeah but not inline with the backticks* Which I find more convenient for small pieces of code rather than making a snippet.
- dcbadacd 8y agoYeah, the "standard" markdown syntax. Facebook Messenger also supports it. Telegram also doesn't.
- charrondev 8y agoWere finishing a HipChat migration to Slack in January. HipChat doesn’t even have inline code or any syntax highlighting so I’ll be very glad to make the transition.
- art0rz 8y agoHipChat is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is that it allows on-prem, where most alternatives do not.
- ultrasaurus 8y agoDoing the math out loud: Worth $1.65B April 19th, worth $1.85B December 19th (+$150MM in new money, for a post-money of $2B ignoring rounding, options pool expanding and preferences). So their value grew ~12% in 8 months.
- dehrmann 8y agoWhen you look at broader market conditions, this is somewhat impressive. Picking a FAANG out of a hat, AMZN is down 12% in the same period. Granted, they're at different stages, but there have been some serious valuation headwinds in the past few months.
- afrnld 8y agohi
- foxhop 8y agoI'm bullish regarding twitch (Amazon) and Discord. Too bad I'm not a VC or have any money or way to monitized my knowledge. Do I use either service? Not often, but I have accounts. When I reconnect to my gamer friends / clicks they all use these services. I have not felt compelled (peer pressure) to create accounts on any cloud provider in a long time. Both got me to sign up.
- shafyy 8y agoWe're also using Discord to deliver our classes and as an alumni community, because our students are teenagers and either already familar with Discord or not turned off by the UX/UI as it's made for that demographic.
- devwastaken 8y agoAs much as I want something like discord to succeed, it throws all cautions to the wind with user data. There is rentention in two databases of every chat message sent. If somebody ever gets access they could crawl all their info and learn most of their private life through it. Steam on the other hand will not retain more than 5ish of the last messages. I'd say it's fine aslong as users could set a duration for their messages automatically, but Discord doesn't even have a mass deletion option. Their API has been Incapable of mass deletion further than 2 weeks. I have no doubt there will be some major leaks in the future that ruin someone's life.
- tenryuu 8y agoSteam holds messages for the past two weeks, you can see these messages I the support tools. GDPR complaincy
- mbesto 8y agoFYI - their support tools are almost entirely disconnected from Steam itself. Source - know owner of said support tool software.
- hnauz 8y agoThere is no way to massively delete your past messages. In addition to that: 1. If you close a private message window and are not friends with the person or share a server with them, there is no way to open it again, so you've lost access to that chat history and can't delete your messages from there. 2. If you get banned from a server, you lose access to that server's history and can't delete your messages from it. 3. If you delete your account, your messages are not deleted and stay in all private conversations and servers forever. Their data management is simply terrible. Personally, I would've deleted my account already, but I don't feel comfortable knowing I can't delete my past messages and that they may add that option later.
- Spivak 8y agoHow does allowing you to delete your messages jive with the UX of other users? If every user you sent a message to had a copy of your message would you expect those to be deleted as well? Isn't that the recipient's data? Assuming you answered no is there a material difference when you store a single copy and do reference counting? Discord's UI might be lacking but allowing you to delete messages authored by you but ownwed by another is already pretty privacy oriented.
- legionof7 8y agoI've used Discord for a long time and my previous startup was even part of the Hypesquad program. However, I'm really concerned with their views around E2E encryption. We've asked many times for an end-to-end encryption service. This became the #3 most upvoted request (https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030084532-Implement-WhisperSystems-Encryption-for-Voice-and-Text https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...). Unfortunately, their "rejection" and user comments were deleted after they switched feature request systems. It was something along the lines of "we take security seriously but we won't do this." IMO, it's pretty important for them to actually consider implementing this.
- dillondoyle 8y agoUnless they need to read the content of messages for advertising
- skrebbel 8y agoIt's extremely hard to get e2e right and still have great UX when your product revolves around semipublic group chats.
- foepys 8y agoI'd argue that it's actually impossible if the target group is not technically skilled. Discord has too many different clients, just the key exchange would be a nightmare for the average person. TeamSpeak tried to use keys for their profile management but everybody I know just simply regenerates their keys when they freshly install TeamSpeak, so it's effectively useless when combined with E2E encryption.
- nikanj 8y agoPretty much every major messaging product with e2e encryption has had child pornography and terrorism claims made against it. Maybe they want to avoid that publicity, even if it costs them some of the most paranoid users?
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- cthalupa 8y agoDiscord is in this weird situation where they've been massively successful at some specific things that people aren't willing to spend money on, and not, as best as I can tell, anywhere else. They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together. But things like Nitro seem to have minimal adoption. The game store isn't particularly compelling. They've got some partnerships with games where they offer Discord up as the actual in-game voice communication, but I haven't seen much adoption of that, and I don't know if it actually results in revenue for them, either. It's not unique - we've seen plenty of major tech companies in similar spots - but they've basically all pivoted to advertisements as a way to make money, something that Discord has categorically said they don't want to do. I don't know what they could do to really turn things around here.
- shiburizu 8y agoWhy do people think this? I know a good chunk of users I interact with every day pay for their Nitro subscription. It's not crazy to think I can buy a game or two on it as well. They partnered with Warframe, I think things are going well.
- sbarre 8y agoDo you have a citation on "Nitro seem to have minimal adoption"? Genuinely curious, as all over this thread there's people saying "so many people have Nitro!" and other saying "no one pays for Nitro".. I'd love to see stats to figure out who is actually correct.
- cthalupa 8y agoThey don't release numbers, so everything I have is personal anecdata, but I'm in 12 active Discord communities, and any time the discussion has come up, pretty much no one involved has a nitro subscription. We're the demographics that, at least to me, seem the most likely to pay for it as well. Better than average incomes, MMO subscribers, groups that host their own servers for games that support it, subscribers to twitch streamers, etc. I can't fathom who is paying for Nitro in large numbers if not these demographics.
- throwawaywhynot 8y agoUnlike slack, discord actually has a functional UI. I can see discord getting into slack's domain more easily than slack entering into discord's
- Cypher 8y agoMeanwhile... who here has updated skype recently?
- degenerate 8y agoI refuse to update to the new monstrosity UI... so if they eventually make my version stop working, so be it. Bye Skype.
- hestefisk 8y agoHow can something as basic as a chat technology be valued at so much? Seems crazy when there much more important problems to solve. Maybe I am missing something :)
- wodenokoto 8y agoYes you are. The communications industry has enormous value and implications for basically any other problem we as humans work on. Anyone who can come with a tool that makes communications marginally more effective has come up with a tool that has great value. What you are missing is the part where messaging is a solved problem. We've come far from telegraph and fax machines, but still have a long way to go.
- radicalbyte 8y agoI've used both Discord and Slack heavily and have to say that Discord is light years ahead of Slack.
- heavenlyhash 8y agoYou know, this might be a linguistic nit, and likely not a popular one to mention on HN, but... I find it awfully odd to use the word "surpassing" to describe valuation, given that valuation is a number on paper. "Surpassing" is for something where there were expectations to exceed; or an arduous challenge overcome to the surprise of onlookers. Valuation is an expectation; by definition it cannot be exceeded. While running a company is surely arduous, the most interesting challenge and the place to surpass expectations is not in the board room where the valuation is decided; and whether the math is massaged to offer a valuation a few decimal digits above or below a nice round $2B is more a foible of those in the room than any real indication of... anything. Odd phrasing, to say "surpassing" here. It's numeric assignment.
- goldenkey 8y agoDiscord banned my account a few weeks ago when a user reported a one word joke I'd made. Here's the scenario: Troll: "Whats your age?" Me: "9" Troll reports messages to Discord after completing the baiting technique (clearly has done this before to other people.) Discord immediately disables my account despite the fact that I 1) paid for Nitro with a credit card in my name and have an ongoing subscription to Nitro 2) Entered my birthdate/age as nearly 30 in my original registration. Screenshots of everything including the messages that Discord banned me over: http://imgur.com/gallery/EmpKpke http://imgur.com/gallery/EmpKpke This company does not deserve our business. While banned I had no access to any of my private chat logs and the servers I run were in jeopardy of being lost. Even though they eventually unbanned me, their last email wuite clearly demonstrates how ridiculous their procedures are: "Never joke about being under the age of 13 [even in private messages.]" They try to back up their bullshit by mentioning it is a because of COPPA. Reminiscent of Slack banning all non US ips because of supposed "embargo laws." I would love if a lawyer could chime in like in the Slack thread and show how lazy anf customer hostile their procedures are. We need to quit using these centralized services. They clearly do not care about you or me as free speaking individuals or even as customers. They are just looking for the next IPO or funding round. The actual revenue we provide to them? Shoe gum.
- sbarre 8y agoOdds are that their reporting and content moderation services are outsourced to companies that are given guidelines and follow them strictly, with no room for interpretation or nuance. No one in that support org is going to go cross-reference your account details and look that stuff up because (1) they hopefully don't have access to it and (2) no offence, you're not important enough to get some kind of special treatment. Your expectations that a company with millions of customers should "get the joke" or spend time triple-checking whether you were serious or not are unrealistic. That's just the reality of moderation services at scale in today's Internet. No one does it in-house anymore, so it's all very very black-and-white when it comes to enforcement.
- goldenkey 8y agoThere shouldn't be a reason you get banned from a chat client except for abuse. I don't see your point making sense except from maybe a sheltered millenials curated softy platform perspective shaped by the centralized services like YouTube and Twitter.