Why Discord founder Jason Citron is stepping down from CEO job | exclusive interview

Jason Citron is stepping down as CEO of Discord and he has hired game veteran Humam Sakhnini as the new CEO.

When the folks at Discord asked me if I wanted to do an exclusive interview Citron about his decision to step down, it was a full circle moment for me.

I was shocked to hear that Citron was going to leave the helm of the communications platform company, which has been rumored to be in the pipeline to go public at a value of billions of dollars. I knew Citron when he was Open Feint, a company he sold in 2011 for $104 million to Gree. He sold that company while in his 20s, and you could say that he might have sold it too early.

And so I expected Citron, who stuck it out for 13 years at Discord, to stay with the ship until it went through its initial public offering. But now Citron has hired Sakhnini and he said in our interview he will stay on the board and transition to adviser to the CEO.

After covering Citron’s first success, Open Feint, during the early days of social gaming and then mobile gaming, he left to start a new multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. I wrote the first story on his company, Hammer & Chisel, and its first game Fates Forever, which sadly didn’t catch on at a time when MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2 ruled. But Citron’s company developed a cool voice and chat communications company, and gamers soon loved it. They built Discord because they wanted a better way to hang out before, during, and after playing games.

Now it has more than 200 million monthly active users who spend two billion hours playing games across thousands of titles. Sakhnini could be a good choice to lead Discord, as he previously took over at King for founding CEO Riccardo Zacconi when he retired. San Franciso-based Discord has more than 800 people.

Sakhnini brings over 15 years of gaming industry experience to Discord. Most recently he was vice chairman at Activision Blizzard, managing a multi-billion dollar portfolio including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. Thanks to Candy Crush, helped King grow operating income from $600 million to $1.3 billion.

Asked about whether Discord was still headed for an IPO, Citron said, “No specific plans. But as you can imagine, hiring someone like Humam is a step in that direction.”

While his partner Eros Resmini was on board early at Hammer & Chisel, Citron cofounded Discord with Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO. Discord expanded beyond gaming during the pandemic as its communications platform was a great way to talk virtually. But in the wake of the pandemic, Discord pivoted back to games and it has been creating new ways to monetize players via ads and rewards. It is now pursuing opportunities beyond its core consumer subscription service, including advertising, micro-transactions, and providing social infrastructure to game developers.

This momentum in product development has been matched by Discord’s financial performance, with continued strength in revenue growth and positive adjusted EBITDA for the past five quarters, the company said.

“Building Discord over the last decade has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. From the very beginning, our mission has been about bringing people together around games. It’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to, and I’m confident that passing the torch to Humam is the right evolution for Discord’s future,” Citron said in a statement. “His deep gaming industry expertise and proven track record of scaling businesses while fostering genuine friendships through play and shared experiences positions us perfectly for our next phase of growth. I believe this transition will accelerate our momentum and unlock even greater possibilities for Discord, our consumers, partners, and the overall gaming ecosystem in the years ahead.”

Mitch Lasky, Discord board member, said in a statement he expressed his sincere gratitude to Citron as he moves on to a new role. Lasky, who is speaking at our GamesBeat Summit 2025 event, said he worked closely with Citron for more than a decade and also knew Sakhnini for many years. Lasky said Sakhnini is the idea leader for the new phase in Discord’s history.

Sakhnini said in a statement that what Citron and Vishnevskiy have built at Discord has been truly remarkable, a platform with product-market fit where hundreds of millions of people connect around their passion for gaming and shared interests. His job is to scale it further.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: It was quite a fun day. I don’t get to make news announcements very often. You guys have some “once every 13 years” kind of news as well here. What’s going on? How did you get to this decision?

Jason Citron: The role of a CEO changes as the company evolves. Every now and then I have to ask myself. Do I hire someone and give them the work and elevate myself, or do I hire someone and–the final boss is you hire yourself out of a job. As I thought about the next chapter of the company and what would be best for Discord and for myself, I made the decision to hire Humam to take on the CEO role and lead Discord from a position of strength as we focus on the gaming industry and take the company to its next chapter. I’m excited to have someone like Humam, who is excited to be here and help bring our mission to life and lead the team to that next mountaintop.

GamesBeat: Were there other priorities that helped you make this decision, other things that affected whether you wanted to keep doing this?

Citron: No, the main thing is that the company is doing really well. As you know, early last year we refocused back on the gaming market. We’ve launched, over the last two GDCs, our social SDK and our quests business. We’ve been doubling back down on building tools for people who play games. I’ve been personally reflecting on the trajectory of the company and what it will be over the next five years, thinking about what I love to do. As you know, I’m more of a builder, an early stage kind of guy. We first got to know each other when I was building OpenFeint. It’s been a minute. I don’t have specific plans for myself. I’ll maybe take a bit of a break to spend time with my kids. But it’s really about how we take Discord to the next level. What sort of skill set and person can do that in an incredible way?

GamesBeat: Everyone expects that next level to be Discord going public. Are you directing anybody on that expectation at this point?

Citron: No specific plans. But as you can imagine, hiring someone like Humam is a step in that direction. We focus every day on just making an amazing service, showing up to surprise and delight our users, and now really working with industry folks to help them bring their creativity to life. It’s going to be in our future, but no specific plans.

Humam Sakhnini: To add to that, what Jason and his team have done, which has been incredible beyond the great success of Discord–as of late it’s just that focus on gaming, really firing on all cylinders, whether it’s quests or the SDK. We’re finding a lot of momentum there. We’re doing well by our community and our product. That’s going to open up a lot of opportunities. Hopefully when the right time comes we’ll pick our shot, but right now we’re not solving for that specifically.

GamesBeat: A lot of the things you guys have done–you seem to have been good stewards in terms of thinking about what’s good for the game industry as well as good for Discord. Has that been a philosophy?

Citron: Our company, Discord, gets to exist because we’re showing up every day in service of our players and of developers. So much of the passion from all the people in the company, and Humam in his career, has come from that place of wanting to delight players and help developers bring their creativity to life. A lot of folks at the company come from game development. I did. Humam does. Stan did. We love playing games, talking to developers, and helping them be successful. We live in service of those people. That’s what gets us excited every morning.

GamesBeat: How do you try to turn that into something institutional, so that continues after you’re gone?

Sakhnini: Let me take a first cut. Honestly, that’s the biggest burden and challenge that I focus on the most. We’re 10 years in. We have this incredible product-market fit. What we’ve seen from franchises that we’ve built in my last stop in my career is that if you continue to innovate on what’s working, those things can really drive you. You earn the trust of your community and you can continue to grow and challenge yourself to innovate on the product you’ve developed.

The institution itself is really true to what Jason just outlined. We exist because we provide an incredible service to gamers. We provide an incredible service to developers. There’s a lot of love from both gamers and developers toward us. Our number one mission is to continue to focus the company to make that better every day for everyone who’s interacting with Discord. That’s the institution. Everything else flows from that.

Citron: We have a very strong culture. I don’t know if you can see the video, but on the mirror where I’m looking, on the wall behind us is the outline of the blue turtle shell from Mario Kart. It’s on the wall because I always tell the story about how–what’s so special about games to me, and to many people who come here, are the stories you can tell about those moments you had with your friends, those memories you created. When you play Mario Kart the blue shell is the perfect example. You’re in last place and doing horribly, but you get the blue shell, hit the button, and your friend hears that sound effect. They explode and you come in first place and they throw the controller. You get excited. That’s the ethos of the company. We love helping people have those moments, whatever kind of games they’re playing.

To Humam’s point, we have this incredible product with incredible market fit, with passionate superfans. Almost 900 of those people work inside the company and carry the torch from their hearts every day. Those two things together create a tremendous amount of momentum that will take the company forward over its next 10 years.

Sakhnini: The focus on gaming has been an amazing cultural bump. Everyone comes to the company for that. They’re gamers themselves. If you see what people are doing when they’re not working, they’re hanging out with each other playing games on Discord. That refocus is why everything is working. We’re firing on all cylinders. That’s the basis of what we’ll do in the future.

GamesBeat: Humam, what are some learnings you’ve had in other positions you’ve held that are going to help you here?

Sakhnini: First and foremost, the real belief in the gaming industry. We’re in the early innings of what gaming can be for everybody. The level of innovation and the level of development that can happen in gaming is core in my beliefs. I’ve been in the industry for 15 years. I’ve seen how, when you tend to franchises and innovation in those franchises, you can make a great product even better every year. To me, that’s the number one thing. That’s making a lot of thoughtful choices about where you invest and where you don’t invest. You can’t be everything to everyone. Our focus on gaming and the product that’s working is going to be first and foremost.

At Activision Blizzard and King, all the positions I had across the company, when we saw opportunity and product-market fit, we poured a lot of our best talent, efforts, and capital to make sure we could make it as good as possible. That’s something I hope to bring in there. And really listening and connecting with our players and our partners. It’s a very complex ecosystem. We need to innovate within that. That helps quite a bit to understand where Discord can be in the future.

GamesBeat: It’s been a crazy industry lately. I wonder what you think about Discord almost feeling like a shelter from the storm outside.

Citron: The industry is cyclical. It has its ups and downs. It’s a difficult time. I watched your podcast with Mitch, Bing, and those guys at GDC. It was interesting to hear you all talking about that. Like many industries, we have our up moments and our down moments. Hopefully we can play a part in re-energizing playtime and distribution for developers. But something will come. To Humam’s point, gaming is a medium that’s so early when you think about mass-market adoption of video games. It’s also always on the bleeding edge of technology. Technology innovation–games are almost always at the forefront of taking advantage of new things.

I’m looking at AI. There’s one version of the story that asks, “How does it affect production?” There’s the scary version of that around whether it will replace people and how it affects industry in that way. There’s the exciting version of that, which is how small teams can build incredible products. And then there’s the part that gets me even more excited: what new kinds of entertainment can be created because of AI that might reinvigorate interest in playing games and growth and accessibility of those titles? It feels like a rough moment, but I think the game industry’s best days are definitely in front of it, not behind it.

Sakhnini: I totally agree with that. When I made the decision to get into the business of games 15 years ago, I remember saying this: I love that it’s being disrupted. Disruption brings out the best sometimes. There’s cyclicality, I know, and we’re at a point where the industry is feeling pain in different areas. But we’ve been there before. What’s always true is that the amount of usage, the amount of mindshare, and the amount of social relevance games have continues to go higher and higher. This is not something that there isn’t consumer demand for.

We’ve gone through a period where, with different distribution platforms, whether it’s mobile or the console cycles, it’s been an incredible time of IP innovation and distribution innovation. Then there are times where that tapers off. The beauty of Discord is that if you’re a very big publisher, we work really well for you. If you’re an independent, we work very well for you as well. We’re where people are soliciting input from their community pre-launch. We’re where they’re distributing their product and reaching out post-launch through live ops.

I’m bullish on the industry. I think it will come back holistically. But I’m extremely bullish about having the community that we have. It brings it all together as disruption happens, whether because of AI or other innovation somewhere. It’s super exciting. What we have in this culture, it’s a super tenacious company. We’ll adapt to the industry and we’ll find this fun.

GamesBeat: What are you going to do right away, Jason?

Citron: I need to finish Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I have a backlog. I want to play Blue Prince. I haven’t even played Baldur’s Gate III, believe it or not. These amazing 100-hour titles, it’s hard to do that with young kids and running a company. I’ll spend some time and chip at the backlog.

Sakhnini: I’m immediately jealous.

Citron: You just had your gap year. Now I have mine. But in all seriousness, I’m going to stay on the board of the company. I’ll be involved as an adviser to help Humam and the team as I can be helpful. I love the product. I love the company. I love what we’ve built. I’m here to help. But Humam is getting the baton as CEO.

Sakhnini: I said this to the team. I did the transition with Ricardo at King when I took over. It’s the same here. I’m the luckiest guy, because I get the benefit of the founders staying on the board and having a great transition. If you think about most CEO transitions, it’s just a high-five on the way out. There’s not much there. I’ve spent a lot of time with Jason and I’ll continue to spend time with him to make sure we’re on the right track and the company is getting the best out of both of us.