Jason Citron learned QBasic at 13 and wrote a text-based role-playing game as his first program. He graduated from Full Sail University with a degree in game design in 2004. He founded OpenFeint in 2009, a social layer for mobile games with leaderboards and achievements, and GREE bought it in 2011 for about $104 million.
In 2012 he founded Hammer & Chisel. Its first game, Fates Forever, came out in 2014 and was not a commercial success. The voice-chat tool the team had built to coordinate play became the basis for Discord, built with co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy.
Discord launched publicly in May 2015. It raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation in December 2018 and about $500 million at roughly $15 billion in 2021. Microsoft was reported to be in talks to buy it for more than $10 billion in 2021, and Discord ended them.
Citron stepped down as CEO in April 2025 and remained on the board, with Humam Sakhnini taking over. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Discord had filed confidentially for an IPO.