Why Discord Is Betting Big on Devs With Anjney Midha, VP of Platform Ecosystem at Discord

How does a platform with 150 million monthly active users build for the future? In a word: Developers.

Discord is betting big that the future of their company, their product, and their community is in supporting developers — and they're putting their money where their mouth is.   

On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, Anjney Midha, Discord's VP of Platform Ecosystem, sits down with us to discuss Discord's past, present, and future.

In this incredible episode, Anjney details Discord's recent product announcement, its spiritual connection to gaming, and why a totally moddable platform is the key to user experience. 

Episode Highlights Include:

• (3:00) Anjney's journey to Discord
• (9:17) Discords acquisition of Ubiquity6
• (13:53) How devs can contribute to Discord
• (22:34) Discord's big announcement
• (30:02) Ecosystem fund
• (37:12) Biggest takeaway for devs

Episode Excerpt

Users Grow Up With Discord, the Platform Has To Grow With Them

Dan: If you do a really good job, you know, over the next few years, what does that look like or feel like at Discord? What are your goals, what would you want to have happen?

Anjney: Ah, that's a good question. So look, my vision and my role is to make Discord an even more open platform, right? That makes Discord super customizable and allows the product and the platform to grow with users in their communities. You know, often users start their journey with Discord when they might be at the end of high school or in college, and their needs change as they get older, and there's just no way the team at Discord can anticipate all the needs of people. When you have 150 million monthly active users, you're at a scale that just makes it hard for the team internally; just think about all users equally. And one of the magic pieces of Discord is it aggregates a lot of niches at scale, and I think there's just a perfect app for every niche, but there's no way the team at Discord as a centralized platform can cater to all those needs. So, openness is sort of the core thing I wake up thinking about every day, and three, four, five, six years from now, if we've succeeded at building an open platform, I think the product will basically look indistinguishable today because developers have really taken it and run with it to serve all kinds of niches that we didn't even expect. We started out with gaming originally many years ago, but today people are doing things like buying, selling, and trading with each other in enthusiast communities. It might be sneakers, it might be GPUs, computer parts, you know, other people use it as a community for open source software discussions, other people, like I mentioned, are using it to build generated AI models together. There's just no way that you can cater to that diversity without being a truly open platform that embraces all of these different use cases. So that's sort of my idea of success.