How Discord Became the Most Successful US Consumer App in the Last 5 Years

There were no new startups which originated in the last five years in the US whose product got > 1 million monthly active users and $2bn valuation. Slack and Discord are very similar chat apps, but their origin story is also shockingly similar. Founders of both these companies have followed this cycle not once but twice but twice. Slack founder Stewart Butterfield tried building a video game game called “Game Neverending” but it failed and pivoted to build Flickr to Yahoo. After that game failed, he ended up pivoting to Slack. After 2 months of working on multiple projects at the same time, the same style of pivoting is that I was officially working on the same project.