Discord

Instacart

Discord

Discord makes money primarily through Nitro — a $9.99/month subscription that gives users bigger file uploads, HD video streaming, custom emoji, animated avatars, and profile customization. There's also Nitro Basic at $2.99/month with fewer perks.

Server owners can pay for Server Boosts that unlock premium features for their community. Discord also added a cut of server subscriptions — creators can charge monthly membership fees and Discord takes 10%.

The key insight is that Discord's core product is completely free. Voice chat, text chat, screen sharing, communities with thousands of members — all free.

Nitro is cosmetic and convenience upgrades. Most users never pay and Discord is fine with that.

The free users create the network effects that make the platform valuable.

Instacart

Instacart operates as a marketplace connecting consumers with personal shoppers and grocery retailers. Revenue comes from multiple streams: delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers (typically $3.99+ per delivery), tips to shoppers (passed through, not revenue), retailer partnerships (grocers pay Instacart for access to the platform and fulfillment services), and advertising.

Advertising has become the crown jewel. Instacart Ads lets consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Nestlé pay for sponsored product placements within the Instacart shopping experience.

When someone searches for "chips," Doritos can pay to appear first. This is incredibly valuable because it's advertising at the exact moment of purchase intent.

Ad revenue was $871 million in 2023 and crossed $950 million in 2024.

The retailer partnership model is key. Unlike DoorDash or Uber Eats (which listed restaurants without permission early on), Instacart works with grocers as partners.

Over 1,500 retail banners including Costco, Kroger, Albertsons, and Publix have formal partnerships. Instacart provides the technology and shoppers.

Grocers provide inventory and stores.

Discord

Jason Citron had already built and sold a gaming company — OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile, which GREE bought for $104 million in 2011. After that, he started Hammer & Chisel, a game studio that was supposed to make mobile games.

The game they built, called Fates Forever, was a mobile MOBA that got great reviews but almost nobody played.

What Citron noticed was that gamers were using terrible tools to communicate. TeamSpeak was clunky.

Skype was laggy. Nothing worked well for groups of people who needed to talk while gaming.

The internal voice and text chat tool that Hammer & Chisel had built for their own team worked better than anything on the market.

Citron and co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy pivoted the entire company. They stripped out the gaming stuff and launched Discord in May 2015 as a free voice, video, and text chat platform for gamers.

It spread through Reddit first — a post on the r/gaming subreddit went viral and crashed their servers on day one. Within a year they had 25 million registered users.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta was a 26-year-old Amazon engineer in Seattle who quit his job in 2012 to start a company. The only problem: he had no idea what to build.

Over the next year, he started and abandoned roughly 20 different projects. A social network for lawyers.

A way to track restaurant wait times. Nothing stuck.

Then one day he was too lazy to go grocery shopping. He looked for a service that would shop for him and deliver everything to his door.

Nothing good existed. The existing options were grocery store delivery services that only worked during specific windows, had limited selection, and required ordering days in advance.

Mehta wanted to order groceries the way he ordered everything else online — immediately, from whatever store he wanted.

He built a prototype in 2012 and applied to Y Combinator. The demo was rough — he ordered a six-pack of beer through the app and had it delivered to a YC partner's house during the application process.

It worked. He got in.

Instacart launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 with a simple promise: order from your favorite local grocery store and have someone shop for you and deliver within an hour.

Discord

Discord grew through communities, not ads. The first users were gamers on Reddit and Twitch who were sick of TeamSpeak and Skype.

Streamers would set up Discord servers for their fans, and every viewer who joined brought their friends. The growth was entirely organic for years.

The bot ecosystem was the secret weapon. Discord made it trivially easy to build bots — automated programs that add functionality to servers.

Music bots, moderation bots, gaming bots, utility bots. Developers built tens of thousands of bots, each one making Discord servers more useful and sticky.

A server with good bots became a mini-app platform.

COVID and the "beyond gaming" shift were massive. When lockdowns hit, study groups, book clubs, art communities, crypto communities, and just friend groups all started using Discord.

By 2020, non-gaming usage overtook gaming usage. Discord quietly dropped the "for gamers" tagline and rebranded as a platform for communities of all kinds.

Instacart

Instacart grew by solving a problem one city at a time. They launched in San Francisco, proved the model, then expanded to other major metros.

Each new market required recruiting shoppers, signing up retailers, and building enough consumer density to make the economics work.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the inflection point. Grocery delivery went from luxury to necessity overnight.

In March 2020 Instacart announced it would add 300,000 shoppers, then raised that by another 250,000 weeks later. Order volume increased 500%.

Years of planned growth happened in weeks. The pandemic proved that grocery delivery wasn't a niche — it was the future of how a significant chunk of the population would shop.

The enterprise play is the long-term moat. By providing white-label technology to grocers, Instacart becomes embedded in their operations.

Even if a grocery chain wanted to build its own delivery service, they'd need years and hundreds of millions to replicate what Instacart provides. The more deeply integrated Instacart becomes in grocery operations, the harder it is to rip out.

Discord

Monetization has been the eternal question. Discord has 200 million monthly active users but has never turned a profit.

Nitro subscriptions are growing but most users are happy on the free tier. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Discord doesn't run ads — they've explicitly said ads in DMs or chat would destroy the product.

Finding ways to monetize without betraying user trust is the core challenge.

The Microsoft acquisition saga. In early 2021, Microsoft reportedly offered $12 billion to buy Discord.

Citron and the board walked away. The thinking was that Discord could grow into something worth much more independently.

Whether that was the right call depends on whether Discord can eventually figure out profitability — Microsoft would have solved that problem instantly with its distribution.

Content moderation at scale is brutal. With millions of servers and hundreds of millions of users, Discord has struggled with harmful content — extremist groups, CSAM, doxxing, and harassment.

They've invested heavily in trust and safety teams and automated detection, but the decentralized nature of servers makes moderation much harder than a centralized feed like Twitter or Facebook.

Instacart

The post-COVID hangover was brutal. After pandemic demand normalized, growth slowed dramatically.

The company's valuation dropped from a peak of $39 billion in early 2021 to about $10 billion at IPO in September 2023. Investors who bought at the peak saw a 75% paper loss.

The narrative shifted from "essential infrastructure" to "nice-to-have luxury."

Unit economics are perpetually tight. Paying a person to walk through a grocery store, pick items, bag them, and drive them to someone's house is expensive.

Unlike meal delivery (one restaurant, one bag), grocery delivery involves dozens of items per order, refrigeration requirements, and substitution decisions. Every order that requires a shopper to call the customer about an out-of-stock item eats into efficiency.

Amazon is the existential threat. Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods delivery, and Amazon's own logistics network represent a competitor with nearly unlimited resources and a Prime membership base of 200+ million.

Amazon has been willing to lose billions on grocery delivery to build market share. Instacart's advantage is retailer partnerships — Kroger and Publix use Instacart specifically because they don't want to help Amazon dominate grocery.

Discord

Discord's core is servers — community spaces organized into text and voice channels. Think of a server like a clubhouse with different rooms for different topics.

Voice Channels let you drop in and out of audio conversations like a walkie-talkie. Stage Channels are for live audio events with audiences.

Forum Channels organize discussions by topic. Discord also has direct messaging, group chats, video calls, screen sharing, and a growing app/bot ecosystem.

Activities let users play games and watch videos together inside Discord calls.

Instacart

Instacart Marketplace — the core platform where consumers order groceries from 80,000+ stores for delivery or pickup, with personal shoppers fulfilling orders. Instacart+ — subscription service ($9.99/month) offering free delivery on orders over $35, reduced service fees, and credit back on pickup orders.

Instacart Ads — a retail media platform letting CPG brands run sponsored product listings, display ads, and coupons within the shopping experience. Instacart Platform (Enterprise) — white-label e-commerce technology that lets grocers build their own online ordering and fulfillment powered by Instacart's infrastructure.

Caper Cart — AI-powered smart shopping carts (from the 2021 Caper AI acquisition) with built-in screens, barcode scanners, and payment that let shoppers skip the checkout line.

Discord

Benchmark, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Spark Capital, Fidelity Investments

Instacart

Sequoia Capital was an early and consistent backer. Andreessen Horowitz invested in growth rounds.

D1 Capital Partners led the 2021 round that valued Instacart at $39 billion. Existing investors including Valiant Capital, T.

Rowe Price, Fidelity, and Tiger Global participated across rounds. Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2012 batch).

The September 2023 IPO on NASDAQ priced at $30 per share, valuing the company at approximately $10 billion.