Discord

Uber

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.

Uber

Uber is a marketplace that connects riders with drivers. You request a ride through the app, the nearest driver accepts, picks you up, drops you off, and Uber takes a cut — typically 25-30% of the fare.

The driver keeps the rest. Uber doesn't own any cars.

They don't employ any drivers. They built a $150 billion company by being the middleman with a really good app.

The model expanded into Uber Eats (food delivery, same concept — restaurants cook, drivers deliver, Uber takes a cut), Uber Freight (connecting truckers with shippers), and advertising. The advertising business is quietly enormous — Uber has data on where millions of people go every day, and brands will pay handsomely for that.

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.

Uber

The idea started in Paris in December 2008. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were at the LeWeb tech conference and couldn't find a cab.

Camp had been obsessing over the idea of summoning a car with your phone. He bought the domain UberCab.com, built a prototype, and recruited Kalanick to help run it.

The first version launched in San Francisco in 2010 as a black car service — not the cheap rideshare everyone knows today. You'd tap a button, a Lincoln Town Car would show up, and it cost about 1.5x a regular taxi.

Ryan Graves answered a tweet from Kalanick looking for an "entrepreneurial product manager" and became employee number one. He ran operations while Kalanick was still finishing up another startup.

Graves would later become CEO briefly before handing the reins to Kalanick. The app launched with just a handful of cars in San Francisco.

It worked so well that riders couldn't shut up about it.

The real inflection point came in 2012 when they launched UberX — regular people driving their own cars at prices cheaper than taxis. That one decision turned Uber from a luxury black car service into a verb.

Within two years, UberX was available in hundreds of cities and the word "Uber" had entered the dictionary.

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.

Uber

Uber's early growth strategy was beautifully ruthless. They'd roll into a new city, launch without asking permission, and deal with the regulatory fallout later.

They called it "Travis's Law" — it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

The playbook was simple: launch in a new city, give massive discounts to riders (sometimes completely free rides), pay drivers signing bonuses and guaranteed hourly rates, and flood the zone until the city was hooked. Then slowly raise prices and cut driver incentives once the market was locked.

They burned billions doing this but it worked — by 2016 Uber was in 500+ cities across 70 countries.

They also weaponized word of mouth with referral codes. Every rider could give free rides to friends.

Every new driver got a bonus for signing up. The viral loop was insane.

At peak growth, Uber was adding a new city every day.

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.

Uber

Where do you even start? Uber might have faced more simultaneous existential crises than any company in history.

Regulatory wars. Taxi unions, city governments, and entire countries tried to shut Uber down.

London revoked their license. France arrested two executives.

Uber was banned, unbanned, re-banned, and sued in dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously.

The toxic culture. In 2017, former engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post describing rampant sexual harassment, discrimination, and HR cover-ups at Uber.

It went nuclear. Investigation after investigation followed.

Board members resigned. Executives were fired.

Travis Kalanick's ouster. After the culture scandals, a leaked video of him berating an Uber driver, and a federal investigation into stolen trade secrets from Google's self-driving car unit Waymo, the board forced Kalanick to resign as CEO in June 2017.

Dara Khosrowshahi came in from Expedia to clean things up.

The cash burn was legendary. Uber lost $8.5 billion in 2019 alone.

They subsidized rides so heavily that riders were paying less than the actual cost of the trip. The company didn't turn its first operating profit until Q3 2023 — fourteen years after founding.

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.

Uber

Uber Rides is the core product — get from A to B in someone else's car. UberX is the standard option, Uber Black is the premium black car tier, UberXL fits bigger groups, and Uber Reserve lets you schedule rides in advance.

Uber Eats is the food delivery arm and competes directly with DoorDash and Grubhub. Uber Freight is the logistics play — basically Uber for semi-trucks, connecting carriers with shippers.

Uber for Business lets companies manage employee rides and meals. Uber now also offers package delivery, grocery delivery, and even boat rides in some cities.

Discord

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

Uber

Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, SoftBank, Toyota, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Tencent