Index Audio

Guests:

*Jason Citron*, Co-Founder & CEO, Discord

*Danny Rimer*, Partner, Index Ventures

With over 4 billion people on the internet, you can take just about any niche – weird black-and-white artwork, crochet cat dolls, candy commercials from the noughties – and it will be huge. In this conversation between Danny Rimer, senior partner at Index Ventures, and Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO of Discord, the pair discuss how the company became the ‘town square’ for creators and their fans to come together, and what Discord has done to avoid the division and polarisation that plagues much of the internet.

Jason starts by talking about the unexpected path Discord took from a platform primarily about friends meeting before and after games, to a place where people could join communication channels known as ‘servers’ to explore their shared interest in everything from TV shows to music. Over 150 million people use Discord every month, with millions of servers made by creators and their audiences. Jason goes on to talk about the surprising importance of voice chat as something that strikes a balance between rich emotional texture and high attentional demands. Danny moves the conversation onto Discord’s unusually exacting – and refreshing – approach to community moderation, and Jason admits his lack of premonition in the early days about the success of the business. He goes on to note the convergence between fans’ desire to support and be closer to creators on the one hand, and on the other, the move away from advertising and towards direct payments for creators. Jason concludes with how Kanye West has used Discord to give fans a greater say over his creative process, and offers some remarks about the truly global spread of Discord’s users.

Guests:

*Sima Gandhi*, Co-Founder & CEO, Creative Juice

*James Berdigans*, Co-Founder & CEO, Printify

*Andrew Lipp*, Co-Founder & CEO, EQL

*Harry Stebbings*, Founder, 20VC

*Mark Goldberg*, Index Ventures (Moderator)

While the tools for making and distributing media across the internet have been around for a while, the financial and digital infrastructure required to make money from online creativity is only just emerging. As the ‘creator-as-business’ model gains momentum, hear from some of the most thoughtful and engaged voices now pushing for the maturation of the creator economy.

Guests:

*Alex Zaccaria*, Co-Founder and CEO, Linktree

*Jim Shepherd*, Head of Talent Partnerships, Snap

*Alex Masmej*, Co-Founder & CEO, Showtime

*Kudzi Chikumbu*, Director of Creator Community, TikTok

*Georgia Stevenson*, Index Ventures (Moderator)

The world is more connected than ever, enabling us to express ourselves in new and different ways. On the internet, we find belonging and we build communities. Here, we discuss how online identity has evolved over time, how different platforms work to shape digital identity, and what we can observe from salient Gen Z behaviors across platforms.

Guests:

*Phillip Wang*, Co-Founder & CEO of Gather,*Devin Finzer* Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea, *Nick Fajt* Co-Founder & CEO of Rec Room and Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures.

We're spending more time than ever interacting and transacting online. And in the future, we'll spend much of our lives—for work and for play—in immersive virtual environments and robust digital economies. This is the future of work and the future of entertainment, combining key gaming, crypto, and media.

Sarah Cannon, partner at Index Ventures, raises the question of what the metaverse should look like from a first-principles perspective. Phillip Wang, co-founder and CEO of Gather, which allows communities to come together online, observes the prospects for a metaverse that doesn’t merely mimic ‘real life’ experiences, but in some cases can go beyond them, with new kinds of social encounters and forms of belonging. Nick Fajt, the co-founder and CEO of RecRoom, where players can build and play games together, talks about his company’s desire to cater to people’s creative need to ‘affect’ the world around them – something that’s been lacking in many virtual environments up to now. Devin Finzer, the co-founder and CEO of NFT marketplace OpenSea, notes that the frontier technologies driving the metaverse – AI, VR and crypto – all have early adopter traction but are only just on the cusp of an exponential growth curve. The group turns to the question of what will ‘mainstream’ the metaverse in order to move it from novelty to necessity; what new jobs it will create; how it could hypercharge digital network effects; and what we can do to ensure the ‘dystopian’ representations of the metaverse in literature aren’t born out in reality.

In the realm of modern technology, it doesn’t get more exciting than self-driving vehicles.

Aurora is the only successful independent company in this business. The team has remained focused on building the Aurora Driver, partnering with existing leaders (Toyota, Uber, Volvo, Paccar, and more) for the other pieces of the puzzle. Chris shares the advantages of relying on partners to bring that technology to market, noting “we’ll actually be able to build a better product and we’ll end up actually having a better business and have a bigger impact on the world because of that.”

What Aurora has been able to achieve in the self-driving space is remarkable. Index partner Mike Volpi sits down with Chris to discuss Aurora’s unique approach to self-driving, the outlook on the industry, and how the company keeps people focused when solving such a complex, long-term problem. In Chris’s words, “it's been an incredible adventure and we're only just at the beginning.”

Guests:

The Chainsmokers’ *Alex Pall*, TikTok Creator, *Josh Richards*, YouTuber, *Shelby Church*, Twitch Streamer, *Youna aka Codemiko* and Index's *Rex Woodbury*.

How can you ‘make it’ as a creator? In this conversation, hear from some of the pioneering artists in today’s digital economy about how they built up their audience from scratch, the roadblocks they encountered along the way, and the strategies they used to overcome them.

Principal at Index Ventures Rex Woodbury begins by asking about Gen Z’s shifting expectations about work and why life as a creator appeals to them. Josh Richards, a creator and entrepreneur who’s amassed 24 million followers on TikTok, talks about the role of the pandemic and the rejection of the ‘9-to-5’ desk job. Youna (otherwise known by her ‘virtual avatar’ name, CodeMiko) moves on to ‘Vtubing’, self-expression and the relationship between monetisation and community engagement, before Shelby Church discusses why it’s easier than ever before to make money on YouTube. The conversation progresses to how creators can build a massive audience on one platform and then re-direct it to another – something that both Josh and Alex Pall, the entrepreneur and member of the DJ duo The Chainsmokers, have considerable experience in. Finally the group considers the tailwinds that are reorienting artists towards maintaining greater control and ownership over their creativity, and they discuss the new tools and businesses yet to be built that will help reduce the pain-points for the next generation of creators.

The Renaissance was humanity's zenith of creativity, art, and expression. Today, we're entering a second Renaissance—a digital Renaissance. Paula Findlen is the world's preeminent expert on the Renaissance. She speaks with Index partner Sarah Cannon on parallels between the Renaissance and our modern, technology-driven creator economy.