Interview with Jason Citron, Founder of OpenFeint

Jason Citron honed his programming skills working on the Eragon video game at Stormfront Studios before joining Double Fine to work on console games, including Brutal Legend. He then joined gaming and mobile incubator YouWeb, where he co-founded mobile games company Aurora Feint with Danielle Cassley in 2007.

Citron was just 26 years old when he and Cassley sold OpenFeint, their social platform for mobile games, to GREE, a social networking service, in 2011 for $104 million. By that time, OpenFeint had more than 100 million users, and over 7,000 games were integrated into their platform.

Following OpenFeint’s sale, Citron founded Hammer & Chisel, and most recently Discord

“The journey of building a company is full of lots of high and low points. High points are easy to talk about. Low points are always harder to talk about, but you learn so much more from them.”

Newnham: What was your introduction to technology, and when did you first get excited about programming?
Citron: My dad first introduced me to technology when I was a little kid. He had always been into tinkering with personal computers, and back then, in the early ‘80s, it was still a small, mostly…