Jason Citron, a co-founder of the popular social chat app Discord, stepped down as the company’s chief executive on Wednesday, a significant management shake-up ahead of Discord’s potential public offering.

The new chief executive will be Humam Sakhnini, a 15-year veteran of the video game industry, Mr. Citron said in a statement. Mr. Sakhnini was previously the vice chairman at Activision, the gaming publisher behind titles like Call of Duty and Candy Crush.

Discord is in talks to go public as early as this year, and was valued by private investors in 2021 at roughly $15 billion. The app is especially popular among gamers, and has over 200 million users.

Mr. Citron will remain on the company’s board and be an adviser to Mr. Sakhnini, he said in the statement. Mr. Sakhnini helped oversee Activision when Microsoft bought it for $69 billion in 2023 and left the company shortly after the acquisition.

In an interview with VentureBeat, a gaming publication that reported earlier on the management change, Mr. Citron said that he was “more of a builder, an early-stage kind of guy,” and that “hiring someone like Humam is a step in that direction” of a public offering.

Discord was founded in 2015 by Mr. Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who had started a video game studio and invented a tool for people to communicate while playing games together.

The company grew through the years and became especially popular during the pandemic, when interest in video games peaked. In 2021, Discord held talks with Microsoft about an acquisition in the range of $10 billion, though no deal was made.

Last year, Mr. Citron testified at a congressional hearing about online child safety, where senators grilled him and the chief executives of Meta, TikTok and X about lapses in safety on their social media platforms.

Discord primarily makes money from its premium subscription service, but in recent years has expanded its revenue from advertising and so-called microtransactions by people using the app.