Chess.com

“I, you know, in, in many ways I was happier than I am today because the stress of chess.com today is so much more than it was back then. So, you know, I don't wish a huge success on anyone. It can be quite a burden at times to be totally honest.”

“I think we're ready for twenty million daily active users and a hundred million monthly active users. I think we're ready for that. And I think it's coming.”

“One thing we tell people who work at chess.com, every single person who gets hired, They hear the same thing, which is chess.com will never be your highest paying job. We're just economically not set up for it.”

“We've been growing at the speed of cash. And so we don't have just tons and tons of excess cash.”

“We're at five million daily active users now, you know, 40, fifty million monthly active users.”

“That's why we recently did you know take money, a little bit of cash, and then some secondary from WME and Endeavor which is a large media company, and we're working with them to, you know, look at different ways we can grow the game.”

“I think people are a little bit Naive about the downsides of raising money. Ultimately your investors will want an exit and it may not be at the same time as you. And for a business that's as mission driven as chess.com is, it's, it has at times been irritatin…”

“Interestingly, India is not a top monetizing country for chess.”

“I mean, we've seen many businesses come into chess, having raised millions of dollars and seen them flame out.”

“We're only really looking for media partnerships at this time, because we believe that while we work on our core business, our top of funnel And new, new users are going to come through media partnerships. And luckily we have some amazing great media partnersh…”

“Met with a lot of private equity and venture firms. And, you know, most of them passed. They still couldn't see the vision of where chess could go. They still thought they said the same things, you know, the market isn't big enough, et cetera. But, you know, G…”

“Wait for the TV show next year. You'll, you'll, you'll hear more about it.”

“Up until about 400 people on our team, We had a kind of everybody was reporting to me in some ways. It was extremely flat company. You know, everybody was emailing me their weekly reports. I was responding to, you know, two, three, 400 emails every weekend.”

“And we ended up we ended up settling that lawsuit in exchange for two cases of vodka. That's what he wanted. And so no money, just had to ship two cases of vodka. And then he settled the lawsuit.”

“A some ridiculously large number percentage of people in Norway have chess.com on their phone. It's like, it's massive. I don't want to say it's half, but it feels like it's close just because of Magnus Carlsen. And probably 10% of them are paying subscribers”

“But I do think we'll be there one day.”

“I think I sold the business for a little under two million dollars, something like that. It was actually less than that. It was like one and a half million, if I remember correctly. And then I paid, so after I paid taxes, I had about a million dollars. And the…”

“I think a lot of people would look at, you know, single digit growth, like we're going to have this year and say, ah, well, you're not ready to be a public company.”

“Yeah, I mean, I've had death threats.”

“I mean, I remember maybe in 2017 or 20 18 doing you know, ten million dollars in revenue or something like that.”

“Started chess.com in many ways to support the e-commerce business.”

“We have been profitable basically since the very beginning.”