The Ledger
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Allebest: Pure software businesses without big tech rivals can avoid venture capital
“For a pure software and content business like ours you know, and one where we didn't have like, you know, no major tech company was bearing down on us. We were able to kind of take a little bit of the slower, a slower road there which was great developed a gre…”
Chess.com remains bootstrapped as private equity investments were entirely secondary
“Well, I'll tell you, we're still a bootstrap business because CBC came in, but they still, you know they came in and bought secondary.”
Lichess functions as the Linux of the chess community
“Obviously Lee Chess exists today. They're kind of the, I would say the Linux of you know, they exist for a really important reason. It's great for the community. It's open source.”
Allebest: Unpatentable games like chess are won purely on product and community
“The interesting thing is chess is like, Not patentable. There's, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of chess apps in the app store and chess websites. And you know, at the end of the day, really product is going to win out and community and content.”
Online cheating cannot be fully prevented, only detected and banned post-hoc
“Cheating. It can't be prevented because you can't, you know, you can't put a webcam in every single person's home. But we do do a really good job at catching it and banning people who do that and trying to educate them as well.”
Chess.com launched Gambit to bring chess-style skill ratings to poker
“We recently launched gambit at gambit.com, which is our poker
site and you can play gambit on your phone as well, but we're doing poker in a different way too.
We're bringing the chess playbook, which is like poker for ratings.”
Chess.com has 10 million daily and 50 million monthly active users
“We're about ten million daily active users, about 40 or fifty million monthly active users.”
Digital tools cannot shortcut the biological repetitions required for expertise
“And so there's really not shortcuts to the process. There are shortcuts in the tools. You know, it's, we've made it, tried to make it as easy as possible to, you know, do your puzzles and to train on your different elements.”
Chess.com mainstreamed the game by celebrating casual and beginner players
“I also feel that we've been partly responsible for that, that we've kind of revolutionized what it means to be a chess player. Chess can be in your pocket. You can do it any time. The content is funny and relevant and interesting. And we also just redefined wh…”
Allebest: Chess.com has over 250 million registered members
“We have more than two hundred fifty million registered members and more revenue than I thought we would end up with as a chess company.”
Allebest: Chess.com plans to launch more classic games using its playbook
“And we're going to roll out other games as well.
because we like the playbook of what we've done.
So we're cooking up a bunch of other classic games.
and we're gonna be launching those out there.”
Chess.com relies on proprietary data and machine learning to detect cheating
“We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources on anti-cheating basically, and we have a whole set of tools, which I'm not going to get into because I don't like to give ideas to people on how we do it, but we track a lot of stuff. We have more dat…”
Chess.com had roughly one million daily active users before COVID-19
“Because before, before COVID and Queens Gambit, we had like a million daily active users, and we were shocked at that.”
Chess.com succeeded by doing the exact opposite of standard VC playbooks
“We literally just did like all the opposite of that. Like I hired my friend from San Jose state. We worked remotely. We didn't raise any money. We didn't pay any money for customer acquisition. We picked a tiny market.”
Early VCs called Chess.com uninvestable and refused to fund it
“And so I had a lot of meetings and basically most of them said, this is uninvestable. You should get a real job. Don't waste your time with this. And so I wasn't able to raise any money. No one believed in the vision.”