May 7, 2024 • 47 mins
In this episode, Shamus Madan interviews Chess.com's Erik Allebest about his entrepreneurial journey, the challenges of running a $100 million business, and maintaining balance. They delve into building company culture in a remote setting, growth strategies, and the impact of AI on online chess.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The year's 2005.
Eric Allevis partners up with his friend, JayStevenson, to start a new company, allowing you
to play chess online.
It's his 3rd chess company.
The other 2, they were successful, but nowherenear the scale that this company was about to
be.
Chess.com today is not only like super viral,but there are $100,000,000 revenue business all
(00:21):
built off the backs of content social media andSEO.
The other week, I sat down with Eric to learnhis story.
The secret behind building a $100,000,000business some of the growth tactics that you
can use when building your business.
This is a master glass for any entrepreneurlooking to start an online business in 2024.
Before we begin, I'm 18, and I'm on a missionto learn from the greatest minds in tech and
(00:45):
business.
And, hopefully, along my journey, I can sharesome of those very same insights with you.
Now if you enjoy these interviews and want meto continue doing them, please subscribe down
below.
It helps the channel when you can imagine, andthe biggest show gets, the bigger the guests
get.
Thank you very much.
And now on to my conversation with EricAllevest.
Eric, thanks for taking the time to join.
(01:07):
I'm excited for this one.
Before we get into how you built chess.com intoa $100,000,000,000 business, I wanna start this
conversation with your early context.
What would be the earliest piece of contextthat I would have to know about you to
understand the person sitting in front of metoday and all that he's accomplished?
Okay.
Well, thanks for having me first.
(01:27):
Context about me is that I have from a veryyoung age been a very scrappy, like, doer.
I could not be stopped in terms of justcreative ways to go out and figure out how to
do a business.
And that includes being eight years old.
(01:49):
And in my neighborhood, I kinda knew where thehigh school kids drink beer.
On the weekends, and I would go there on Mondayafter school, and I would collect the cans into
garbage bags and then have my mom drive me tothe grocery store, and I'd cycle those and
make, you know, a dollar 15, and I would feelamazing about it.
So that's just the very first story.
(02:11):
Of just many, many, many, business typeactivities that I did.
It's just inside of me.
And my dad is the same way.
And so it's that's some context about me.
You also sold candy bars at middle school whendid a ton of these little entrepreneurship
experiments.
Why do you think it's inside of you?
(02:32):
So my dad's dad was an immigrant, to the USfrom, the Netherlands escaped kind of after the
war, was an was an artist and kind of a, youknow, a crafty person, my grandpa, my opa, as
we call him, very much a resourceful person hadto be during the war, came to America, moved
into a chicken coop as his first home,converted from a chicken coop into a house, and
(02:58):
then just was like scrappy.
And my dad was, you know, came at age four andfive and, you know, I think had some of that
immigrant chip and some of that immigranthustle, to make things happen and tried many
different businesses.
Frankly, none of his businesses succeededoutside of his law career, which he's very had
a very, good law career, been very successfulthere, but he was always doing something.
(03:23):
So maybe it's because I'm part Dutch.
Maybe because it's part immigrant.
You know, maybe it's it's DNA.
But it's in it's definitely inside of me.
And for those early businesses, you mentionedyour dad's businesses didn't didn't really do
so well.
Were you making any money from your earlybusinesses?
Yeah.
(03:43):
I was.
If I wanted some my my dad was was reallyawesome in that He had a sticky note on his
wind bathroom mirror.
I remember seeing it that said that, that thethe the the sons of the rich are often poor
because what happens is people don't learn howto work card, and they get everything handed to
(04:09):
them.
And so my dad knew because he was an estateplanning attorney.
He'd seen so many families that had money andsaw the children who grew up in that
circumstance.
And again, this isn't true always, but there'sa lot of people who get silver spooned and do
very well.
There's a lot of people get everything and havegenerational wealth.
So I'm not saying this is held true, but he hadthe fear that his own success would lead to his
(04:35):
kids not being, you know, not learning how towork hard.
And so if I wanted a remote control car, whichI did, it wasn't handed to me.
I had to go door to door selling stationeryfrom the back of boy's life magazine, making
two bucks a sale.
To, you know, to save up $200 to buy the remotecontrol car I wanted.
(04:59):
I had to go to my neighbor and mow lawns for,you know, 5 bucks an hour to get what I wanted.
He didn't hand us things.
We didn't have we didn't have, you know, Lance.
We didn't have yard workers.
You know, we had a we had a nice big yard thenwe had to do our own chores.
So it wasn't handed to me, and that was veryintentional by him is to not not not make life
(05:22):
easy for us.
So I wanna connect the dots.
But before we get to chess.com and and some ofthe businesses you're running today,
previously, but before founding chess.com, youthought business school and law school was
pretty important that it could change yourlife.
But in fact, it changed your life in a way youdidn't expect.
(05:44):
You were rejected from every business schooland law school you applied to.
How did that impact you?
Well, it was the first of all, it was a toughtime to be applying to business school and law
school.
It was, you know, in 2001, the dot com bubblemelt down, all that stuff, and it's a record
time for people to be applied to schools.
So, but I'm super glad I got rejected.
(06:05):
It was great.
You know, I I had people in my ear telling me,oh, you know, if you wanna be successful, you
have to do this schooling or you have to dothis thing and I grew up in a great area, and
that those were my mentors, people who weredoctors, people who were lawyers, people who
had done business, and, you know, getting agreat education was a key part of that in their
mind, so they told me that.
(06:26):
And I actually don't think that's necessarilytrue at all.
Having gone through that process, I think itcan be true and it can work out, but I think
some of the most successful people we've seen,who's really more about their hustle and their
driving what and their own creativity than theschool that they went to.
(06:47):
And so but I was told differently oh, have agreat career.
Do this.
This is the path.
Go do this.
And I did end up going to Stanford BusinessSchool, and I will say amazing experience.
Met incredible people.
The connections have been phenomenal.
But I the first time around, I was rejectedeverywhere.
In 2001.
(07:07):
And then was like, well, okay.
Now I gotta go do something and started my owncompanies and then you know, 4 years later, did
reapply because I wasn't actually feeling superhappy and satisfied at the time.
And I did get in later, but only after kind ofcutting my chops on on doing an actual
business.
(07:28):
What companies were you running after you wereejected from business
So one was called schoolhouse chess.
I did that for a while.
I was teaching chess to kids and afterschoolskind of on a on a larger scale had about over a
100 schools.
You know, lots of kids involved.
You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I'll bea chess coach and they like individual
(07:49):
students.
That's like step 1 is you have, like,individual students.
That's great.
You can make a great living and be very happydoing that.
Step 2 is I'm gonna teach multiple students in,like, a class or a school, and I'm gonna do a
bigger program where I teach more people at atime.
K?
You can make a little maybe a little more moneydoing that.
Then you're like, oh, I'll do a couple ofthose, and I can personally drive on Mondays
(08:12):
here and Tuesdays there that you can do more.
To scale that, you have to then set up asystem.
And I so I set up a system and I was hiringother people to go do that.
They were getting 15, 20 bucks an hour ascollege students.
And then I was running the business and scalingthe business.
(08:33):
So I quickly understood leveraging, you know,systems and operations to kind of scale and
grow something.
And hiring great people to, you know, whowanted to be involved to go do the work.
So that was able to to raise it.
The second business I did was called wholesalechess where I was importing chest equipment
from overseas, which was scary to do back then.
It's a lot easier.
(08:53):
A lot more confident now.
But, you know, back in, you know, 2001, why$50,000 over to China using a fax machine.
It was a different world.
It was pretty scary, but I did that and I setup a warehouse.
Built our website because there was no Shopify.
We had to custom build an entire e commerceplatform.
(09:14):
And, you know, set up our business.
There were much higher barriers to entry forbusiness back then.
And it was different.
And now actually easier to start a business insome ways and to test that.
Yeah.
There's so many platforms.
There's so many, you know, different tools.
There's so many different you know, people whoare doing it and supporting it.
But, you know, 20 plus years ago, starting yourown business was a different thing.
(09:37):
Anyway, I did it twice.
I see exceeded twice.
And I guess the Stanford admissions office waslike, this weirdo.
I mean, did 2 chess businesses.
You know, has never had a real job.
Let's get him into our class and see whathappens.
So that's probably how that happened.
So you mentioned you were running 2 businesses,both of which were successful.
(09:57):
I feel like entrepreneurship is is oftenglamorized, a lot, that profession.
Why were you unhappy?
I think entrepreneurship is way overglamorized.
It can be so miserable.
I don't know very many, like, super happyentrepreneurs.
And they don't wanna talk about it.
And they talk about it with each other becausewhen your CEO or running a company, everyone
(10:19):
else is like, oh, that's awesome.
And if you're like, actually, it's not, youkinda sound like it doesn't sound great.
It doesn't come off well, but that's whyfounders get together and they just
commiserate.
But Yeah.
Anyway, there's something about the ups anddowns that can be hard.
But but let me I'll just say it this way.
If your business is growing super fast, it'smiserable because everything is seems like it's
(10:47):
going well.
But you're not prepared.
You don't have the team.
You're stressed out of your mind.
It's like your business is going up super fast.
And, like, you you you can't deal with it.
It's just overwhelming.
It's all encompassing and, like, it's very hardto handle growth.
So growth can feel miserable.
And you're like, where's my life?
(11:08):
What is going on?
It's it feels it feels scary.
What if it goes down?
So growth is hard.
If your business is flat, that sucks becauseyou're always thinking, how do I grow?
And if your business is going down, That sucksbecause your business is not doing well and
you're dealing with all those problems.
So whether your business is going up, Whetheryour business is flat, whether business is
(11:31):
going down, all you have is problems.
That's all you're doing is dealing withproblems, and you're dealing with people
problems, and you're dealing with, you know,external factors.
You're dealing all sorts of things.
So entrepreneurship is just problems.
Do you like problems?
Be an entrepreneur.
You wanna not have problems in your life, goget a great job.
(11:51):
So that's
Even with chess.com, you guys are a 100 plus$1,000,000 revenue business now.
Do you feel that same way?
Yeah.
All I have is problems, man.
It's true.
Like, of course, yeah, and people like, oh, yougot a $100,000,000.
That's yeah, everything's easy.
Well, guess what?
Costs are rising all the time.
Like, your vendors are raising their prices,and then you're, like, you raise your prices on
(12:14):
your community.
And your community's like, oh, yeah.
You're raising prices on us.
And you're like, oh, you know, your health carecosts are going up and the cost of inflation's
going up.
And then You know?
And then you got competitors coming at you, andthen you've got this crisis.
And then you've got this important personwho's, you know, out for some reason or I'm
(12:34):
just gonna be honest.
Like, entrepreneurship is is problemmanagement, and it's judgment, and it's it's
judgment, and its vision, and its resources,but it's problems.
I mean, how would you feel?
Sure.
You have a $100,000,000 company and how youwake up one morning and in your and and
everyone's texting you saying, hey.
What are you gonna do?
You just got sued for a $100,000,000.
(12:54):
Like, that's that's a problem.
You know?
Sure.
It's an opportunity, but it's also a problem.
So It's a bit glamorized, and you're just goingkind of from crisis to crisis at times.
Meanwhile, you have a whole bunch of otherpeople looking at you just like, well, I guess,
you know, the your our CEO, our founder, is,like, handling all the problems.
(13:16):
That's great.
And then they're all trusting you.
And then you're looking back at them and like,wow.
I have all this, like, everyone's trusting meto do this.
That's a lot of pressure.
So that it can definitely lead to, like, amental health, you know, problems for for
founders and and entrepreneurs.
And so, anyway, Yeah.
It reminds me it reminds me of the story ofBobby Brennan.
We had him on the show.
(13:38):
His business, he was selling textbooks.
He was doing about maybe somewhere in the 7figures or 8 figures in revenue a year, but the
the profit margins on that were super slim.
So when he got sued by for the biggest textbookpublishers in the world.
He was super stressed.
He didn't have the money to account for that.
And when he went he was driving on the highway,and he just blacked out, and he found himself
(14:01):
on the on the side of the road surrounded byparamedics.
He was like, what happened?
And that's when you realize something had tothe had to change.
I mean, if you could give yourself one piece ofadvice during that time, what would you say?
The advice I I I give here is not thatnecessarily advice people like to hear, but you
you I think there's 3 things that you have tohave to have a balance because entrepreneurship
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and the weight of that is so heavy.
You need some other things on the other side ofscale.
The things that have worked well for me, greatrelationships.
I have an amazing wife, and children andfamily.
I have great friends, and that helps me staybalanced.
The other is I take care of my health aboveall.
(14:50):
I get sleep.
I exercise every day.
I eat well.
Because I have to be in best performance to dothat.
And thirdly is I do have hobbies and otherthings that I can do so that I can find peace
and quiet.
I can't be doing email and slack and problemswhile I'm playing pickleball.
So I'm happy to be playing pickleball, or Ican't think about that, and I can focus on
(15:13):
something else, and my brain can reset.
And so relationships and health and hobbies,balance that out for me, and keep me able to
then, when it's work time, be maximum, hardfocused on solving problems and kicking ass.
Got it.
So you applied to Stanford Business School.
You get in.
But when you're applying, what were some of thekey things that you wanted to get out of, and
(15:37):
NBA at the time?
I just needed a change, honestly.
And my wife was, like, You need to do somethingdifferent.
Our business was flat.
It was operating.
It was kind of boring at the time.
Playing too many video games.
I wasn't taking care of my health.
(16:01):
And I needed a big reset, and she could seethis in me.
And she She's always been a little out, youknow, ahead seeing the the right ways.
And she's like, you gotta go to businessschool.
I'm gonna help you write your essays becauseshe's an amazing writer.
And I think that's best for our family.
And you, you know, I think this is this is yourlast chance to use that really lucky good GMAT
(16:23):
score.
You got coming out of a college as your lastyear, go for it.
I was like, alright.
Let's do it.
And I think she could see the life that wewanted and where we wanted to go.
And she kinda nudged me that way really, helphelpfully.
And, you know, I applied.
We applied in some ways.
And, I got in and then we we got to go.
(16:43):
And I will say I went there with a fair amountof ego.
I'm a pretty different person than when I firstgot there because I didn't have a lot of other
people or peers who were doing similar things.
Like, if people were in entry level jobs, youknow, kinda out of college and my peer group
was kinda like a lot of entry level jobs wherepeople still in school, And I was, like,
(17:06):
running a business and making a lot of money.
And I'm like, hey.
I'm an entrepreneur.
Like, I know what I'm doing.
I'm gonna go to Stanford.
I don't know what I'm gonna learn there.
I'm already an entrepreneur.
It turns out I didn't know anything, and I hadso much to learn from a business point of view,
from a interpersonal point of view, from acultural point of view, how to be a good
(17:28):
leader, And, you know, I I am an open person,so I didn't know what I didn't know, but when I
got there, I was a I I did immediately prettyimmediately realize I have so much to learn
here, and I open myself up to that.
What do you think is the biggest thing you led?
(17:51):
Wow.
That's a huge question.
I think what I realized is that building acompany is the is the bringing together an
orchestration of so many different elements andthat you're really like in an orchestra and a
conductor, you are moving people together in ainto creating something.
(18:17):
And in order to do that, there's there's manydifferent leadership styles that can work but
you have to have a familiarity with all thedifferent pieces and how they can work
together, and you have to put the best peoplein the seats and you have to get the right
resources in in order to do that.
And then you have to guide and lead.
(18:39):
There there are a lot of different types ofleaders.
You can have people who are sales leaders.
You can have people who are mission and cultureleaders.
You can have people who are product leaders.
You can have technology founders.
There's all sorts of things that you can do.
You you can have some people who have aruthless mission and are kinda jerks to work
for but they pay people a lot of money andattract people to a mission and a talent.
(19:03):
That can work.
We the the the Elon Musks can do the thing.
That can happen.
But where I went to business school and mypersonal life philosophy was on the other side,
which was like, how do you create an amazingculture that people wanna be a part of and then
do great things together and have a mission anddo that?
And that is what I learned.
(19:26):
And I have executed on that.
I would say our company culture is arguably,like, one of our is one of our greatest assets.
And very few people ever leave our company,because it's such a great place to work, and
we've created something awesome.
And we have a great and chess is such a greatgame.
I mean, it's just like, who doesn't wanna be apart of it?
So all of that, but I did learn a lot there,and I learned you know, a a lot of humility.
(19:51):
And I learned how to be a servant leader whereI'm there to serve.
Yes.
I'm leading.
Yes.
I'm strategically helping.
Yes.
I'm tactically like, strong to help in all thedifferent areas and touching the product and
things, but I'm also there to serve people andshow them how much I love them, how much I
support them, and the and that we're all goingand doing this mission together.
(20:12):
The culture aspect of it is actually prettyfascinating to me because you're a pretty big
business now, but I think almost your entireteam is completely remote.
How have you been able to build that such astrong culture, remotely?
I would flip the question and say, how were weable to build a remote company is because of
our culture.
(20:32):
It's not how did we build our culture inside ofa remote company.
Does that make sense?
It was our culture that allowed us to be agreat remote company.
And so that's what we started with and focusedon mission driven.
No assholes.
Like, focus on what's important.
Getting people there who wanted to be a part ofthat mission.
(20:56):
Everybody who joins chess.com knows from thevery first interview that this is not their
highest paying job.
If you want your highest paying job, gosomewhere else.
Go somewhere where you probably don't have thegreat culture.
You probably aren't doing an awesome mission.
So we attract people who are like, I wanna be apart of this.
(21:19):
I wanna do this.
I'm making enough money to be happy and live.
I could make more money somewhere else.
I probably won't enjoy it, but I could.
So we don't have those people coming in to ourculture who are, like, just focused on their
own personal advancement and own personalfight.
We just we just don't attract those people.
They don't they don't they don't apply.
(21:41):
They don't get through the interview process.
Or if they do, they don't stick around.
And so we have we have a culture of like, hey.
We're we are on a mission together.
And it's a very similar and kind of like mindedthing.
And then we use good practices.
I mean, we're always talking we don't we don'ttalk about business metrics.
We probably need 2 more.
But when we have our managers meeting liketoday, our topic was giving people the benefit
(22:06):
of the doubt and how important of a tool thatis when you're running a company and especially
a remote company where when someone typessomething, you can't see their face.
You don't know the meaning of what they'resaying.
All you see is words, and you can take words ina negative context, a sarcastic context, or a
serious and con sincere context.
(22:27):
So you have a choice And we talked about that.
That's that was our manager's meeting today.
So that's our culture.
We're constantly refining and and and pushingon that culture, and that's what we focus on
maybe and and maybe like I said, we shouldsometimes do a little bit more data and metrics
stuff, but our culture is super important tous.
Mean, we've been talking about chess.com for alittle bit.
(22:47):
I wanna paint the picture here and take a stepback.
What's the founding story behind chess.com?
How did you come up with the idea?
And, why'd you decide to start the business?
So we were doing wholesale chess at the time.
And when you do a search on Google, there inthe past, there was, like, very clear ads And
(23:10):
then there was, like, the natural searchresults.
And we were constantly battling who over beingthe first for the natural search results.
SEO search engine optimization.
We wanna be number 1 for chess boards, chesspieces, chess sets, chess clocks.
There's kinda competition between the topsites.
And we were also, though, the Google ads at thetop were getting a lot of clicks.
(23:32):
So we were all spending money.
So here was the top 5 competing chess vendorsat the time selling the exact same product And
we were nickel and diming each other down onprice.
Meanwhile, spending more and more money to getclicks to our site, and our margins were
(23:54):
evaporating.
And I'm like, this is insane.
We're selling a commodity item, trying tocompete on price, and trying to outbid each
other to get customers.
This is going to break and fail.
And, yes, we eventually have the most marketshare, and we have the best service in the best
(24:16):
website and best brand and all the differentthings, but we still felt like we were on a
race to the bottom.
And I said, look, at the time, MySpace was,very popular and growing.
And I was like, look, there's why don't webuild a community for chess players, then
(24:36):
they'll come and they'll chat about chess andwatch chess and play chess and learn chess and
do chess stuff.
And they'll come for that reason, then we canhave ads that don't cost anything, and then
they'll buy the chest equipment and we can havea better chess selling business because of
that.
That was the initial idea behind chess.com wasto build a community and then sell chess
(25:01):
equipment.
Well, kinda while this was percolating, I gotinto Stanford Business School.
As as you said, And I was like, I can't keeprunning this business.
I have to sell this business.
And so I sold the business, but I kept thedomain name and the vision And while I was at
the business school, I built all the wireframes and started to then work with my
(25:24):
cofounder Jay.
He was the technical side and 2 of us would Ido school during the day.
And then until 3 AM, I was staying up andbuilding chest.com with Chet.
And It was it was a grind.
Also, I had, you know, 2 or 3 kids at the time.
Like, I was a pretty, pretty busy person, nottaking care of myself, in some ways, which
(25:45):
that's okay.
It was a period of investment.
But while I graduated from that so I'd sold thechest equipment business, built chest.com, I
had some job offers at Facebook and Palantirand YouTube and mint and other kinds of things,
But I was like, I'm just gonna try this chestthing.
And everyone was like, you're crazy.
(26:06):
I was like, maybe.
Maybe I'll go get a job later, but I'm justgonna see this out.
And as I graduated, we started chess.com, and Ihad some money from having sold the other
companies And the rest is history.
I mean, community platforms are extremelydifficult to build and and get engagement on
there and retention how did you get those first100,000 people in that in, chess.com's
(26:31):
community?
Back in the day, you know, a community was aprofile and some forums and some content.
It was a simpler world.
I mean, social media was different back then.
It it really meant something else.
So we built those things.
And then, you know, there used to be more kindof like little tiny pockets Maybe now it's like
(26:53):
subreddits.
But before, all of those were just or, youknow, were discord servers or whatever, those
were all just different domain names.
You know?
One would be a place for talking about cars.
Then you'd go to, you know, golf.com, and you'dtalk about golf, and you'd go to, you know so
it was different at the time.
And in chess.com was, you know, where we hadthe community forum.
(27:15):
And every single day, you know, a thousandpeople would type chess into the browser, and
it would put a dotcom on it, and it would justgo.
And then, you know, people would sign up.
And then more and more.
And then our SD and then people would and theneventually, you know, Google Chrome wasn't just
putting the dot com on there.
They would do a search for chess, and we werenumber 1.
(27:37):
So then we were capturing all that.
And then people would join, and then they telltheir friends about it.
So it was just a very kind of natural growthfrom search engine optimization and from, you
know, the virality of people sharing.
And on the capital side, you mentioned you hadsome capital from your other business and you
used it to start and grow just.com.
(27:59):
For the 1st 5 years of the business, in fact,you actually tried to raise money and couldn't
get any traction from investors.
What were some of the investor conversationsthat that were going on behind the scenes and
and why were they all saying no?
I met so many great people.
And, you know, when you're an investor, It'shard to be an angel or VC investor because you
(28:22):
have to choose businesses because your hit rateis so low, you have to choose businesses that
can do outsized returns.
You don't want a 2 x, 3 x, or even 5 x yourmoney.
That doesn't help because if you invest in 30businesses, like, you know, 27 of them are
gonna be zeros.
So you have to have high returns.
(28:42):
And so everyone was looking at chess and justbeing, like, chess is, like, tiny.
Like, it's nothing.
It's insignificant.
Like, why are you spending your time on this?
And so it just wasn't big enough for anybody.
And so you know, I was like, fine.
(29:04):
Okay.
I'll just fund it myself.
I mean because I I could be happy.
I was like, well, I can be happy if our companyyou know, pays my wages and we can hire a great
team, and I can live happy on that.
I don't I don't need to build a $1,000,000,000company to be happy.
But if for if you're a venture investor or anangel investor, you're like, can this company
(29:24):
be a $1,000,000,000?
If not, I don't know that I want to investbecause it might not work out on the and it's
not not a big enough upside.
Now I think dotcom could be a $10,000,000,000company.
I have no idea.
I never thought it would be as big as it is,but, like, I think chess is just way more
popular and and and has way more potential thananyone ever I have no idea what the potential
(29:44):
is, but we're we're definitely gonna keepgoing.
I mean, knowing what you know today, if youcould and let let's say investors were saying
yes, would you still bootstrap in in thecompany and fund it yourself, or would you say
yes to those investors?
I probably I mean, look, not not every notevery founder has an option to do what I did.
(30:08):
I had money.
I had sold 2 companies.
I made money while I was in business schooldoing other small businesses.
I'm scrappy.
I've made money.
So I had a I had a fair amount of money of myown, and then I plowed that all in to the
business.
So I could bootstrap And we decided to makemoney early on, and and and go to revenue soon.
(30:32):
I would still have done that but not everybodyhad money or has money to put in to start.
So taking on investment is fine.
Now That said, you can also do a lot morebusiness now because of the cost of software
and running a business and starting somethinghas come down so much.
So you can bootstrap.
(30:52):
You still can.
It's cheaper and faster and easier than ever tostart something, even a software business.
But when we started, it was not there wasnothing, and it was harder and cost more money
in some ways.
So I just happened to have money.
That's That's the truth.
My my dad, when he started, his business, hewas fired from his corporate job and and
(31:14):
started an ed tech company the 1st few years,though, were pretty were pretty stressful
because he was taking our family savings to togrow the business.
Luckily, it all worked out.
But you mentioned you plowed some of some ofyour money and you had a family at the time.
Was that time special for you?
Absolutely.
I I have been under nonstop stress for 18years, man.
(31:38):
Like, the moment I graduated from businessschool has been nonstop stress.
So, yeah, like, not taking a job, plowing allof our savings in.
Yeah.
That was stressful times.
But I had already had some successes in thepast, and I think my very supportive and
(32:00):
trusting wife was like, well, he's done itbefore.
I think he could do it again.
So there wasn't stress coming from her, but,you know, I I had 4 kids at that point and was
you know, going forward.
So, it definitely was a little stressful.
You mentioned some of the earlier growthtactics that he used to grow chat dotcom.
(32:23):
1 was a domain in in SEO.
What do you think are probably maybe 1 or 2 ofthe key inflection points that kinda led it to
where it is today?
So being excellent at SEO, being excellent atcontent, content was and still is King.
Like, that's what people want.
People don't want eyeballs.
(32:43):
Like, they don't I mean, sorry.
They don't want ads, but they want content.
That's where they're putting their eyeballs.
And so we knew very early on that instead ofinvesting a ton of money into buying ads, we
should invest in content because that's wherepeople wanna be, and that's what they wanna
consume, and then we'll be there.
(33:04):
And that has been a through line forever.
Don't spend, you know, 1,000,000 of dollarsjust buying ads.
Spend 1,000,000 of dollars making content.
And that's what we did.
And but now the channels have changed.
You know, it's not articles as much anymore,and people will read, and it's not long videos
(33:25):
as much.
Now it's like short form content and andcreator partnerships and all sorts of things,
but it's just content.
And we invested in that content.
And then the community builds around thecontent, and you're basically investing in the
benefit of the content in the community ratherthan frankly, the weird circle of where venture
(33:47):
capitalists put money in businesses then take alot of that money and just buy ads with it,
which goes into the other venture capitalistcompanies.
It's just a weird thing.
And no offense to, you know, any of thosebusinesses and you know, I know that there's a,
you know, there's a lot of people who do wellusing ads, but it just wasn't our strategy.
(34:07):
Content and community have always been ourstrategy.
Plus product excellence.
Like, there's a lot of people who do differentthings, but they don't focus on their product.
Well, I'm a user of my own product every singleday.
And so we focused on product.
We focused on content and community.
And that those were our levers for growth.
On that content side, you actually had a adifferent growth strategy for each platform.
(34:33):
Why was that?
And what were what were those different growthstrategies?
Every audience, every platform is different.
And we have different voices.
There's different demographics.
There's different people.
There's different channels.
We would test and see what works.
Like, we found that, like, happy birthdaymessages and inspirational quotes work well on
Facebook.
But no one wants to see that on Instagram.
(34:55):
Like, I don't know.
Like and frankly, this is where we hire a bunchof younger, smarter people who have their
fingers on the pulse of content.
To kind of help drive this vision.
But, you know, I do remember from the earlierdays that there was just like a different touch
and a different feel.
And so you're constantly experimenting andbeing like, okay.
This does well here, but this doesn't work wellover here.
(35:16):
So let's just okay.
We're gonna do this differently like this.
So you always you have to be very sensitive andand and realize that you have to really target
the message to the channel and to the audienceto get there.
You can't just say all we're doing content.
It's just you gotta dial it in.
One of the most difficult things to solve foris that people would download the app or or try
(35:39):
it and then not log back on in again or notopen back up the the app again.
And user retention is is pretty difficult tosolve for.
What are some of the things that you and theteam have done to have such high user retention
for chess.com.
Well, I wish I could say, oh, I feel awesomeabout our user retention.
I would say I feel we made a great product, butwe're still at the beginnings in some ways I
(36:04):
feel like of really being excellent at that.
In fact, we're doing some hiring right now totry to bring some people in who are more
experts at this.
But we do have a CRM department.
We call CRM, which is basically emails and pushnotifications of a really fun creative team
that's trying to, you know, have the rightnotifications.
(36:24):
So when the right time happens, sends you areminder about chess, etcetera.
So CRM is a big part of our strategy there.
We also have tried to make the product more funand more inviting for all types of players over
time.
And I would say we've done a okay job, but nota an amazing job.
(36:46):
And that's part of our future going forward.
It's like, just helping people just a littlebit more have a little more fun to make it a
little easier to get into chess because, forexample, people who lose their very first chess
game at a much higher rate, they bounce out anddon't come back.
So we're gonna, you know, try to try to helpwith that where you can play versus a coach and
(37:08):
an AI bot that will kinda help you play andwin, feel good, and then you can go do it.
So We also just tried to have more fun with it.
You know, we made crazy bots like mittens and,you know, all these other kind of fun bots to
play again.
So know, we made puzzle rush, which kinda helpsyou feel good about solving a bunch of puzzles
and different things.
So we've worked on a product strategy, but weare about to embark on our phase of just
(37:29):
getting better at understanding our funnel andour retention through data, etcetera.
So that's kind of our next phase.
In terms of AI, I'm curious about this one.
I mean, do you think in the future, or can youalready, I guess, determine whether somebody is
playing, a human or or potentially an AI,especially if it's, like, trained maybe off of
(37:50):
a human.
Is that something you're you might be able todetect?
Or we do a lot of work in fair play or anticheating.
We do a lot.
We have a lot of people on the team.
We work on it.
We use a combination of you know, technologiesand research and stats and AI and all the
different things.
If somebody created a program and that, youknow, there's one out there called Maya plays
(38:16):
at different strengths, etcetera.
If you're a if you don't even know how to playchess, but you used, like, some chess engine
like Maya that was, like, plays like a human,to go from, like, a 0 chess player to a 1500
chess player, we're not gonna know.
Like, we're just not gonna know.
You're playing like 1500 chess player.
(38:36):
We're not we're that's not true.
There are ways we might know, but if you'rereally good at it, we're probably not gonna
know.
But a lot of people leave a lot of fingerprintsthat they don't know about, so we do know that.
But, look, at the end of the day, if your chessgame, look like a mid level human player,
you're not gonna trigger the alarms.
But the higher up you go, the more alarm bellsand whistles and things we have.
(39:02):
And most people aren't like, hey.
I'm gonna cheat my way into being an averagechess player.
That's not why they're doing it.
So, you know, most of them both, you know, thenthey wanna cheat and they wanna get higher and
higher.
And then, you know, then then it just getseasier and easier for us to find
You mentioned stress a a couple of times duringthis show so far.
(39:22):
I feel like like I mentioned a little bitearlier that the public perception sitting on
the outside, just when you reach a 100,000,000in revenue or or a billion revenue or whatever
it might be, is that people on the outside feellike you've made you're there.
You're at the top.
And life must be so much easier.
And in some ways, that that might be true, butin reality, it's still a pretty stressful job.
(39:43):
What do you think is most stressful about yourjob today?
The most stressful thing about my job today isthat I want to build a company that's gonna be
here for a 100 years, and that a lot of peoplecan come and and work out for a very long time.
And love it.
And it just gets harder when you've got 700plus people, you know, when there was seven
(40:05):
people.
I knew everybody.
We'd spent, you know, that's all over that wasall of us.
When we were seventy, okay, now it was, youknow, more challenging.
I get less time and you know, we are at 700.
It's the whole different set of challenges.
And I I just a lot of the weight is, like, Iwanna I wanna make all I I have to try to make
(40:26):
all those people happy, which I try to do.
You know?
And everyone, you know, this person's having ababy, and this person's father died, and this
person, you know, is having a mental health,you know, challenge.
And this person, like, you know, is, you know,there's so there's just 700 people that try to
make happy there.
And then now we have a community of a100,000,000 people who have, you know, who who
(40:47):
who like chess in some way, and we have all theresponsibilities of of making sure they're
having a good time.
So I'm I'm just trying to make everybody happyall the time, and that's a very that's a very
uphill battle.
So I'm a bit of a people pleaser.
I want everyone to be happy.
I want everyone who works at our company tofeel like it's the best and only job they ever
want.
And I want every single person who downloadsour app or plays on our website, to be like,
(41:11):
have a really good time and be happy.
And that's hard to do because technologybreaks, and there's bad people out there who
are being abusive and jurorced and there's tryto tear you down, and then there's, you know,
people have high expectations.
And when you don't, you know, meet every singleexpectation there are understandably
frustrated.
So, you know, I think and we fall short attimes.
(41:35):
Impossible to please everybody.
And and and even if we try, you know, lettingpeople down can can feel bad.
Do you think that scary to you as you as yougrow the business because you have more of
those people to manage more of those types ofproblems, more users, or is that just not
something you think about too much?
No.
I think about it all the time.
I I will say we've also but as we grow, we andhave more resources, we can hire people, and we
(41:58):
have hired an amazing team And so more peoplecan help handle all those issues.
So we have a great supportive management teamwho, you know, tries to you know, instead of an
org chart where, like, the boss and then the,you know, you go down to, you know, we try to
do it the opposite.
So I'm supporting people and they're supportingpeople and they're supporting people and We're
all at the top of our org chart as ourindividual contributors and developers and and
(42:21):
amazing, you know, content people and supportpeople So that's so we're we're supporting
everyone.
So we have a great support structure, but it'sstill, you know, a lot of stuff trickles to me
I've been there the longest.
I know the most about certain things.
And so, you know, a lot a lot of stuff fallsdown to the bottom where I am.
To to to to clean up.
(42:41):
So it it's still very stressful.
Yeah.
And before we wrap it up, we have a a fewclosing questions that that we like end with.
One is, how did it feel when you reached a100,000,000 in revenue?
I wish I wish I could celebrate more.
(43:04):
I I'll say that.
It is It's hard to do.
Because, again, it the number doesn't meananything to me.
It just I'm not motivated by that.
I don't care.
What I care about is, like, having a happy teamand having users that feel happy.
And so to me, I'm I'm not much of a celebrator,and I don't care about money.
(43:28):
So frankly, it didn't care.
It didn't really mean that much to me.
You mentioned that you don't care too muchabout money.
Why is that?
Is that something you can, I guess, more easilysay because you have it versus if you didn't
have it, you would probably care much more?
Oh, for sure.
And I grew up in a home where, you know, wewere fine.
And so I recognized my privilege there of,like, you know and and look, I have money.
(43:52):
Like, the don't, you know, I have it.
And so I could stop working today, and I willbe fine for the rest of my life.
So that's easy.
But what I don't understand is people who havethe amount of money I have or less or more who
are just needing even more Like, it's crazy.
I I don't understand that.
Like, I have more money than a human shouldhave.
(44:13):
And, yeah, I and and so then I'm like, I don'tcare.
Let's just put it to other people and do thosethings, but there is something weird about
humans where some people is just not enough andthey just want more, and then they see someone
who has more, and they wanna beat that personand they hoard it.
And, like, that it's not an abundancementality.
(44:33):
It's just a lot about scoreboarding and, Idon't know.
I don't know why I don't have that.
I don't care about it, and I think it's kind ofa turnoff for me and is why in some ways, I
don't I don't love the tech entrepreneurshipscene sometimes because I feel like it's
sometimes money driven versus, like, changingthe world or doing something interesting.
That also happens, but sometimes I get that,like, scoreboard money.
(44:57):
We made this valuation.
We did this thing.
This person made this much money.
It's just yucky to me.
I don't I don't like it.
I mean, I I remember hearing Mark Cuban had ahad a similar similar thought around it.
I think he's sort of maybe 4 or 5,000,000,000.
And he says, like, some of his friends or orsome of the people he knows would consistently
try to try to get more and more money, andthey're already worth billions.
(45:19):
He's like, you really don't need more.
Like, what are you doing?
Mean, the amount of money someone needs to becomfortably retired for the rest of our lives
is so much less than a $1,000,000,000.
So at that point, I mean, I I also just don'tunderstand why more of them aren't doing more
good with their money, honestly.
And, again, I'm not I'm not trying to introducethat into your podcast.
(45:41):
But, like, it's very weird to me.
And sometimes the personality traits that candrive somebody to be successful aren't
necessarily the personality traits that makethem then turn around and wanna help other
people.
Sometimes there are a lot of people who do.
There's a lot of people weirdly who don't And,anyway, it's kinda weird.
I guess for the last two questions, if I slidyou over a phone and and you could call your
(46:05):
eighteen year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
You know, I I love this question.
I I really try to live my life without regrets.
It's a kind of a big policy for me.
So and I also really like my life, so I don'treally wanna change anything.
So if I but if I could go back to my eighteenyear old self and send one message knowing that
(46:32):
it wouldn't change who I married and who myfriends are and how my companies did, I would
have told myself start exercising regularly andseriously, that's what I would have said to
myself because that's such a core part of myday in my life now.
And I started too late at 30.
(46:53):
I probably would have told myself somethingsimilar.
Well, not eighteen year old self, but maybe,like, twelve or thirteen year old self.
Definitely was not exercising a lot, try to doit a little bit more.
But, yeah, I think that that's a great way toend it.
Thank you, Eric, for taking the time to jointhe show.
For anyone's interested, we'll have a link tochess.com in the episode description down
below.
Go check it out.
(47:13):
Give it a shot if you haven't already.
And thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
The year's 2005.
Eric Allevis partners up with his friend, JayStevenson, to start a new company, allowing you
to play chess online.
It's his 3rd chess company.
The other 2, they were successful, but nowherenear the scale that this company was about to
be.
Chess.com today is not only like super viral,but there are $100,000,000 revenue business all
(00:21):
built off the backs of content social media andSEO.
The other week, I sat down with Eric to learnhis story.
The secret behind building a $100,000,000business some of the growth tactics that you
can use when building your business.
This is a master glass for any entrepreneurlooking to start an online business in 2024.
Before we begin, I'm 18, and I'm on a missionto learn from the greatest minds in tech and
(00:45):
business.
And, hopefully, along my journey, I can sharesome of those very same insights with you.
Now if you enjoy these interviews and want meto continue doing them, please subscribe down
below.
It helps the channel when you can imagine, andthe biggest show gets, the bigger the guests
get.
Thank you very much.
And now on to my conversation with EricAllevest.
Eric, thanks for taking the time to join.
(01:07):
I'm excited for this one.
Before we get into how you built chess.com intoa $100,000,000,000 business, I wanna start this
conversation with your early context.
What would be the earliest piece of contextthat I would have to know about you to
understand the person sitting in front of metoday and all that he's accomplished?
Okay.
Well, thanks for having me first.
(01:27):
Context about me is that I have from a veryyoung age been a very scrappy, like, doer.
I could not be stopped in terms of justcreative ways to go out and figure out how to
do a business.
And that includes being eight years old.
(01:49):
And in my neighborhood, I kinda knew where thehigh school kids drink beer.
On the weekends, and I would go there on Mondayafter school, and I would collect the cans into
garbage bags and then have my mom drive me tothe grocery store, and I'd cycle those and
make, you know, a dollar 15, and I would feelamazing about it.
So that's just the very first story.
(02:11):
Of just many, many, many, business typeactivities that I did.
It's just inside of me.
And my dad is the same way.
And so it's that's some context about me.
You also sold candy bars at middle school whendid a ton of these little entrepreneurship
experiments.
Why do you think it's inside of you?
(02:32):
So my dad's dad was an immigrant, to the USfrom, the Netherlands escaped kind of after the
war, was an was an artist and kind of a, youknow, a crafty person, my grandpa, my opa, as
we call him, very much a resourceful person hadto be during the war, came to America, moved
into a chicken coop as his first home,converted from a chicken coop into a house, and
(02:58):
then just was like scrappy.
And my dad was, you know, came at age four andfive and, you know, I think had some of that
immigrant chip and some of that immigranthustle, to make things happen and tried many
different businesses.
Frankly, none of his businesses succeededoutside of his law career, which he's very had
a very, good law career, been very successfulthere, but he was always doing something.
(03:23):
So maybe it's because I'm part Dutch.
Maybe because it's part immigrant.
You know, maybe it's it's DNA.
But it's in it's definitely inside of me.
And for those early businesses, you mentionedyour dad's businesses didn't didn't really do
so well.
Were you making any money from your earlybusinesses?
Yeah.
(03:43):
I was.
If I wanted some my my dad was was reallyawesome in that He had a sticky note on his
wind bathroom mirror.
I remember seeing it that said that, that thethe the the sons of the rich are often poor
because what happens is people don't learn howto work card, and they get everything handed to
(04:09):
them.
And so my dad knew because he was an estateplanning attorney.
He'd seen so many families that had money andsaw the children who grew up in that
circumstance.
And again, this isn't true always, but there'sa lot of people who get silver spooned and do
very well.
There's a lot of people get everything and havegenerational wealth.
So I'm not saying this is held true, but he hadthe fear that his own success would lead to his
(04:35):
kids not being, you know, not learning how towork hard.
And so if I wanted a remote control car, whichI did, it wasn't handed to me.
I had to go door to door selling stationeryfrom the back of boy's life magazine, making
two bucks a sale.
To, you know, to save up $200 to buy the remotecontrol car I wanted.
(04:59):
I had to go to my neighbor and mow lawns for,you know, 5 bucks an hour to get what I wanted.
He didn't hand us things.
We didn't have we didn't have, you know, Lance.
We didn't have yard workers.
You know, we had a we had a nice big yard thenwe had to do our own chores.
So it wasn't handed to me, and that was veryintentional by him is to not not not make life
(05:22):
easy for us.
So I wanna connect the dots.
But before we get to chess.com and and some ofthe businesses you're running today,
previously, but before founding chess.com, youthought business school and law school was
pretty important that it could change yourlife.
But in fact, it changed your life in a way youdidn't expect.
(05:44):
You were rejected from every business schooland law school you applied to.
How did that impact you?
Well, it was the first of all, it was a toughtime to be applying to business school and law
school.
It was, you know, in 2001, the dot com bubblemelt down, all that stuff, and it's a record
time for people to be applied to schools.
So, but I'm super glad I got rejected.
(06:05):
It was great.
You know, I I had people in my ear telling me,oh, you know, if you wanna be successful, you
have to do this schooling or you have to dothis thing and I grew up in a great area, and
that those were my mentors, people who weredoctors, people who were lawyers, people who
had done business, and, you know, getting agreat education was a key part of that in their
mind, so they told me that.
(06:26):
And I actually don't think that's necessarilytrue at all.
Having gone through that process, I think itcan be true and it can work out, but I think
some of the most successful people we've seen,who's really more about their hustle and their
driving what and their own creativity than theschool that they went to.
(06:47):
And so but I was told differently oh, have agreat career.
Do this.
This is the path.
Go do this.
And I did end up going to Stanford BusinessSchool, and I will say amazing experience.
Met incredible people.
The connections have been phenomenal.
But I the first time around, I was rejectedeverywhere.
In 2001.
(07:07):
And then was like, well, okay.
Now I gotta go do something and started my owncompanies and then you know, 4 years later, did
reapply because I wasn't actually feeling superhappy and satisfied at the time.
And I did get in later, but only after kind ofcutting my chops on on doing an actual
business.
(07:28):
What companies were you running after you wereejected from business
So one was called schoolhouse chess.
I did that for a while.
I was teaching chess to kids and afterschoolskind of on a on a larger scale had about over a
100 schools.
You know, lots of kids involved.
You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I'll bea chess coach and they like individual
(07:49):
students.
That's like step 1 is you have, like,individual students.
That's great.
You can make a great living and be very happydoing that.
Step 2 is I'm gonna teach multiple students in,like, a class or a school, and I'm gonna do a
bigger program where I teach more people at atime.
K?
You can make a little maybe a little more moneydoing that.
Then you're like, oh, I'll do a couple ofthose, and I can personally drive on Mondays
(08:12):
here and Tuesdays there that you can do more.
To scale that, you have to then set up asystem.
And I so I set up a system and I was hiringother people to go do that.
They were getting 15, 20 bucks an hour ascollege students.
And then I was running the business and scalingthe business.
(08:33):
So I quickly understood leveraging, you know,systems and operations to kind of scale and
grow something.
And hiring great people to, you know, whowanted to be involved to go do the work.
So that was able to to raise it.
The second business I did was called wholesalechess where I was importing chest equipment
from overseas, which was scary to do back then.
It's a lot easier.
(08:53):
A lot more confident now.
But, you know, back in, you know, 2001, why$50,000 over to China using a fax machine.
It was a different world.
It was pretty scary, but I did that and I setup a warehouse.
Built our website because there was no Shopify.
We had to custom build an entire e commerceplatform.
(09:14):
And, you know, set up our business.
There were much higher barriers to entry forbusiness back then.
And it was different.
And now actually easier to start a business insome ways and to test that.
Yeah.
There's so many platforms.
There's so many, you know, different tools.
There's so many different you know, people whoare doing it and supporting it.
But, you know, 20 plus years ago, starting yourown business was a different thing.
(09:37):
Anyway, I did it twice.
I see exceeded twice.
And I guess the Stanford admissions office waslike, this weirdo.
I mean, did 2 chess businesses.
You know, has never had a real job.
Let's get him into our class and see whathappens.
So that's probably how that happened.
So you mentioned you were running 2 businesses,both of which were successful.
(09:57):
I feel like entrepreneurship is is oftenglamorized, a lot, that profession.
Why were you unhappy?
I think entrepreneurship is way overglamorized.
It can be so miserable.
I don't know very many, like, super happyentrepreneurs.
And they don't wanna talk about it.
And they talk about it with each other becausewhen your CEO or running a company, everyone
(10:19):
else is like, oh, that's awesome.
And if you're like, actually, it's not, youkinda sound like it doesn't sound great.
It doesn't come off well, but that's whyfounders get together and they just
commiserate.
But Yeah.
Anyway, there's something about the ups anddowns that can be hard.
But but let me I'll just say it this way.
If your business is growing super fast, it'smiserable because everything is seems like it's
(10:47):
going well.
But you're not prepared.
You don't have the team.
You're stressed out of your mind.
It's like your business is going up super fast.
And, like, you you you can't deal with it.
It's just overwhelming.
It's all encompassing and, like, it's very hardto handle growth.
So growth can feel miserable.
And you're like, where's my life?
(11:08):
What is going on?
It's it feels it feels scary.
What if it goes down?
So growth is hard.
If your business is flat, that sucks becauseyou're always thinking, how do I grow?
And if your business is going down, That sucksbecause your business is not doing well and
you're dealing with all those problems.
So whether your business is going up, Whetheryour business is flat, whether business is
(11:31):
going down, all you have is problems.
That's all you're doing is dealing withproblems, and you're dealing with people
problems, and you're dealing with, you know,external factors.
You're dealing all sorts of things.
So entrepreneurship is just problems.
Do you like problems?
Be an entrepreneur.
You wanna not have problems in your life, goget a great job.
(11:51):
So that's
Even with chess.com, you guys are a 100 plus$1,000,000 revenue business now.
Do you feel that same way?
Yeah.
All I have is problems, man.
It's true.
Like, of course, yeah, and people like, oh, yougot a $100,000,000.
That's yeah, everything's easy.
Well, guess what?
Costs are rising all the time.
Like, your vendors are raising their prices,and then you're, like, you raise your prices on
(12:14):
your community.
And your community's like, oh, yeah.
You're raising prices on us.
And you're like, oh, you know, your health carecosts are going up and the cost of inflation's
going up.
And then You know?
And then you got competitors coming at you, andthen you've got this crisis.
And then you've got this important personwho's, you know, out for some reason or I'm
(12:34):
just gonna be honest.
Like, entrepreneurship is is problemmanagement, and it's judgment, and it's it's
judgment, and its vision, and its resources,but it's problems.
I mean, how would you feel?
Sure.
You have a $100,000,000 company and how youwake up one morning and in your and and
everyone's texting you saying, hey.
What are you gonna do?
You just got sued for a $100,000,000.
(12:54):
Like, that's that's a problem.
You know?
Sure.
It's an opportunity, but it's also a problem.
So It's a bit glamorized, and you're just goingkind of from crisis to crisis at times.
Meanwhile, you have a whole bunch of otherpeople looking at you just like, well, I guess,
you know, the your our CEO, our founder, is,like, handling all the problems.
(13:16):
That's great.
And then they're all trusting you.
And then you're looking back at them and like,wow.
I have all this, like, everyone's trusting meto do this.
That's a lot of pressure.
So that it can definitely lead to, like, amental health, you know, problems for for
founders and and entrepreneurs.
And so, anyway, Yeah.
It reminds me it reminds me of the story ofBobby Brennan.
We had him on the show.
(13:38):
His business, he was selling textbooks.
He was doing about maybe somewhere in the 7figures or 8 figures in revenue a year, but the
the profit margins on that were super slim.
So when he got sued by for the biggest textbookpublishers in the world.
He was super stressed.
He didn't have the money to account for that.
And when he went he was driving on the highway,and he just blacked out, and he found himself
(14:01):
on the on the side of the road surrounded byparamedics.
He was like, what happened?
And that's when you realize something had tothe had to change.
I mean, if you could give yourself one piece ofadvice during that time, what would you say?
The advice I I I give here is not thatnecessarily advice people like to hear, but you
you I think there's 3 things that you have tohave to have a balance because entrepreneurship
(14:28):
and the weight of that is so heavy.
You need some other things on the other side ofscale.
The things that have worked well for me, greatrelationships.
I have an amazing wife, and children andfamily.
I have great friends, and that helps me staybalanced.
The other is I take care of my health aboveall.
(14:50):
I get sleep.
I exercise every day.
I eat well.
Because I have to be in best performance to dothat.
And thirdly is I do have hobbies and otherthings that I can do so that I can find peace
and quiet.
I can't be doing email and slack and problemswhile I'm playing pickleball.
So I'm happy to be playing pickleball, or Ican't think about that, and I can focus on
(15:13):
something else, and my brain can reset.
And so relationships and health and hobbies,balance that out for me, and keep me able to
then, when it's work time, be maximum, hardfocused on solving problems and kicking ass.
Got it.
So you applied to Stanford Business School.
You get in.
But when you're applying, what were some of thekey things that you wanted to get out of, and
(15:37):
NBA at the time?
I just needed a change, honestly.
And my wife was, like, You need to do somethingdifferent.
Our business was flat.
It was operating.
It was kind of boring at the time.
Playing too many video games.
I wasn't taking care of my health.
(16:01):
And I needed a big reset, and she could seethis in me.
And she She's always been a little out, youknow, ahead seeing the the right ways.
And she's like, you gotta go to businessschool.
I'm gonna help you write your essays becauseshe's an amazing writer.
And I think that's best for our family.
And you, you know, I think this is this is yourlast chance to use that really lucky good GMAT
(16:23):
score.
You got coming out of a college as your lastyear, go for it.
I was like, alright.
Let's do it.
And I think she could see the life that wewanted and where we wanted to go.
And she kinda nudged me that way really, helphelpfully.
And, you know, I applied.
We applied in some ways.
And, I got in and then we we got to go.
(16:43):
And I will say I went there with a fair amountof ego.
I'm a pretty different person than when I firstgot there because I didn't have a lot of other
people or peers who were doing similar things.
Like, if people were in entry level jobs, youknow, kinda out of college and my peer group
was kinda like a lot of entry level jobs wherepeople still in school, And I was, like,
(17:06):
running a business and making a lot of money.
And I'm like, hey.
I'm an entrepreneur.
Like, I know what I'm doing.
I'm gonna go to Stanford.
I don't know what I'm gonna learn there.
I'm already an entrepreneur.
It turns out I didn't know anything, and I hadso much to learn from a business point of view,
from a interpersonal point of view, from acultural point of view, how to be a good
(17:28):
leader, And, you know, I I am an open person,so I didn't know what I didn't know, but when I
got there, I was a I I did immediately prettyimmediately realize I have so much to learn
here, and I open myself up to that.
What do you think is the biggest thing you led?
(17:51):
Wow.
That's a huge question.
I think what I realized is that building acompany is the is the bringing together an
orchestration of so many different elements andthat you're really like in an orchestra and a
conductor, you are moving people together in ainto creating something.
(18:17):
And in order to do that, there's there's manydifferent leadership styles that can work but
you have to have a familiarity with all thedifferent pieces and how they can work
together, and you have to put the best peoplein the seats and you have to get the right
resources in in order to do that.
And then you have to guide and lead.
(18:39):
There there are a lot of different types ofleaders.
You can have people who are sales leaders.
You can have people who are mission and cultureleaders.
You can have people who are product leaders.
You can have technology founders.
There's all sorts of things that you can do.
You you can have some people who have aruthless mission and are kinda jerks to work
for but they pay people a lot of money andattract people to a mission and a talent.
(19:03):
That can work.
We the the the Elon Musks can do the thing.
That can happen.
But where I went to business school and mypersonal life philosophy was on the other side,
which was like, how do you create an amazingculture that people wanna be a part of and then
do great things together and have a mission anddo that?
And that is what I learned.
(19:26):
And I have executed on that.
I would say our company culture is arguably,like, one of our is one of our greatest assets.
And very few people ever leave our company,because it's such a great place to work, and
we've created something awesome.
And we have a great and chess is such a greatgame.
I mean, it's just like, who doesn't wanna be apart of it?
So all of that, but I did learn a lot there,and I learned you know, a a lot of humility.
(19:51):
And I learned how to be a servant leader whereI'm there to serve.
Yes.
I'm leading.
Yes.
I'm strategically helping.
Yes.
I'm tactically like, strong to help in all thedifferent areas and touching the product and
things, but I'm also there to serve people andshow them how much I love them, how much I
support them, and the and that we're all goingand doing this mission together.
(20:12):
The culture aspect of it is actually prettyfascinating to me because you're a pretty big
business now, but I think almost your entireteam is completely remote.
How have you been able to build that such astrong culture, remotely?
I would flip the question and say, how were weable to build a remote company is because of
our culture.
(20:32):
It's not how did we build our culture inside ofa remote company.
Does that make sense?
It was our culture that allowed us to be agreat remote company.
And so that's what we started with and focusedon mission driven.
No assholes.
Like, focus on what's important.
Getting people there who wanted to be a part ofthat mission.
(20:56):
Everybody who joins chess.com knows from thevery first interview that this is not their
highest paying job.
If you want your highest paying job, gosomewhere else.
Go somewhere where you probably don't have thegreat culture.
You probably aren't doing an awesome mission.
So we attract people who are like, I wanna be apart of this.
(21:19):
I wanna do this.
I'm making enough money to be happy and live.
I could make more money somewhere else.
I probably won't enjoy it, but I could.
So we don't have those people coming in to ourculture who are, like, just focused on their
own personal advancement and own personalfight.
We just we just don't attract those people.
They don't they don't they don't apply.
(21:41):
They don't get through the interview process.
Or if they do, they don't stick around.
And so we have we have a culture of like, hey.
We're we are on a mission together.
And it's a very similar and kind of like mindedthing.
And then we use good practices.
I mean, we're always talking we don't we don'ttalk about business metrics.
We probably need 2 more.
But when we have our managers meeting liketoday, our topic was giving people the benefit
(22:06):
of the doubt and how important of a tool thatis when you're running a company and especially
a remote company where when someone typessomething, you can't see their face.
You don't know the meaning of what they'resaying.
All you see is words, and you can take words ina negative context, a sarcastic context, or a
serious and con sincere context.
(22:27):
So you have a choice And we talked about that.
That's that was our manager's meeting today.
So that's our culture.
We're constantly refining and and and pushingon that culture, and that's what we focus on
maybe and and maybe like I said, we shouldsometimes do a little bit more data and metrics
stuff, but our culture is super important tous.
Mean, we've been talking about chess.com for alittle bit.
(22:47):
I wanna paint the picture here and take a stepback.
What's the founding story behind chess.com?
How did you come up with the idea?
And, why'd you decide to start the business?
So we were doing wholesale chess at the time.
And when you do a search on Google, there inthe past, there was, like, very clear ads And
(23:10):
then there was, like, the natural searchresults.
And we were constantly battling who over beingthe first for the natural search results.
SEO search engine optimization.
We wanna be number 1 for chess boards, chesspieces, chess sets, chess clocks.
There's kinda competition between the topsites.
And we were also, though, the Google ads at thetop were getting a lot of clicks.
(23:32):
So we were all spending money.
So here was the top 5 competing chess vendorsat the time selling the exact same product And
we were nickel and diming each other down onprice.
Meanwhile, spending more and more money to getclicks to our site, and our margins were
(23:54):
evaporating.
And I'm like, this is insane.
We're selling a commodity item, trying tocompete on price, and trying to outbid each
other to get customers.
This is going to break and fail.
And, yes, we eventually have the most marketshare, and we have the best service in the best
(24:16):
website and best brand and all the differentthings, but we still felt like we were on a
race to the bottom.
And I said, look, at the time, MySpace was,very popular and growing.
And I was like, look, there's why don't webuild a community for chess players, then
(24:36):
they'll come and they'll chat about chess andwatch chess and play chess and learn chess and
do chess stuff.
And they'll come for that reason, then we canhave ads that don't cost anything, and then
they'll buy the chest equipment and we can havea better chess selling business because of
that.
That was the initial idea behind chess.com wasto build a community and then sell chess
(25:01):
equipment.
Well, kinda while this was percolating, I gotinto Stanford Business School.
As as you said, And I was like, I can't keeprunning this business.
I have to sell this business.
And so I sold the business, but I kept thedomain name and the vision And while I was at
the business school, I built all the wireframes and started to then work with my
(25:24):
cofounder Jay.
He was the technical side and 2 of us would Ido school during the day.
And then until 3 AM, I was staying up andbuilding chest.com with Chet.
And It was it was a grind.
Also, I had, you know, 2 or 3 kids at the time.
Like, I was a pretty, pretty busy person, nottaking care of myself, in some ways, which
(25:45):
that's okay.
It was a period of investment.
But while I graduated from that so I'd sold thechest equipment business, built chest.com, I
had some job offers at Facebook and Palantirand YouTube and mint and other kinds of things,
But I was like, I'm just gonna try this chestthing.
And everyone was like, you're crazy.
(26:06):
I was like, maybe.
Maybe I'll go get a job later, but I'm justgonna see this out.
And as I graduated, we started chess.com, and Ihad some money from having sold the other
companies And the rest is history.
I mean, community platforms are extremelydifficult to build and and get engagement on
there and retention how did you get those first100,000 people in that in, chess.com's
(26:31):
community?
Back in the day, you know, a community was aprofile and some forums and some content.
It was a simpler world.
I mean, social media was different back then.
It it really meant something else.
So we built those things.
And then, you know, there used to be more kindof like little tiny pockets Maybe now it's like
(26:53):
subreddits.
But before, all of those were just or, youknow, were discord servers or whatever, those
were all just different domain names.
You know?
One would be a place for talking about cars.
Then you'd go to, you know, golf.com, and you'dtalk about golf, and you'd go to, you know so
it was different at the time.
And in chess.com was, you know, where we hadthe community forum.
(27:15):
And every single day, you know, a thousandpeople would type chess into the browser, and
it would put a dotcom on it, and it would justgo.
And then, you know, people would sign up.
And then more and more.
And then our SD and then people would and theneventually, you know, Google Chrome wasn't just
putting the dot com on there.
They would do a search for chess, and we werenumber 1.
(27:37):
So then we were capturing all that.
And then people would join, and then they telltheir friends about it.
So it was just a very kind of natural growthfrom search engine optimization and from, you
know, the virality of people sharing.
And on the capital side, you mentioned you hadsome capital from your other business and you
used it to start and grow just.com.
(27:59):
For the 1st 5 years of the business, in fact,you actually tried to raise money and couldn't
get any traction from investors.
What were some of the investor conversationsthat that were going on behind the scenes and
and why were they all saying no?
I met so many great people.
And, you know, when you're an investor, It'shard to be an angel or VC investor because you
(28:22):
have to choose businesses because your hit rateis so low, you have to choose businesses that
can do outsized returns.
You don't want a 2 x, 3 x, or even 5 x yourmoney.
That doesn't help because if you invest in 30businesses, like, you know, 27 of them are
gonna be zeros.
So you have to have high returns.
(28:42):
And so everyone was looking at chess and justbeing, like, chess is, like, tiny.
Like, it's nothing.
It's insignificant.
Like, why are you spending your time on this?
And so it just wasn't big enough for anybody.
And so you know, I was like, fine.
(29:04):
Okay.
I'll just fund it myself.
I mean because I I could be happy.
I was like, well, I can be happy if our companyyou know, pays my wages and we can hire a great
team, and I can live happy on that.
I don't I don't need to build a $1,000,000,000company to be happy.
But if for if you're a venture investor or anangel investor, you're like, can this company
(29:24):
be a $1,000,000,000?
If not, I don't know that I want to investbecause it might not work out on the and it's
not not a big enough upside.
Now I think dotcom could be a $10,000,000,000company.
I have no idea.
I never thought it would be as big as it is,but, like, I think chess is just way more
popular and and and has way more potential thananyone ever I have no idea what the potential
(29:44):
is, but we're we're definitely gonna keepgoing.
I mean, knowing what you know today, if youcould and let let's say investors were saying
yes, would you still bootstrap in in thecompany and fund it yourself, or would you say
yes to those investors?
I probably I mean, look, not not every notevery founder has an option to do what I did.
(30:08):
I had money.
I had sold 2 companies.
I made money while I was in business schooldoing other small businesses.
I'm scrappy.
I've made money.
So I had a I had a fair amount of money of myown, and then I plowed that all in to the
business.
So I could bootstrap And we decided to makemoney early on, and and and go to revenue soon.
(30:32):
I would still have done that but not everybodyhad money or has money to put in to start.
So taking on investment is fine.
Now That said, you can also do a lot morebusiness now because of the cost of software
and running a business and starting somethinghas come down so much.
So you can bootstrap.
(30:52):
You still can.
It's cheaper and faster and easier than ever tostart something, even a software business.
But when we started, it was not there wasnothing, and it was harder and cost more money
in some ways.
So I just happened to have money.
That's That's the truth.
My my dad, when he started, his business, hewas fired from his corporate job and and
(31:14):
started an ed tech company the 1st few years,though, were pretty were pretty stressful
because he was taking our family savings to togrow the business.
Luckily, it all worked out.
But you mentioned you plowed some of some ofyour money and you had a family at the time.
Was that time special for you?
Absolutely.
I I have been under nonstop stress for 18years, man.
(31:38):
Like, the moment I graduated from businessschool has been nonstop stress.
So, yeah, like, not taking a job, plowing allof our savings in.
Yeah.
That was stressful times.
But I had already had some successes in thepast, and I think my very supportive and
(32:00):
trusting wife was like, well, he's done itbefore.
I think he could do it again.
So there wasn't stress coming from her, but,you know, I I had 4 kids at that point and was
you know, going forward.
So, it definitely was a little stressful.
You mentioned some of the earlier growthtactics that he used to grow chat dotcom.
(32:23):
1 was a domain in in SEO.
What do you think are probably maybe 1 or 2 ofthe key inflection points that kinda led it to
where it is today?
So being excellent at SEO, being excellent atcontent, content was and still is King.
Like, that's what people want.
People don't want eyeballs.
(32:43):
Like, they don't I mean, sorry.
They don't want ads, but they want content.
That's where they're putting their eyeballs.
And so we knew very early on that instead ofinvesting a ton of money into buying ads, we
should invest in content because that's wherepeople wanna be, and that's what they wanna
consume, and then we'll be there.
(33:04):
And that has been a through line forever.
Don't spend, you know, 1,000,000 of dollarsjust buying ads.
Spend 1,000,000 of dollars making content.
And that's what we did.
And but now the channels have changed.
You know, it's not articles as much anymore,and people will read, and it's not long videos
(33:25):
as much.
Now it's like short form content and andcreator partnerships and all sorts of things,
but it's just content.
And we invested in that content.
And then the community builds around thecontent, and you're basically investing in the
benefit of the content in the community ratherthan frankly, the weird circle of where venture
(33:47):
capitalists put money in businesses then take alot of that money and just buy ads with it,
which goes into the other venture capitalistcompanies.
It's just a weird thing.
And no offense to, you know, any of thosebusinesses and you know, I know that there's a,
you know, there's a lot of people who do wellusing ads, but it just wasn't our strategy.
(34:07):
Content and community have always been ourstrategy.
Plus product excellence.
Like, there's a lot of people who do differentthings, but they don't focus on their product.
Well, I'm a user of my own product every singleday.
And so we focused on product.
We focused on content and community.
And that those were our levers for growth.
On that content side, you actually had a adifferent growth strategy for each platform.
(34:33):
Why was that?
And what were what were those different growthstrategies?
Every audience, every platform is different.
And we have different voices.
There's different demographics.
There's different people.
There's different channels.
We would test and see what works.
Like, we found that, like, happy birthdaymessages and inspirational quotes work well on
Facebook.
But no one wants to see that on Instagram.
(34:55):
Like, I don't know.
Like and frankly, this is where we hire a bunchof younger, smarter people who have their
fingers on the pulse of content.
To kind of help drive this vision.
But, you know, I do remember from the earlierdays that there was just like a different touch
and a different feel.
And so you're constantly experimenting andbeing like, okay.
This does well here, but this doesn't work wellover here.
(35:16):
So let's just okay.
We're gonna do this differently like this.
So you always you have to be very sensitive andand and realize that you have to really target
the message to the channel and to the audienceto get there.
You can't just say all we're doing content.
It's just you gotta dial it in.
One of the most difficult things to solve foris that people would download the app or or try
(35:39):
it and then not log back on in again or notopen back up the the app again.
And user retention is is pretty difficult tosolve for.
What are some of the things that you and theteam have done to have such high user retention
for chess.com.
Well, I wish I could say, oh, I feel awesomeabout our user retention.
I would say I feel we made a great product, butwe're still at the beginnings in some ways I
(36:04):
feel like of really being excellent at that.
In fact, we're doing some hiring right now totry to bring some people in who are more
experts at this.
But we do have a CRM department.
We call CRM, which is basically emails and pushnotifications of a really fun creative team
that's trying to, you know, have the rightnotifications.
(36:24):
So when the right time happens, sends you areminder about chess, etcetera.
So CRM is a big part of our strategy there.
We also have tried to make the product more funand more inviting for all types of players over
time.
And I would say we've done a okay job, but nota an amazing job.
(36:46):
And that's part of our future going forward.
It's like, just helping people just a littlebit more have a little more fun to make it a
little easier to get into chess because, forexample, people who lose their very first chess
game at a much higher rate, they bounce out anddon't come back.
So we're gonna, you know, try to try to helpwith that where you can play versus a coach and
(37:08):
an AI bot that will kinda help you play andwin, feel good, and then you can go do it.
So We also just tried to have more fun with it.
You know, we made crazy bots like mittens and,you know, all these other kind of fun bots to
play again.
So know, we made puzzle rush, which kinda helpsyou feel good about solving a bunch of puzzles
and different things.
So we've worked on a product strategy, but weare about to embark on our phase of just
(37:29):
getting better at understanding our funnel andour retention through data, etcetera.
So that's kind of our next phase.
In terms of AI, I'm curious about this one.
I mean, do you think in the future, or can youalready, I guess, determine whether somebody is
playing, a human or or potentially an AI,especially if it's, like, trained maybe off of
(37:50):
a human.
Is that something you're you might be able todetect?
Or we do a lot of work in fair play or anticheating.
We do a lot.
We have a lot of people on the team.
We work on it.
We use a combination of you know, technologiesand research and stats and AI and all the
different things.
If somebody created a program and that, youknow, there's one out there called Maya plays
(38:16):
at different strengths, etcetera.
If you're a if you don't even know how to playchess, but you used, like, some chess engine
like Maya that was, like, plays like a human,to go from, like, a 0 chess player to a 1500
chess player, we're not gonna know.
Like, we're just not gonna know.
You're playing like 1500 chess player.
(38:36):
We're not we're that's not true.
There are ways we might know, but if you'rereally good at it, we're probably not gonna
know.
But a lot of people leave a lot of fingerprintsthat they don't know about, so we do know that.
But, look, at the end of the day, if your chessgame, look like a mid level human player,
you're not gonna trigger the alarms.
But the higher up you go, the more alarm bellsand whistles and things we have.
(39:02):
And most people aren't like, hey.
I'm gonna cheat my way into being an averagechess player.
That's not why they're doing it.
So, you know, most of them both, you know, thenthey wanna cheat and they wanna get higher and
higher.
And then, you know, then then it just getseasier and easier for us to find
You mentioned stress a a couple of times duringthis show so far.
(39:22):
I feel like like I mentioned a little bitearlier that the public perception sitting on
the outside, just when you reach a 100,000,000in revenue or or a billion revenue or whatever
it might be, is that people on the outside feellike you've made you're there.
You're at the top.
And life must be so much easier.
And in some ways, that that might be true, butin reality, it's still a pretty stressful job.
(39:43):
What do you think is most stressful about yourjob today?
The most stressful thing about my job today isthat I want to build a company that's gonna be
here for a 100 years, and that a lot of peoplecan come and and work out for a very long time.
And love it.
And it just gets harder when you've got 700plus people, you know, when there was seven
(40:05):
people.
I knew everybody.
We'd spent, you know, that's all over that wasall of us.
When we were seventy, okay, now it was, youknow, more challenging.
I get less time and you know, we are at 700.
It's the whole different set of challenges.
And I I just a lot of the weight is, like, Iwanna I wanna make all I I have to try to make
(40:26):
all those people happy, which I try to do.
You know?
And everyone, you know, this person's having ababy, and this person's father died, and this
person, you know, is having a mental health,you know, challenge.
And this person, like, you know, is, you know,there's so there's just 700 people that try to
make happy there.
And then now we have a community of a100,000,000 people who have, you know, who who
(40:47):
who like chess in some way, and we have all theresponsibilities of of making sure they're
having a good time.
So I'm I'm just trying to make everybody happyall the time, and that's a very that's a very
uphill battle.
So I'm a bit of a people pleaser.
I want everyone to be happy.
I want everyone who works at our company tofeel like it's the best and only job they ever
want.
And I want every single person who downloadsour app or plays on our website, to be like,
(41:11):
have a really good time and be happy.
And that's hard to do because technologybreaks, and there's bad people out there who
are being abusive and jurorced and there's tryto tear you down, and then there's, you know,
people have high expectations.
And when you don't, you know, meet every singleexpectation there are understandably
frustrated.
So, you know, I think and we fall short attimes.
(41:35):
Impossible to please everybody.
And and and even if we try, you know, lettingpeople down can can feel bad.
Do you think that scary to you as you as yougrow the business because you have more of
those people to manage more of those types ofproblems, more users, or is that just not
something you think about too much?
No.
I think about it all the time.
I I will say we've also but as we grow, we andhave more resources, we can hire people, and we
(41:58):
have hired an amazing team And so more peoplecan help handle all those issues.
So we have a great supportive management teamwho, you know, tries to you know, instead of an
org chart where, like, the boss and then the,you know, you go down to, you know, we try to
do it the opposite.
So I'm supporting people and they're supportingpeople and they're supporting people and We're
all at the top of our org chart as ourindividual contributors and developers and and
(42:21):
amazing, you know, content people and supportpeople So that's so we're we're supporting
everyone.
So we have a great support structure, but it'sstill, you know, a lot of stuff trickles to me
I've been there the longest.
I know the most about certain things.
And so, you know, a lot a lot of stuff fallsdown to the bottom where I am.
To to to to clean up.
(42:41):
So it it's still very stressful.
Yeah.
And before we wrap it up, we have a a fewclosing questions that that we like end with.
One is, how did it feel when you reached a100,000,000 in revenue?
I wish I wish I could celebrate more.
(43:04):
I I'll say that.
It is It's hard to do.
Because, again, it the number doesn't meananything to me.
It just I'm not motivated by that.
I don't care.
What I care about is, like, having a happy teamand having users that feel happy.
And so to me, I'm I'm not much of a celebrator,and I don't care about money.
(43:28):
So frankly, it didn't care.
It didn't really mean that much to me.
You mentioned that you don't care too muchabout money.
Why is that?
Is that something you can, I guess, more easilysay because you have it versus if you didn't
have it, you would probably care much more?
Oh, for sure.
And I grew up in a home where, you know, wewere fine.
And so I recognized my privilege there of,like, you know and and look, I have money.
(43:52):
Like, the don't, you know, I have it.
And so I could stop working today, and I willbe fine for the rest of my life.
So that's easy.
But what I don't understand is people who havethe amount of money I have or less or more who
are just needing even more Like, it's crazy.
I I don't understand that.
Like, I have more money than a human shouldhave.
(44:13):
And, yeah, I and and so then I'm like, I don'tcare.
Let's just put it to other people and do thosethings, but there is something weird about
humans where some people is just not enough andthey just want more, and then they see someone
who has more, and they wanna beat that personand they hoard it.
And, like, that it's not an abundancementality.
(44:33):
It's just a lot about scoreboarding and, Idon't know.
I don't know why I don't have that.
I don't care about it, and I think it's kind ofa turnoff for me and is why in some ways, I
don't I don't love the tech entrepreneurshipscene sometimes because I feel like it's
sometimes money driven versus, like, changingthe world or doing something interesting.
That also happens, but sometimes I get that,like, scoreboard money.
(44:57):
We made this valuation.
We did this thing.
This person made this much money.
It's just yucky to me.
I don't I don't like it.
I mean, I I remember hearing Mark Cuban had ahad a similar similar thought around it.
I think he's sort of maybe 4 or 5,000,000,000.
And he says, like, some of his friends or orsome of the people he knows would consistently
try to try to get more and more money, andthey're already worth billions.
(45:19):
He's like, you really don't need more.
Like, what are you doing?
Mean, the amount of money someone needs to becomfortably retired for the rest of our lives
is so much less than a $1,000,000,000.
So at that point, I mean, I I also just don'tunderstand why more of them aren't doing more
good with their money, honestly.
And, again, I'm not I'm not trying to introducethat into your podcast.
(45:41):
But, like, it's very weird to me.
And sometimes the personality traits that candrive somebody to be successful aren't
necessarily the personality traits that makethem then turn around and wanna help other
people.
Sometimes there are a lot of people who do.
There's a lot of people weirdly who don't And,anyway, it's kinda weird.
I guess for the last two questions, if I slidyou over a phone and and you could call your
(46:05):
eighteen year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
You know, I I love this question.
I I really try to live my life without regrets.
It's a kind of a big policy for me.
So and I also really like my life, so I don'treally wanna change anything.
So if I but if I could go back to my eighteenyear old self and send one message knowing that
(46:32):
it wouldn't change who I married and who myfriends are and how my companies did, I would
have told myself start exercising regularly andseriously, that's what I would have said to
myself because that's such a core part of myday in my life now.
And I started too late at 30.
(46:53):
I probably would have told myself somethingsimilar.
Well, not eighteen year old self, but maybe,like, twelve or thirteen year old self.
Definitely was not exercising a lot, try to doit a little bit more.
But, yeah, I think that that's a great way toend it.
Thank you, Eric, for taking the time to jointhe show.
For anyone's interested, we'll have a link tochess.com in the episode description down
below.
Go check it out.
(47:13):
Give it a shot if you haven't already.
And thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
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