Entrepreneurs are first pulled towards their ardour in all types of the way—whether or not that be by way of an overbearing mother or father, chasing a childhood dream profession, or realization {that a} passion can herald hundreds of thousands. However Danny Rensch, chess champion and cofounder of Chess.com, initially strived for greatness throughout his unconventional childhood rising up in a cult.
At the moment, Rensch helms one of many largest on-line chess platforms on the earth with greater than 225 million registered members and 40 million lively month-to-month customers. As one of many firm’s three cofounders and chief chess officer, he’s an American entrepreneur main a gaming web site beloved by hundreds of thousands. Chess.com says it surpassed a $1 billion valuation in 2023 with none enterprise backers, completely bootstrapped by the entrepreneurs who had been “laughed out of VC rooms” on the firm’s inception. Rensch’s celebrity standing as a teen and worldwide platform success has made him probably the most highly effective figures within the trade. However his entry into the world of chess was something however typical.
Rensch tells Fortune he first encountered the historic sport whereas watching the film Looking for Bobby Fischer, which explores the American chess genius who turned the youngest U.S. Champion in historical past at age of 14. Rensch romanticized the concept of a kid prodigy discovering himself inside the sport, and along with his life circumstances, the board might function a instrument for his survival.
As detailed in Rensch’s latest e-book launch Darkish Squares: How Chess Saved My Life, the wunderkid spent his early years within the Church of Immortal Consciousness: a cult run by Trina and Steven Kamp in Arizona. The group, dubbed the “Collective,” attracted these in want of assist, together with individuals with alcohol and drug abuse problems and victims of abuse. Rensch’s mother and father had been pulled into the group, the place the younger chess wiz spent his childhood operating round barefoot in a distant forest village. His childhood was largely in flux, residing off meals stamps, taking part in within the woods, and being tossed between the supervision of his mom and the cult’s different members.
However when Rensch first found the sport as a nine-year outdated, chess turned solely the chance for him to achieve approval in his abusive residing scenario, however to additionally pave a path for fulfillment as soon as he left.
Chess as his mentor and tormentor—a solution to go away the cult
The cult’s chief, Steven Kamp, was obsessive about chess, and Rensch was rapidly pulled into his orbit. Recognizing the potential of his non secular pupils, Kamp arrange a chess staff at an elementary faculty close to the Collective’s setup in Tonto Village. Rensch was advised chess was his life’s goal—and he was alienated from his household within the pursuit of greatness.
“As he saw what we were capable of doing—me and my peer group, the Shelby School chess team—we all got good very fast. I became the best, but the truth is they were all amazing players. We were winning championships left, right, and center,” Rensch says. “Chess became a way to climb the hierarchical ladder of the Collective.”
In 1997, the Shelby College gained the Tremendous Nationals chess match—and one 12 months later, Rensch took house his first particular person nationwide championship title. However when his success sputtered on the age of 14, he was separated from residing along with his mom in an effort to sharpen his gameplay in the home of Kamp’s shut confidant, who Rensch came upon was additionally his organic father. Chess was not solely his ardour, however a buoy in these tough instances; because the cofounder defined in his e-book, “to be special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God.” Rensch continued to rise by way of the ranks, changing into the youngest nationwide grasp in Arizona historical past, and ultimately profitable the nationwide high-school chess championship on the age of 18.
The Church of Immortal Consciousness has since disbanded, however now 39-year-old Rensch says reconciling the abuse and stress he skilled for the majority of his formative years remains to be an ongoing course of. He explains—like many who grew up in a cult—he’s on a journey of “unpacking and learning to interrogate those feelings.” Rensch says he has no exhausting emotions about what occurred to him, however the love and attachment he as soon as felt inside the cult is now gone.
“Growing into the life that I have, and being an adult now, and many years of therapy, I’m fully aware of what it was,” Rensch says. “With time, the pain got worse, and the success got better, so it became its own very meshy web.”
“Where to pull on the string was hard to really figure out: where my healthy enjoyment as a kid could have began for the game, and where my performance, based on what was expected of me, ended,” he continues. “It was very, very hard to untie those.”
From being the ‘laughing stock’ to bootstrapping Chess.com
Quickly after Rensch was hitting his teenage chess highs, he skilled a severe medical emergency. His eardrums burst on a aircraft experience, which compelled him to be “sidelined and bedridden,” which put him out of the operating in aggressive chess competitions simply as he was hitting his stride. Whereas he was present process surgical procedures, he spent loads of time browsing the web, which was nonetheless in its early days on the time.
YouTube’s reputation was rapidly rising. Sensing the potential of different community-building platforms, inspiration struck—what if there was a solution to carry chess on-line?
Rensch had the chess brains to carry aggressive gameplay to the platform, however didn’t have the technical or enterprise wherewithal to launch the concept by himself. That’s when Chess.com’s former CTO Jay Severson and present CEO Erik Allebest got here into the image; Severson leveraged his coding expertise to energy the earliest model of the platform, whereas Allebest introduced his Stanford MBA experience to flesh out the enterprise facet. Nevertheless, when it got here to securing traders for the positioning, their pitch was largely dismissed as a pipe dream.
“We were laughed out of VC rooms who said that chess would never be anything,” Rensch recollects. “Nobody invested early on, and it became the biggest blessing in disguise.”
However these early rejections didn’t destroy their confidence. The three cofounders bootstrapped their very own firm in 2009 with Allebest’s cash earned from earlier chess ventures that he had bought, and borrowed $70,000 from a mom’s good friend (which Rensch says they paid again in a short time). They needed to maintain their jobs for the primary couple of years whereas Chess.com was nonetheless the “laughing stock of the online chess community,” who doubted it might develop into mainstream. However right this moment, it’s a staple for chess champions and budding gamers alike.
Chess.com’s success was solely bolstered by the pandemic and the sport’s growth in popular culture relevancy as hit Netflix present The Queen’s Gambit introduced new gamers into the fold. The miniseries attracted 62 million pairs of eyes in its first 28 days, dominating the streaming web site as a high present throughout dozens of nations. Launched in October 2020, throughout the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, it got here at an opportune second whereas viewers had been quarantined at house. Chess.com was already including a million new accounts each month since March 2020, and within the month following The Queen’s Gambit’s launch, the server exploded with a 2.8 million enhance in new customers. Rensch says driving the pure momentum of the pop-culture machine with no backers and minimal advertisers is what units Chess.com aside as a enterprise.
“We got lucky in that we did not pay for The Queen’s Gambit…That was awesome and great for the game that has inspired millions,” Rensch says. “If we had taken a different approach and tried to throttle our customers versus allowing them to do chess however they want to do chess, I think it would have been a different outcome for us.”
