YouSaid · the spoken record

Erik Allebest

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90
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2024-02-07
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2024-02-07
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  1. “We have not historically been a metrics driven business. We've been a heart and mission and chess-driven business. We are getting smarter about it.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It pains me to say this, but somebody who wins their first game of chess is two to three times more likely to stay around than someone who loses their first game. And so then you're like, well, you got to make sure that people win their first game. But doing that is like morally problematic in some ways. Do you make them play a bot so they, but they think they're playing a person? And there's all these things you can do. There's moral hazard in all of it. And we've kind of avoided it. And so what we're trying to do is push people toward not playing a person first, but knowingly playing a coach bought personality where they will win and feel good, but not to just throw them in the pool of players against other people where there's a 50-50 chance they're going to lose. That's the honest truth.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There were a couple of moments that things took off. So, one was with the kind of Twitch creator streamer influencer. That was a big one. Another one I'm actually going to give a shout out to Keith. We talked about our mutual friend Keith. Keith was in the car with me one day and he said, Eric, I like chess. Sometimes I don't feel like I'm that smart enough to do it. Also, sometimes I feel like it's too frustrating. And I go do the puzzles. And I feel like I get all the puzzles wrong. And it's not fun. And I was like, man, Keith just told me that chess isn't fun, that doing puzzles isn't fun because he gets them wrong. That conversation.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Lot of browsers and a lot of providers have removed attribution to make it really hard to tell. So Twitch does no attribution, but we've seen a tremendous amount of growth. I would say our most recent wave was completely driven off of short forms, whether it's YouTube shorts, Instagram, reels, or TikTok. It has totally driven.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There, then Twitter was a little different. So we've actually been pretty smart on how each platform responds to the different types of content.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I think podcasting is a little different because there was like these other platforms. And then when did YouTube become a podcasting platform? You know, I think for chess, chess is visual. And so as soon as YouTube came out, we were like, we want to do that. We were doing live streaming back when it was justin.tv long before it was Twitch. Our very first live event that we really promoted was Danny Wrench, who's our chief chess officer versus David Proust, who was, you know, at the time our head of content. We put a thousand dollars cash on a plate in between those two guys on there. And then had them play chess against each other. And that was kind of the beginning of our live streaming. You know, we would put kind of static content on YouTube that was in the, you know, 10 to 30, you know, minute range, and then we would do live shows on Justin TV or live stream.com and eventually Twitch. And then, you know, Facebook was a different strategy. We would do a lot of quotes and meme.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It's always been a little different. Some is through kind of like chess.com affiliate. So if someone signs up on chess.com and then they become a premium subscriber, they'll get a cut of that. Sometimes it was just some cash or an ambassador like we would do a year-long ambassador for, you know, some dollars. We also create value for them because we then expose them to our community and then they get bigger and make money in their own channels. And so sometimes it's a scratch my back. I'll scratch your back with embedding them on like our platform where people can discover them and then go to their platform. So it's kind of a range of all of those.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think we were smart about it. One of my other classmates at Stanford, you asked about NBA is it worth it? I have some brilliant classmates from Stanford who've been really great to work with, including Andy, including Lior. Another one was Marcela Camberos, who was at Ipsy. And he and I talked early on, and he told me early on how valuable getting a YouTube influencer was to their cosmetic subscription business. And I was like, okay. And I thought about that. And we started looking at that kind of early influencer marketing. And we found some really great chess creators. And we kind of started working that angle. And it was really valuable for us.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And worked with really creative people and excellent people, and we invested in the product and we invested in the content, and we invested in capturing search, but not paid. So I'm sorry to every all the businesses that operate on ad revenue, but we don't participate in that.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah. We'd totally been burned on paid acquisition, and we pretty much made a very firm rule that we weren't going to do paid acquisition. And so instead, we said, we're going to take any money that we have and we're going to put it into content because content drives user value and it drives SEO. Our team has always been very good at like capturing demand on any platform, whether it's Google or App Stores, because we create content, we create value. When people interact with that, it signals to the search engines that it's something valuable. And so it's always been an investment in content. And then the next platform of Discoverability after kind of Google and, you know, app stores was YouTube. And you got to get content and it's got to be good. And then after that was Twitch. And we followed that. And then it was shorts and TikTok and we followed that. And so we always followed the content where it was.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I just read about this game, and I don't remember the title. There's a mobile game that launched literally last year, in the last nine months, that in those nine months did $400 million in revenue. Some kind of like snow survival game or something. And I'm like, maybe I'm doing it wrong. I don't know. Talk to Leor. He made a lot of money faster than chess.com did. Maybe.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I don't know what would have happened if we had hired a bunch of local people. Would we have moved too fast and done the wrong thing? I mean, there's something about...”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Raising money feels a lot like earning money in that it's a validation I'm worth the money my idea is worth the money it can fill a hole in your soul and it can make you feel like you're going to be more successful because of it and you can i mean honestly there are a lot of businesses that need capital do not get me wrong there are a lot of businesses that need capital it's critical it's important you can't do certain things without it you don't get immediate ROI you need a runway all of that is true but there are times where I have seen people over raise money or raise money at times they didn't need it or pursue things within their business that we're we're not right because they had money and knew they could get it”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean, had to do it differently. Everything I saw going on in Silicon Valley was based on large amounts of readily available capital. That means getting the best co-founder from Berkeley or Stanford. And that means like setting up an office on, you know, California Ave. It meant having a full-time chef and Masus in the office. It meant everybody hiring the best people you could, putting them in the office and doing everything right there. And later on, it meant doing everything in the cloud and it meant buying ads on Facebook. It meant, you know, scaling up as quickly as you could. Everything was like spend, spend, spend, spend. Eventually you'll think about monetizing. We did the opposite. We thought about monetizing immediately. Everybody was remote. There was no office. Our engineers were spread all over the world. My co-founder was my college buddy from San Jose.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “No, but just the recognition of saying I'm feeling this because of this thing, but I am actually a safe, grounded person outside of that. I am not my slack. I am not my inbox. I am not my social media presence. I am something deeper, safer, more foundational than that.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “My life. And I am in an altered state because of that. The most helpful thing from that was to realize that when I am feeling anxiety or when I am feeling something, I am probably and I'm not centered, I'm probably under the influence of something. And it may not be a drug as we characterize it, but it's probably slack. It's probably a message someone sent me. It's probably a fear. It's probably something someone said on Reddit. I am under the influence.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “My biggest takeaway from this experience was, this is so weird. I grew up in a Mormon home and beliefs and culture and I live that lifestyle. I never did any drugs or alcohol. So then to go do an ayahuasca retreat, I was so afraid to do that, to be in a mind an altered mind state. But when I did that, it actually for the first time took all the other mind altering things out of my mind. And I was present only with my mind. And my biggest takeaway from that retreat. And it took drugs to get me there. It's medicine. Sorry for those who practice. It's called medicine. But it took a medicine drug to teach me that I am every day microdosing on drugs. I am microdosing on slack. I am microdosing on email. I am microdosing on Zoom. I am under the influence of drugs every single day and every single moment of”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Is inside of all of us an inner person, an inner being, and you have to get comfortable and happy with who that person is. You can do that in a number of ways. Some people do meditation. Other people do a lone time where they can find peace in long runs or walks or other things. Other people get it from achieving something and being in the flow and could be skiing. It could be sports. It could be writing. It can be all sorts of things. But I think there's something about that. But I did do an ayahuasca retree one time. It's the only drug I've ever done. And part of that journey for me was to get comfortable with myself and really be happy and solid and grounded in myself.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would start and say, and this is something every human struggles with, but first question should be, why are you valuable to yourself? If your entire self-worth is a reflection of other people, you'll always be chasing that mirror. You have to start with good, balanced, self-worth and self-value. That's a struggle for me as well. Like I'm a very extroverted person. I love being around people. I love doing all that. But self-care, self-talk, self-worth, all of that is like very critical to my well-being and makes me a better person to show up for others. And then also that interaction is important anyway.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I love experiences. I love having things. I love the security of feeling safe and having my needs and most of my wants met. But I know people where money is like, it's like self-worth or it's a scoreboard or it's like precious something. And I just don't know why I don't feel that. I have a deep relationship and love of food, but I have some friends who are like, yeah, I eat when I'm hungry and food is good. But I'm like, no, no, no. I love food. Well, it's kind of the opposite. I like, okay, I appreciate money, but I don't love money or I'm not motivated by it. I don't care about it in the same way. I don't know why”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I don't think so. I don't care about money. I'll be honest, I just don't care about it. And so it's just not the lens I look at. I mean, I think if you're a venture investor saying like, hey, I need to get to a 5 billion exit, like chess may not be your investment. And that's totally okay.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I don't think I did anything wrong. I think everybody was wrong. Consensus, including for me, was the chess was too small. And so why would you invest in a business that you thought would make $10 million in revenue at its best?”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We tried for like the first five years to raise money. We tried many times. We tried angels. We tried, I met Peter Thiel. I met a bunch of different angels. I went up and down. I used all my connections, you know, Sandhill Road to try to raise money for chess and just time and time again was told the market's too small. This is uninvestable. Maybe I'll give you a little bit of money at like an insanely low valuation. And I was like, ah, I don't need it that bad.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It was after we launched the learning product where you would go online and move a piece and it would give you a response. And we took basically all the learning instruction material that we bought out of bankruptcy along with the domain name, which was called Chess Mentor. And we put that online. And then we said, if you want access to this, you got to subscribe. And once we did that, we immediately had people subscribing and were like, now we have money. are voting with their dollars and saying we like this and then we're like okay it's time to like 100 all in on this”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It was definitely under a million. Every day, a few hundred people would sign up. I mean, maybe a thousand or more would come to chess.com and then we would convert a fairly high percentage of them to just creating an account. But there wasn't a ton for them to do other than forums. But back in 2006, seven, eight, nine. Forums was a big part of the internet.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Social media profile. But then people started coming. They're like, dude, we want to play chess. I'm like, okay, okay, okay, we'll build that. But that was really hard to do because back in the day, people were downloading clients to play. Gaming was all done on like executable programs on your computer. Doing it in the browser was like an insanity at the time. JavaScript wasn't mature enough. There was no web sockets or anything like that.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I opened up Microsoft Word and I started building wireframes in Microsoft Word. That's how that's kind of where I was coming from, you know, had a friend of mine from college design a logo. You know, then I took these wireframes from Microsoft Word and then I started building the front end of these web pages in macromedia Dreamweaver. That's how long ago that was. And then I would build these web pages, push them through an FTP server to a fake domain name that we just that I and my co-founder, technical co-founder Jay had. And he would take that HTML CSS document, put it in with some PHP and MySQL and like push it live to the server. And that's how we got started. And then so we built a homepage. We built a login. We built forums. We built blogs. We built news. We built everything but how to play chess at the start. We're like, we're just going to do a community and people can play on Yahoo or on ICC and then they can say what their rating is and we're just going to be so.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Ridiculously large roll, especially at the beginning, and the beginning sets the tone for later. In today's world, if we hadn't done it, would you have to start on chess.com? Probably not. But given the time that we started and how it worked and it was web first and all the, so it was critical at the time. And so by the time we hit the kind of mobile ecosystem where app downloads don't require a dot com and some people don't even have websites, et cetera, it's way less important now, but we were already massive at that time. It was fundamental.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “To an e commerce business. And then while I was doing e-commerce, I was like, customer acquisition cost is killing my business. I need to get off the Google AdWords or Google Ads at the time and build something that is meaningful for people and for users so they will come and do that activity. And then I can sell them some chess equipment. I was like, I need to build a community. I want to build the MySpace of chess. You're not going to do that in an e-commerce site. I want to do that on chess.com. So then I contacted the people who owned it. They had like $5 million of like debt on the books and they needed to go bankrupt. So there's a bankruptcy auction and I bought the domain out of bankruptcy and me and Jay started chess.com.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So it started while in college kind of teaching chess to kids and setting up after school programs where lots of kids would come and you know I was basically a labor arbitrage business where 30 kids would pay 15 bucks an hour to do an after school club and then I would pay an instructor you know $50 to teach the class and I did that in dozens of schools while I was in college and after and then I kind of got this idea to franchise that business with this other science company that was doing the same thing and then they needed chess equipment so I started buying chest equipment and reselling to them and then I'm like I got to cut out the middleman so I started buying stuff in China then I had extra inventory and I was like I'm gonna start selling this extra inventory online so I created a website with my friend Jay we started doing basically like the Amazon.com of chess before Amazon was doing anything except books and so you kind of went from a teaching business”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I have accepted that. That's just a role. That's a position. That just comes with the territory at times of being sometimes a person in a position of power. I'm fine with that. I embrace that role.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It's not an either or. It's not like be nice and then don't be direct. It's like you can be both. And I think a lot of it has to do with the number of deposits and withdrawals you make in any relationship. It's like your bank account. So you need to have a way more positive interactions with someone if you're going to have a negative or what they might feel as a negative or something. And so I do a lot of positive investing everywhere with everyone in my company, with my kids, with my wife, with all my relationships, that builds up a buffer of trust and kindness and all that. So then if I have a moment of maybe clarity that feels a little bit stinging or a little bit too much or something, they already know that there's a good amount of goodwill that I've built up there. But I'm accused of the same. I'm pretty brash at times. I'm not everybody's favorite flavor of ice cream. That's all there is to it.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, first of all, I learned that I was an asshole and I wasn't a very pleasant person. And one of my dear friends out of business school, Andy Dunn, basically one day said to me, hey, let's have lunch. And we go have lunch. And he's like, hey, you come off like an asshole all the time. You don't smile that much. You kind of like assume that you're in charge of everything that's going on. It's off-putting. And I was like, first of all, thank you for being brave enough to tell me. Second of all, like, I'm going to work on that. I'm going to try and, you know, fix my RBF, my resting unhappy face.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Like, you are miserable. Change pace, go do something. And so for me, it was more of like an exploration of myself and like what did I want to do, not a fallback.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I didn't really understand what an NBA was. So I didn't really view it as a downside protection move for me or like a career advancement. I mean, it was literally at first a little bit I got some career advice. I mean, coming out of college, I was so lost. I was an English major, but I really loved technology and like entrepreneurship, but none of my education prepared me for that. And then I was just kind of scrappy and doing things. But, you know, my parents and my in-laws and everyone's like, hey, you need to go get like a real job and you need to go do some stuff. So I applied to like business school and law school. I didn't get in anywhere because it was like right after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. And I got rejected to every school. And I was like, oh man, so then I'm like, all right, I'm just going to go start and do something. And then later it kind of was always in my mind. And then I got pretty unhappy in the entrepreneurial thing I was doing and thought actually was my wife's like, hey, you need to go back to school.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I think my dad ended up doing something he loved, which was serving people in the legal community, but he really doesn't love being a lawyer. So he kind of tried a lot of different things. And unfortunately for him, they didn't really pan out. And so he kind of always fell back. And, you know, he came from like a very poor immigrant family after World War II, you know, moved to the US when he was five and kind of really had nothing. And so he had a bit of that immigrant mindset where like, you know, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be a professional, and you'll always be safe. But in his heart, he was an entrepreneur. So he tried a lot of different things, but always kind of fell back on being a lawyer. And there was a part of me too that almost had a fallback too where I was like, oh, I probably should go do a JDMBA. You have a fallback. And I'm like, I don't know. I want to do chess or something. So anyway.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “You know, it's kind of funny. I have this thing inside of me. If it's my mission of something I want to do, I am 100% in. I am 200% in. If it's somebody else's thing they want, it just doesn't motivate me. This is my dad and now my 15-year-old son is exactly the same. If he wants to do it, he's thousand. He just can't be stopped. But if it's something someone else wants him to do, he cannot be motivated. And so I don't know what it is, man. You know, and it's not like I'm a noncompliant or disobedient person, but like with my heart's not in it, I can't get there. But if my heart is, nothing can stop me.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, I was always like scrappy. And I don't know. My dad was the same way. He was always starting stuff, doing things. I did several things at a young age. I would sell things at school. We would sell like either candy bars or bracelets or things. I would go to where the high school kids would drink beer and leave all their cans and I would collect them all and go recycle them. I would go door to door to sell stationery. I was just always hustling for something, some way to kind of like make money and like do something. Yeah, it's in like the blood.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Thanks for having me. I try not to dig myself very seriously. I love dressing up in different costumes and being weird. So thanks for using it.”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “We tried for like the first five years to raise money. And just time and time again was told the market's too small. This is uninvestable. Everything I saw going on in Silicon Valley was based on large amounts of readily available capital. We did the opposite. We thought about monetizing immediately. Everybody was remote. There was no office. Our engineers were spread all over the world. Everything was the opposite because we had no money. I'm really grateful for that. 20 VC, the memo”

    2024-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Chess.com Memo: The Most Untold Story in Startups; Scaling to $100M Revenue, 150M Members and 700 People, All with Zero Venture Funding | Erik Allebest, CEO @ Chess.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source