Chess.com grew from a $56,000 domain purchase to over $200 million in annual revenue without ever raising traditional venture capital.

3:52building >> and uh well bridge the gap from that to the scale of community you have today like how did you grow? How did you think about fundraising? Yeah. So, we did think about fundraising. Uh, you know, obviously I was at uh I was at Stanford Business School at the time. So, you know, Sand Hill Road was right there and I had access to a lot of venture

4:11capitalists. They were, you know, teachers and were guests in, you know, classrooms I was in. And um, so I had a lot of meetings and basically most of them said this is uninvestable. You should get a real job. Don't waste your time with this. And so, I wasn't able to raise any money. No one believed in the vision. I asked some classmates if they wanted to like join me on this venture

4:32and they're like, "Nah, we're going to go like do something serious." And um so then my friend and I um you know, he was kind of the CTO. I was the product person. Just the two of us started building it together. Um didn't raise any money. Eventually I started putting money in. I had money from a you know, a couple previous businesses I had sold. Um borrowed like a little bit of money

4:51from my friend's mom um and then paid it back later. But um you know, we just really kind of grew at the speed of cash. And after we launched in 2007, right as I graduated um from school and then I think within like 18 months we were starting to charge memberships for like online chess learning and we pretty quickly became profitable and then we just grew you know as we had more

5:14revenue we would just hire somebody new whether it was a community manager, a developer, a system a cis admin, you know, eventually designers and it just kind of grew as we had money to to you know for it to grow. Um, and we never then again considered raising money. It it never crossed our minds. Um, we just thought, hey, we're profitable. Let's just keep let's keep growing. And we

5:38always thought like, oh, when we hit like 50 people, like we're never going to have more than 50 people on our team. And of course, we blew and we're never going to have more than 100 people on our team. And then we just stopped saying that because, you know, chess just continued to to surprise us as to how big it it got. And it still surprises me. But what's interesting is

5:55now I'm like, if 250 million people have said they want to play chess at some point on chess.com, like why don't we have 50 million daily active users? You know, a billion people should be playing chess. So now our ambitions are are are pretty big and we see the good that chess does in the world and and uh brings people together and and gives them confidence and you know teaches