What Chess.com Teaches US About Superhuman Capabilities, with CEO Erik Allebest

COVID happened. Queen's Gambit happened. Some news cycles happened. And we're like, oh, this might just be a flash in the pan like treadmills and sourdough bread. But then in 2023, we had another crazy wave where all these kids started playing in schools because of short form content and the mittens bot and the cheating scandal, and we just spiked again. And then when we came down again, we were so much higher and we maintained this baseline. How do you think about, like, how to design a rating system for poker? We're bringing the chess playbook, which is, like, how good are you really? Not just can you buy the most chips, or can you use a bot, or can you steal the most money? Whatever it is, we've all played those games where you're playing for M and M's and someone's just, like, all in all the time and they just rebuy more M and M's. As people get used to, like, wait. I actually care about my poker rating. People are gonna care about it as much as money because it's a reflection of, like, the value and their skill as a player. I think this is gonna be quite an interesting, innovation for for poker. Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Eric Alabest who bought the chess.com domain out of bankruptcy auction in 2005 for $55 when almost every investor told him it was an uninvestable niche passion project. Two decades later, he's built the dominant chess platform with more than 250,000,000 members, 200,000,000 a year in revenue, on a mission to get a billion people to play chess. It's a game that's more popular than ever despite computers outclassing humans at it for the last thirty years. We talk about what AI means for games, the future of chess.com, how to build a rating system for poker, and the future of human skills. Welcome, Eric. Eric, it's great to have you on No Priors. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So I'd love to just make sure our listeners have a little bit of the backstory of, chess.com and how you built this business. But, could you paint a little bit of a picture of just, you know, usage and both the company and the user base and product today first? Yeah. Sure. We are, we are much larger than I ever thought we would be. So it's kind of wild to say these numbers for me. We're about 10,000,000 daily active users, about 40 or 50,000,000 monthly active users. It's always a little slower in the summertime as people are, you know, in the in the Northern Hemisphere out and about. We have more than 250,000,000 registered members and more revenue than I thought we would end up with as a chess company, a little I think this year, we'll do a little over 200,000,000, which is frankly, again, surprising. We have about 650 people on …