How the co -founder of Chess.com went from a child prodigy in a religious cult to build an empire of 225 million players

Today, Rensch runs one of the largest online chess platforms in the world with more than 225 million registered members and 40 million active monthly users. As one of the three co-founders of the company and chess director, he is an American entrepreneur who heads a beloved game site of millions. Chess.com says that he exceeded an evaluation of $ 1 billion in 2023 without any funder, entirely kicked by entrepreneurs who “laughed at venture capital” at the creation of the company. Rensch’s superstar status as adolescents and the international platform has made it one of the most powerful figures in industry. But his entry into the world of chess was anything but usual.

Rensch tells Fortune He first met the historical game while watching the film Search for bobby fischer, Who explores the genius of American failures who became the youngest American champion in history at the age of 14. Rensch romanticized the idea of ​​a prodigy child is found inside the game, and with his life circumstances, the board of directors could serve as a tool for his survival.

As detailed in the recent version of the Rensch book Black squares: how the failures saved my life, The Wunderkid spent its first years in the Church of Immortelle Consciousness: a cult led by Trina and Steven Kamp in Arizona. The group, nicknamed the “collective”, attracted those who need help, including people with alcohol and drug addiction disorders and victims of abuse. Rensch’s parents were fired in the group, where the young failure of failure spent his childhood running barefoot in an isolated forest village. His childhood was largely en masse, living food coupons, playing in the woods and being thrown between the supervision of his mother and other members of the worship.

But when Rensch discovered the game for the first time, nine years old, failures only became an opportunity for him to obtain approval in his abusive life situation, but also to open a path of success once he left.

Failures like his mentor and executioner – a way of leaving worship

The head of worship, Steven Kamp, was obsessed with failures, and Rensch was quickly pulled on his orbit. Recognizing the potential of his religious students, Kamp has set up a team of chess in a primary school near the configuration of the collective in the village of Tonto. Rensch was said to chess was the goal of his life – and he was alienated from his family in the pursuit of grandeur.

“As he saw what we were able to do – Me and my peer group, the chess team of the Shelby school – we all went very quickly. I became the best, but the truth is that they were all incredible players. We have won championships on the left, right and center, ”says Rensch. “Failures have become a way to climb the hierarchical scale of the collective.”

In 1997, the Shelby School won the Super Nationals chess tournament – and a year later, Rensch won its first title of the individual national championship. But when his success flouted at the age of 14, he was separated from living with his mother to sharpen his gameplay in the house of the near Confident of Kamp, which Rensch discovered was also his biological father. Failures were not only his passion, but a buoy in these difficult times; As the co -founder explained in his book, “being special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is being special in the eyes of God.” Rensch continued to get into the ranks, becoming the youngest national master in the history of Arizona, and finally winning the National Lycée chess championship at the age of 18.

The Church of Immortelle Consciousness has since dissolved, but now Rensch, 39, says that reconciling the abuses and the stress he suffered for most of his first life is always a continuous process. He explains – like many of those who grew up in a cult – he is traveling to “unpack and learn to question these feelings”. Rensch says he has no grudge on what happened to him, but the love and attachment he formerly felt in the cult is now gone.

“Becoming the life I have, and being an adult now, and many years of therapy, I am fully aware of what it was,” explains Rensch. “Over time, pain has worsened and success has improved, so it has become its own very mesh web.”

“Where to shoot the rope was difficult to really understand: where my healthy pleasure as a child could have started for the game, and where my performance, depending on what was expected of me, finished,” he continues. “It was very, very difficult to detach them.”

To be the “ rigor ” in bootstrap chess.com

Shortly after Rensch reached his chess for teenagers, he experienced a serious medical emergency. His eardrums broke out on a plane stroll, which forced him to be “sidelined and in bed”, which put him out of the race in competitive chess competitions when he struck his stride. As he was undergoing surgeries, he spent a lot of time surfing the internet, which was still in his early days at the time.

The popularity of YouTube increased quickly. Feeling the potential of other community construction platforms, inspiration struck – that if there was a way to put online failures?

Rensch had chess brains to bring a competitive gameplay on the platform, but did not have the technical or commercial means to launch the idea by itself. It was at this moment that the former CTO Jay Severson of Chess.com and the current CEO Erik Allebest entered the scene; Severson has exploited his coding skills to feed the first version of the platform, while Allebest brought his expertise in Stanford MBA to expand the commercial side. However, with regard to investor guarantee for the site, their argument has been largely rejected as a pipe dream.

“We laughed while laughing VC rooms that said that failures would never be anything,” recalls Rensch. “No one has invested very early, and it became the greatest disguised blessing.”

But these first refusals did not destroy their confidence. The three co -founders enlisted their own business in 2009 with Allebest money won in previous chess companies which he had sold and borrowed $ 70,000 from the friend of a mother (which Rensch says they reimbursed very quickly). They had to keep their jobs for the first two years while Chess.com was still “laughing at the online chess community”, which doubted it could become common. But today is a basic food for chess champions and budding players.

The success of Chess.com was only reinforced by the pandemic and the boom of the game in the relevance of pop culture as a Hit Netflix Show The Gambit of the Queen brought new players to the lap. The mini-series attracted 62 million pairs of eyes during its first 28 days, dominating the streaming site as the first show in dozens of countries. Released in October 2020, during the thickness of the COVID-19 pandemic, it arrived at a timely moment while viewers were quarantined at home. Chess.com has already added a million new accounts every month since March 2020, and the following month The Gambit of the QueenReleased, the server exploded with an increase of 2.8 million new users. Rensch says that getting on the natural momentum of the pop culture machine without donors or minimum advertisers is what distinguishes Chess.com as a business.

“We were lucky that we did not pay The Queen’s Gambit …It was great and great for the game that inspired millions of people, “said Rensch.” If we had adopted a different approach and tried to strangle our customers in relation to allowing them to do failures, but they wanted to do failures, I think that would have been a different result for us. “”