Entrepreneurs often have to take a leap of faith to get their businesses off the ground—whether it be cashing out their 401(k)s for funding or dropping out of Ivy League colleges to go all-in. Chess.com cofounder Danny Rensch started his 235-million-player empire when his life was on the brink of collapse. Although he initially believed his vision was unrealistic, he credits a bit of that self-delusion to the platform’s success.
“The idea that Chess.com could actually be what I thought it could be required me to be delusional,” Rensch, who serves as chief chess officer, tells Fortune, referencing the same wisdom as his friend, Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn. “The belief that you see something that doesn’t exist yet, and how delusional that is, is the requirement for every successful entrepreneur.
“To some degree, there was magic in the idea that necessity breeds genius, because I truly was surviving a situation.”
Lovers of the historic board game from all around the world tune into the platform daily, facing off in around 26 million matches each day, and more than 800 million monthly. Some of the world’s greatest players, including the likes of Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, frequent Chess.com. And beyond the fanfare, the business is thriving. The company says it surpassed a $1 billion valuation in 2023—an impressive feat for a bootstrapped platform with no venture backers.
But turn back the clock 20 years, and the snapshot of Rensch’s life looked a whole lot different. While dreaming up the business at just 18 years old, the chess prodigy was cornered by life challenges; his game-playing career was in jeopardy and marriage was on the rocks, all while battling against the cult he was raised in. During that dark time, Rensch still mustered the ingenuity to make Chess.com a reality—and his livelihood was hinging on it.
“Nobody likes to say the obstacle is the way when they’re in the middle of facing what feels like an unscalable mountain, but in how I view it, I do view it as the choices you make in those moments will ultimately define you,” Rensch says. “I accepted the reality I was in, like it or not, and did everything I could to make something magical happen.”
Reeling from a medical emergency that ended his chess-playing career
Rensch landed on the idea of Chess.com while bedridden from a serious injury. Before the incident, the entrepreneur-to-be had been riding a career high; Rensch was the youngest national master in Arizona history at the time and had just won the national high school chess championship. It was his latest victory in a string of chess wins—years after he triumphed in his first individual national championship title as a young teen.
But on a flight back home from a chess tournament, his eardrums burst, forever altering the career path that once felt like destiny. “Sidelined and bedridden,” the then 18-year-old was involuntarily taken out of the competitive chess world. While undergoing medical procedures for his injury, Rensch started spending a lot of time surfing the internet.
The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and he noticed that a new website, YouTube, was quickly gaining momentum. Creators and users alike were finding community on the video platform, and Rensch wanted the same space for chess fanatics. Although his competitive chess-playing days were at an end, he found another way to stay connected to the game.
“With hindsight, you want to say that I saw the future, and I knew it was time to pivot, and I knew what the internet could become,” Rensch says. “But the truth is, if that was 1% [of the reason for success], I would say 99% of it was surviving the situation I was in…I didn’t have any other option to embrace.”
Cutting ties with his childhood cult and cofounding Chess.com
Rensch’s life-altering medical crisis was just the tip of the iceberg; a tribulation that he had faced since childhood was continuing to cause chaos.
The now 40-year-old first developed his gameplay as a kid chess whiz while raised in the Church of Immortal Consciousness, a cult run by Trina and Steven Kamp based in Arizona. Rensch’s parents were pulled into the group, dubbed the “collective,” where members of the remote forest society lived off food stamps, and children played barefoot in the woods. When he was just 9 years old, Rensch discovered his love for chess through a Bobby Fischer documentary. The cult’s leader, Steven Kamp, also happened to be obsessed with the game—and quickly pulled Rensch into his orbit.
To sharpen the skills of his religious pupils, Kamp set up a chess team at an elementary school near the collective’s setup in Tonto Village. Kamp instilled in Rensch that chess was his life’s purpose, separating him from his mother at the age of 14 in the pursuit of greatness. For years, Rensch and the Shelby School chess team dominated the game locally and internationally. But the success was laden with abuse, and Rensch says he’s still working on “unpacking and learning to interrogate those feelings.”
The Church of Immortal Consciousness has since disbanded. But when teenage Rensch was bedridden and on the precipice of launching Chess.com, it was still a force in his life.
The Chess.com founder has since reversed the course of his life by giving in to his delusion. Rensch and his cofounders, former CTO Jay Severson and current CEO Erik Allebest, bootstrapped the company entirely by themselves after being “laughed out of VC rooms.” The platform was branded as a pipe dream, and for a moment, Rensch himself believed it was a long shot. But with hundreds of thousands to millions of new players registering on the site every month, Chess.com has proved itself as a staple for modern-day chess fans.
