Entrepreneurs are first pulled toward their passion in all sorts of ways—whether that be through an overbearing parent, chasing a childhood dream career, or realization that a hobby can bring in millions. But Danny Rensch, chess champion and cofounder of Chess.com, initially strived for greatness during his unconventional childhood growing up in a cult.
Today, Rensch helms 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 company’s three cofounders and chief chess officer, he’s an American entrepreneur leading a gaming site beloved by millions. Chess.com says it surpassed a $1 billion valuation in 2023 without any venture backers, entirely bootstrapped by the entrepreneurs who were “laughed out of VC rooms” at the company’s inception. Rensch’s superstar status as a teen and international platform success has made him one of the most powerful figures in the industry. But his entry into the world of chess was anything but usual.
Rensch tells Fortune he first encountered the historic game while watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, which explores the American chess genius who became the youngest U.S. Champion in history at age of 14. Rensch romanticized the idea of a child prodigy finding himself inside the game, and with his life circumstances, the board could serve as a tool for his survival.
As detailed in Rensch’s recent book release Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life, the wunderkid spent his early years in the Church of Immortal Consciousness: a cult run by Trina and Steven Kamp in Arizona. The group, dubbed the “Collective,” attracted those in need of help, including people with alcohol and drug abuse disorders and victims of abuse. Rensch’s parents were pulled into the group, where the young chess wiz spent his childhood running around barefoot in a remote forest village. His childhood was largely in flux, living off food stamps, playing in the woods, and being tossed between the supervision of his mother and the cult’s other members.
But when Rensch first discovered the game as a nine-year old, chess became only the opportunity for him to gain approval in his abusive living situation, but to also pave a path for success once he left.
Chess as his mentor and tormentor—a way to leave the cult
The cult’s leader, Steven Kamp, was obsessed with chess, and Rensch was quickly pulled into his orbit. Recognizing the potential of his religious pupils, Kamp set up a chess team at an elementary school near the Collective’s setup in Tonto Village. Rensch was told chess was his life’s purpose—and he was alienated from his family in the pursuit of greatness.
“As he saw what we were capable of doing—me and my peer group, the Shelby School chess team—we all got good very fast. I became the best, but the truth is they were all amazing players. We were winning championships left, right, and center,” Rensch says. “Chess became a way to climb the hierarchical ladder of the Collective.”
In 1997, the Shelby School won the Super Nationals chess tournament—and one year later, Rensch took home his first individual national championship title. But when his success sputtered at the age of 14, he was separated from living with his mother in order to sharpen his gameplay in the house of Kamp’s close confidant, who Rensch found out was also his biological father. Chess was not only his passion, but a buoy in those difficult times; as the cofounder explained in his book, “to be special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God.” Rensch continued to rise through the ranks, becoming the youngest national master in Arizona history, and eventually winning the national high-school chess championship at the age of 18.
The Church of Immortal Consciousness has since disbanded, but now 39-year-old Rensch says reconciling the abuse and stress he experienced for the bulk of his early life is still an ongoing process. He explains—like many who grew up in a cult—he’s on a journey of “unpacking and learning to interrogate those feelings.” Rensch says he has no hard feelings about what happened to him, but the love and attachment he once felt within the cult is now gone.
“Growing into the life that I have, and being an adult now, and many years of therapy, I’m fully aware of what it was,” Rensch says. “With time, the pain got worse, and the success got better, so it became its own very meshy web.”
“Where to pull on the string was hard to really figure out: where my healthy enjoyment as a kid could have began for the game, and where my performance, based on what was expected of me, ended,” he continues. “It was very, very hard to untie those.”
From being the ‘laughing stock’ to bootstrapping Chess.com
Soon after Rensch was hitting his teenage chess highs, he experienced a serious medical emergency. His eardrums burst on a plane ride, which forced him to be “sidelined and bedridden,” which put him out of the running in competitive chess competitions just as he was hitting his stride. While he was undergoing surgeries, he spent a lot of time surfing the internet, which was still in its early days at the time.
YouTube’s popularity was quickly rising. Sensing the potential of other community-building platforms, inspiration struck—what if there was a way to bring chess online?
Rensch had the chess brains to bring competitive gameplay to the platform, but didn’t have the technical or business wherewithal to launch the idea by himself. That’s when Chess.com’s former CTO Jay Severson and current CEO Erik Allebest came into the picture; Severson leveraged his coding skills to power the earliest version of the platform, while Allebest brought his Stanford MBA expertise to flesh out the business side. However, when it came to securing investors for the site, their pitch was largely dismissed as a pipe dream.
“We were laughed out of VC rooms who said that chess would never be anything,” Rensch recalls. “Nobody invested early on, and it became the biggest blessing in disguise.”
But those early rejections didn’t destroy their confidence. The three cofounders bootstrapped their own company in 2009 with Allebest’s money earned from earlier chess ventures that he had sold, and borrowed $70,000 from a mother’s friend (which Rensch says they paid back very quickly). They had to keep their jobs for the first couple of years while Chess.com was still the “laughing stock of the online chess community,” who doubted it could become mainstream. But today, it’s a staple for chess champions and budding players alike.
Chess.com’s success was only bolstered by the pandemic and the game’s boom in pop culture relevancy as hit Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit brought new players into the fold. The miniseries attracted 62 million pairs of eyes in its first 28 days, dominating the streaming site as a top show across dozens of countries. Released in October 2020, during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, it came at an opportune moment while viewers were quarantined at home. Chess.com was already adding one million new accounts every month since March 2020, and in the month following The Queen’s Gambit’s release, the server exploded with a 2.8 million increase in new users. Rensch says riding the natural momentum of the pop-culture machine with no backers and minimal advertisers is what sets Chess.com apart as a business.
“We got lucky in that we did not pay for The Queen’s Gambit…That was awesome and great for the game that has inspired millions,” Rensch says. “If we had taken a different approach and tried to throttle our customers versus allowing them to do chess however they want to do chess, I think it would have been a different outcome for us.”
