Chess.com
Brigham Young University graduates Erik Allebest and Jay Severson created an online empire worth over $500 million.
The two met as freshmen at BYU in 1995 and spent two years with no pay writing code. When the Chess.com domain came up for auction, Allebest bought it for $55,000. Severson came onboard to develop the website. They launched Chess.com in May 2007. “In the decade that followed the launch of Chess.com, the website experienced steady growth. Allebest and Severson hired more employees, acquired smaller chess companies and rolled out new features. Severson eventually stepped away in 2017 to work on another online gaming project.”[1]
The company saw a quick rise with the onset of COVID-19. In March 2020, the number of daily active users rose from 280,000 to 1 million. Following the fall 2020 release of the Netflix miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit,” a story of an orphaned girl who becomes one of the world’s greatest chess players, Chess.com spiked again, with as much as 6 million users a day. By the end of 2022, the website had a record 100 million members and 7 million of them active. That number rose to 10 million active members by January 20, 2023.
