Chess.com: From $0 to $100 million revenue

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Wassup everyone! I’m Erik Allebest and I’m the co-founder and CEO (the real one, yes, the memes aren’t true) of Chess.com!

I’ve been doing business ventures since college and even founded two chess-related businesses beforehand; Schoolhouse Chess and Wholesale Chess, with chess.com being my third journey into chess-related stuff.

Chess.com has millions of daily users, with 11,000,000 being our peak during 2023. We also got very good numbers during 2020 and 2021, and we had a small lull during 2022 then peaked in 2023. We’ve had a very interesting ride as a company and I’m glad that you’re here to listen about our efforts and journey.

What’s your favorite game to play at this point in time?

It is very hard to choose. I will say Valheim because my son and I are deeply into the Ashlands and having a great time there, followed closely by Helldivers 2, which my son and I also play a lot. So those are the two games my son and I bond over the most. In my private time, I play a lot of chess and I play a lot of a game called Landover, which is similar to Settlers of Catan, but in my view much better. Anyway, those are my games of choice these days.

Valheim is actually more of like a resource grind, and I call it Minecraft for adults. I also love Minecraft but Valheim is like the next level Minecraft so it scratches that itch. But I grew up playing first-person shooters so I love Helldivers 2. I love the stress of an extraction where all the bots and bugs are coming at you. Landover is a calm strategy game and then chess is not calm for me.

Why Landover Is Better Than Catan

If you're going to play in person, you know Catan over the board is awesome. I think Cities & Knights + Seafarers Expansion stuff makes the game more interesting. The reason Landover is just straight-up a better game is it takes so much of the mess out of the game. It automates a ton of the mechanics. You don't have to do all the weird trading stuff. It just speeds up the game, takes all the unnecessary stuff out, has way more variety in maps, better balancing and still preserves the gameplay of the five resources and the ports and stuff.

But it's slightly more complicated in its strategy and its maps, but reduced in friction. So that's my pitch. Sorry, disclaimer! Landover’s a game created by Jay, who was the co-founder of chess.com with me. He no longer works at chess.com but this is his passion. I am an investor but I'm not pitching. By the way, this is the most used app on my phone at times!

On playing chess

I'm a 1 + 1 player, meaning I like the one-second increment. I've been trying to understand the psychology of chess. Some people get in there, they download the app and they dabble with the bots. They have this slow relationship and they're like, “Oh, this is interesting, let me take back the move.” And they like that slow bot play. That's great because it's like low-stress, low-stakes.

Some of those people hit the play versus another person. Now there's a clock. Now there's another human. They're now measuring against another human, not a machine, and that has a certain amount of stress and pressure. Some love that and some don't like it. So those of the latter either go back to bots or quit chess entirely. 

But then the other people who are like, “Oh, I like this!” They like the mano y mano about it. They like the perfect information. They like that they know that their opponent doesn't have a better deck stacked with better cards that they paid for that's going to beat them. It's very straight up.

What I've realized is that the losses in chess hurt many people so much more than losses in other things, but the wins in chess are so much more rewarding than the wins in other games. And so there is something about chess that gets you coming back because that feel of like, “Oh, I made that one discreet, awesome move!” is different from other games where you don't have that discreet knockout blow or that great thing. So there's something about the equality and discreetness of chess, plus the satisfaction of knowing you just went straight up against another person and came out on top. It's rewarding.

How did games come into your life?

As a kid growing up, we had a lot of games around. We played games. We were a fun kind of gaming family. My mom taught me when I was eight how to play chess. You know, her mom lore is that I won the first game and we never played again. I played a little bit with friends or did different things, but we always had games around with friends. I was playing a lot of games. 

Did you ever play Axis & Allies? It's a board game that takes like, you know, 12 hours to play. I loved that! So I've always been a hardcore gamer. And so there's something about gaming. There's something about strategy. I really love strategy and tactics, grew up playing paintball a lot, where you're one of the characters in the game. So I'm just a gamer at heart.

Can you tell us about your previous chess ventures and why you left them?

Chess.com actually did start because of Wholesale Chess. The idea was to create a community and lower customer acquisition costs so we could have a more profitable e-commerce business. E-commerce is hard. Like, real hard. Margins shrink, competitive bidding, customer acquisition costs… it's all very challenging. And the other thing is, I might have done it all together, but it was in a weird and different ownership structure, that’s how we kind of started with it, so it couldn't all be in one entity. I thought chess.com would feed and improve the Wholesale Chess business, while they would be separate entities with different ownership structures and investments.

But, honestly, the real problem was that I just got bored with e-commerce. E-commerce was not a fun game for me. E-commerce was like a spreadsheet, which is, I know there's a Spreadsheet World Championship, but it's not my jam. It's not a game to me. That was just like your customer acquisition cost minus your margin, plus some operations like sell this, divide that, oh, my competitors are doing this… Ugh. Boring. And it's hard. 

However, I think branded e-commerce is interesting, but we were non-branded. we were commoditized e-commerce, so it was super tough. You're just competing against everyone else selling very similar products or the same products. Now you're just competing on price and customer acquisition, not a fun game. You're not set up to win that. Branded e-commerce is different because building a brand and getting the feels and creating a relationship or innovating on a new product, that stuff's all fun.

Going to business school

But yeah, frankly, e-commerce got boring for me. My favorite part of the day when I worked at Wholesale Chess was just cleaning the warehouse at the end because I also love cleaning. But everything else about it was boring. I didn't enjoy it and I was like, “I got to go do something different.” So I applied to business school. I think my wife got me into business school. She's a better writer than I am. She really worked on my essays with me and was actually the one motivating and pushing me. So she kind of really nudged me and helped me get into business school.

And then she realized, “Wait, I'm not the one going to business school.” So she later went to Stanford and got her Master's as well. But she kind of got me into doing something different. And I really got pushed out of my comfort zone at business school, and gaming was always in the back of my mind. 

But I thought I would go do things. I looked at maybe Electronic Arts or YouTube was, you know, there was there a gaming angle. So I looked at a lot of different possibilities. But, you know, ultimately just decided to go my own way and turn down job offers at Facebook and Google and and some other places.

But what's so fascinating to me is the full circle of gaming. For a while, gaming was hot for different reasons, and then it went cold. But it came back! I mean, Netflix is now a gaming platform. YouTube's a gaming platform. Facebook wants to be a gaming platform. You know, LinkedIn reached out to us and they're like, hey, games on LinkedIn. Everybody understands the power of games. And so it's just very interesting to see the evolution of how content and gaming sit so close to each other. It's just fascinating.

But content companies don't understand gaming because it's a different DNA of what it takes to create a game and how to build a game. But gaming companies oftentimes don't understand the content world and what it takes to build content and community in those pieces. And so it's very interesting to see that and with chess.com, we've really tried to be all of these things, a community, a content production house, a gaming development place, and it's made us into a kind of an interesting hybrid company.

Is content creation the major piece of the pie that is chess.com?

It's a big part of our company, and it's part of our customer acquisition strategies like social media and all the media elements that drive Top-of-Funnel. But the truth is that all that media stuff can bring people in, but still, the funnel of SEO and people searching for chess is really what gets more people to the site and the app. Then the media can help engage and retain those numbers.

The percentage of people who play chess on a given daily basis versus consume the content, in that regard, the content consumer side is much smaller, but it's a very rabid and tight group. And so more people just play chess, but the people who consume the content are some of the most hardcore users. So you have to serve everybody. So I wouldn't say content creation is the most dominant. If it were in pie charts, it would all be in portions of three, so everything is a third of the whole pie.

And frankly, serving the community is mostly through product and content anyway. So it's kind of like we serve the community by doing both of those things. But we definitely have more resources on the product and engineering side than we do on the content side. And the other thing is content doesn't pay. Content has no revenue essentially, and only gaming drives the revenue, so it makes for an interesting balance of pieces on the board.

Can you tell us more about your branding backstory with chess.com?

It was such a fascinating world because I don't know about today’s stuff, but 18 years ago, if you did an image search for “chess company” or “chess logo”, kings and knights were at the forefront, it was all the power pieces. And we wanted to do things a little differently. We want chess for everybody. We want chess in a democratized version where it's different.

And so we chose the pawn, cause the pawn is, you know, the most common. It also has the potential to become something more. It was really a differentiator for us and it felt a little risky at the time, because some people are like, “Dude, don't do the pawn that's so weak. You want to be the king or you want to be the knight.” Well, turns out we were right on this because I think one of the major things that we did to generationally change the perception of chess was to change the definition of who is a chess player.

And in the past, if you were a highly rated man from these countries and then you were a chess player and everyone else was a patzer. But we said no, no, no, no, no! Over time, our message has been: “Everybody's a chess player.” I'm a chess player in 1600 or 1800. You're a chess player at whatever you are. Women are chess players, people of color are chess players, people just learning the game are chess players. Kids are chess players. Everybody! Just erase that preconceived definition.

Changing what it means to be a chess player

It's easy to say that, but if the mentality is still measured on how good you are, then you're like, “Hey, everybody can be a chess player.” You know, you're really only a chess player as good as you play, and that self-selects and it keeps people out. So we said that's not true.

And so in our social media and stuff, instead of celebrating only the best moves and this stuff, we celebrated the moves we all make, which were the blunders and the mistakes and the heartbreak and the learning. We celebrated all the different levels of experience of chess. And when we did that, it changed the definition of who could become a chess player.

And after a generation of doing this, we're now 18 years in. When I grew up, chess was for nerds. Nobody thinks that anymore. When I grew up, chess was for boys. Nobody thinks that's anymore, even though it is still skewed that way. But there isn’t the gatekeeping that there used to be. And so it's just fascinating that we changed the definition of who is the chess player and by doing that, vastly expanded the market. And we have much more to do in this area as well. So we're not done yet.

So how truly big is the market for chess?

There have been reports that 600 million people know how to play chess. They know the rules or have played chess or like there's a large number of people even vaguely acquainted with chess. We're not even at the scale yet of everybody who knows how to play chess in terms of our business and our platform, let alone all the people who will eventually want to learn or all those other things.

Because, again, it's generationally changing. When Netflix did The Queen's Gambit, all these people in their kind of late 20s up through their 40s who watch a lot of Netflix were inspired by the show. Well, they're now teaching their kids and they're teaching them in a different way to enjoy it. And it's not all the pressure of you have to be a champion or stop playing. They're teaching it differently. And then their kids will teach their kids. So there are billions of possible chess players on the planet.

And I think it will grow to that because it's just this game that also just doesn't change. And it is so accessible. And once you learn it, you can have a relationship with the game at any level throughout your whole life. Whereas in other games, they kind of push you to be hardcore and you end up becoming whales or the hardcore audience. And the learning curve is hard. They're always changing the rules of the game. Like you stop playing Hearthstone for six months and you come back and you don't even know the new cards. 

But chess will never change and it will be there forever. And so you can play it for three months and then you can stop playing for three years and then you can go back and play for three months. So there's going to be more people with relationships to the games, and the game is going to get easier to find an opponent and will get easier to get better at and enjoy. And people might become fans of the game outside of just playing.

My kids don't play chess, but they like the stories and the heroes and the memes and the different cultural elements. So there's more to the game than just the boards. So that's why I think like we have a lot of growth ahead of us.

How much of an impact have streamers and modern media had on the progress of chess.com?

That has been one of the most interesting parts of this and how this generationally changed too, because then again, in the past, the people that you saw in the media playing chess were the old white guys from these countries. And that was what it was because representation matters. And so that's what you saw.

You saw the Garry Kasparovs and you saw the Bobby Fischers and you're like, “Oh, those are chess players.” But streaming started even before COVID. We had a streamer’s program and people were doing it. It didn't really explode quite as much until kind of COVID and all that, but we had streamers coming and people were kind of like on there. In fact, Twitch came to us and they're like, “Hey, streaming is a really interesting category for us because your users are sticky. They're actually a different demographic than the normal viewers. We really like your demographic. Let's do a deal together!”

And we like signed a deal with Twitch and we're like, “Wow, Twitch is like a big company paying attention to chess. That's crazy!” So then COVID happens and then all these other gamers that were playing other games, Fortnite streamers, you know, and different people like, xqc or MoistCr1TiKaL… they were suddenly like, well, we're playing a little bit of chess online and we're like, “Oh, that's this is interesting. Non-endemic chess streamers who are like, Fortnite streamers or from other games, are playing chess. Let's double-click on this one.” Like a lot.

They taught their audience that everybody can be a chess player and that being a bad chess player is still a fun chess player. And so everyone was asking themselves, “Is it actually more fun to watch low-quality chess than high-quality chess?” It just might be. Because they're playing moves that I understand and they're making mistakes that I play. And what we saw was originally the top players were incensed that this PogChamps event we did with these average, low-level chess players was getting way more viewership than their championship things.

And they felt it was disrespectful to the game. And there was like this huge thing in the community and that was polarizing in the sense of do we embrace this or shun it? And many different people had different reactions, but we were of course, like, well, this is good, more wood on this fire. And that's what we did.

And so that has become a key part of our strategy—engaging with people who aren't the top players. We do interact a lot with top players and we also do with other people who are creators. We just did a deal with Mark Rober, and he loves chess. He's like a YouTube science guy, but he loves chess. Well, great! We can teach his audience that chess can be a really great part of their life! 

We have a department that works with different celebrities, influencers and creators, because chess can apply to everybody and every time. And so we're just like maximum representation, maximum get it out there. And streamers were really what opened the door to this whole strategy.

The joy of watching others try their best

So if you watch the Overtime Basketball League, it's different. This is different from the dudes at the NBA. But the Overtime League has a following because these are, you know, amateurs, but they have aspirations and they want to play well. And then you're along for the story and the heartbreak.

With the NFL players, we did BlitzChamps, which was like a chess tournament for active NFL players. And these guys are kind of mid-level players, but they all want to win. They want to be the best chess player that's also in the NFL. And so the chess is lower level. There are mistakes and there are different things, but you're watching people try to do their best. It's not like we want them to be their worst, they want to do their best. We want to watch it, but it is more relatable and that's the fascinating part.

The problems with fame and maintaining image

That is something super, super fascinating, which is one of the impediments to us being able to do more collaborations with celebrities, is that they do have an ego about it sometimes. They're so good at something in their life that they don't want to be on the public stage to not be good at another thing. So for them, they're like, “Hey, I love chess, but I love it privately. And that's just my safe space to be a normal human. Don't put me on the center stage.”

And so it's kind of an interesting dynamic for us because we're like, “Hey, get out there and, you know, show your chess!” And they're like, “Uhh… I'm not that good. I don't want to be in front of everyone and look vulnerable and all those different things.” So we're trying to get them out there, but it is a challenge.

The appeal of human vulnerability

What was so interesting about streamers is that they understood early that their audiences connect with their failures almost more than their successes. And streamers knew that. The content isn't “I just fucking destroy everybody all the time.” It's the highs of the wins and it's the laughing at the lows. So they know that that's what drives it.

So all the streamers were like, “Hey, I'm already in a vulnerable position, showing that I am good and bad at things on the regular. I'm not in this highly curated thing.” So they were way more open. But I think human vulnerability of like, “I want to be seen for everything I'm good at and things that I'm not.” That's not native, but streamers were the start. 

But what's really interesting is that media is changing this now. In the past, it was like everybody wanted to look their best, very carefully curated press releases and things. But what's changing that is like, well, now you got Twitter and people can share their things or now you have in-depth, behind-the-scenes shows where you have these athletes and competitors who want to win so much, but they're opening up on camera about their fears and vulnerabilities. So people are starting to understand that vulnerability. It's eyeballs and it sells. 

And so more people are more vulnerable. They're more willing to do that. So shows like Quarterback or Drive to Survive or all the other sports and gaming documentaries, Hard Knocks, the athletes in the Olympics, Simone Biles, etcetera, everyone's like, “Hey, vulnerability is in!”

So I think that's great. I think it's good for humanity. I think it's good for content and I think it's good for everybody. And chess will make you vulnerable because it will humble you. It is a relentless game on that. So anyway, these are all very positive signs for all these areas.

Do you think what you’ve done with chess.com can be replicated in another classic game?

We've thought about this, you know, everyone's always like, “Oh, well, if you did chess now go do checkers and backgammon!.” But well, chess has its own unique culture that's very old and it has that to build on top of. And the content is interesting and the storylines and the players.

I think this can be done. I think that things are moving this direction and there are other areas where you're suddenly starting to get a little more interest in that. But it really takes a collaboration of a great product with great media and a great community to do that.

So you take a game like Scrabble, who doesn't play Scrabble? So everyone loves Scrabble, but Scrabble didn't figure out how to harmoniously mix content, product and community. Like I read the book Word Freak when I was, you know, in college and I was like, oh, Scrabble's really interesting.

And so there was just a little bit of content for Scrabble, but it never escaped that. And the community is like the old chess community that hasn't changed yet. And the product was a board game, which is great and I love IRL games. I love real chess boards and all that. But the digital product never got great in my view. Sorry, Scopely, but the pieces didn't come together.

Could they? I think they could, but it would take more willingness from all parties to elevate that. And because Scrabble is an owned brand and they can kind of master control that, it makes it hard.

But chess is not owned by anybody. So anybody can enter. May the best player win, may the best company, may the best experience, may the best content win. And that created the competition to let someone rise. We happen to rise because we tried and we succeeded there.

You know, I think maybe certain games owned by brands didn't rise because of control a little bit, maybe overaggressively trying to monetize more than the purpose of serving the audience. This is my personal view. I think there are other classic games that can have a similar renaissance. 

But to be honest, chess is the king of the game, so it's not really in our playbook at this time to try to dabble with other stuff. We have so much more we want to do in chess.

Could you tell us more about the relationship between The Queen’s Gambit and chess.com?

I had no idea they were creating it until I saw one commercial somewhere and I was like, “Netflix is doing a chess movie… that's weird.” and then it released and everything went crazy. So that was literally the entire thought process of how it went. And then our servers are melting and like, you know, we're  going “AHHHHHH!!!”

It was absolute chaos for us… well, internally. It was exciting chaos! But we did not really understand, Netflix didn't reach out to us even though they learned from us and they even copied some of our design things in the filming but never gave us credit or anything like that. 

They took our design chess pieces and used them in their show, but we never got credit for it. But then when we made the bots that played like Beth Harmon, the main character, and put them on our site. Well, their lawyers were certainly quick to come and tell us off, and we're like, “Hey, wait a second! Come on, you used our stuff, we promoted you, we did this, you used our some of our IP. We're not coming after you.” 

And then they're like, “Pay us for doing your bots.” and we're like “Pay YOU for doing the bots?! You should pay US for doing the bots so people will go watch your show!!!” It's just funny dynamics how that all went down. 

Anyway, we have a great relationship with Netflix now and you know, we ended up resolving all of our stuff, but it was just an interesting thing to be a part of at the time. But that first wave was COVID, then it was Queen's Gambit, then it was PogChamps. Again, PogChamps cannot be underestimated in how massive that was for us. And then all of those things made the media right about us. And that was its own self-fulfilling cycle. Everyone out there, oh, chess is getting so popular. Chess is getting so popular. What did that do? It made chess even more popular. 

So that first wave was just everything compounding together. And 2020-2021 was just an amazing ride through all of that and then the decline and we thought, oh, well, chess is going to be like treadmills and sourdough bread—going to go right back to where it was pre-pandemic. But it didn't.

Is chess.com going to delve more into the content and entertainment industry?

So we produce a lot of content, whether it's short-form media for YouTube Shorts or something like that. We do funny memes and all that stuff. That's kind of the media. But then we also have events, you know, we produce our own events. We cover different chess events that are already out there. There's constantly someone trying to start a new chess tournament, whether it's freestyle chess or we just did a deal with the Global Chess League from Tech Mahindra in India. So people are coming into chess saying we want to put on events, great, we'll make the shows out of it. But that's like the shows. Then there's the media. 

But then the entertainment side. This is where it was interesting because Netflix was fiction. Sorry to spoil it for everyone. Beth Harmon ain't real. So that was fiction, but it drove interest in the game. We think there's more of that to be done. And so next year, we actually know of several projects that are going to be on the media entertainment side, which is going to, in our view, create another wave of interest in chess.

Because it's different from just watching great chess players play or watching some short stuff on YouTube and some memes. This is different. So we know that there's a Netflix Untold episode coming out that's going to hit kind of the sports and its Netflix audience. We know that Ben Mezrich, who is famous for The Social Network, Bitcoin Billionaires and the GameStop book and you know, a bunch of books I read when I was growing up, he's writing a book about chess.

The rights to that were bought by Emma Stone to do a movie, which apparently is coming out later next year. I also know of several other projects in the works which are different media series, and those are all being cooked right now. And so I think that all of that stuff is going to make current chess players have a better longer term relationship with the game and it's going to bring more new people into the game. So I'm pretty excited about where media is going to take chess in 2025.

What advice can you give to people to try and follow your process?

I’ve been talking about how I approached chess.com with a mix of media, product and community. I will tell you I did not think this way. My brain isn't the media brain, my brain was the gaming brain. But one of our co-founders Danny, his brain is the media brain. He started the streamers program and it was also his vision to bring media and entertainment to it and to bring it mainstream even more. 

He really thought like, “Hey, get more people watching, change what it means.” And some of this whole thing we did kicked off with Danny's idea, which was… oh my God, this is so ghetto, like, I don't know how many years ago, but a long time ago, we got two medium-level International Masters. So Danny and one of his friends. And we had two laptops in an e-sports style kind of facing, so they were facing each other with screens away. And then we put a plate worth $1000 in $1.00 bills in the middle. And it was like, you play for the money. And that was popular.

And we're like, people want to watch this, people want to see this. And of course, we also did the “Here's a tutorial on how to play chess” and “Here's how to use chess.com.” And we did the regular content stuff of the playbook. But then the thing with the humans and the cash and the stakes, that is what people were like. We want more of that. And they responded to that. And that was what Danny understood and still continues to understand.

It is not just doing a tutorial thing that’s by the book. You have to create stakes, create cultural touch points. How do you hook into the other things? And you have to get inventive. It's not that easy. You can't just go online anymore and, you know, spend $20,000 to pay a streamer to play your stupid game for an hour and then like, “Oh, well, that's all you got to do.” That's just not how it works. There's no easy insurance here. It has to be authentic. It has to be resonating. It has to have a community. 

You need to have your Discords, you need humor. I mean, Helldivers 2 has succeeded as a game from great gameplay but also incredible zeitgeist humor tone that really captured a lot of what is going on. And so a community immediately gravitated around that feel and that has been their successful playbook.

So everybody has to figure out what that is. And so you can't just make a high-quality game. You can't just make a fun game. You need to make a socially relevant and interesting and differentiated game, and then work hard to find your hooks into the broader conversation pieces.

How large is the chess.com team right now?

We're about 500 people. We have a big product and engineering team, we have a big content and media team, and a support team. You know, in some ways, our business is like part Duolingo—'cause it's like learning and engagement—then part gaming. So we're also a casual game. So we're like Candy Crush plus Duolingo plus content and media. And so we try to do all that stuff at once.

So, you know, we have a pretty large team because of that. The other thing is that our product is super complicated. Like I've talked to other people at other games, they don't have some of the problems we have. Cheating is a problem, matchmaking is a problem. A single global server that serves all the games of everyone is a problem. Skill levels and ratings are a problem. Then you have leaderboards. We also do all the educational content. You got puzzles, you got lessons, you got drills… Then Duolingo’s here like, “Whoa, whoa! All we have is a learning path and a leaderboard and some friends stuff!”

What about the onboarding for new users, how’d that go?

Man, honestly, I'm not sure we've done anything well there. We have a long way to go there. It's actually a current focus of ours to make that better. I think we benefit from the fact that like chess is a bit, you know, it's a known game and people can come in and they can kind of choose what they want to do. And we can teach you the rules and do those things. 

But a lot of people get soft onboarded before chess.com. They get soft onboarded by a friend who pulls out a chess board and teaches them the moves and does certain things. So we actually get a fair amount of onboarding softened by the real world, which is different from another thing where you have to explain the rules and all these different things.

So in the field of onboarding new players, we can do better here, and we’re going to. When you say, “Well, I’m this kind of chess player!” We're going to be like, “Wait, we recommend this for you.” So there are a lot of things in the works, and one of the key products we're working on is “Play vs. Coach” so that you don't have to come in and immediately get blasted by some other human. 

Our Play vs. Coach product, which will be launching this year, is much more of a personality, like someone who's on your team trying to teach you while you play. And that's going to serve a need for people who are like, “Look, I want to get into chess, but without any of the stress.” And we're like, ‘Great, you know, Play vs. Coach is for you. And then later on you can kind of ramp up.”

So there's so much we have to do to make chess more accessible. We've done a lot, we've made it fun. We've depressurized what it means to be a player, but we can still make our products better. Our game review is our most popular product outside of play because it explains the game to you. It takes the mystery out of it a little bit. It helps you improve. So those are all the areas where where we're investing right now.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

Yeah, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty accessible on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out and, you know, always happy to be supportive of the ecosystem. I know our playbook was a little different and we got lucky in a lot of different ways and you know, happened at a different time and with a different type of game. But hopefully, some of this will inspire this generation of amazing game builders to keep creating great stuff.