Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest on the Netflix documentary, the cheating scandal and 10M daily users

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will sits down with Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest. Erik walks through the early days of Chess.com and the two chess businesses he ran before it. He talks about the company's slow, steady growth for over a decade, the surge that came with COVID and Queen's Gambit, and the playbook they built afterward for getting chess into the cultural conversation. He also covers the second spike in 2023, driven by the Hans Niemann lawsuit, short form video, and chess taking off in schools. He talks about his role as CEO, why he still does it after 20 years, and his view on capitalism, the negative perception of CEOs, and how he tries to make that change inside his own company first. He also gets into the cheating controversy involving Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen, the report Chess.com published, and how he feels he was portrayed in the Netflix documentary.