Chess.com Reviews

First and foremost, thank you for sharing this feedback. I’m grateful for you taking the time to call out the positives as part of this post. With your tenure, you’ve seen us operate with less than 100 team members all the way to the 650+ of today, and we would not be where we are without your years of support. One thing that has not changed is our commitment to maintaining a great place to work for a fully-remote, async team of passionate, brilliant, lifelong-learners and chess-lovers. You are right, the company has had to transform with scale, and this has been one of the more challenging parts of growth. There is an understanding that some elements of culture are forced to change along the way, and we’ve believed in a mutual responsibility to ensure it changes for good. We have looked to our core values to serve as guardrails for this type of change, and I would love to hear more about where you feel we may have misfired on this so we can work together on improving it. I also appreciate your feedback for leadership both individually and in our strategic planning. We’re excited about the knowledge, passion, and energy our CTO has brought to the team and would love to understand your experiences here more deeply. This topic is difficult to address with the appropriate amount of privacy in an open forum, but please understand that a receptive audience always exists for any leadership feedback, and you can always bring concerns to Erik or I for an honest and constructive discussion. We have felt the pain of growth, and while we believe deeply in the power and appeal of chess, we were very cautious in our acceptance of the sudden and rapid growth of global chess interest. However, we believe our member growth and the infrastructure needs to support that also grew at a rate beyond what even more aggressive projections would’ve provided for. We’re immensely grateful to the team rallying to support us through this, and we are heavily-focused on long term strategic scaling efforts to ensure this is a lesson learned, not repeated. After two years of record hiring numbers, we’re continuing to aggressively build the teams to support our scaling efforts and help everyone maintain balance in this new normal for the game of chess. Of course, with rapid growth, we further the cycle of transformation, and need to keep receiving this type of feedback from team members like yourself to ensure we’re seeing things from all angles and able to maintain a place to work just as great as the one you joined years ago, even if it looks a little (or a lot) bigger. Thank you again, sincerely, and I would encourage you to reach out internally to Erik or I to continue this conversation privately and confidentially. Sincerely, Brendan Woodroff