Latest / Linen Suit & Plastic Tie / How Do You Design Fun? ft. Chief Growth Officer @ Chess.com (Albert Cheng)

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How Do You Design Fun? ft. Chief Growth Officer @ Chess.com (Albert Cheng) · Linen Suit & Plastic Tie

0:00
Welcome, Welcome to the Linen Suit and Plastic Tie podcast.
0:04
This is the podcast where we work today.
0:05
Set, then analyze and investigate and explore the
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amazing, the epic, the awe inspiring, the cool, the
0:12
impressive, the awesome power of storytelling and learn how to
0:15
harness that power in our everyday lives.
0:18
I'm Gorv. And I'm Kevin.
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Kev, coming to you from Philadelphia, you know it's
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wild. You know everything I I miss LAA
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lot. Obviously, this is probably the
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longest I've gone. It is the longest I've gone
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since 2016 with not being back in Los Angeles.
0:35
And I've been thinking about LAA lot and even more so because of
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this God damn 20/26/2016 trend where like I moved to LA in
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2016. I was 17 years old.
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I started school at UCLAI know you had a similar experience.
0:51
Yeah. And then UCLA of course topped
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up this trend with a 2016 UCLA trend, which was our freshman
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year. So I'm.
1:00
Like, what are you doing? Wasn't that 5 minutes ago?
1:02
Yeah. You talking about 10 years?
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But I'm 27 now, and I moved to this country at 17, and I
1:11
started UCLA and I'm like, wow, I guess we're coming up on that
1:15
decade. And especially because, like,
1:17
I'm back in school 10 years later, I'm in school again, I'm
1:20
taking classes again, I have homework again, I have credits
1:23
again, I have class schedules again.
1:25
It's so weird, you know, to be like, oh, yeah, it's been 10
1:28
years when I'm back in school learning things.
1:31
And we've talked a little bit about if you were coming off of
1:34
our hiatus right now and returning to Season 5.
1:37
I think that's what we decided returning to Season 5 of the NAN
1:41
Student Past High, and it's been really hard to balance this show
1:44
with all the new priorities I have in my Business School.
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But I think this is an interesting storytelling point
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to this 10 year trend. People are doing 2026 share 2016
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photos. I think it's so important that
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we stop and do that because I'm definitely one of those people.
2:00
I talk about this in therapy where I fight, fight, fight,
2:03
work very hard, hit a goal, achieve something that I was
2:06
scared about. And then as soon as it's over, I
2:09
don't even think about it. I'm like, oh, what's the Nets
2:11
thing? Oh, that was simple.
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Someone's done it before. But my favorite songs remind me,
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wait, wait, that's a win. Like you've been working towards
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this to this point, That's a win.
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Take that win. And I think when we take a
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second to do this like 10 years earlier thing and say, look at
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2016, it is so important to take the win and be like, look what
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you did in these ten years, right?
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10 years is a long fucking time. Look what you did and celebrate
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that. So I really encourage people in
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this trend, whether or not it's still a trend, this comes out,
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but in this trend, not only to say, oh, look at all these
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photos from 10 years ago. Look how baby I look.
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Look how young. Oh my God, I'm so old.
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But like, take a second, say, hey, what are like 10 things
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that you accomplished since then that that person would be in
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awe, would be incredibly impressed of would make that
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person smile. Also, as you were talking about
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being in school as well, even though that college era has been
3:09
a little bit of distance away from us, it didn't mean we have
3:12
stopped learning. You and I on separate occasions
3:16
have tried to learn new languages on Duolingo, which at
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this point you're obviously sticking it up for way longer
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than I have. If I said that wrong, then you
3:32
know I can't speak French. What did you say?
3:36
I think you're trying to say yes.
3:39
What did you say? Yeah, I was trying to say that I
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can't, I don't speak French. And if I got it wrong, then you
3:46
know that I don't speak French. I was just in France, so I had
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to say a few times junior parlet par Francais and it's something
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I haven't said in a while. So like I mixed it up a bunch
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where I was like junior parlet Francais.
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So I forgot the part and there's stuff like that.
4:01
And it was funny too. You know, I took French for 10
4:04
years of my life when I was a kid.
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I really retained very really nothing of it.
4:09
And I I've actually been interested about picking up
4:11
again, but the thing I noticed in France is like when I would
4:15
try to like speak in a different language, I would default to
4:18
Italian. Which is really funny because
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I've been taking Italian on Duolingo for like a little over
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a year now. Been little bite size even
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though I was in France, even though I took French for 10
4:28
years as a kid, it's in there. Even though I probably still
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know more French and Italian. I would say instead of we for
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yes I would say C all the fucking time by mistake.
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And I'm like what am I doing? French is more core to me.
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Why am I saying C? And I'm the reverse because I
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started French first. When I try to do Italian, I
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realized I sounded to myself like I was speaking French.
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Yeah. And, you know, it's this thing
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with AI where some people are like, well, with AI, why would
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any of us need to learn new languages?
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Because there'll be automatic dubbing and like, things like
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that. And language learning is it has
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so much less to do than, like, conversing with someone
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functionally than you think. Like, it's so much more about
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the way we phrase things. We learned this in sociology
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back at UCLA. The way we phrase things, the
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language we have access to, the word choice we have access to,
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the words we know, often shape our existence, right?
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It shapes what matters to us. Even with this ability for shows
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and movies and fans to travel across the globe at rapid speeds
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without needing to learn their language, we are still very
5:43
different people. We live different values in
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different cultures. We, we're not in the world of a
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homogeneous culture. And that's why learning
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language, even in the world of AI, it's good.
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It's still incredibly important because it helps you gain that
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lens and it helps you enhance your life in a way that's like
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just by learning these words, learning how to communicate,
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learning the culture, even if it's not fluent, like 5% more,
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it can be incredibly enriching and understanding a different
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point of view. And that's storytelling.
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Story is in language. Yeah, it has, I think has really
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highlighted the human touch and what that means and who's really
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trying to put in the effort to do that.
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The way people communicate have changed because you you notice
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you have an internal radar that helps to detect, you know, if
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something someone is communicating from themselves or
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employ an AI tool and people can tell and especially when it's
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done in a not so eloquent way, you can really notice that.
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You know recently I got called out on LinkedIn for a LinkedIn
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message. I sent someone a LinkedIn
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message and they're like I didn't read the above because
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it's clearly written by AI. So the tell tale sign was there
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were M dashes. I think when I read it I'm like
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yeah it looked like AI was involved.
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I didn't care to be honest because I was like, it's a
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short. It was like 2 free sentences
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that I had written and just had it edited by AI.
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And I think for you, it's like how you use Grammarly, right?
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You're trying to edit your message.
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But in this case, your tool or editor has its unique styles
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that's very recognizable. But I think these are a great
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example of the lessons we've been emphasizing on our show,
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and we keep trying to remind ourselves is that you need to
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think about your audience, obviously, and your audience
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owes you nothing, as we like to say.
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So when we are trying to get our message across, we need to
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understand how they might be received and how do we
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communicate in a way that is digestible for the for the
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recipient. I I think that's a huge point
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you just made because yeah, I even put it was actually a
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little bit more effort instead of just sending it.
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I threw it in AI just to edit it.
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And then I would use it for, especially when you're
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networking in B school, looking for jobs, looking to connect to
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people you send like I am booking so much right now.
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I'm booking this podcast, I'm booking a conference in New
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York. I'm booking another podcast.
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I am networking for jobs. I kid you not when it would be a
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light day to send 100 Lincoln LinkedIn messages out of the day
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because I'm booking for so much and I have so many different
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uses. So like, yeah, AI speeds that up
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and it does, it does bring that to that conversation of like,
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where do you draw the line? What's too much, what's too
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little? And I'm struggling with it.
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I really AM. And I think, you know, Kevin and
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I, we were having this conversation recently about my
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LinkedIn posting as well. Like just to get really critical
8:47
on me it. Was more of a academic research
8:52
I would say. Like if you want to like if you
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have it on top of your head and you want to kind of go through
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the the phases you mentioned, it's interesting.
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Yeah, I think there was basically this one recent
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LinkedIn post by Gaurav that really ticked me off in some
9:09
way. I guess where I went, OK, this
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is this looks really interesting.
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I wonder how differently you sounded, you know, 3-5 years ago
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when we didn't all start employing AI are day-to-day.
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And so I really went back and scrolled through all of your
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pills over the course of past three years and you can really
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tell distinct phases where you know things really sounded like
9:39
you. I would expect that post to be a
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text message, let's say come directly from you and versus
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there's an in between phase, I would say, where we were really
9:51
getting much better at understanding what we wanted to
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share with the public about our new episodes.
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That phase where you had your best work, where you started off
10:05
your post with an interesting leading question, and then you
10:08
went on to explain what this new episode is about and why it can
10:12
be interesting for you to to listen.
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And then at a certain point, you'd really just start noticing
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that there are more bullet points than complete sentences
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and passages. And that makes it harder to
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follow when you're a reader, even though there's more blanks
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and fewer words on the page. But what makes it harder is that
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there's no complete sentences. So it's harder for a reader to
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follow a train of thoughts because their eyes have to keep
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skipping down. It's kind of like a PowerPoint
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reading a PowerPoint when you know, like you are supposed to
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also have someone talk through those bullet points for you that
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didn't didn't seem to be sufficient information on its
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own. So I think sometimes we
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definitely, especially if you're someone who used these new tools
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a lot, it's also important to go back and, and read the stuff you
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edited and you know, just do a second pass and see if it's
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don't make sense and what might seem off and then you know how
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to further adjust it from there. So, so I think especially in
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this day and age, that's something that could be really
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beneficial. It's interesting because like
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the bullet point frame is like a LinkedIn train.
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Like it's a, it's a framework people give you.
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And I was trying, I have been trying to adopt it more.
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Have I been using it too much? I write everything and I purge
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it into a chachi or a large language model.
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All these thoughts and then I have it edited and I woke with
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it. These take a lot of time, and I
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always just kind of like word vomit and I say what I want and
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I frame it and I play around until I have a post that looks
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like it has good content and it's in a LinkedIn format,
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right? I always like to write stuff
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out, work with it, ask you to put in my words whatever it
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thinks my words are. But you're right, you know, is
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that working? And I think one big thing is I
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have such insecurity about my writing.
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As you know, I don't consider myself a good writer.
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Like if you people who tested me know my grammar is shit,
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everything's full of typos. That's why the LLM really helped
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unlock this video. Like oh, I can write because it
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will fix some of these gaps, but it's tough because I don't know
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where that line is. You know, we are also the
12:24
recipients of a lot of these cold messages as well.
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And we have also gotten messages where clearly you can see they
12:32
are AI edited if not AI generated.
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Does that bother you? You know, it doesn't bother me.
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There, there's a part of me that rice them off pretty quickly.
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The moment I noticed that, I couldn't always pinpoint what it
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was. Because on the other hand, I
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know that it does show them trying to Polish their writing
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too. So if that shows me their
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effort, I shouldn't be ignoring these messages.
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But as we were talking through this, I'm realizing that maybe
13:07
the part of it that makes it difficult for me to comprehend
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is that I don't know how this person sounds anymore.
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So I think sometimes I can get an outreach that's in poor
13:23
grammar, because there's a lot of times where people don't
13:26
speak English as their first language either.
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But I can see the sincerity, I can see their intention and that
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they really would like to see help.
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They're willing and eager to learn that.
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That allows me to look past the details in the syntax.
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But when a message is so heavily edited in such a way, I don't
13:48
know who I'm talking to anymore. I don't know how you sound,
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especially when you're a stranger.
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So there's a gap in that sense of trust where I, I, I can't
14:02
really articulate it, but I, I'm not sure who I'm talking to.
14:07
So the trust thing is interesting.
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The trust thing is interesting because I, I think I assume good
14:13
intent with most people. Anytime anyone reaches out to me
14:17
on LinkedIn for coffee chat, I try to do it every single time
14:19
because I understand that where they're coming from.
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Like I have no issue if you use AI to edit it because I don't
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have any qualms with this idea of like, you don't have to put
14:28
in that much work to message me because that's how the Internet
14:33
works. Odds are like just the odds are
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I'm not going to respond. I message hundreds of people.
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Vast, vast majority don't respond.
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I don't want to live in a world where that person spend 7 hours
14:44
crafting a message to me and because I am busy with exams
14:48
that week or I'm out of this country, that person wasted 7
14:52
hours of their life. I'm perfectly OK with being one
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of the 100 people. They message and then that's
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cool. Like they fought.
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Out of all the people online, I should be with 100.
15:00
That's awesome. And then we have that
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conversation because when I build a connection with someone,
15:05
a mentorship relationship, a podcast relationship, whatever
15:08
it is, it's never because they had the most eloquent first
15:11
message, right? It's because of the relationship
15:13
that built from there. I just, I don't know if the
15:18
people who can write the most eloquent first message should be
15:23
the people, the only people that get elevated, you know, because
15:27
yeah, it's just another place for bias, especially against
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people who don't speak your language as your first language.
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To be clear, I do. It just sounds like English
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isn't my first language. It is.
15:40
I'm just bad at it. Well, my point was that the the
15:45
lack of eloquence doesn't matter sometimes.
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And yeah, I think it's actually the the the reverse is that
15:54
chase after eloquence that that is driving people to edit,
15:59
heavily edit their messages. And at some point you tip over
16:04
the skill and your messages lose a bit of that human touch.
16:10
And that can be off putting for another human being who have
16:15
this inexplicable radar for whether they're talking to a
16:20
human being or not. Because at the end of the day,
16:24
we are trying to establish human communication and connection.
16:29
I I think there's something to be said about making sure
16:33
you're, you're not losing that intention in, in the message
16:41
that that you're sending over. And even before AI, there are
16:44
days we where we sent hundreds of messages just handwritten,
16:48
obviously copy and pasted, but handwritten.
16:50
Yeah. And so you know that part of
16:54
cold messaging hasn't. Changed Anyways, it's a
16:58
complicated question and that's some of the key reasons why even
17:03
in this age that chat bots are taking over, I am even more
17:06
convinced that this work could we do is really important.
17:10
Kevin, who are we talking to today?
17:13
Well, we have brought up great learning tools here and there
17:18
between Duolingo and Grammarly and go out for you.
17:24
When we did our annual trip together, you were glued to your
17:28
phone and I was really confused what you were doing.
17:31
But then I realized you were playing chess, which is, I
17:34
guess, a new obsession for you and another skill or a game, if
17:39
you will, that you've been learning over the course of past
17:41
year. And so this week, we are talking
17:45
to someone who has accelerated growth and all these things.
17:51
Albert Chung. He is the Chief Growth Officer
17:55
at chess.com is one of the largest online chess platforms
18:01
for chess players from beginners all the ways to the
18:05
grandmasters. He has also worked in pivotal
18:09
roles for Grammarly Duolingo with pretty distinct brand
18:14
stories. So without further ado, let's
18:19
hand the floor to Albert. Hello.
18:56
So, Albert, welcome to the show and can you tell us a little bit
18:59
about yourself? What is your story?
19:02
Thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be the Chief
19:06
growth officer at chess.com, but that's not my story, so I'll
19:09
rewind a bit to to tell that. So my mom studied research in
19:13
childhood education and my dad's been a computer engineer his
19:17
entire career. He's actually retiring this
19:19
week. So shout out to my dad for 50
19:22
great, great years. And I didn't put the two
19:24
together until recently, but it actually makes a reasonable
19:28
amount of sense given my mom and dad that I ended up with this
19:30
career leveraging technology to help people learn.
19:35
So throughout my career, I've worked on products including
19:38
YouTube, Sofi, Duolingo, Grammarly, and now chess.com.
19:44
It's a mouthful, but I'm proud to say that these are all home
19:47
screen apps of mine that I use everyday.
19:50
So regardless whether I'm still there at, at some of these
19:52
companies, you know, I definitely want them to succeed
19:54
and they've played a meaningful part of my daily habits.
19:58
And then from a functional perspective, I started out in
20:01
engineering. Then I shifted over to product
20:04
management and then eventually over to growth.
20:07
I don't know that this is necessarily a common career
20:09
path, but it's very helpful, I guess, to my career to have had
20:13
the scaffolding right, where you start by learning about the code
20:16
and the engineering perspective, and then you learn about the
20:19
user from a product manager perspective.
20:21
And then you can learn about how businesses grow, which is
20:23
probably what you do in growth. So that's my story.
20:26
Definitely. My career purpose is to help
20:28
these great products and brands grow so they can become a more
20:32
positive and meaningful part of people's lives.
20:34
Awesome. And I'm really curious about
20:36
that one party where you mentioned, you know, your mom
20:39
having worked in childhood education.
20:41
Was there anything from her work that snug into your daily life?
20:46
Little snippets of her lessons that you remember to this day?
20:49
Yeah, it's a good question. I need to talk to her next time
20:52
I go back home and and have that conversation.
20:54
But obviously she she raised me and you know, I think part of
20:58
what we'll get into with Duolingo and some of those like
21:00
kind of daily rituals, daily habits.
21:02
She raised me in in the sense that it's very important to
21:05
like, the inputs matter a lot, right?
21:06
Like do the right thing everyday, you know, practice in
21:08
the right way. Eventually the outcomes will
21:10
take care of itself. So I think that's just general
21:12
mentality and philosophy that I still remember like as a kid
21:15
growing up. And, you know, funny to see that
21:17
play out in some of the products that I've worked on, too.
21:20
You know, streaks are so such an important mental story.
21:25
I worked at Snapchat for a bit and they had big on streaks over
21:28
there about keeping that connection, keeping that
21:30
friendship and little bits that kind of build that overall
21:33
story. My biggest streets are a little
21:36
over here at Duolingo. And then I have 2600 something
21:41
days on Headspace. And there's this thing about
21:44
this thing in mindfulness about like building blocks, right?
21:49
It's so easy to get lost by this big goal.
21:51
But if you just show up every single day and do little bit, a
21:54
little bit, and then when you look back, oh, look at all this
21:57
growth and it's such an interesting kind of rewire
22:00
because we're so used to looking at that big overall arc.
22:04
But if you break it down to I just do this and I'm consistent
22:07
with it. Why do you think people struggle
22:09
so much with this consistency kind of with that story?
22:11
Why do people struggle so much to take big goals and break it
22:14
up? Because I do for sure.
22:16
I do too. No, I mean, it's truthfully it's
22:18
really hard. And it would certainly be nice
22:21
if you could get that quick dopamine hits and learn how the
22:23
pieces move and suddenly you know how to beat your friend or
22:26
something. Or you learn some basic like do
22:29
three lessons on Duolingo and suddenly you expect you can go
22:31
to some country and speak fluently.
22:33
It just doesn't work like that in practice, right?
22:35
And I think to your point, streaks has become a really
22:38
powerful gamification mechanic to day by day, right?
22:41
Feel like you're building something.
22:43
And we saw a Duolingo very strongly that streaks became a
22:46
huge part of like the identity, right, of the person that was
22:51
using the product. Very commonly when people would
22:53
tell other people that they're using Duolingo, it's always like
22:56
what language I'm learning and what is my streak length, right?
22:59
And we even briefly did some screenshot kind of tracking
23:03
inside the app to just understand, like, what are these
23:05
moments inside the product experience where people who are
23:08
just like, they're clearly like screenshotting and texting it to
23:11
their friends? There's almost always like
23:13
streak milestones far and away beyond anything else.
23:16
So yeah, just kind of fascinating.
23:18
And I agree with what you're saying.
23:20
Yeah, I love what you talked about that identity piece,
23:22
right. We're constantly searching for
23:24
pieces of identities and things we can connect to and a phone
23:29
can become such a time sucked. I know I'm always looking for
23:32
ways to be more productive on my phone and free apps that have
23:36
really taken over my life recently.
23:37
Duolingo, the Grammarly keyboard.
23:41
The Grammarly keyboard man is my favorite.
23:43
Thing on Earth. And then also recently Kevin and
23:47
I just got back from Florida. We do this yearly trip with our
23:49
friends and Kevin can attest every car.
23:52
Ride, Yeah. I was doing chess.
23:55
I was playing chess on chess.com on the app, every car ride,
23:58
anytime we sat. I don't it's so addicted, but
24:02
it's this thing where all of these pieces more Duolingo and
24:05
chess.com, I internalize this idea of like, oh, I'm being
24:08
productive. Oh, I'm I'm training my brain.
24:10
I'm doing something worthy of my time versus scrolling through
24:13
TikTok. What do you think about that
24:16
story? Like is it a story that we can
24:18
kind of get too obsessed with? Like how do you guys think about
24:21
that internally when building these companies trying to make
24:23
people better? No, 100% it's interesting that
24:26
practically all these companies that I've worked at never really
24:29
talked internally about like the total addressable market or
24:32
whatever, right? The competitors for Duolingo and
24:35
chess.com many ways are like Instagrams and Tik Toks the
24:38
world, right? It's like entertainment products
24:40
more so than, you know, a strict set of language learning or
24:43
whatever, right? And so, yeah, I would say that's
24:47
exactly right. Avoiding doom scrolling is
24:49
important and it's hard. And a lot of the stories that
24:52
people users tell themselves are ones of personal growth, right?
24:57
And actually Duolingos core founding insight is that the
25:00
hardest part of learning is motivation.
25:03
So even from day one, like the core of the product is about
25:07
habit formation and you see that deeply embedded into what they
25:10
do, which now gives them the right to expand and try
25:13
different subjects as well, right?
25:14
Because it's not, you know, 100% tailored toward toward language
25:18
learning. And how does that translate to
25:22
what you're doing at chess.com? Because to me, the idea is very
25:26
interesting. It's really interesting that
25:28
you're obviously applying the gamification mechanics onto this
25:33
product, but the product itself is also a game.
25:36
Yeah. So how to gamify a game?
25:38
Is it similar to what you're doing with language learning, or
25:42
do you do something different as well?
25:44
Yeah, there are both similarities and differences.
25:46
So one of the differences of all start is that chess is like
25:52
inherently more of a competitive game.
25:54
Like actually playing chess means you're like kind of
25:57
playing against someone to a degree.
25:59
And practicing a language is not exactly like that, doesn't
26:02
require someone else to lose. And so those dynamics do make
26:06
some of the kind of product building challenges a little bit
26:10
differently. But that said, right, I would
26:12
say like chess has his problematic reputation that it's
26:15
just like solely a game for intellectual elites that you
26:18
need this like extreme photographic memory or you can't
26:21
excel in it. And it's just that's just not
26:23
actually accurate. You know, chess is a skill that
26:25
takes practice and can be learned by anyone, and that's in
26:30
many ways just like a language, right?
26:32
You just have to put in the effort and put in that kind of
26:34
daily practice, right, to get better and better.
26:37
Yeah, and one thing I love about chess.com and that I actually
26:42
found really fascinating the more I looked into it, is it has
26:44
a lot of legitimacy at almost every level of play, right?
26:48
There's a lot of new people. There's a lot of people like,
26:50
oh, chess.com, easy app, what have you.
26:53
But then you also see like, like the big chess influence of the
26:56
world, like we see like Magnus Collinson playing on chess.com.
26:59
You see Hakaru, you see both tests.
27:03
I'm just naming people so you know, I've done it.
27:05
But and my favorite, Anna Kremlin, you see these were
27:08
actually using chess.com. And that's such an interesting
27:11
thing because I don't think we see a lot of platforms where we
27:15
see the best in the world and the brand new people.
27:18
How did that come about? Like how?
27:20
Why does Chessmark come maintain this legitimacy in like the
27:23
highest levels of chess? Yeah, well, you could probably
27:26
tell by the name of the company, chess.com that you know, it's
27:29
like the people are very fanatical and passionate about
27:32
growing the overall game and serving all parts of the
27:35
community. And a big part of making that
27:38
successful is to essentially nurture and find talent and, and
27:42
show a spotlight on their their channels.
27:45
And so, yeah, we do provide that entire platform for you to learn
27:49
and play and watch and talk about chess.
27:52
And we just hope that gives like our members, the confidence that
27:55
they can have this lifelong journey on our platform.
27:58
We have over 100,000 people that sign up every day.
28:01
And a lot of them are actually quite beginner, right.
28:03
But to your point, we also have Magnus Carlsen and top
28:06
grandmasters that are also enjoying that.
28:08
And so that can be a challenge in the sense that we're trying
28:11
to provide a consistent product and gameplay experience across
28:14
all. But yeah, I mean, hats off to to
28:16
the team. I'm, I'm still relatively new at
28:18
the company, but you know, 20 years of hard work of building
28:21
this broad community for everyone in the chess world.
28:24
Yeah. And I think that goes down to
28:26
that authenticity. We talked about this a lot of
28:27
show about like authenticity is so important when building a
28:31
product and building a brand. And like anyone can snap on
28:34
chess, anyone can try chess, but like there's such a ingrained
28:37
like roots in the community and you are in standing and playing
28:41
on all these influencer stories and you're taking like these big
28:45
make voices and saying, hey, you want to learn with them, You
28:47
want to learn, play from them. Come to chess.com, play like
28:50
they do. You can kind of experience the
28:52
world almost like they do. And I think that authenticity is
28:55
so interesting. Yeah.
28:57
No, I appreciate that. We definitely care about
29:00
introducing the game to like millions of people that
29:03
otherwise would not have thought about trying chess.
29:05
And so even beyond these chess endemic graders that you just
29:09
talked about, we also invest in like organizing these crossover
29:13
events. I don't know if you've ever
29:14
watched like POG champs or blitz champs on YouTube or Twitch.
29:17
If not, they're basically these like online amateur chess
29:19
tournaments where we get, you know, the Mr. Beasts of the
29:22
world or they miss musicians or athletes or, you know, these
29:25
types of people that like chess, right?
29:27
But it definitely is not their main profession, right?
29:30
But they're happy to raise their hand and participate in this
29:33
like fun tournament. And then that in turn helps
29:37
raise awareness of the game of chess to their followers, their
29:40
subscribers, etcetera. And that's great for the game.
29:43
Yeah, we kind of touched about this a little bit already, but
29:48
what would you describe is the typical user story of a player
29:53
comment on to chess.com. Obviously it features a wide
29:56
range of players, but how do you go about crafting that story
30:00
when it you think about growing the product?
30:02
Or platform. Yeah, You know, our belief is
30:05
that chess is for everyone and actually means something
30:08
different to everyone. So that is one of the big
30:11
challenges quite frankly about working for our products or for
30:15
many products throughout my career that have had such a
30:16
broad range of of user bases. And so one thing that I've
30:20
leaned on pretty heavily in the growth world is through
30:23
experimentation, right? We now have a a big enough user
30:26
base that by investing in the culture and the tooling around
30:29
high velocity experimentation, we can constantly test, right,
30:32
test different product ideas, test different marketing ideas
30:36
and then cohort that data. So we understand, OK, based on
30:40
this change to the onboarding user experience as an example,
30:43
this is the effect on people that skill level is like they
30:47
don't know how to move the pieces to someone that is
30:49
starting to learn to someone that's a grandmaster.
30:52
And so understanding some of those differences can help us
30:54
also build user empathy for the changes that we have and how
30:57
that's affecting their real life user experience.
31:00
And then on top of that, we do invest in user research in spots
31:04
that might be or blind spots to the company.
31:07
So for us at chess.com, naturally we do have a range of
31:10
kind of chess players, but for the vast majority know how to
31:13
move the pieces, right? And so we invest very
31:15
intentionally to make sure that we are talking to every single
31:18
day, you know, people that don't.
31:20
And we're putting that giving them prototypes and writing
31:23
explicit user stories around that persona because that
31:25
persona is not inherently like the product managers persona,
31:28
right? That's like building the
31:29
feature. So in spots where that's
31:32
intentional and you're designing for a persona that's not
31:34
yourself, that's where it really comes into play.
31:36
Otherwise, we tend to use frankly our taste, our
31:39
intuition, and then our experimentation results to to
31:42
guide the how the product evolves.
31:46
This is something so interesting with product in general.
31:48
I I just finished a course at Wooden with Carl Yorick.
31:51
He wrote a book on product management and he talked a lot
31:53
about breaking it down into a lot of interesting story tones,
31:57
right, story points and storyboarding.
31:59
And you mentioned a few words. They're kind of zooming out on
32:02
the role of product. And because so much of this is
32:05
building empathy with the consumer experience, how much of
32:08
your role do you believe is storytelling?
32:10
And how is your? Role as a storyteller.
32:12
Morphed as you jump between these companies.
32:15
Yeah, I I do think it's a big part of it.
32:17
You know, something that I've learned is that the storytelling
32:20
has to be organic to your brand, to your product experience.
32:24
You can't just copy and paste some other type of product that
32:27
your users have a different relationship with onto your own
32:30
company. It's got to come more
32:31
organically. Maybe a couple examples.
32:34
I'll just throw out there just to, to talk through this.
32:37
So at chess.com, you know, we intentionally chose a pawn as
32:41
our logo. And that's an intentional
32:42
choice. It symbolizes the journey from a
32:44
beginner to a master. And so those that don't play
32:47
chess are listening to this. Pawns are perceived to be the
32:49
weakest piece on the chess board, but they actually become
32:52
quite powerful, right as they March down the board and they
32:55
could be promoted to a queen. And it's, it's a, it's the right
32:58
piece, right? To kind of symbolize that growth
33:01
that you have in in the chess world.
33:03
And then over on the Duolingo side, if you look at their
33:06
social media from 5-10 years ago, it was actually basically
33:09
language learning testimonials, right?
33:12
But actually the main value proposition of the product is
33:15
that it's fun and it's quirky, right?
33:17
And all these things. And they had this character in
33:19
Duo that was the face of our push notifications and our users
33:23
were organically creating memes and content about it on Reddit
33:26
and Twitter and all these other places.
33:28
And so the team kind of recognized that and they made an
33:31
intentional decision to lean heavily into Duo as this
33:34
character that would create unhinged content on social
33:37
media. And, you know, just leaning in
33:38
that to go super viral and whatnot.
33:40
And on certain days it would like even drive 20 or 30% of new
33:44
users. And so it's like storytelling
33:47
kind of question can be weaved throughout your marketing, your
33:50
product experience, your brand, like what's your voice?
33:53
And when it is all consistent, that can really propel growth
33:57
for your company. You know, as you talk about
34:00
chess, it does remind me of a past guest we had, Aaron
34:02
Cusherman, and she talked to us about the wine world.
34:05
You know, it's kind of a similar vibe, but it seems very
34:08
overwhelming. It seems very posh.
34:11
It seems very like for a certain echelon of the world, when you
34:16
build chess.com, when you look at growth, how do you balance
34:20
that between like the best, the grand masters, right?
34:24
How do you balance their story and kind of serving their need
34:26
to connect to the community and these novices, these people who
34:29
just started people like me who have a laughable E low score.
34:32
How do you balance those? Stories.
34:34
It's not laughable. Actually, I don't know what it
34:37
is, so maybe it is not kidding. No, I was going to say though,
34:41
like we have to do it intentionally, meaning like we
34:44
put specific resources on the power user community.
34:49
We invest in forums, we invest in events, we invest in
34:52
tournaments. Like we have made a decision at
34:54
the leadership level that this group of users is important to
34:57
us. And there is a loop around that,
34:59
right, where, you know, beginners, intermediate people
35:02
see the best of the best and they're aspired, right, to try
35:05
to become that. And they want to create content
35:08
and sometimes the best of the best also like they'll make
35:10
YouTube channels and they'll create content that teaches
35:13
people and kind of brings them up.
35:14
So we see it as an overall ecosystem.
35:17
Now, that said, one of my biggest priorities on joining
35:20
the company is to help the company see things in a
35:22
quantitative manner. And the truth is, you know, I
35:25
talked about the over 100,000 new users that come onto our
35:29
platform every day. And just quantitatively, it does
35:31
skew relatively beginner, right? And so we need to not lose sight
35:35
of that, even when a lot of the big biggest stars and biggest
35:39
voices in the chess ecosystem tend to be the the top end.
35:43
So I'm not sitting here and saying that it's not a challenge
35:46
to kind of balance both side of the sides of the extremes, but
35:49
it works for us because again, it's a whole ecosystem that
35:52
builds on top of it. Yeah.
35:53
Super important. And another interesting kind of
35:57
contrast between chess.com versus something like a
36:01
Duolingo. It's with chess, there's
36:04
obviously the the bigger names and you have the personalities
36:09
that that people subscribe to. And chess itself is a very, very
36:14
well defined games throughout millennia.
36:18
And chess.com happens to be, you know, the platform where people
36:22
interact with versus something like a Duolingo where the
36:25
activity itself is, I would say more or less, you know, less
36:30
kind of human centric in the sense that you're studying the
36:34
text, the language. And with a platform like a
36:37
Duolingo, you have this mascot that grants a personality.
36:42
So the platform itself actually takes on more of a center stage
36:46
role. Here.
36:47
How do you envision the rent ethos of chess.com to be
36:51
compared to something like a Duolingo?
36:53
Would you rather feel like, you know, it blends into the
36:57
background like a chess board? Or would you rather be something
37:01
like Jewel, who's taken the Internet by storm?
37:06
It's a good question. I would say that we're still
37:08
evolving our thoughts around this, but one of the things that
37:12
I find beautifulaboutchess.com is that we actually don't own
37:15
the game of chess. Like there's no underlying IP
37:19
that we need to have licensing or whatnot, right?
37:21
And so one of our most important missions is to grow the overall
37:24
game of chess. And so we don't actually see
37:28
necessarily that much difference between growing, you know,
37:31
chess.com and the game of chess. It's all kind of symbiotic.
37:34
And so to your point about whether we want to blend in the
37:37
background, I mean, sort of right.
37:39
We think of our platform as more of a conduit for people to enjoy
37:42
chess as opposed to us always needing to market like chess.com
37:46
or our specific characters as like the only way to to kind of
37:50
get there. If our content or our puzzles,
37:52
our news, anything else, it makes people fall in love with
37:55
chess, then we're doing our job. And we are totally happy for
37:59
other players like, you know, Duolingo, who now also has a
38:01
chess course, right, to go enter the market and help grow the
38:04
game. So again, if the ecosystem is
38:06
growing, more people are talking about it, more people are
38:09
enjoying it, that will inevitably be a good thing for
38:12
our business as well. And so we think about that in
38:14
that order as opposed to the other way around.
38:17
You know, kind of touch upon Duolingo entering the market.
38:20
Obviously you have good familiarity to two companies.
38:22
It's something Kevin was kind of getting at is it's two very
38:25
different approaches, right? With Duolingo, with all of its
38:28
learning, there's such an investment in the IP, in the
38:31
characters. And like Oscar, he's teaching
38:33
you Italian now he's playing chess with you, where chess.com
38:37
is much more like, let's get you in front of a person or let's
38:39
use an AI coach of a real influencer.
38:42
It's much more about the game itself.
38:45
I think they're sensible to each company, frankly, right.
38:47
I think we are fortunate at chess.com to have great
38:52
relationships with some of the the best and brightest and most
38:55
famous people in the the chess world.
38:57
They play regularly on chess.com.
38:59
And so because of that, I think that, you know, allows us right
39:04
to to surface them, to give a platform to create the AI coach
39:08
version of themselves. And so for those that don't
39:10
actually play on chess.com, the way it kind of works is that you
39:13
can select one of 10 or 15 coaches.
39:17
Some of them are fictional, but it also includes, you know,
39:19
folks like the Botez sisters and Anna Kramling and Magnus Carlsen
39:22
and Karu, some of these names, right?
39:25
And so when you play a game of chess, at the end of the game,
39:29
you can review your moves. And so one of these virtual
39:33
coaches can speak to you and translate, right, your best
39:36
moves, your blenders, etcetera, using the personality of that
39:39
character. And so it's really delightful.
39:41
And it's a way that you really couldn't get in real life,
39:44
frankly, unless you knew these people in in person.
39:46
And so I think that's been a way that has allowed us to make the
39:49
game much, much more approachable through the lens of
39:52
an expert. Now Duolingo has a more broader
39:55
sense in that their, their goal is to make learning approachable
39:58
and fun. And chess is one of those
40:00
subjects, right? And so they have this set of
40:02
world characters that for them strategically, it makes sense
40:05
that those world characters could then expand across
40:08
subjects such that they have their own kind of AI virtual
40:11
coach that can teach you frankly anything.
40:14
You know, a lot like Chachi PT or Gemini, right?
40:17
They don't have like a virtual coach per SE, right?
40:19
But you're, you're, you're working with those tools, right?
40:22
And you can ask it a broad array of things.
40:24
So I think that's the direction that they're.
40:26
Likely to head in the future. And I want to kind of double
40:29
click in the AI coach aspect of chess.com because you know,
40:34
obviously AI is a hot button topic.
40:36
I'm majoring in AI for business that wouldn't it's obviously
40:39
super important in changing the world.
40:42
And we see a lot of companies go to the direction of OK, AI is
40:44
important. That's slap AI, that's random.
40:47
We say this is AI now, but what I loved about dual, not dual
40:50
site lower chess.com's approach in the AI coach world is that it
40:56
leans into authenticity, right? You're taking these stories of
41:00
these different chess grand masters, all these different
41:04
experts that you already have a connection with over YouTube,
41:06
what have you, and you're overlaying it.
41:09
Can you tell me a little bit about why now to go the AI
41:13
route? I mean, we've tried to lean into
41:16
the authenticity from day one for sure.
41:18
So we don't think of this as like a, a now all of a sudden
41:22
this like massive pivot. So obviously AI is a, a huge
41:25
topic right now, as you touched on.
41:27
But chess and AI, they've been intertwined topics for almost a
41:31
century, to be honest. And even early computing
41:34
pioneers like Alan Turing, he built like, chess algorithms to
41:38
test early computer machines before like that was even a
41:41
thing. And so in the 80s and 90s,
41:44
computing power grew dramatically.
41:46
And in 1997, IBM released Deep Blue, which then defeated the
41:52
world champion back then, Garry Kasparov.
41:54
And that was like a big watershed moment for AI, deeply
41:58
unsettling for a lot of people in the chess community and just
42:01
people at large, right? They're like, oh, now, if, you
42:04
know, computers are smarter than humans, then what's left for
42:07
humans to do? And today's machine learning,
42:11
they can create these remarkably powerful chess engines like
42:15
Stockfish and A0. It's like a car racing Usain
42:19
Bolt, right? To a degree.
42:22
But has chess disappeared? It actually hasn't.
42:24
It's far from it. It's more popular than ever.
42:26
And so I think this is like this beautiful story where AI is now
42:30
able to augment the human understanding of the game and
42:34
really is providing this like profound improvement in how
42:38
players learn and train in the game.
42:42
And essentially the way it works, which is I just talked
42:44
about it a few minutes ago, is that after you play a game,
42:47
we're actually running some of these super powerful AI engines.
42:50
So not LLMS, but things like Stockfish, right, to analyze,
42:54
move by move by move by move, your best moves, your blunders,
42:57
etcetera. And then we're translating that
43:00
over to the LLM side, right, to then give this personality,
43:05
right, the language and the audio and you know, in the
43:09
future animation, right, such that it feels like this type of
43:13
coach is actually reviewing your games and and then teaching you
43:16
how to do that. And so we can offer this
43:18
experience to our over 200 million members on the platform.
43:22
That's an amazing thing. So I guess if anything, that
43:25
part is the kind of why now of like, it would have always been
43:28
amazing to have these virtual characters go and do it, but to
43:32
allow such a wide breadth of them to exist and for it to feel
43:36
very human, like now, the technology's there for that to
43:39
really be magical and effective for the user.
43:43
Actually I have a. Question for Grove here because
43:45
I on our Uber rides in the past week I keep hearing you play
43:49
chess with commentating which I assumed was that AI feature.
43:55
So how has your experience been playing with that coaching?
44:00
I was just gonna say Kevin has heard me say fuck I've blundered
44:05
like 8 times. In the last week.
44:08
But no, because I've been doing a lot.
44:10
I've been using Anna Kremlin as my AI coach for the learnings
44:14
and also for game review and kind of going back and looking
44:18
through I've, I've watched her on YouTube and she just seems
44:21
like the nicest person. So I picked the nicest one.
44:23
I'd be scared to do madness to be completely honest, but I
44:27
like, I like Anna. It's been great.
44:29
I think it's this thing where it's like I connected with her
44:32
content on YouTube. I honestly think I got into
44:34
chess. I have no idea why the algorithm
44:38
gave me chess influences, but then it just kept doing it.
44:41
Then I'm like, well, I should play and then I played, and then
44:44
I started playing on Duolingo and then also chess.com.
44:47
And then after all that, I finally watched the Queens
44:49
Gambit. I want that to be clear, it
44:51
wasn't the other way around, but I had this connection.
44:55
It's this thing where you have a connection with someone in the
44:58
real world and you you like, you like their content, you already
45:01
enjoy it. So when you add it to something
45:02
like this, it kind of deepens that story.
45:04
So I've been enjoying it a lot. I think it's a really cool non
45:08
robotic voice. I think it's fun.
45:09
I think it connects to something I'm already interested in and
45:13
it's just an interesting way of a centuries old game.
45:18
I appreciate that Anna is a wonderful person.
45:20
And yeah, we try to provide a personality that fits everyone,
45:24
right. And so I think that's the thing,
45:25
even with our fictional coaches, we're working to make them more
45:28
diverse and, you know, have a a broader spread, right, of the
45:32
ways that they interact with you.
45:33
So that's wonderful. Appreciate you sharing that.
45:36
How does that work? Like when you connect with
45:38
different influences, how do you have the conversation of like,
45:40
OK, Anna is different than Andrea, I want to integrate her
45:44
story, her personality into this AI.
45:47
What's that conversation like? How do you distill personalities
45:50
into features of an AI? Yeah.
45:53
I mean, we try to integrate them into the process as much as
45:56
possible, right? So we are essentially leveraging
45:59
their public content that's already out there or maybe they
46:02
will record, right, some types of phrases or catch phrases with
46:05
us, that type of stuff, right? That then gets trained into the
46:08
AI and then the AI can then translate back what they would
46:11
say. But it's fun.
46:13
I just watched a video of Andrea, who you just mentioned
46:15
that was like playing a game with her or against her AI bot
46:20
and then reacting to herself essentially like coaching
46:23
herself or playing against herself.
46:24
So that's pretty meta and surreal to see.
46:27
But yeah, I mean, they're they're part of the community in
46:30
a big way. And we just try to make sure
46:32
that it really honors their personality in a way that feels
46:35
authentic to them as well. And then kind of taking a step
46:39
back to your role as a product builder, we're similar in the
46:43
sense that both our entire careers has been in or for the
46:46
most part consumer tech, right? I love consumer tech.
46:49
Let's talk about you've run like huge products on huge levels.
46:54
What does day one look like when you join a big product of a big
46:58
user base? Yeah, obviously you've used the
47:00
product, you've talked to people, but how do you go in and
47:03
say, hey, I want to understand the user story?
47:05
How do you build that empathy that's so important in product?
47:08
It's a funny question because I think of day one as like, you
47:13
know, many years in the making at a lot of these places,
47:15
because to your point, you know, these have been products that
47:19
I've used for many, many, many years before joining the
47:22
company. And already come to those
47:24
conversations having an opinion and having been an an active
47:29
user right of the company that I'm joining chess.com being no
47:32
different from that. And so that helps a ton.
47:35
I think when that's not the case and you join a company
47:37
completely cold, especially the consumer world, I highly
47:41
recommend, like you should dive very, very deep into the product
47:45
experience. Sometimes that can be a huge
47:47
positive in a way. Like I do hire some people where
47:50
that's not necessarily the case. And I tell them, hey, from day
47:52
one, your job is to actually record yourself using the
47:55
product. You have the huge benefit of
47:58
seeing this with fresh eyes. Please document your thoughts,
48:01
your emotions, your opinions upon using this type of thing
48:04
and share it back to the team. For me, though, the passion is
48:07
so much stronger when I already feel this deep inherent
48:10
connection with the company that I'm working with.
48:12
And so I, I make that a big part of the kind of job prospecting,
48:16
if you will, right, to ensure that I'm, I'm going to a place
48:19
where I inherently want them to succeed and, and be as, yeah, be
48:23
as great as possible. Has there been hidden
48:29
connections between all these different platforms you've
48:32
worked on that you don't you don't think people necessarily
48:35
appreciate? And I'm talking not just some of
48:38
the the more kind of viral ones we've been talking about in
48:43
terms of chess dot com currently deal league on also talk about I
48:47
know you worked on YouTube Gaming as a platform.
48:50
You worked on Sofi, which is, you know, a more of a consumer
48:53
finance platform. Have there been, you know,
48:55
connections or lessons that? Carry with you to this day.
48:59
Yeah. You know, I think a common
49:01
elements across many of these companies is around the
49:03
community and around the content angle.
49:06
I am a very quantitative experimentation oriented person.
49:09
And so I would say early in my career I didn't appreciate this
49:12
as much as I do now. All these platforms have
49:16
actively embraced social media events, you know, social
49:20
features. These all help bring customer
49:23
love and they create these network effects.
49:25
And a lot of times like its impact is sort of intangible,
49:28
but it creates such a like tailwind, right?
49:31
Because the users themselves, like they like it so much.
49:35
And the companies have always embraced them creating
49:37
essentially creating content, right?
49:39
And spreading the word about it. And so I, I don't know, I find
49:41
this earlier in my career just a hard thing to kind of grok and
49:44
think about how you go build it. But yeah, I would say that's
49:47
probably the one consistent thread that I probably have not
49:50
talked about as much myself because it's not been the part
49:53
of like each of the company that I how to manage and own
49:57
necessarily. But I've grown a tremendous
49:58
appreciation for the positive effects that that can have.
50:02
You know, there's a common thread in a lot of these, even I
50:05
would say Grammarly to an instant, but this idea of fun
50:07
and play and learning in a fun way for habit formation.
50:12
And I, Kevin knows I ranted about this.
50:14
We talked about in a show a bit, but it's this idea that
50:16
somewhere along the way we decided that fun was for kids,
50:20
right? And that's one thing I love
50:22
about chess and chess.com and Duolingo.
50:24
It's bringing back the fun. It's this idea of like, no, we
50:27
can have fun, we can play games. How important is it to ingrain
50:31
fun into products? Super, super important.
50:34
Yeah. I think this is one of the
50:37
misconceptions actually, about a lot of these consumer products.
50:40
Like they're animated, they're fun, they're delightful.
50:43
And so you might assume like this is, you know, specifically
50:47
tailored made toward kids or teenagers or whatnot, but it's
50:50
actually quite a misconception. You know, some of the most
50:52
passionate users across all these products are people in
50:54
their 80s or 90s or something, right?
50:56
Like they choose to improve and evolve themselves and spend
50:59
their time using a product that is genuinely fun for them,
51:02
right? And helps them connect with with
51:04
their family and friends. I would also say fun is a
51:07
critical ingredient to build a habit, quite frankly.
51:10
You know, you can have all the best gamification mechanics in
51:13
the world, but if you're not inherently enjoying the
51:16
experience, there's so much user choice now, right?
51:19
Like not even just the digital world, but the offline world of
51:22
ways that you could spend your time, right?
51:24
And so I think increasingly I've seen the power of great design
51:29
and illustration and animation that that craft helps create fun
51:35
in the product experience, which then creates, you know,
51:37
stickiness and habits and and learning formation.
51:40
So without fun as that ingredient, a lot of that gets
51:43
gets lost and is broken apart. If you don't know how to move
51:46
the pieces, we should make sure that you have a delightful way
51:49
to learn where you try to simplify the game, make sure
51:52
that the user has developed some confidence and how the pieces
51:55
move. And then you zoom back out and
51:57
you try to have them practice it right.
52:00
Play a game with a bot or play a game with the coach, like that
52:02
type of stuff. So we need to provide that
52:04
scaffolding and that again the first day, the first week, such
52:08
that incrementally you feel like you're developing confidence.
52:12
You feel like, Oh yeah, I can figure this game out such that
52:15
by the time you enter the arena or the real world of like
52:19
growing your ELO rating and playing against live people, you
52:22
at least have some scaffolded foundation and you have
52:25
developed some degree of excitement and resilience
52:28
through that. The way to advancement and
52:30
progression is often through, you know, the hardships of
52:33
playing against people, losing some games, analyzing your games
52:36
getting better and better and better.
52:38
But the onus is on us to make sure that that's not like
52:42
literally step one for the user. If you if you don't want to play
52:45
chess at all, we should give you some delightful on ramp.
52:48
So again, learn the pieces, get some confidence, and then go
52:51
from there. We have learned so many great
52:59
stories and insights from you. For closing segment, we call it
53:04
suspenders and this is. Where we ask you a fun random
53:08
question that's unrelated to anything and you can give us any
53:12
answer you feel like. So the question of the day is if
53:16
you could delete one everyday inconvenience.
53:20
Forever. What's gone?
53:23
Wow one everyday inconvenience the first thing that coast
53:29
divide. So I have two little kids and I
53:31
work mostly so I'm in California.
53:33
I work mostly with people in Europe and so I love, love, love
53:38
the morning time with the kids. But sometimes, man, I start
53:41
meetings at 7:00 AM or even earlier.
53:44
And so that really like with the kids kind of getting up.
53:50
So I think I gotta figure out what to do in that one
53:52
particular hour of every day. I think that's the hardest thing
53:56
for me right now in my stage of life.
53:58
But yeah, the kids are awesome and just part of growing up and
54:01
working hard. I.
54:03
Think I knew this. Is chess.com a European company?
54:06
No, we are global and we are remote.
54:09
But yeah, we're spread all around the world.
54:11
So I start pretty early cuz I'm on the West Coast.
54:14
I will say this is also one thing I do love about chess, and
54:17
I see this a lot of chess.com, is that when you start a game
54:20
and you're connected with someone D geographies. 2 people
54:24
speak in totally different languages playing the same game.
54:28
So when you see a name in like Sanskrit, or you see a name in
54:31
Mandarin, you're like, wow, that's just such an interesting
54:33
connection across the world. Totally.
54:35
We have this feature called passport.
54:37
So I don't know, when you play a game, you could see the flag of
54:40
your opponent and every time you play someone in a country and
54:43
you never played someone in that country before, you collect that
54:46
flag. So it's almost like an
54:47
achievement system. And it's one of the most
54:49
shareable and most liked features in our entire product.
54:52
So yeah, to your point, chess has really played around the
54:55
world and it's it is very, very fun.
54:57
And also shout out to the engineering team for building
54:59
like real time gameplay system that spans across the world.
55:02
And you know, it's not not easy by any means.
55:06
That's awesome. And that's storytelling, right?
55:08
So much a product, so much a consumer.
55:10
So much of your role is understanding the user story,
55:13
connecting with this user story, building empathy with it.
55:16
And this is just one form of storytelling, but we really,
55:19
really appreciate your time. We learned so much.
55:21
Again, I love all of your products like Obsessive
55:24
Grammarly, Obsessive Duolingo, have this new obsession with
55:27
jess.com. You have taken over so much of
55:30
my life, so I really appreciate your time.
55:32
Thank you so much, this is really fun to do.
55:40
Welcome back to Top Hat. This is the part of the episode
55:43
where we dissect and analyze from the epic and awesome
55:46
learnings we got from this week's at split Story Tower.
55:50
In this episode, we had someone really, really cool.
55:52
We had someone who's built and worked on products that have
55:55
dictated so much of my life from doing.
55:58
A lot of people's. And a lot of people's from
56:00
Duolingo to Grammarly to chess.com, these are free apps
56:06
that I use daily now. Free apps are a huge part of my
56:09
screen time. And like I'm still.
56:11
Really, really bad. At chess I looked me up.
56:13
My ELO score is embarrassing, but I'm playing pretty much
56:16
every day and I see myself getting better.
56:20
It does remind me a lot about life.
56:21
There's new play, a game of strategy like this.
56:25
You can see ways that it helps in life.
56:27
You can see the stories you're learning from chess.
56:30
Whether it's I start really strong and I'm feeling good, but
56:32
then I get cocky and I move too fast.
56:34
And sometimes you focus too much on protecting your queen and you
56:37
forget that your pawn can win here like you can win with any
56:42
piece. And something that's very
56:44
admirable that chess.com is doing is that they are, in a way
56:50
revamping the brand story of chess.
56:53
Because for the longest time, and even now, when you bring
56:57
this game to people, it can be very intimidating because we
57:01
conventionally think that it's a game for very, very smart
57:05
people. Like, yes, you can learn how the
57:09
pieces move, but that feeling of defeat is not always enjoyable.
57:16
But for chess.com to be able to gamify 1000 year old game, which
57:23
sounds funny to say out loud, but is allowing beginners to
57:29
start somewhere and stay consistent and build day by day
57:35
so that you know you can make real progress.
57:38
And as you're describing, really take a lot more away from just
57:43
the game itself. And it actually reminds me of
57:47
our episode with Aaron Kirscherman, the wine.
57:51
Yeah, Yeah. Tasting editor and instructor.
57:54
Obviously, it's not to endorse the consumption of alcohol, but
57:57
we talked about how the wine industry was in dire need of a
58:03
new brand story because over time it has built up this
58:07
threshold for younger people and the people who are not deep into
58:13
the knowledge of just wine tasting in general, right?
58:16
But in the example of chess, they have found a way to
58:22
successfully break down that barrier for a lot of people and
58:26
achieve growth, obviously for the platform, but also to
58:29
introduce this game and keep it alive and still growing.
58:34
There's something amazing about when I'm playing and it shows me
58:38
someone whose names in a different script and who's flag
58:43
is from a different country. We don't speak the language, we
58:46
couldn't communicate if we saw each other.
58:47
But we are playing chess. We are having kind of a
58:50
communication. And that's kind of the cool
58:53
thing about influences like this, about what chess.com is
58:56
doing. It's making this iconic game
58:59
accessible and finding another way to connect different
59:01
cultures. Yeah, it's good UI and user
59:04
journey design makes you feel like this game is taking you
59:08
places and it's allowing to connect with people.
59:11
And that's obviously a great way to develop your story as a user
59:17
to the platform and as a player. Yeah, try to make things fun.
59:20
Try to make your story fun. Try to make things entertaining.
59:23
It's something we talk about along the shows that your
59:25
audience owes you nothing. Like you don't get bonus points
59:29
for doing something boring and hard.
59:31
And that's kind of what chess felt like before I got into it.
59:34
No, it's fun. It's exhilarating.
59:36
It's cool to see things you didn't see before.
59:39
It sucks when you move a piece and you're excited about it and
59:41
you didn't realize you just exposed your queen.
59:44
It's fun to sit back and watch and like review your game when
59:47
you're like, I didn't even see that checkmate coming.
59:50
That's the whole ball game. And that's one of the essential
59:52
parts about storytelling is find ways to make your story more
59:56
fun. And this has been another great
59:59
episode of the Linen Suit and Plastic Tie Podcast.
1:00:03
Thank you again, Albert, for sharing your great journey and
1:00:08
the stuff that you're doing on our platform so we can help
1:00:12
celebrate it. For those of you listening, if
1:00:14
you liked listening and watching us, subscribe wherever you've
1:00:19
seen or heard us. Follow us on Instagram at LSPT
1:00:23
Pod, also on TikTok of the same name and LinkedIn.
1:00:27
Linen suit and plastic tie. We really appreciate you riding
1:00:31
with us. We know there's been some gaps.
1:00:33
We've been a little bit slow with the episode this year.
1:00:37
Adapting to a new city, adapting to a new school has taken its
1:00:40
toll. But we are not done.
1:00:42
We have barely scratched the surface.
1:00:44
In this day and age, storytelling is even more
1:00:46
important than ever before, and we're excited to bring you more.
1:00:49
Storytellers help you unlock the power storytelling in your
1:00:52
everyday lives. See you next time, we appreciate
1:00:55
you. Have an amazing day.