In any entrepreneur’s journey, there are bound to be naysayers and doors slammed in their face.

When Jeff Bezos was drumming up his early visions of Amazon while working as a hedge fund manager, his Wall Street boss questioned if he could achieve success and financial security by selling books on the internet. And when Howard Schultz was looking for money to back his coffee business, called Starbucks , more than 200 investors believed no one would pay $3 for a cup of joe.

The same goes for two of Chess.com’s founders, Danny Rensch and Erik Allebest, when they were shopping out their platform to potential investors. Rensch tells Fortune they were routinely overlooked and disregarded.

“We were laughed out of VC rooms who said that chess would never be anything. Nobody invested

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