At Web Summit Vancouver last month, Danny Rensch, co-founder and chief chess officer of Chess.com, asked the audience for a show of hands: Who had seen Untold: Chess Mates, the Netflix documentary about the 2022 Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal that rocked the professional chess world? Rensch, who was featured prominently in the film, has become one of the most visible figures in chess as the game’s biggest online platform has expanded into media, subscriptions and brand partnerships.

Rensch’s route to co-founding Chess.com was unusual. In 2005, internet entrepreneurs Erik Allebest and Jay Severson bought the Chess.com domain at a bankruptcy auction for their fledgling online chess business. But the company that exists today took shape later, after Rensch joined in 2008 and pushed for a bigger vision involving live video play, coaching and community. “They had a vision for it to be the MySpace of Chess, a smaller vision with many domain names. But I was like, no, no, no, this is the beginning of the future. Chess was made for the digital age, and it’s coming online,” he told Observer on the sidelines of Web Summit.

Today, Chess.com says it has more than 250 million members and generates around $150 million in annual revenue. It hosts more than 30 million chess games every day, and its business now extends well beyond gameplay into coaching, events, creator content and advertising.

That expansion has helped make Rensch a recurring figure in chess media this year. Besides Untold: Chess Mates, the documentary series Grandmasters, in which Rensch also appears, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. The three-episode series follows modern chess through the lens of Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen’s attempt to launch a new chess league.

“The story initially focused on the players, but I realized much of the drama was happening outside of them,” Grandmasters director Liz Mandelup told Observer. “Danny has an amazing story. It was almost insane to not include it.”

Last year, Rensch published Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life, a memoir that traces how chess shaped his life before and after his formative years in a controlling Arizona collective. The book offers important context for how that experience shaped his worldview and the company he built.

Rensch grew up in a small, financially merged collective in rural Arizona called the Church of Immortal Consciousness, which was run by trance medium Trina Kamp and her husband Steven. He found chess at nine after watching Searching for Bobby Fischer, and he progressed quickly. By age 12, chess had been declared his divine purpose, and he was increasingly and then fully separated from his mother as the collective controlled more of his life.

There’s even a chapter in Dark Squares called “Cults Work,” meant to be read with some irony. Its point is that people can do extraordinary things when they unite around a common goal.

Rensch is careful with the term. “Cults work. Until they don’t,” he writes, and his line for where healthy group energy becomes dangerous is simple. “The moment it tells you it is the only one that has all the answers is the moment it becomes a cult,” he said. 

The internet boom in the mid-2000s helped pull him out of that world. Bored and bedridden while recovering from extensive surgeries to repair lost hearing from years of medical neglect living under the cult, Rensch taught himself search engines and SEO. From there, he came to see chess as a product that was naturally suited to the digital age. 

Rensch helped Chess.com ride the successive internet waves from live streaming to social media to A.I. In the years leading up to the pandemic, the company invested heavily in courting top creators and influencers, as well as in live-play and cheat-detection systems. As a result, when lockdowns kicked in across the globe, and TV shows like Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit popularized chess to the masses, traffic and sign-ups soared. “Chess.com captured probably 95 percent of the growth of the chess community,” during that time, writes Rensch in Dark Squares, and there hasn’t been a dropoff. 

The company’s recurring-revenue business combines utility and entertainment, using subscriptions to fund features that help players improve while also creating enough content and community to keep them engaged. Most of its revenue comes from roughly 2 million subscribers across three tiers, with more than half on the $119-a-year Diamond plan. Advertising still makes up a relatively small share of the business, but the company is expanding its direct ad sales as it looks to appeal to blue-chip and luxury brands.

Unlike traditional media companies that “gamble” on expensive intellectual property and hope subscribers follow, Rensch said, Chess.com built storytelling on top of an already profitable product. Its media arm, including YouTube and Twitch programming and a creator network, grew out of an ecosystem of players who were already paying for the game. That gives the company a built-in audience and a business model that is grounded in usage rather than speculation.

Rensch sees that structure as one reason Chess.com has stayed aligned with its users in a way his childhood collective never did. “I feel so grateful that we couldn’t even let money be in charge if we wanted to, because the community owned the game,” he said.

His broader point is that communities can act as a check on institutions when they have real agency. In chess, players, creators and fans can move freely across platforms, which keeps Chess.com accountable in a way many companies are not. 

And given that IBM Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in a game 30 years ago, what business lessons does the chess world offer the rest of us today? “We live in a world where more human beings play chess than ever before,” he told the Web Summit audience. “Human beings do still value the journey more than the destination. There are reasons to be more efficient and productive, but chess has shown that the process of learning and failing while you strive for perfection, knowing you’ll never attain it, is not just B.S. Otherwise, chess would be dead.”

When one of his co-founders, Vivek Sodera, urged him to fly to Hawaii for a business conference in 2017, Rahul Vohra hesitated. Superhuman, his A.I.-powered email startup, was still in its early days, and the trip felt like a distraction he couldn’t afford. But on his first afternoon by the pool, he met Shishir Mehrotra, an engineer who had worked at Microsoft and Google and shared Vohra’s obsession with email productivity.

Vohra gave Mehrotra a demo, took his credit card, and signed him up on the spot. Mehrotra went on to invest in Superhuman and later co-founded the collaborative document platform Coda (originally called Krypton). When Grammarly acquired Coda in late 2024, Mehrotra became CEO of the combined company. In July 2025, Grammarly acquired Superhuman and rebranded the combined suite under the Superhuman name.

Vohra founded Superhuman in 2014 to tackle a familiar professional frustration: the elusive goal of “inbox zero.” Managing a constant stream of newsletters, promotions, and work messages can feel like a second job. Research from McKinsey and Microsoft shows the average office worker receives roughly 120 emails per day and spends about three hours—nearly 28 percent of the workweek—managing them.

“That’s 3 billion hours every single day that go into reading and writing email, or north of a trillion hours a year that go into that – and I couldn’t find a bigger problem to solve,” Vohra told Observer at Web Summit Vancouver earlier this month.

Raised in the U.K., Vohra studied computer science at Cambridge. Before Superhuman, he founded Rapportive, a Gmail plug-in that displayed social profiles alongside emails, which LinkedIn acquired in 2012. This experience sharpened his view of the shortcomings of major communication tools for power users. The gap was underscored when a Gmail product manager told him their average user manages only two significant emails daily. “It really dawned upon me how painful and how bad that experience was, and how Outlook and Gmail, these products, were designed for everyone, and therefore no one,” Vohra said.

Superhuman sits on top of Gmail or Microsoft 365, replacing the standard interface with a faster, keyboard-driven experience. It uses A.I. to triage messages before users see them, draft replies in their voice, and trigger follow-ups when recipients don’t respond.

Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital and IVP, Superhuman became one of the few venture-backed email startups to reach meaningful scale, hitting an $825 million valuation and $35 million in annual revenue by 2021.

For much of its early history, Superhuman Mail operated without generative A.I., prioritizing speed and efficiency. Unlike Gmail or Outlook, which fetch data on demand, Superhuman downloads everything locally to eliminate loading times. Its minimalist, keyboard-driven design and specialized features—like intelligent follow-up reminders and read notifications by default—offered a power-user experience that larger platforms ignored. The rise of generative A.I. in 2022 and 2023, Vohra said, fundamentally reshaped the product.

Internal data shows users who adopt Superhuman’s A.I. features handle 34 percent more email and save more than four hours per week. Customers, including Spotify, Notion, OpenAI and Deel, underscore its appeal to high-performance teams. By contrast, Microsoft has said Outlook Copilot users save about 30 minutes per week. Vohra added that one major consulting firm identified Superhuman and ChatGPT as the only A.I. products being purchased at a significant scale.

A standalone productivity app in the era of Big Tech A.I. and “vibe coding”

Since launching in 2014, Superhuman has built a loyal following among professionals willing to pay $30 to $40 per month for email despite free alternatives like Gmail and Outlook. That trade-off has only become more contentious as A.I. tools make it easier to build custom software.

Vohra has been fielding the same question for a decade: why pay for email? His answer is blunt. “I think there’s just a big difference between products that are free, where really you are the product…versus products you actually pay for to do a good job.”

The debate has intensified with the rise of “vibe coding,” or using A.I. to generate software from plain-English prompts—Collins Dictionary’s 2025 word of the year. In one Reddit thread titled “Rebuilt Superhuman in 2 hours and saving that sweet $40/month,” a developer described building a barebones alternative using Claude Code. “I think we’re squarely done with monthly fees for most software,” the post read. It was ultimately downvoted more than it was upvoted.

More experienced engineers are skeptical. One 15-year veteran who built an email client with A.I. put it this way: “A.I. can scaffold an email client in a weekend. What it can’t do is handle the thousand edge cases that make email actually work.” Those include maintaining stable Gmail connections when credentials expire, preventing malicious code embedded in emails from executing, and building filters that reliably catch phishing attempts. 

Competition, meanwhile, is intensifying. Microsoft’s Copilot in Outlook and Google’s Gemini in Gmail have narrowed the gap in A.I. drafting and summarization—and they come bundled into existing workplace ecosystems. Corporate IT policies often restrict third-party tools, pushing users back to default clients regardless of preference.

For those who stick with Superhuman, the appeal is less about features than cognitive load. As one Reddit user put it, paying $30 a month beats “trying to make the square pegs of free apps fit into the round holes of my information ecosystem.”

Today, the rebranded Superhuman suite costs $33 per month and bundles four products: Superhuman Mail, Grammarly’s writing A.I., Coda’s collaborative workspace, and Superhuman Go, a cross-platform A.I. assistant. Whether that price is justified ultimately depends on how much users value their time and whether they trust a specialized tool over a general-purpose A.I. for the hours they spend in their inbox.

In November, a 60-kilogram satellite the size of a small refrigerator called Starcloud-1 streaked into low Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket carrying the first data-center-class GPU ever operated in space—an Nvidia H100 roughly 100 times more powerful than any prior orbital compute. Within weeks, Starcloud, the company making the satellite, announced it had trained a language model on the complete works of Shakespeare and had run Google’s Gemini from roughly 200 miles above Earth.

“The spacecraft is performing better than we could have hoped for,” Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, told Observer. Johnston founded the Redmond, Wash. company in early 2024, backed by a conviction that has since attracted $200 million from investors, including Nvidia, In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator: Rather than build better infrastructure on Earth to satiate A.I.’s runaway energy appetite, move the infrastructure off of Earth entirely. Today (March 30), the company announced it raised a $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, helping it reach unicorn status in just 17 months (and the quickest to do so in Y Combinator’s history).

Johnston, 39, brings a distinctly financial pragmatism to the cosmos. Before pivoting to aerospace, Johnston served as an algorithmic trader at BNP Paribas, consulted for national space agencies at McKinsey and co-founded Opontia, an e-commerce aggregator that raised $46 million before being acquired.

A self-avowed space nerd, Johnston came upon the idea for Starcloud after a solo weekend trip to Starbase, the Texas city where SpaceX is headquartered, to see the Starship rocket. What struck him was across the road from the rocket: two gigafactories “similar to Tesla production lines,” he shared in a TED Talk in October, designed to each produce a new Starship every day. He went home, called his co-founders Ezra Feilden, a materials engineer he had grown up with in the U.K., and Adi Oltean, a former principal software engineer at SpaceX, and started running the numbers on what that launch capacity could enable. Data centers kept coming up as the answer.

Starcloud-1 is the first data center in space

The numbers driving his conviction are hard to argue with. A typical A.I.-focused data center consumes as much electricity annually as 100,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency. In space, Johnston says, one square meter of solar panel produces eight times the energy of an equivalent panel on Earth. 

Starcloud-1 is a 60-kilogram aluminum box packed with five Nvidia GPUs in total, with the H100 drawing the most attention, and other supporting hardware. It circles Earth every 90 minutes in a dawn-dusk orbit designed to keep its solar panels in near-constant sunlight. Starcloud is already running edge computing workloads in space for Earth-observation and military satellites: Running inference—say, real-time ChatGPT-like requests that don’t need as much computing power or data transfer as training LLMs—in orbit. “We can shorten the time to actionable insight from a few days to potentially a few seconds,” Johnston said. Longer term, he has filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites and envisions a 5-gigawatt orbital hypercluster. Starcloud is positioned not as the next AWS, but as neutral infrastructure. “I would view us more like an Equinix,” the CEO said, referring to the global data center developer and operator giant.

Starcloud plans to launch its second satellite, Starcloud-2, in October this year, and a third, Starcloud-2.1, in 2027. The commercial inflection point will happen with Starcloud-3: a 200-kilowatt, three-ton satellite. It’s designed so that 50 satellites, each weighing 3 tons, can be launched with SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which is still in development. Johnston projects mid-2028 as the moment when orbital data centers become cost-competitive with terrestrial facilities, so Starcloud-3 would presumably launch sometime between now and then, though it’s an ambitious bet on a launch vehicle that has repeatedly slipped its own schedules. Further along in the future is Starcloud-4: a Starship-deployed satellite with a four-kilometer solar array powering a 5-gigawatt data center,  a structure that would exceed the generating capacity of the largest power plant in the U.S. For now, however, it’s more concept video than engineering blueprint. 

“By moving A.I. compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck,” Johnston said in regards to the latest fundraise, which will go mainly toward development of Starcloud-3, increased headcount, more manufacturing capacity and business development. “This funding allows us to rapidly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the massive commercial demand for sustainable A.I. compute.” 

Orbital data centers have a cooling problem

Many experts consider thermodynamics the most severe bottleneck for orbital data centers. Since space is essentially a vacuum, containing almost no matter to dissipate heat, it’s inherently cold. It might seem ideal for chilling high-performance electronics, but it’s also an insulator.

“How do you dissipate heat into a vacuum? It’s like your thermos,” Josep Miquel Jornet, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, told Observer. “The outside is cold, great. The inside is hot–great if you want a tea, but not if you want to operate a data center in space.”

Without air or water for convective cooling, spacecraft rely on thermal radiation. Cooling a modern A.I. training cluster requires massive radiator panels. Pushing gigawatts of infrared radiation into deep space has consequences, many of which aren’t yet understood. Jornet noted that the astronomical community relies on those same electromagnetic signatures to observe the formation of stars and galaxies. At the constellation scale, radiating infrared outward could interfere with NASA and other observatories scanning those frequencies. “If we start shooting infrared everywhere, it’s going to piss off many people,” he said. Even taking Starcloud’s dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit window into account, Jornet says that twilight is a significant window for wide-field surveys that track near-Earth objects, and that space-based infrared telescopes like NASA’s SPHEREx operate entirely above the atmosphere, unaffected by Earth’s day-night cycle.

In a recent episode of Sequoia Capital’s Training Data podcast, Johnson said that cooling consumes roughly 70 percent of his engineering team’s attention. Starcloud-1 is equipped with a proof-of-concept cooling system that can’t run continuously. The production version—a liquid-loop radiator with custom heat sinks feeding a large deployable radiator panel aimed out at space—will go on Starcloud-2 in October. “We’ve tested it in thermal and vacuum chambers, and it works,” he said. Johnston added that chip reliability is another concern: even a 10 percent higher failure rate in space than on Earth “would basically wipe out all of the savings from the energy,” he said. Luckily, the H100 on Starcloud-1 has had no chip-level restart failures to date.

Space data centers are gaining steam amid regulatory and political risks

Starcloud, which currently employs 13 people, is hardly alone in the race. In January, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million orbital data center satellites. The company cites orbital data centers as a primary growth driver as it prepares for a historic IPO. In the same months, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin unveiled its own data center effort, Project Sunrise, which plans to launch up to 51,600 satellites (per its FCC filing) in orbit. Google’s Project Suncatcher plans to launch two test satellites with its A.I. processing chips in 2027 in partnership with Planet Labs. Aetherflux, founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is also targeting a 2027 launch for its first orbital data center node. Axiom Space has already deployed a data center node to the International Space Station. Against that backdrop, Starcloud’s distinction is concrete: It’s the only company to have already demonstrated working A.I. compute hardware in orbit.

Ian Christensen, senior director of private-sector programs at the Secure World Foundation, which filed formal comments with the FCC on SpaceX’s data center application, noted that Starcloud’s filing for 88,000 satellites represents close to an order of magnitude increase over Starlink’s current fleet of 10,000 satellites, and that existing safety standards were established for a far smaller orbital population. Currently, most satellites simply burn up upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Space policy experts at the SWF warn that burning up large numbers of aluminum satellites at scale could have unknown effects on the ozone layer. The FCC began reviewing its 1980s-era categorical environmental exemptions roughly a year ago without producing change. 

“It’s an area where I think there might be some downstream regulatory risk in certain jurisdictions that may take a more forward-leaning approach,” Christensen told Observer, noting that environmental law might eventually apply in ways that go far beyond standard space regulation. “Space is a unique domain,” he said. “There are unique regulatory risks that are going to affect your business plan in ways you might not think about for a terrestrial plan.”

Johnston has been building against skepticism since before Starcloud-1 left the ground. Now he has a satellite in orbit running real workloads for paying customers, a production cooling system that hasn’t yet been tested in space and a chip reliability risk he identifies as potentially existential to the business case. And given how much oil and, subsequently, energy prices have risen as a result of increased global conflicts over the past few weeks, the appetite for risk that could solve energy scarcity has grown significantly almost overnight. 

While he may not have had specific current events in mind, it’s worth noting something that Johnston told a TED audience in San Francisco last October: “The most effective way that we can save our own children and grandchildren from the scourge of war will be to stop competing over the fundamentally finite resources of Earth and to start utilizing the near limitless energy of our solar system and eventually of our galaxy.” 

The same week Paramount Skydance clinched its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, journalists, podcasters and media executives gathered in Brooklyn for On Air Fest, an annual conference focused on podcasting, the creator economy and the future of broadcasting. Amid two days of panel discussions on the rapidly evolving media landscape, one of the sharpest conversations was a live taping of “The Don Lemon Show” about building a media business outside the legacy system. Lemon, who left CNN in 2023 after 17 years, was joined by ESPN’s Pablo Torre and comedians Gianmarco Soresi and Jay Jurden. They spoke candidly about their pivots to independent media, the push for authenticity and transparency, and the paradox at the heart of it all: Creators have never had more freedom, or more structural vulnerability.

The panel’s most provocative argument was that point-of-view journalism has evolved beyond being simply an editorial preference for online media. Today, it’s the more trusted business model. Torre argued that legacy media’s insistence on an omniscient posture has become a liability. “Corporate media is stuck being a bit ‘voice of God’ as if we are the arbiter of neutrality, as opposed to what people are sensing, that maybe we shouldn’t trust what is being brought down to us from on high,” he said.

The alternative, he argued, is transparency: Disclose your perspective, ensure you have your facts down, and let the audience evaluate accordingly. “Independent media has leaned into the ability to do reporting from a point of view,” Torre said. “If you disclose the point of view, and you’re upfront about that, and you’re also rigorous in your reporting, then at the very least, the audience is getting something like a more honest depiction of how you as this flawed meat sack exist in this ostensibly apolitical space, how you actually think and feel.”

Building a personal brand, post-CNN

Lemon, who now runs his own podcast on audio platforms and YouTube, framed his departure in precisely these terms. “I became disillusioned when we had to put on people who were election deniers and insurrection deniers,” he told an audience member who asked when he’d soured on corporate news. His editorial philosophy now is right to the point: “Don’t give false equivalence, and don’t give misinformation. It’s pretty simple.” He described broadcasting live on the streets of New York the previous morning with nothing but a selfie stick and an iPhone, a production that would have required a satellite truck and at least eight crew members at a network. 

Lemon now handles editorial, sales, and legal himself, moving from sourcing content at 3 in the morning to business calls to prepping his 5 p.m. show. “It is a lot of work, but I love it because it’s mine,” he said. He drew a couple of hundred thousand viewers for his State of the Union coverage on what he called “my little independent channel.”

He may own all the upside, but he also owns all the overhead. That burden extends across independent media. Legacy media, for all its flaws, once provided an “insulation between the quality of the work and the economic incentive,” Torre said. Good journalism could be a loss leader inside a larger enterprise. When that erodes, “you are unavoidably doing commerce” alongside the work, he added. 

Independent creators who left networks now depend on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, TikTok and other platforms with shifting terms and opaque algorithms. Torre acknowledged the bind: You’ve traded one boss for another.

Still, the challenge of building credibility and audience remains. On that front, the panelists agreed that journalism works best when embedded in content people already consume—something Torre and Soresi, like many late-night hosts, already do. Torre, whose ESPN reporting blends sports with culture and politics, calls sports “the last monoculture,” one of the few arenas where people across the political spectrum share a live experience. The strategy, he suggested, is a Trojan horse: Present as a sports story, deliver something deeper. “It’s storytelling, it’s reporting, and it’s showing people that in this sports story, there’s this other thing which feels undeniable, because the journalism has made it so,” he explained. 

Lemon, whose easy comedic back-and-forth with Jurden was a far cry from his CNN persona, argued that humor works the same way. “When you soften the beach, people actually end up learning things,” he said.

How and where news is now consumed

That dynamic–meeting audiences where they are before steering into heavier terrain–is also shaping how political news is consumed. When an audience member floated the idea of finding “the Joe Rogan of the left,” Jurden dismissed the premise, arguing that Rogan functions less as an ideologue than as a mirror to his guests. “The Joe Rogan of the left is Joe Rogan when he’s talking to someone on the left,” Jurden said. Torre reminded the audience that when it launched, Rogan’s show focused on apolitical topics like mixed martial arts and Bigfoot. “He assembled a coalition of dudes who didn’t come there for politics and then stayed while he got into politics.”

Other On Air Fest panels reinforced these themes. “Social is turning into television. But guess what–television is turning into radio,” Audie Cornish, the former NPR “All Things Considered” co-host and current host of the CNN podcast “The Assignment,” told Observer during a Q&A session. “Nobody knows. And that’s a great place to be in.”

On the corporate overlord front, Ari Shapiro, Cornish’s former “All Things Considered” co-host, offered a promising forecast for his former employer, NPR, which lost federal funding last year. “This might be a rough year or two [for NPR],” Shapiro told Observer, but “the fact is that it’s run by journalists, not business people, not billionaires, not companies with other interests. On the other side of that rough patch, I believe NPR’s future is really bright.”

No matter how you look at it, much of that future will likely live on YouTube, where more than 15 billion hours of news content were consumed in the first six months of 2025, according to statistics the video streaming behemoth announced at its Independent Media Summit last week. (YouTube’s internal polling also suggested that almost half of all voters now rely on its platform more heavily than traditional television for their news consumption and political analysis.)

Lemon noted that legacy media is already taking cues, with on-air talent adopting the bolder, more personal style pioneered by independent creators. He took it as flattery, while Torre took it as a warning sign. “The incentive structures are pretty clear on how to at least perform authenticity,” he said. “That, to me, is always the disturbing reality of media–you’re performing what it means to be honest.”