A pawn is queen in waiting

Introduction

The first time I played chess, I was eight years old. After that, I would play casually every now and then, but never in a serious or structured setting. No one ever taught me about strategy, openings, the midgame, or the endgame, so I often lost and didn’t make much progress. Later, when I started participating in programming contests, I was surprised to see how many computer science challenges included problems inspired by chess. There’s even an entire field in computer science called "game theory", where programmers take on tasks like building game engines capable of competing against human players.

Life is a kind of Chess, with struggle, competition, good and ill events

Over time, I honed my chess skills and eventually started winning against the very people who taught me the game. While I never reached master level, I can hold my own against stronger, more seasoned opponents. My university course project in ray tracing at Sofia University was a 3D chess engine—an incredibly fun challenge that helped refine my skills even further. Recently, inspired by my older daughter, I've been diving back into chess theory and strategies. I’ve even started coaching her, and at just six years old, she regularly beats chess bots rated at 800 and challenges her older relatives with ease.

Why share this with you? Because chess, along with professional bridge and Chinese Go, are three of the most essential games for entrepreneurs. They cultivate critical skills:

In my 20 years of experience with start-ups, I've rarely seen a successful venture where founders didn’t master these skills. When one of them is missing, the risk of a dramatic failure rises sharply.

In life, as in chess, forethought wins

What I enjoy most about these games is the need to create a solid plan and then bring it to life. With experience, intuition becomes sharper, leading to impressive positional plays, particularly in the opening and middle game phases. In chess, for example, there’s an intriguing concept called "tempo". This refers to the advantage of making moves that strengthen your position or compel the opponent to react, effectively "gaining time." Conversely, losing tempo means making moves that waste time or allow the opponent to gain ground. This idea of tempo closely mirrors the situation a start-up faces: it must build momentum early and constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition.

Strategy without tactics slows victory; tactics without strategy lead to defeat

At S³, we push each of these skills to their limits to create an ideal framework for launching a tech start-up—what we call our “chess strategy.” This approach guides you through every phase of start-up development:

  1. Opening Phase: This is where you attract early investors and customers. By joining our academy, you’ll gain essential skills and access to our platform. From there, you can leverage free cloud provider tiers or utilize our whitepapers and even deploy our platform on a home setup, like a Raspberry Pi mini-cluster, to kickstart your journey.
  2. Middle Game: After developing your MVP and gaining initial traction, you can scale seamlessly by deploying our platform on any cloud provider, switching between them, or adopting a multi-cloud strategy as you grow.
  3. End Game: If you face challenges, our “solidarity” package ensures you can exit gracefully without any debt owed to us. And if your company is acquired, our “cash out” clause allows new owners to continue independently, avoiding vendor lock-in.
Just as chess grandmasters use engines to perfect their strategies, we equip you with the tools, tactics, and guidance needed for success. Through our consulting initiative, we support you at every stage of your company’s journey. Our flexible approach allows you to pivot quickly—a crucial advantage in the early stages when your product and target audience are still taking shape. We call this agility “tempo for entrepreneurs”.

Conclusion

Empowering exceptional individuals and their organizations to reach their full potential is essential. Like chess grandmasters, these leaders benefit from a structured path to progress. Yet, there’s a significant shortage of high-quality material that provides a systematic approach to entrepreneurship. Most serial entrepreneurs build their next ventures on the foundation of previous successes. For example, SpaceX was launched using funds from the sale of PayPal. However, there isn’t a comprehensive, scientific approach that guides the creation of multiple companies from scratch, especially with limited resources.

To address this issue we've intentionally built our infrastructure in house and on a budget, using second-hand computers, servers, and equipment, to replicate the real-world conditions that early-stage entrepreneurs encounter. By bridging this gap, we're proving that since our setup works for us, it will work for them too.

Feel free to share your comments and suggestions via email at [email protected].

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