We're Getting the Band Back Together

Back in 2021, a friend of a friend asked me to rescue his event ticketing website. He'd contracted with a development team overseas and the result was, to put it charitably, a mess. So I called in a crew I trusted: Bill Murray, Earl Gero, Jesse Kranz, and Gisela Velazco. Together we rebuilt HungryTickets from the ground up. The client ultimately moved on, but the five of us came out of it knowing exactly how we work together — and that we work well together.

We stayed in touch. We all got deep into AI. And when I told Jesse that I was building a chess-focused sister site to minesweeper.org, his reaction was immediate. Jesse has been serious about chess since fourth grade — he ranked among the top 35 scholastic players in the country and won both the Minnesota Open and Closed tournaments in eighth grade. A world-class chess platform is not just a project for him. It's personal.

That conversation turned into a plan, and the plan turned into this: we're getting the band back together.

The Team

Jesse Kranz — CEO has been serious about chess since grade school, ranked among the top 35 scholastic players in the country, and won both the Minnesota Open and Closed tournaments in eighth grade. He also holds an M.B.A. in Finance and has deep expertise in SEO — which matters a lot when you're trying to build an audience for a chess platform from scratch. He'll be driving the vision, the growth strategy, and the direction of the site.

Bill Murray — CTO is a co-founder of FiberXL, holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Indiana University, and has been our infrastructure backbone on every project we've built together. He's also an avid chess player who has been on the Free Internet Chess Server since 1996. That history matters: one of our goals is to build a better FICS client, and Bill knows that world from the inside.

Earl Gero — Developer has been contributing to minesweeper.org and brings strong Python skills along with real experience building software with AI tools. He's proven that a skilled developer who embraces AI can move faster than a team of five who don't.

Gisela Velazco — Developer & DBA is a database administrator and software developer who has become expert at leveraging AI to build software. She brings the data engineering foundation that a serious platform needs, plus the kind of AI-assisted development speed that makes a small team punch well above its weight.

Richard Cross — Chairman founded Regis Consulting, built minesweeper.org from scratch, and has been writing software since the late 1990s. He'll be providing technical leadership and keeping the trains running.

What We're Building

AjaxChess.com is already live with Kriegspiel — a multiplayer variant where you can't see your opponent's pieces — along with chess puzzles, a Knight's Tour, and a live FICS connection. But this is just the beginning. With the full team together, we're building toward something much larger: a platform that does justice to the depth and beauty of chess.

We'll be sharing the journey here on the blog. Follow along — you're going to see something great get built.