So having that sort of asynchronous conversation, if you will, I think, may result in higher quality feedback.
Today we have Chris Ruder, founder and CEO of Spikeball!
In this episode, we talked about how shaping up company culture and values, the “a-ha” moment when Chris realized that an office is not really required to get things done, how Chris deliberately works on processes and culture within the company, and his advice for companies starting out with remote work.
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- The history of Spikeball
- Why playfulness and kindness is essential to Spikeball’s company culture
- Identifying traits that makes someone suitable for remote work during the interview process
- Spikeball’s onboarding process for new employees
Mentioned resources:
Full transcript:
Jovian: Hello, world. Welcome to another episode of “Outside The Valley,” a podcast by Arc, the remote hiring platform that helps you hire senior remote software engineers easily. Here, we interview remote startup leaders, remote work advocates, and workers of distributed teams who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama.
I am super excited for this episode because our guest today is the founder of a product that we at Arc really love. It’s not a software, it’s way better than that. Today, I am joined by Chris Ruder, founder and CEO of Spikeball, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, game you’ll ever play. Believe me, we’ve played a lot. Spikeball and Chris has been featured on “Shark Tank,” “The Today Show,” “ESPN,” and “Inc. Magazine.” Also being praised by Ryan Seacrest for that matter.
And one thing that people probably don’t know is that Spikeball is also a fully remote team. And I cannot wait to learn more about the company, the culture, the processes, and the internal side of things, and more. So first of all, Chris, welcome.
Chris: Thank you so much. Quite an intro. I love it. Glad you guys are fans.
Jovian: Superfans. So, in this podcast, I love to listen to founder stories and especially a bootstrap one as well. This is kind of like the selfish side of me. The reason is because, like, I believe that the rise of remote work, the fact that people can work remotely, helps entrepreneurs everywhere to just get started. So let’s chat a bit more about the history of Spikeball and your background.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So occasionally, I’ll get the question asking how did I invent Spikeball? And I actually did not, I brought it back to life. So it was originally launched in 1989 here in the U.S. At the time, I was 14 years old, and one of my friends bought it at a toy store and brought it back to the neighborhood. And we’d play the game on and off, we fell in love with it and thought it was, you know, a super cool game. And we’d play, and people would…strangers would walk up to us and ask us about it and say, you know, “What’s that game? How do you play? And where can I get it?” And the “Where can I get it?” part we could never really answer because from what little we knew, it launched in 1989, and it was killed in 1991. So it was only in the market for, like, two years.
So thankfully, one of my friends bought it back then. But I guess when they launched it, for some reason, it just didn’t sell well. So we played…you know, that was back in late ’80s,’ early ’90s.’ And then fast forward to 2003, me and those same friends, and my brother, my now wife, went on a trip to Hawaii, and those friends brought one of those beat-up old Spikeball sets. And that really rekindled my love for it, and I really got into it, and we started thinking like…and, again, in Hawaii, people would ask us…like, strangers would ask about the game.
So we started thinking like, “I wonder if we could actually bring this thing back to life, like, that’d be pretty cool.”
And so we did what most people do with ideas, is we just talked about it. We didn’t do anything, we just talked, and talked for, I think, a couple of years.
And I got sick of that, and I said, “All right guys, I’m gonna talk to some attorneys and see if we can actually legally do this because I have no idea how that sort of thing works.” So the attorney told me, “The trademark which protects the name Spikeball…” that had been expired for over 10 years. So they said, “Yeah, you can do what you want with the name.” And they said, “There never was a patent on the product, so you guys can do whatever you want.”
So, you know, we did talk to the guy that invented the game and, you know, weren’t able to sort of get a deal going there, so we just went ahead and did it on our own. Between me, my brother, my cousin, and three other childhood friends, we chipped in a total of about U.S.$100,000 and went into business. So talked to a friend of a friend and the first company that was our first manufacturer was the same company that makes all the little plastic toys that show up in McDonald’s Happy Meals. So that was our first factory. They helped with product design. We talked to another friend that helped with logo design, and our packaging, and our website. And yeah, then we launched spikeball.com in June of 2008, and officially in business.
Jovian: That’s hell of a story. So now, something came to mind, I didn’t prepare this to you. But I’m curious about the fact that you are a remote team and the fact that you’re kind of, like, a hardware company, right because there’s, like, physical product that you need to quality control. Like, if you’re co-located, it’s quite easy. You just send the stuff to your office, and you have, like, QC team that deal with it. And how do you go about it in Spikeball?
Chris: Absolutely. So I’d love to show you a prototype that I have in the office right now, but it’s top-secret, so I can’t, but we got some cool stuff coming out. But it’s a perfect example, right? It’s an accessory that will go with the Spikeball set, and there’s a lot of different parts to it. We have to, of course, make sure they all work well, and the quality is there, and it’s pretty pragmatic. So it went from the factory in China to our head of marketing and product in Austin, Texas. He inspected it, took a bunch of notes, repackaged it up, sent it to…we’ve got sort of an informal product quality committee at Spikeball.
So one of the guys that heads it up is Kyle, and his sort of normal job at Spikeball is SMB sales. So he calls to get small retail stores carrying Spikeball. But he’s also very passionate about the product, so he’s helping out a lot with product quality. So Nick, our Head of Marketing, mailed the prototype to Kyle. Kyle messed around with it, and took notes, and said, “Here’s what I like and don’t like.” Kyle then shipped it to another employee, and I think I was, like, fourth in line, so I just got it the other day.
Jovian: Got it.
Chris: And I used it in the backyard with my kids, and you know, all of us kind of talked about what we liked and didn’t like. And all of those notes, my notes, Kyle’s notes, Nick notes, they’re all on a single string in Basecamp, so everybody can see everybody’s notes. Some of us included photos and videos. And, you know
It takes a little longer than maybe all six of us sitting in the same room doing it, but I also like it because we’re not influencing each other as much. Like I may say that I really don’t like something, and if I say that, maybe the person on the other side of the table will be less likely to say, “Actually, that’s something that I really like.” So having that sort of asynchronous conversation, if you will, I think, may result in higher quality feedback.
Jovian: Got it. Yeah, it’s very similar… So I interviewed another D2C startup founder, and he’s a remote company, he’s Fred Perrotta from Tortuga Backpacks. And his quality control process is super similar to you. Like, these new backpacks will be passed around to different states, different cities, before they have been okayed. So I feel like this is something that, in my opinion, will be optimized going forward, like more people go remote. And there’s probably some services that can…I know some solution will come up.
So, one of the reason why I super excited to invite you to this podcast is not only because we love the product, but also what I know about the culture of the company and also you as a person. I follow you on Twitter, you’re pretty transparent about the company culture, this is our team and whatnot. So when I read about Spikeball and what people say about the company itself, there is this culture of fun and playfulness that is so true to your product. In fact, I’m actually looking at your About Us page, and one of your core values, number one is “have fun.” So people say the company culture is an extension of the CEO’s personality and leadership style. Can you share a bit more about what shaped your leadership style to what it is today?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I’ve…this is the first company I’ve ever run. I have a degree in photojournalism, so I’ve never studied business.
And I think I kind of run it like, you know, just a company that I’d want to work at.
You know, most of the jobs that I had before Spikeball were kind of big corporate jobs where the culture wasn’t that great, they weren’t that fun, you know. Maybe they paid well, but it was basically a 9 to 5 job. I was passionate about basically zero of my jobs before Spikeball came along. I had some decent managers, but I also had some pretty bad ones.
And a lot of what I’m trying to build at Spikeball is pretty much the opposite of what I learned at, you know, the corporate jobs. You know, the corporate jobs, I think the main thing I took away from there was I learned how to be a good salesperson. And regardless of your role, I think everybody needs that skill. But, you know, have fun you know, when I worked at…I worked at Microsoft for, I don’t know, four or five years, that was not an element of the job. You know, the, you know, trust, give it until you shouldn’t, that’s another one of our values. That wasn’t a part of it.
But with our values, you know, most companies have them, but most of them are also maybe written by the executive team. And the executive team will then print them out or email them out to the team and say, “Hey, everybody, here’s our values.” Maybe they’ll put it on a plaque on the wall, and you’ll never talk about it again. And the only fingerprints on those values are those of the CEO and maybe, you know, a few other execs. And I wanted to make sure that wasn’t how our values were. So when we first drew them up, it was all employees. I think maybe at the time, there was, like, eight or nine of us. And we sat in a circle…like, we do retreats twice a year where we’re actually physically all together.
And at one of those retreats…so every year, we review our values. And that way, we basically say, “Okay, everybody, our first value is, ‘Have fun.; Do we still like that? Do we believe in that? Do we wanna change that?” And maybe it’s have fun when necessary. Do we wanna make a minor change like that, or do we just wanna leave it at that?
So you’ll see on our site, I believe we have links to some of the older versions of our values, and you can kind of just see how they’ve evolved over the years. So some will have…maybe we’ll add or delete a value, maybe we’ll just remove a period or add a couple of words to some, but we go through them one by one.
And whether you know, you’re 23 years old and you’ve been working at the company for 6 weeks, or if you’re the CEO, you get equal amount of input as to what you think the value should be. And now when people are doing…if I see somebody that’s having fun or like, they’re just, you know, doing a great job along those lines, rather than just saying, “Oh, you know, good job in that.” I’ll say, “Hey, good job of exemplifying our first value, which is, have fun.” Or you know, surprise and delight is another one of our values.
Skyler, who works for us, he lives in Colorado, and you know, everybody is locked home right now. And there’s a family that lives down the street, they’ve got three or four kids. He noticed that the kids love sports. He doesn’t know this family, but one day he stopped and left a Spikeball set in the yard with his business card attached to it. Didn’t say anything, just left it. About an hour later, he got a photo emailed to him from the mom, saying, “Thank you so much. Our kids love this.” Rather than just saying, “Hey, Skyler, good job on that,” I’d like to try and make sure, “Hey Skyler, great job of exemplifying our value of surprise and delight. That is fantastic.”
So a line that I heard which I really like is, “You should hire, fire, and manage, according to your values.” So, you know, we’ve had to let a few people go, and we don’t just say, “You know, it just wasn’t working out, so sorry.” We’ll say, you know, “One of our values is this, and you weren’t really living up to it. We had a couple of conversations, you know, it just didn’t work.” So, you know, maybe the listen, improve, always be learning, was something that didn’t quite click with that person, and we decided we need to make a change.
But I wanna make sure it’s a living, breathing document, it’s not just this plaque that we put up on a wall and just kind of pat ourselves on the back that we did at once.
Jovian: Absolutely. There’s so much into that I want to dive deeper a bit later, especially on the hiring. But before that, I like to understand a bit, like…as far as I know, like, Spikeball is, like, 100% remote from Day 1. It’s just from just you, right? When did it hit you that…make you realize, oh, you can actually build a company that is not co-located, like, “I don’t need an office,” and still get things done? Was it like…is it kind of, like, some moment of clarity or just this gradual process?
Chris: Yeah, our early days were unique in that…you know, I ran the company for five years as a night job before I went full-time. So you know, we only raised $100,000 to start the company, so most of that went to making our first 1,000 sets, and packaging, and website, and all that. So the company had no money to pay for any full-timers. So I kept my job at Microsoft, did that during the day, came home, hung out with my wife and kids at night. They went to bed around 8 or 9, and I’d work from home at 9:00 at night until 1 or 2 in the morning.
Our first warehouse was in my basement. Usually every night around midnight, I’d go down there and grab one box, maybe two boxes if we had a really good day of sales. And I would literally drive to the post office, drop that off, come back home, work a little bit longer, go to bed, do that. So, it wasn’t like I made a decision on that first day, like, “Yeah, we’re not gonna get an office.” Like, we had no money, I had no idea if the company was gonna work or not, you know, this was kind of a fun side project that we started.
But you know, after Year 5, we had $1,000,000 in annual sales, with zero full-time employees. That’s when my wife and I agreed it was safe for me to quit my day job and go full-time. And that’s, I believe, the time when we had a decision to make, do we wanna get office space, or do we wanna kind of keep doing what we’re doing? And at that time, it was me and Scott, our now COO. He lives about half-hour, 40 minutes from me. And yeah, we’d meet up at random Starbuckses a couple of times a week. We tried doing…we did have some office space, just the two of us, it was like kind of like a co-working space. WeWork wasn’t around back then, but it was kind of like that.
We did that for a while, and then we realized that it wasn’t necessary. Because when we were together, we were basically just hands on keyboard and staring at a screen, it wasn’t like we were talking all the time. And when we needed to talk, you know, we could just call each other or, you know, didn’t lose much. So as we started adding employees, you know, there were people that lived…you know, like some of our earliest employees were, like, Skyler and Shaun, two guys from California. I live in Chicago. We needed them to be promoting on the beach and trying to, you know, build things in Southern California.
So I wasn’t gonna ask them to move to Chicago, and I wanted them out and about. Like, “Yeah, we don’t need an office. If you guys want an office, then, you know, of course, we’re happy to pay for it, but I don’t think we need it.”
And yeah, for the most part, you know, in the early days, I struggled with it because, you know, I think I just wanted more control. And, like, you know, the common line is, you know, “Well, if people are remote, then how do you know if they’re working?” Well, I know they’re working because I trust them.
And I think that’s a huge thing, especially with COVID-19, a lot of companies are being forced to do remote work, right? And they’re like “Oh, my gosh, how are we gonna know?” I’m like, “Well, how do you know they’re actually working when they’re sitting next to you? Maybe they’re on Facebook, or maybe they’re just doing all sorts of other stuff, but let the results speak for themselves.” And if you don’t have that trust, then you have much larger problems. And hopefully, you can get some idea of that trust during the interview process, or especially since these people have been working for you, some of them for years, if you still can’t trust, then I don’t know what to tell you.
But there are some execs, I think, that just love that power, you know, sort of that ego trip of having people where I can actually see. And I think they need to kind of…yeah, just kind of think about the ego and like, is it really that important? Like, it’s gonna be very interesting when the whole COVID-19 thing is hopefully behind us, and normal life or whatever the new version of normal comes back. And there’s millions of people that got that sweet taste of work-from-home life, and they love it. And the bosses are gonna say, “Sorry, it’s over, come on back in.” And they’re going to say, “I don’t want to.” And that’s gonna be a tough conversation. Some people will say they hate it, of course, you know, I’m not speaking in absolutes here.
But for us, it’s been working. And I just look at, like…I remember one time I got in trouble for, like, showing up at my day job at, like, 9:05, and I was supposed to be there at 9. Even though I was, like, I don’t know, 120% of quota, I was killing it, I showed up a little bit late, and the boss kind of looked at me funny. Like, this is bullshit. Like, why does it matter where I show up or when as long as I get the job done? So that experience is informing a lot of how I’m trying to do things here.
Jovian: And as you mentioned, like, after the COVID-19, everything is [inaudible 00:17:43], we also hope that on the positive side of things, probably some boss or some entrepreneurs will realize that, “Hey, I actually don’t need an office. Like, things are doing really well working from home.” And then that’s another, you know, lease money, get back and you can invest to your employee, to your product, or to your customers.
Chris: I’m very glad I do not own any commercial real estate…
Jovian: Absolutely.
Chris: They’re gonna be…we are 100% remote with an asterisk. We do have an office in Chicago. So we have 28 employees, 26 are in the U.S., and 2 are in the UK. But the Chicago office, when it’s open, which it isn’t right now, but when it’s open, I’m usually the only one in it. It has room for six people, but, you know, on a typical day, there’s one person, maybe two. It’s a beautiful office, I love it. It’s not cheap. I’ve been thinking, like, “Hmm, I’ve been able to work from home. It’s been nice.” We may eliminate that. We’ll see, I don’t know. But it’s definitely not necessary, it’s not needed. It’s kind of a nice to have.
Jovian: Speaking about Chicago startups that actually fully remote, so from what I’ve researched, you are a big fan of the Basecamp folks and their a philosophy. Me too. And I’ve been following them for a while now, and I think one of the most intriguing learning from how they run things is that how they see the company itself as a product so that you work on the company.
So, you’ve been working on…I guess, it’s a couple of…you know, even though you started from you alone as a solo founder. But as you hire more full-time people, were there any time where you needed to take a step back and work on the company? Like, you realized, “Oh, these things, processes, are not working.” If yes, can you remember what are those moment that you realized, “Hey, I actually need to look inside the company and try to clear things up,” so to speak?
Chris: One of the early examples I’ll give is…I think it might have been still when it was just Scott and I. I could be wrong. Or maybe it was just maybe when Scott was first coming on board. We ran out of inventory for the month of July, two years in a row, and that was completely my fault. I just forgot to call the factory and say, “We need more inventory in time” I called them too late. And July, you know, middle of summer and one of our busiest sales months, and because we didn’t have a process in place, because I didn’t have a process in place, we had no inventory. And that’s one thing that Scott, our COO, does an amazing job of, just systems and processes, and he has done a fantastic job of, yeah, just sort of systematizing nearly everything.
So that’s been great. You know, you use the term “on the business.” I absolutely love that. And I think we’re gonna talk about onboarding here in a bit. One of the slides in the…I got this deck I call the history of Spikeball that we walk all employees through, and one of it is talking about working in the business versus on the business. And some people are familiar with the term, and some are not.
So I kind of walk them through. And I’m like “Yeah, on the business is taking your hands off the keyboard and just kind of thinking about how you do what you do, and wanting to make sure, like, whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, if you’re doing it the same way today that you were doing it yesterday, then that’s not a good thing. We want everybody looking for a better way to do things.”
We had a guy that’s no longer with us, but he used to run our tournaments. And I don’t know, we had 100 tournaments one year, and we were hoping to have, like, 300 the next year. And I was talking to him, like, “Hey, you know, we’ve got a lot of tournaments happening right now, and you’re crazy overworked right now. Like, I don’t like the amount of hours you’re putting in. We’re gonna have three times as many tournaments next year. How are you gonna handle that?” And his response was, “Well, I guess I’m just gonna have to work that much longer.” And that’s not the mentality we’re looking for. So that right then and there, I said, “All right, we don’t have a fit.”
The answer is, “I’m gonna try and find a more efficient way to do it.” Or, “I realized that the way I’m doing this right now isn’t working, so I’m gonna start studying and looking at how this works. So how can I actually, you know, get more done with less?” to use the beaten-up line.
But yeah, you know, whether it be how we’re replying to customer service tickets, how we’re designing products, or whatever it is, I just wanna make sure that we’re always looking for a better way. As I mentioned, one of the values is listen, improve, always be learning, and we take that seriously, so yeah, it’s been working.
Jovian: So, you know, building process is…as I talk to a lot of founder and CEO in this podcast, I think building process the one thing that is really challenging, like, especially when you’re CEO, like, starting small. Switching that mindset from, oh, like moving fast, if I want something I can just get it done. Or I just ask someone verbally or via text, and you can get it done. But when you’re, like, 20 people, 40 people, 100 people, and then you need some kind of process. And for some founders, it can be quite painful because there was always in this…you know, I’m not sure if hustling is the right word. But it’s like, why is everything so slow? Something like that. So I think it’s a really challenging mindset. Have you ever had that?
Chris: Yeah, the feedback I’ve received from my team is, “Chris, it feels like it’s never enough for you.” You know, maybe I ask a team for this much, they do it, but then I’ll say, “We could have done this. Why didn’t we do that much or this much, and, you know, a little bit more and more?” And it’s something I’m trying to work on. Like,
I don’t want to, you know, sort of move the goalposts, if you will, during the game, on one end, but on the opposite end, I do wanna make sure that the company and all of us are living up to our potential.
So if we set a revenue goal for $100, and we hit it, but if I think we actually could have hit $200, then I’m gonna be kind of bummed out.
And we’re having an internal debate right now about sort of the difference between habits and goals. Which one is more important?
So let’s say we set the goal of $100 in revenue, where did that $100 come from? How did we pick that goal? Let’s just kind of…you know, we probably based it on some sort of a trend or something. But the main reason we picked it is because it’s a nice round number. And maybe if we would have spent more focus on our habits…okay, what are the habits needed to hit $100? And let’s place way more emphasis on those day-to-day things that will get us there.
If we focus more on those habits, maybe we’ll actually get to $200. But if we focus on $100, we may be placing this artificial ceiling above us where that $100 is just an arbitrary number. So I’m not sure what the right balance is. I don’t think it should be all habits or all goals, but we need to have them aligned a little bit more. Jason from Basecamp, he’s, you know, almost…
Jovian: No goals.
Chris: …anti goals. Yeah, right? Like, it’s bizarre. And I’ve had to have a handful of conversations with him about that. You know, he used to be on our advisory board. Their office is maybe eight blocks from our office, they’re actually getting ready to get rid of theirs. So yeah, they’ve been a great company to learn from. But yeah, it’s a tricky thing, like,
I think the founder CEO, we always want more. It’s great we hit whatever goal it was, but no matter what, like, “Hmm, we probably could have done more.” But you don’t wanna just rain on the parade of the team that just had that great success. So it’s a tricky, tricky thing.
Jovian: Got it. It’s really tricky yeah. Switching gears just a little bit. So I wanna talk about remote hiring. So, you’re quoted in this article about the best practices of managing a remote team. So, I’m gonna read out the quote. “We hire people that have shown an abnormally high amount of intrinsic drive and motivation. If they have that…” I cannot speak, “They won’t need to be pushed and told what to do. They’ll own it and run with it on their own.” So I think the biggest question here…I think some listeners will also have the same question, how do you identify these characteristics on the hiring process? Like, what’s the key here? Or is there any particular questions or stages in your process that you feel like super important to make sure that this particular person is a fit?
Chris: Yeah, we don’t have, like, a standard set of questions. As the interview process begins, whoever is actually gonna be interviewing the person…and more often than not, the interviews are remote, you know, they’re video calls. Occasionally, they’re face to face but usually not. At least I know when I’m doing it, it’s more conversation. I just wanna learn about them as a person, learn about their work experience, definitely wanna learn outside of their work experience. So you know, a question like, “What do you geek out on? What are your hobbies? Or what are you into?”
So if the person does their day job, comes home, and they just watch sports all night long, and just kind of veg out and do nothing, and there’s really no motivation outside of sort of what they’re required to do at work, all right, probably not gonna be a fit.
You know, a few years back, we were interviewing Bridget, who’s on our team, she’s fantastic. And she was still a student at Northwestern University, and she was telling a story…you know, she was on their ultimate frisbee team. And I think she was maybe a junior or maybe a senior or something like that. But, like, the head manager of the ultimate team, I don’t know, they graduated, or the spot was vacant, nobody was taking it, work needed to be done. Nobody asked her. She just started doing all this stuff. And, you know, Northwestern is a crazy good school, so she’s getting great grades, heavy class load. She also has time not only to be on a team but to take a leadership role, a self-assigned leadership role, and just she identified things that needed to get done and she did it.
Nobody wants the employee that just kind of sits around waiting to be told what to do. And, you know, we probably could have asked Bridget, the question of, “Hey, can you give us an example of intrinsic motivation?” And she, probably like anybody, would just stutter a little bit and try and come up with something but probably wouldn’t have answered it well. But just through my normal conversation of, you know, “What are your favorite classes? What class don’t you like? Why? What do you do after class?” And somehow we got on ultimate frisbee, and she started telling me about it, and it just kind of came up naturally. So it wasn’t a, “Okay, we need to learn about intrinsic motivation, we need to learn about aptitude,” you know, whatever else. So a lot of it, it’s just coming up in conversation.
And yeah, I just try to think of current employees that we have that have done great. And then also on the opposite side, so think of the ones that, you know, maybe haven’t been that great. And, you know, if it’s a student, maybe ask, “Okay, how are you studying to make sure that you do well? What’s your system?” And if you’re at a current job and you hate it, then okay, that’s fine. What are you doing outside of your job to find something you do enjoy? Yeah, and if somebody shows up just too polished, and they’ve got every answer perfect, and it just kind of feels like we’re talking to a robot, then that doesn’t go anywhere as well. We want somebody, you know, that we’re gonna enjoy working with. We’ve gotten a handful of them wrong, but we’ve literally only had one, maybe two people quit in the history…
Jovian: Got it.
Chris: …of the company. So that tells me we’re doing something right.
Jovian: I love how organic the process is. I also want to link it to the fact that…like you mentioned, if you are someone who are looking for a remote job, for example. So I think having some kind of passion or a side project outside of your day-to-day job, well, doesn’t mean you need to burn yourself out, but something that you really like, it doesn’t feel like work, is actually very important. Especially in remote job, like, you’re not working with them, it’s very important to build trust even before the interview starts, even on the resume stage. So you have this trust on this person that this person can get things done, so to speak.
And especially in this day and age where it’s super easy to build an audience. Like I mentioned in the beginning, like, I feel like in the rise of remote work, we’ll have more entrepreneurs will start a company also like creators. This whole creator economy right now with, you know, Shopify, I know Spikeball is on Shopify if I’m not mistaken, and with this Gumroad, and everything. So I really love that. And your process, you take this into account, like, a lot.
So I look at Spikeball’s career page. So there’s this…even though you’re not hiring right now, but one thing that really stuck out to me is there’s this part where you say, “You can join Spikeball if you’re not…” Like this negative thing is always interesting because…which means that there’s a really high, like, intense preference for this particular thing to not show up.
So in your webpage, you’re saying that you can…if you wanna join Spikeball, we hope you are not… I’m actually trying to find that, I actually can’t find it now. Oh, I actually cannot find it. So basically there’s a part where…I think if…I’m paraphrasing here, but basically, don’t be an asshole, don’t be a jerk. And don’t give unsolicited advice to our team members. So I’m curious how do you guys get into this? Like, basically you’re flashing out that these are the kind of person that we don’t want to work with.
Chris: Yeah, like the unsolicited advice, I think that came just from a pet peeve of mine. Like any entrepreneur, I’m assuming they can relate to this, where you’re out with some friends or you’re out to dinner or something, and somebody learns that you run a company, and they’ll begin a sentence with “You should…” blank, blank, blank. So what I’ll hear is “Oh, Chris, Spikeball, love it. You know, you guys really should go into college, you should start having tournaments, and you should do that.” And all I wanna say is “We’ve been doing that for years, and by the way, you don’t know anything about my company, so quit telling me what I should do.” But I try to be nice, so I smile, and “Oh, thanks, we’ll take it into consideration.”
The word “should” is a word that I have a really hard time with, I think it’s a four-letter word. And people throw it around pretty often, and I know I hate being on the receiving end of it. So if the person had said, “Chris, have you guys ever considered college tournaments? I think that’d be pretty cool?” That’s way different than saying, “You should do this,” you know?
Jovian: Absolutely.
Chris: You know, the advice thing as well,
I love shared experiences way more than I like advice.
So, if somebody says, “Chris, in my experience, when I was running a company, I did this really well, and I think that may work for you.” Absolutely right, and I love those kind of conversations. But if it’s, “Chris, you should be doing this,” then I’m almost allergic to that.
So I wanna make sure I’m not gonna hire somebody that’s gonna be tapping me on the shoulder a couple of times a day saying, “Hey, Chris, do this, you should do this, you should do that.” Like, yeah, we actually had a shareholder that we, unfortunately, had to vote off the island or kind of ask to sell his shares because he did that all the time. He’d just call me up and tell me what to do. I’m like, “What?” Like, “No, I can’t.”
So yeah, having the section of sort of what you are not, we’re hoping we can scare away a lot of people. Like, we don’t want hundreds and hundreds of resumes and applications. That takes so much time to go through. It’s a waste of time for the job applicant, and it’s a waste of our time. So if we can just be that much more specific about who we want and who we don’t want, I think that should make life better for both sides.
And the job application as a whole, the descriptions, we get…like, even when we’ll send a note to somebody saying, “Hey, thanks for applying. Unfortunately, we didn’t see a match.” You know, “Have a good one,” we’ll get notes from those people, even though we just shot them down, they’ll say, “Thank you so much. This was the first interview process or application process where I actually felt like I was talking to a human being.”
You know, we want that human touch, whether it’s our marketing, our product design, or even how we’re interviewing people.
One thing I tell my team is, “I always want somebody to know there’s a human being on the other end.” I don’t want Spikeball to be this faceless company that just really has no soul or anything like that. So you’ll see in the descriptions that we’re kind of having some fun. And you know, I just pulled it up here, so it says, “You’re not one who cuts off people when they’re speaking, a one-upper, arrogant, an asshole.” Can I say that? “Never wrong, a loud talker, comfortable with the way things are currently done,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, right?” There’s some personality to that.
You’re not gonna see that on a job description at Nike, or at Microsoft, or at a giganto company. Great companies, right, they’ve got their own culture. But for us, that sort of thing, we want that personality to be oozing from everything we do, and we think that’s gonna be attractive to the right type of person. It may scare some people away, and if it does, that’s great. That means it’s doing its job.
Jovian: I find this really fascinating because I’ve talked to a lot of…I found, like, 20 something remote startup people here, and this is like the core of it. As in, you have to communicate well, you know, have deliberate intent. And you have to…when you communicate with remote teams, you have to understand the context or try to be as…to load your communication style with context.
Chris: We need to be very intentional, I think you hit the nail on the head, especially with a remote team. Like, if you’ve got everybody coming into the office every day, you know, that culture could go bad pretty quick with a bad hire. But you at least can, like, physically see the interactions between people and just you know, doing a scan of the office, like, “Okay, these three people typically hang out. These two people I can tell can’t stand each other, they’re always at the opposite end.” Like you don’t have that with remote, you know. So hopefully you’re doing video calls, you know, we’re active Basecamp users, we’ve got a retreat twice a year. But yeah, just kind of everybody is involved in most things, it’s a very autonomous culture as well.
So I had very little say in what I was gonna be doing at my former jobs, and that kind of sucked, right? I had no…I wasn’t making decisions, I was more or less being told what to do. So we’re very intentional at Spikeball, where whether it’s your first job out of college or you’ve been working for 20 years, you will most likely be deciding and drawing up that game plan. Whereas a lot of other jobs on your first day, you’re handed that playbook, and you’re told to go execute it. We have no playbook. Almost everybody at Spikeball, their job…they were the first person to hold that job, right.
We just hired Ruth last week. Her first day was a week last Monday, and she’s doing marketing in Europe. We’ve never had a marketer in Europe before. So she’s not the type of person, though, that’s gonna say, “Oh, guys, how do I do this?” She’s the type of person that’s gonna say, “I’ve never marketed Spikeball in Europe before, but I’m gonna figure it out.” And she’s just scrappy enough where I know she’s gonna start doing it. And that’s exactly the type of person we’re hoping to bring on.
Jovian: Self-sufficiency, in my opinion, is still underrated even in this day and age, so yeah. So one of the things I’m always curious, still related to hiring, when interviewing founders in this podcast, is how they do new employee onboarding. And you shared a bit just now that you have these PowerPoint slides about the Spikeball culture. Can you share a bit more what else there in the onboarding process for new hires?
Chris: Yeah, perfect example, I’ll continue with Ruth, right. So she started…today is what? Wednesday. Today is Day Number 8 for her. And she’s living in…well, she normally lives in London in city proper, but due to COVID-19, she moved home with her parents to, I believe, a dairy farm in, like, rural England. So she’s trying to get used to living at home with mom and dad while starting a new job. But we’ve got 28 employees, so she will have a one-on-one conversation with all 27 people most likely during her first 2 weeks. And those conversations may be work-related, they may be personal, they can be absolutely anything, but that’s just kind of get to know the people that you work with.
Of course, she’ll have the paperwork, and insurance, and payroll, and all that stuff. But almost all of that is usually done before her first day on the job. So from the time, you know, somebody accepts, usually they start the job maybe two, three weeks later, we try to get all the paperwork and the BS done before so that when their first day on the job happens, it’s fun stuff.
I need to check with the team to make sure it happened, but we also typically on the first day of the job, if they’re in Chicago or if they’re gonna come here for their first two weeks, sometimes we’ll actually have them come here for the first two weeks, we have a table with all sorts of Spikeball gear.
So it’s every Spikeball set, every piece of clothing, a laptop still in a box, and just every…it’s like Christmas morning. Like, you just got all this stuff, and, you know, it’s a really nice way to welcome people.
So you get all that stuff, you get a phone call with every single employee. I do a presentation that we call The History of Spikeball. So it’s about an hour and a half. We try to do it face to face. You know, Ruth obviously couldn’t come to town with COVID-19, so we did it remote. But that presentation is one that I created years ago for one of our retreats. I think we maybe only had 10 employees at the time. It was at the end of the retreat, and I said, “Hey, guys, I know some of you guys know our story, you know, I’ve heard a lot of different versions of the story, but I put together a quick PowerPoint just kind of telling the story.”
And I walked everybody through, and it had photos from the early days. And you know, it showed, like, our revenue from Year Number 1, which, I think, it was $10,882, which is what we did in 2008. And the feedback I got was, that was their favorite part of the entire retreat. Everybody loved hearing the old stories and kind of the founding and all that. And Hadas, who heads up our customer service team, she helps run the retreats, and she runs the onboarding. She said, “Chris, I think it’d be a great idea…you know, we employees loved that so much. I think it would be very beneficial for every new employee to hear it as well.”
So we now have a standing rule that says, All right, no matter what, when everybody starts within their first week or two, I’ll have about an hour and a half of time with them to walk them through.” And it’s pretty cool, like, you know, it shows, you know, revenue from Year 1. It shows when new products came out, when new employees were added, when we were on “Shark Tank,” and all this sort of stuff. And it’s a really nice walk-through. Everybody goes to the warehouse as well, that’s kind of cool to see. So, you know, if you’re a remote person, seeing a physical something is actually kind of nice or seeing other employees.
So usually, when people start, within the first few weeks, they’ll come to Chicago, spend some time with me, even though…you know, we have about six employees in the Chicago area, but everybody works from home, so we don’t see each other that often. But it is very efficient if somebody comes here, they can actually get facetime with that many people, so that’s pretty nice. Go down to the warehouse, they’ll get a tour of that. So they’ll see a gigantic building with just boxes everywhere and forklifts, and that’s kind of cool to see. They’ll probably also be helping work in the warehouse for a couple of hours, like actually putting labels on boxes and doing that.
And it doesn’t matter if that’s a…you know, maybe you’re on marketing, and the warehouse has nothing to do with your job, we still want you to get a taste of that just so you understand sort of most of the business. So, yeah, giving everybody a taste of the entire company, I think, it’s worked well for us rather than, you know if you’re marketing, you’re only gonna hang out with people on the marketing side and only learn about marketing stuff. No, you’re gonna speak with our finance folks, with the operations folks, and with everybody.
So we’ve gotten a lot of compliments from people that have been…you know, their first couple weeks, they’re like, “This is the last thing I was expecting.” I think almost everybody has terrible stories from other jobs of, you know, onboarding, and, you know, it’s, “Oh, I had to do my insurance paperwork, then they messed up payroll,” and then all that like…we’ve got that stuff wrapped up.
Jovian: Got it, yeah, it’s really awesome. So I interviewed the VP of operations for another remote company named Hotjar. So he mentioned to me…I always remember the onboarding process starts when the new hire signed the contract. So that’s where, you know, start buying the laptops and what. So I love that you also have like the similar philosophy on this. So on Day 1, you’re just like Christmas morning and you’re just ready to go. There’s no waiting, “Oh, where do I get my laptop?” Oh, there’s this one paperwork that you haven’t signed, you just need to get things done.
Chris: Yeah, getting back to the values, right, surprise, and delight. How can we surprise…
Jovian: Absolutely.
Chris: …and delight them on Day 1? How can we make that first impression amazing? I remember my first day at Microsoft, I was handed a three-ring binder, and my manager was out of town for the week. I literally sat in a cubicle reading policies and stuff for five days. It wasn’t until Week Number 2 that I actually, like, got time with my boss. You know, it wasn’t my boss’s fault, like his boss’s boss called him and said, “You have to be here.” What a miserable way to start though, right? Like that now is setting the tone for the rest of my time there. So again, how can we do the exact opposite of what I learned in my experience is what drives a lot.
Jovian: I can almost feel the disdain oozing out from my screen right here. So yeah, we’re almost running out of time. So one question before I let you go. I know this is, like, a weird time right now because most of company are forced to, you know, work remotely. But any advice or messages for companies who are still afraid of hiring remotely probably even after everything goes to normal?
Chris: I would…you know, I’m cautious around the advice part because that’s close to the word “should.” But, I would encourage if you’re very against it…you know, sort of like when you’re learning how to debate right? The first part of it is you wanna debate why you’re for it, and then the second part is you wanna work on the debate why you’re against it.
I think people that are against it, they’ve been practicing that debate about why it will never work forever. I don’t think they’ve ever gone through the exercise of how it actually could work.
So let’s pretend we live in a world where you have to do remote forever. What would that world look like? Go through that exercise, put pen to paper and actually, let’s think about it. What are the good things that could actually come from it? A friend of mine runs a company, and they do a lot of, you know, face-to-face sales. And he was telling me…I was asking, I was like, yeah…and he has a traditional office setup. And I was like..this is before COVID-19, I was like, “Do you think work remote could ever work? Like could your salespeople do…could they do it, you know, over the phone or video calls?” Like, “Oh, no, no, no. Our relationships, and it has to be face to face, and, you know, that’d never worked for us.” And I think that’s a common response for most people.
But I talked to him a week or so ago, and his, you know, team has been remote, and he’s like “We’re doing great, like, I had no idea.” And you know, it was forced on him though. But if it had never been forced, I don’t think he would have been as open to trying. So seeing that there’s company…you know, Spikeball we’re still a tiny company at 28 people, we can make it work. But you know, there’s companies that are thousands of people strong, and they’re remote, and they can do it. Like, I don’t know unless you physically need to be there.
I think you know, we’re a great example that you can build a culture, a very strong culture where people love working together, remotely. A lot of people think that yeah, you have to be together in order to build those relationships, and we’re together twice a year, and we’ve got fantastic relationships. So that’s my sales pitch.
Jovian: Chris, this has been an absolute blast. I am definitely surprised and delighted for this podcast interview. It has…
Chris: Nice.
Jovian: Right. It has been super fun. So, Chris, where can people learn more about you and Spikeball online?
Chris: Yeah, so, me, personally, my Twitter handle I’m @spikeballchris, that’s Twitter and Instagram. And then just type up Spikeball on any platform, we’re live on all of them. And spikeball.com is our main site. And yeah, when this all is behind us, we’ll get back to having our tournaments. Our next big one that is still in the books is our first ever World Championship taking place in Belgium in end of August-early September we’ll have 20 plus countries there. So love to see you, Jovian, there, and all of your listeners as well.
Jovian: Got it. If you haven’t tried Spikeball, try it, it’s addictive. It’s not that easy to master at the beginning, but once you, like, play it, like, two or three times, absolutely addictive. Spikeball also has an app where you can find other Spikeballers… Is that a term?
Chris: Yep.
Jovian: …on your region. So yeah, check it out. And yeah, you can also play at home, I guess, or in your backyard. So again, Chris, thank you so much.
Chris: Absolutely. I appreciate the time. This was fun.
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