Think of your startup like a beach volleyball team

I had the great fortune last week to be able to meet Stanford Business School professor, Huggy Rao. What an amazing guy and rest assured, I’ll be referencing him in many blog posts in the future as I have pages upon pages of notes from his talk, plus I’m reading his book, Scaling Up Excellence, which I highly recommend.

He spends a great deal of his time studying successful startups to both inform entrepreneurs of best practices but also to help businesses understand how to “think like a startup”. Among other things, he told us that…

Startups need to behave like a beach volleyball team vs. a regular volleyball team.

This is one of the more brilliant ways to describe a startup vs. a “regular business”.

Think about it, a beach volleyball team is made up of two people, no coach, and no substitutes. In regular volleyball, there are typically six players, each with a defined position, a coach and you can sub in players when you need to.

Entrepreneurs that start companies have to be the ultimate role players. They can’t rely on a team of people to produce reports, make the sales calls, build the product, etc. It’s usually a couple of people who have to wholly rely on each other to build their business.

I also love the fact that beach volleyball is played on sand whereas regular volleyball is played on a hard surface. In startups, the landscape is constantly changing, its hard to get your footing and you always have to be ready for things to shift beneath your feet.

Another aspect of beach volleyball is that there is no “passing the buck” when something goes wrong. It’s just you and your partner. The ball hits the sand, its obvious what happened and where communication broke down. In a larger company, or a regular volleyball team, its easier for communication to break down and four people to end up standing there watching the ball hit the ground. Who was supposed to be where? Did you set the ball high enough? You called out the wrong play! Well you were in the wrong position!

Businesses need to embrace this concept as they try to build out “startups” within their company. Typically these efforts are over-staffed and over-structured. Startups need to be nimble and agile and overspending on them can actually make them perform less effectively.