Cricket and Startups — How one has helped me get better at the other | A Founder’s Chronicle
June 2017, things weren’t hunky-dory on the personal front — a family that didn’t understand entrepreneurship (not for lack of trying though), a rocky relationship, lack of finances — you name it. We had had a year on running GoMechanic and it was taking every ounce of inner strength to fight the self-doubts and keep the engine running.
A junior from college (also one of the most positive people you can come across) suggested joining his team in Delhi for a game of cricket to keep the mind off. His brief — a bunch of cricket lovers who meet every Sunday morning for the love of the game. I had always been a cricket fanatic but hadn’t picked a seasoned bat since B-school, glad in retrospect that I jumped on the offer.
So, that Sunday, wearing the newly bought cricket whites (duh!), I drove to Saket. I remember spending the entire 1st innings fielding at 3rd man and then batting 6 down to make 14 runs with a boundary over covers (applause anyone?) for a losing cause.
Over the last 3 years, I have only come to appreciate the similarities between the 2 loves of my life (cricket and GoMechanic) and hence an ode to these beauties.
Other than being a team sport, I believe cricket is the closest to running a startup than any other sport and here are my reasons why?
A perfect blend of individual brilliance and clockwork teamwork
How many times have we heard — Kohli single-handedly won us the game and on the flip-side, we have the super successful Kiwi team with virtually no stars. And the fact is, cricket has space for both a star who would pull his weight more often than not and at the same time a team of worker bees that makes the thing work. Nothing different in a startup — It is an amalgamation of bull-headed mavericks (super good at their work but individual contributors) and process-oriented team players who keep the engine rolling. As a founder, your biggest job is to man-manage, give the 2 kinds of individuals commensurate opportunities to contribute coz putting one in the place of other is recipe for disaster.
The process is more important than the results
My batting form hit a slump mid-2018 and what a shoddy way to spend a Sunday morning. Go to the field, get out cheaply, keep fielding in the sun for the rest of the game. And then I realized, it is about the discipline and little choices that you make every day. In this case, it was about 30 mins of more sleep every morning or regular exercise; Saturday night party or a fruitful Sunday outing. Clearly Cricket > Liquor ☺. We are trying to inculcate something very similar at GoMechanic; through charters where projects are broken into activities with the strict discipline of meeting every week and ticking off these activities. Frustrating at first, it yields predictable and incremental results
The virtue of being patient
“Give the first 5 deliveries to the bowler, the next 20 are yours,”
says my teammate — ex Bihar U-19 player. His advice works uncannily and in a way, it is very close on the heels of what Kunal and Rohit (Snapdeal founders and our investors) continuously tell us. “I should have done this pilot sooner — says no successful founder”. The journey of being a startup co-founder will present innumerable opportunities where you think that sky’s the limit and let me try 5 different pilots in 5 different cities. And trust me, it is so easy to give in to these temptations. It is at these times, you have to give the bowler (read market forces), her due respect and prioritize. In our experience at GoMechanic, the most successful pilots have been when the founders have dedicatedly worked on a hypothesis and seen it through until it becomes a process and is internalized by the team.
Declutter and keep it simple
As Sunny Gavaskar would say — “Play in the V”, “Show the full face of the bat”. For the layman, all it means is — stick to the basics and give yourself the highest probability to succeed. At GoMechanic, we are big fans of first principle thinking and building business models block by block. There is a huge belief in the founding and core team at GoMechanic that businesses have to be built on strong foundations of unit economics and then scaled. “Let me acquire the customer and the economics will be figured at scale” is equivalent to trying the “Dil Scoop” on ball 1. It looks very fancy if it gets executed but you won’t connect 9 times out of 10.
When you are in the middle, it’s just you and your partner — communicate
All your preparation, all the processes can only take you to a point. When you are in the middle it is a real pressure cooker. That is when you need to communicate, assess your partner’s strengths and weakness, be a counsel, receive counsel and work together for the greater goal. Individual records don’t matter. A start-up story has more downs than ups but the ups are so high that they make you giddy with delight and make all the toil and pressure worth it. That is why you need a partner(s) you can trust, guys who would pull you out of the trough, guys you would take a bullet for.
The most important learning with both GoMechanic and Cricket though has been the power when people rally towards a common goal. It’s the camaraderie that makes you wait for the morning and rush to the ground or office (depending on which day of the week).
Don’t we all like the banter and sweet smell of victory that follows ☺
