![]() ![]() I just enjoy building human connections, and knowing that I am the person behind those experiences. Where does that part of you come from?I am not the type of person who needs to be under the spotlight. You are such a genuine person and I can see that you want to spread love. That’s what makes us wildly different from the rest. There’s about 10–12 knockout sets out there in the market today, but none of them are trying to build a community. We go to every tournament ourselves and all of our employees are required to do customer service shifts every once in a while. To eliminate mediations, we don’t have any media agencies helping us. I also believe in minimizing the distance between us and the Spikeball players. Our employees love helping other people, and their passion is contagious. What’s the magic behind that?I hired a lot of my employees from Spikeball tournaments and communities. You are building communities and bringing people together. I’ve worked in corporate for 13 years, but never once did I get such deep, emotional, and sincere connections like the ones I have everyday at Spikeball. It’s an incredible feeling: seeing people take a product I have built and grown so seriously, and make it a part of their life’s biggest moments. The magic comes from the fact that the game requires four people to come together to play. It’s a plastic net and a rubber ball, but that’s not where the magic comes from. There are brides in their beautiful new wedding dresses playing Spikeball with their husbands at their wedding. I know a man who carried a Spikeball set with him to basecamp at Mount Everest. I know three people who have Spikeball tattoos on their bodies. I know people who met their spouse through Spikeball. What’s the most exciting thing about working for Spikeball?The community. Luckily, I was always over quota at my sales job, so I started taking more time off of my day job to invest more time into Spikeball. As Spikeball kept growing, my challenge became keeping the two worlds separate. It was actually going to the day job that dreaded me - the work itself didn’t excite me. But I loved Spikeball so much that I was so excited to work on it everyday. I got a degree in photo journalism, and I wasn’t into sports. How did you navigate through THOSE challenges?I did not know how to do anything when I first started Spikeball. You were working for both Spikeball and Microsoft, I’m sure that was a challenging and pressurizing experience. I’ve had the idea of Spikeball for a long time, and my friends and I would always joke about making it into a real business. So I had two full-time jobs for five years. How did Spikeball get started?I started Spikeball when I was still working at Microsoft, and I would go home at night to run Spikeball. I’ve worked for SF Weekly,, Microsoft, a Bay Area based startup called Keep, and Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. Then I jumped to doing corporate sales, and kept doing it for 13 years. After graduating, I tried freelance photography but realized how difficult it was to get a job as a photographer. What did you study in college and what were your jobs before starting Spikeball?I studied photo journalism in college, which is largely irrelevant from what I do now. In this interview, I chat with Chris about his personal motivations, the successes and struggles of Spikeball, and how he managed to turn a small idea into a million dollar business. In 2013, Spikeball hit $1 million in annual revenue, and Spikeball has been doing better ever since. Chris Ruder is the founder and CEO of Spikeball, a sport that has gained four-plus million players worldwide.
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