Running A Startup Is Like Playing RISK The Board Game
Growing up I played a lot of board games over weekends. My favorite was RISK. Each game would be a long grind, if you wanted to win, and strategy and a little bit of luck played a big part. Now that I’ve been running my own startup for the past year, SocialRank, I see many aspects that make a good RISK board game player also make good founders, products, and companies.
When you start the game you are given territories and armies to place there. There is luck and strategy that goes into deciding where to place your armies. The players go around placing one army person down at a time until you have finished placing all your allotted pieces. This is very similar to starting a company. You have a certain amount of resources and you need to figure out what to focus on. Should it be this idea, that idea, something else. This is like placing your armies on your territories. Should you place your armies all in one location, spread them around a few areas, something else? The placement of these armies will highly correlate to success in the game.
Once the armies are placed and the board shakes up you can clearly see who is going for what. There are a myriad of strategies one can take to try and “conquer the world” (sound familiar to startups?). I have two favorite ones: one is widely known and one I sort of made up myself (by accident) that I’ve seen very successfully played in the past few years. They are both great analogies to building successful startups. Before we go into the winning strategies, let’s talk about the losing strategy. There is one surefire way to lose in the game of RISK (and failing with your startup) and that is diversifying your placement of armies (and not focusing your startup on one product/offering from the outset).
I notice that the people that lose at RISK the most, scatter their armies trying to diversify their battles in the board game. They put a few armies in some territories in China, Europe, the Americas, and Africa without having a real battleground. This doesn’t mean if you put all your armies in one location you will necessarily win. It just means you’ll be able to last longer and fight better. Who is going to go after a strong army in one location? The first players that are attacked are the weak and scattered. It is easy to pick off 1–4 army pieces then it is to go after a base of 10–15 in one or two places.
Same with startups that fail, they have a hard time focusing on one general product or area, trying to do a little bit of everything. They want to see what sticks, instead of choosing one thing they are passionate about and trying to build on top of that and becoming a force to be reckoned with. Ask anyone successful. A surefire way to fail in building a startup is lack of focus.
The two good RISK strategies, however, stem from a similar belief of going slow and reinforcing your core.
The Australia Strategy
This is a widely known and popular strategy for RISK. The concept behind it is fairly simple. Australia is the easiest country to defend. You need to just defend one border territory, as opposed to other countries like South America (2), America (3), Africa (3), Europe (4) and Asia (5). If you land a territory in Australia or on its border it is very clear that you should go for Australia. The main pitfall is when multiple people go for Australia. It could be a board game blood bath (In that case I would stay in a nearby territory and come in and wipe out the remaining armies once the blood bath subsides).
The strategy with Australia, once you gain control of the 4 territories is to build up a force at the border. Every turn you will get at least 5 new army pieces (because you own the country you get 2 armies and by default you get at least 3 armies just for being alive). The strategy is to then take Siam, which is the connecting land. Then slowly take China and India. At a certain point you should have tons and tons of armies and at that point you go out and continue to slowly take over. Maybe take out another player and get their cards to get more armies. The Australia Strategy is a slow play and takes hours to do right but has a higher level of success than other strategies.
This relates to startups doing one thing really well and slowly but surely building on top of that. Think about the best startups: they do one thing really really well. They don’t have a million offerings day 1. Maybe 10 years down the road they do a lot of things like Google, but to start they have one mission and that is to be the best at what they do. The Australia Strategy embodies that. Go after this one country, build on top of it. Make it the best and strongest country and then slowly go out and conquer the rest of the world.
The Northern Hemisphere Strategy
I think I made this strategy up. It’s probably been used before, maybe not purposefully though. If this is the first public mention of this, I’d like to rename it after me. I’ve always wanted a board game strategy named after me. It’s the non-technical person’s dream of discovering a disease or species. Anyways, the Northern Hemisphere is also a slow play and patient strategy like The Australia Strategy. But unlike the Australia Strategy it involves heavy misdirection on what you are truly doing. To an unobserved eye you look scattered and un-focused but to a keen eye you are a few moves away from seemingly coming out of nowhere and taking over the world.
Another name for this strategy could be “The No Country Strategy” because you aren’t looking to take a over a country, rather you are looking to take over the entire Northern Hemisphere. Going with this strategy also involves luck on the territories dealt. The idea is that you should be trying to go after the entire Northern Hemisphere of the board- specifically trying to get Alaska and Kamchatka. The main territories to occupy are (from west to east) Alaska, Northwest Territory, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Ukraine, Ural, Siberia, Yakutsk, and Kamchatka.
The thing here and the general mindset is that most players are attacking people with countries. If you take one piece of someone else’s country they don’t get extra armies their next turn around. So most people leave you alone when you go with the Northern Hemisphere Strategy because you seem not to be a threat. But once you have conquered the above territories you slowly move down and eventually conquer North America and Europe netting you 10 extra armies per round. The rest is up to reinforcing, a little luck, and taking out some of the weaker players.
This strategy directly relates back to startups because it has aspects of the slow play but true intentions are hidden, as opposed to The Australian Strategy which is clear as day to anyone playing against it. Actually the way to defeat The Australian Strategy is to just wage war on Australia before they can begin building and reinforcing. It is sort of a suicide mission because most likely both players will fight to their last pieces and at least one will be wiped out the next round by a bystander. It is sort of similar to a big corporation offering a massive amount of money to a startup just getting started (think $1B that Yahoo offered Facebook early on). Squash them (or in the tech sense, bring them in-house via an acquisition) before they get too big to deal with.
But the Northern Hemisphere strategy, if executed correctly, is a dangerous weapon and something that isn’t really noticed until it is already too late. Similar to startups that are seemingly quiet about their intentions, just building something that is “cool” and something that they want to exist or like. They start amassing users, and by the time their true mission is public it is like- “Oh, well of course that is what they were doing all along.” But while it is happening there are either doubters or just a general ignoring of them and what they are doing. I love companies like that.
RISK is a fun board game. Growing up (and here and there these days) I spent countless hours playing with friends, strategizing about how to win and I think it has helped me think about strategy, positioning, and just general management in my startup. I didn’t get deep into other aspects of the game like public and private treaties/alliances, dice probabilities, and things like Secret Missions. If you are looking to sharpen your strategy skills, I recommend picking up some good old RISK again with friends.
One last note: another good board game that helps build a lot of good qualities founders have is “Settlers of Catan” but that is for another post ☺
