A Dream Run

BY NEETA NAIR

Every year, exchange4media Group and IMPACT’s flagship property, the IMPACT Person of the Year (IPOY) title is presented to one or more persons who have made the maximum impact in the domain of Advertising, Media, and Marketing, having influenced the industry with significant contributions. Some of the past winners of the IPOY Award include Sanjiv Mehta, ex-Chairman, HUL; Sanjiv Puri, Chairman and MD, ITC Ltd; Rajan Anandan, former Vice President, South East Asia and India, Google; Baba Ramdev of Patanjali Ayurved; Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm; Arnab Goswami, former President and Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and ET Now; Punit Goenka, MD & CEO, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd; Vineet Jain, MD, Times Group; and Ambika Soni, the then Minister for Information & Broadcasting, amongst others.

In its 18th edition, the IPOY 2022 shortlist has some remarkable legacy and modern business leaders from varied fields. It is a testament to the award’s growing significance and commitment to recognising outstanding businesses and leaders. The list of nominees for this year’s title was compiled based on insights from industry leaders and experts and with meticulous editorial consideration.

While Harsh Jain, CEO and Co-founder of Dream11 and Dream Sports took home the coveted IPOY, the shortlisted nominees deserve a special mention. These include Aman Gupta, Co-founder & CMO, boAT Lifestyle; Darpan Sanghvi, Founder & CEO, Good Glamm Group; Ghazal Alagh, Co-founder CIO with Varun Alagh, Co-founder and CEO, Mamaearth; Harsh Mariwala, Chairman, Marico Limited; Mohit Burman, Chairman, Dabur Limited; Nisaba Godrej, Executive Chairperson, Godrej Consumer Products Ltd.; Peyush Bansal, Co-founder & CEO, Lenskart; R.S. Goenka, Co-founder & Non-Executive Chairman with R.S. Agarwal, Co-founder & Chairman Emeritus, Emami Ltd.; Sanket Ray, President, India and Southwest Asia, The Coca-Cola Company; and Vineeta Singh, Co-founder and CEO with Kaushik Mukherjee, Co-founder and COO, SUGAR Cosmetics.

A DREAM RUN

Over the years, the IMPACT Person of the Year (IPOY) award has been regarded as an insignia of excellence. The award presented to leading business leaders stresses the ‘disruptor’ factor, identifying game-changers. With that in mind, Dream Sports’ Harsh Jain has come under the spotlight this year, as the man who has had a ‘dream run’ forming the largest sports technology company in the country.

Harsh Jain is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Dream11 and Dream Sports. The new-age company has over 220 million users across brands such as Dream11, DreamSetGo, Dream Game Studios, and Dream Sports Foundation. In an interview on YouTube, Jain famously said, “If you are an entrepreneur then usually it is not your work, it is your life.” It is this tenacity that puts him in the league of extraordinary men and women who have been nominated for this year’s IPOY. Coming out on top, Harsh Jain has now become a fine example of untiring dedication and creative innovation.

Harsh decided to club together his fondness for sports, gaming, and technology to build Dream11 from the ground up. Considered to be among the largest fantasy sports platform in not just India but the world, Dream11 was founded in 2008 by Harsh Jain along with his childhood friend, Bhavit Sheth.

The net worth of Harsh Jain’s Dream11 was reported to be around INR 65,000 cr. mark, as they transformed India’s passion for sports into a business of epic proportions. But before tasting success, Jain and Sheth had to digest a lot of failures.

As per Jain, some 150-odd venture capitalists initially declined to invest in Dream11. However, the business professional did not succumb to the rejections and continued working towards his goals. Eventually, perceptions changed. Some of the top investors who have placed their bets on Harsh Jain and his team are - Red Bird Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management, Kaalari Capital, and Falcon Edge India. Then in 2019, he garnered a lot of attention after his group created history by becoming the first sports tech conglomerate unicorn in India. As per industry experts, Jain’s vision to build culture-driven organisations and adopt a user-first approach to problem-solving is considered to be the reason for the rampant growth of his conglomerate in the last few years. Harsh often speaks in favour of building businesses that solve real problems based on personal experiences instead of simply jumping on to opportunities. He believes that the act of problem-solving becomes easier if one is passionate about that field. The essence of a successful business, according to Harsh, lies in generating significant impact and value, while catering not just to the needs of the investors and users, but also prioritising the well-being of employees.

As a business leader, Harsh Jain has lept from from working as a summer intern at Microsoft to becoming the co-founder and CEO of the lead sponsor of the Indian cricket team, highlighting that the sky’s the limit, and dreams do come true. It is believed that he got acquainted with the fantasy sports scene during his time in London. In addition to this magnificent feat, his company has formed partnerships with various sporting leagues, tournaments and associations. Some of the key partnerships include the Indian Premier League, Pro Kabaddi League, International Hockey Federation, and Big Bash League. Furthermore, in May 2023, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) elected Harsh Jain as its chairperson.

With the help of Dream11 platforms, sports lovers are no longer mere supporters or spectators. Instead, they are actively participating and competing in various sports such as basketball, hockey, football, kabaddi, and cricket by creating their own teams online, for which they are compensated based on their performances. This avenue for fantasy sports and gaming is not only said to be creating more engagement for sports but is also notably making sports better and more fun. Jain also likes to compare fantasy gaming with the stock market. As per him, skill sets like researching and understanding the environment play a significant role in fantasy sports as well as the stock market.

In the industry, Jain is well-known for his bold ambitions and the urge to do more. Recently, Dream Sports acquired the fantasy cricket platform Sixer for an undisclosed sum. In addition to this, the company also launched its inaugural cricket mobile game in India to capitalise on the craze surrounding the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023. Today, Harsh Jain aspires to solve problems faced by sports fans, which could range from sports content to sports commerce, or even fitness.

Harsh Jain’s business acumen perhaps stems from his pedigree. After finishing school at Sevenoaks High School in London, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in engineering, electric engineering, mathematics, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 2012, he went on to get an MBA degree from the prestigious Columbia Business School in New York. His education could have easily landed him a high-paying job anywhere in the world, but instead, he chose to follow his dreams.

Harsh Jain vehemently believes in giving back to society, and his association with sports extends beyond his business operations and personal consumption. The business professional is actively involved in philanthropy through the Dream Sports Foundation, where he focuses on serving the Indian sports ecosystem. He also set up an NGO called Raksha Foundation in association with his wife, Rachana, that works towards helping children and animals in need. He has always openly talked about his wife being one of the key reasons behind his success. The business professional believes that families keep founders grounded. A strong advocate for tech and its role in transforming businesses, he is also aiming to promote research on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning by forming a partnership with Columbia University.

A transparent leader, Harsh Jain has always been an advocate of giving opportunities to his team. Forwarding the perspective that the employees of a company are the true assets, the business head often speaks in favour of giving meaningful ESOPs to the entire workforce. According to him, some of the office boys that have been associated with his organisation now have ESOPs. Keeping these numerous achievements and milestones in the picture, we present to you Harsh Jain, The IMPACT Person of The Year 2022.

‘We’re a sports data company today looking at solving real user problems’

Harsh Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of Dream11 and Dream Sports is one of India’s youngest billionaires, who has given a new dimension to games like cricket, kabaddi, football, etc., turning a passive game watcher into one who can engage with the sport he loves. He has done it with Dream Sports, India’s largest sports tech company which is valued at Rs. 65,000 cr. with over 220 million registered users. Jain speaks to Neeta Nair, as we try to decode his journey and the ambition behind Dream11 and Dream Sports, which is the first Indian sports tech conglomerate to become a Unicorn.

Q] Your father, Mr. Anand Jain, is a respected name in the business fraternity. Growing up, would you say that entrepreneurship was always on the cards for you or was there another option?
No, it was quite the opposite. I was fortunate enough to be born with a silver spoon because of what my father had achieved. We have a publicly listed company, Jai Corp. Hailing from a Marwari business family, it was almost pre-decided that I would join the family business. Entrepreneurship, for me, was breaking away from what everyone thought I should do. My parents have been very supportive. In fact, considering that my mother was very athletic, even as a child, she encouraged me to play a lot of sports which ingrained that DNA in me.

While my father always gave me the freedom to explore, he did have some reservations initially as I had asked for a significant amount of money to launch my business. Rs. 10 cr. in 2008 was an exorbitant amount for a 22-year-old who was fresh out of college. It is equivalent to Rs. 50 cr. today. My mother intervened with the typical Marwari statement, ‘We have only one son!’ We burned all of those 10 crores in two years and so yes, my father was right in not wanting to give me that money. But the lessons I learned from that are invaluable. They helped me pivot, adapt and succeed eventually.

Q] Recently, you were served what is being called the biggest tax notice in Indian history. Post that, we heard Dream Capital was shutting down. At the same time, other fantasy gaming companies who were also served similar notices were laying off their staff. Tell us how difficult it is to focus on growth in the face of such challenges. How are you grappling with this one?
I won’t deny the fact that it’s very challenging to get such a large notice running into tens of thousands of crores served to you. We’ve gone to court and are hoping it will help us with not being charged retrospective tax. The government has come up with a prospective tax, which is also 300 percent more than what we used to pay. We, and most of the industry too, have taken the hit and all our revenues are down about 30%, EBITDA is down about 50-60%. But the upside is that there is now complete clarity on taxation, which is something we have wanted for a long time. So, we believe the business will bounce back in a couple of years, emerging stronger than ever due to this clarity. We had also been waiting for a nodal agency for some time, and now we have it in MeitY. They’re putting together regulations for real-money gaming, which will give a huge fillip to the industry’s growth. As long as the retrospective part does not become a reality, all of these, despite some short-term negative impacts, will be positive in the long-term.

Q] What would be your advice for entrepreneurs who are trying to build affinity for a product which doesn’t exist in the market? What should their starting point be?
Super Selector was the first fantasy cricket platform. When the IPL was launched in 2008, I went looking for Super Selector, but I couldn’t find it. That was the trigger for starting Dream11 and I pitched it to my friends. Only one, Bhavit Sheth, was crazy enough to join me. He’s my co-founder today, and together we’ve been running this for 15 years now.

But my advice would be that if you are the first to build something, in all likelihood, people won’t even know that they want it. Where we went wrong in the first few years was that we were trying to solve our problem, which was a season-long fantasy football game. We used to love that and wanted it for cricket. But when we launched a product in the Indian market, emulating the US market, it failed for four years. So, we had to pivot to solving user problems. That’s when it started taking off. It doesn’t matter who came first and who came last. What matters is who solves the user problem in the best way and scales up the fastest. For instance, one of the most popular product features out there today is stories on Instagram. Yet most people don’t know that it was Snapchat which came out with stories first.

Q] Despite fighting off legal battles to prove the legitimacy of the platform, the name Dream11 is often taken in the same breath as betting sites or gambling platforms. It is banned in states like Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. To what extent does such a perception have an impact on the brand?
The laws in India are clear. When you have a game that is more about chance than skill, it is betting and gambling. But when it is more skill than chance, it’s a regular business activity. That’s why Fantasy Sports and Dream11’s format has been approved by multiple courts in the country as a game of skill; it’s not betting, gambling or wagering. I would compare this to the stock market where a similar argument could be raised – is it a place for institutional or retail investors to invest their money without financial knowledge? The point is that it’s an environment where SEBI is regulating it in a way that allows all of India to participate in and contribute towards our economy through the stock market. That is exactly what we want in gaming. We want a regulator to come in. That’s why I said that one of the best things that has happened is that MeitY has become a nodal ministry and we are waiting for a SEBI kind of body to come in and regulate the entire gaming environment to better answer this question.

Q] In one of your earlier interactions, you mentioned that using marketing right from the start is not productive for a start-up. What is that sweet point in an entrepreneur’s journey when you must allow marketing to take charge?
Never. If you are a product company, marketing can never do all the work. Your product needs to be good. And yet I would say good products with great marketing succeed more than great products with no marketing. Marketing is a key component because that’s where the awareness and reach come from. In the initial years, the priority should be to have the correct Product Market Fit. When users start to come in, using and advocating the product, retention and engagement should become the focus. Once you have that, you’re ready to scale and spend some ad dollars. Even there the unit economics must be in place.

Q] Currently, there is a big focus on advertising at Dream11, in fact, your brand got a lot of mileage when at the Cricket World Cup final everyone was wearing the Dream11 sponsored jerseys. You also have an ongoing association with many cricketers. What’s the outcome that Dream11 expects from advertising at this stage?
We measure everything. The jersey though is one of the harder things to measure. It’s the first time we’ve done front of the jersey for any large team. We haven’t done it in the IPL yet. We live in a measurable world today. Digital Advertising is measurable down to every click, every impression, and so you can track that user and say how much a click cost, how much did an impression cost, how much did an install cost, how much did a paying customer cost. These are all extremely measurable. As an entrepreneur looking to spend marketing dollars, I would put aside brand marketing for a long time, and start with digital advertising, which you can measure minutely. Brand marketing comes in when you almost have diminishing returns on digital marketing and when you are trying to elevate your brand presence/awareness.

Q] Cricket drives sports in India, but on the fantasy gaming side of it, from the range of sports you have on the Dream11 platform like cricket, hockey, football, basketball, and kabaddi, what share of revenue comes from cricket?
It’s still around 90%. India is a cricket-crazy country. While we do try to constantly push other sports like kabaddi, basketball, football and hockey that are all showing good growth, cricket continues to grow much faster. It’s great to see India becoming a more diverse nation in terms of sports affinity.

Q] You hold the largest market share in the fantasy gaming category in India, but with its growing popularity and the entry of newer players, are you confident you can maintain the leadership position even in the next 2-3 years?
I hope the market expands so much that it’s difficult for us to maintain our share in the larger market. At the same time, I also hope that we can meet the needs and wants of new users and continue to be the best place for them for fantasy sports.

Q] Earlier this year, you acquired a cricket stock startup company called Sixer, also forayed into the UPI space with DreamX. How important is it for you to diversify at this stage?
It’s always important. We’ve been profitable for a few years now, and our strategy was that once we became profitable, we would continue solving more problems for sports fans in India. We are into sports content, sports commerce, sports travel and experiences, e-sports, sportswear, sports equipment, and other sports gaming. We need to get the depth and breadth of sports products and services that India is missing currently. Other sports have a long way to go.

Q] You’ve always been vocal about transforming Tech in India and have encouraged opportunities on the home ground. As the chairperson of IAMAI, how do you plan to fulfil this objective and seize the untapped opportunities of the market?
Having studied in the U.S. and the U.K., I believe that everyone who’s Indian should come back home and build here. Today, our population, which used to be a problem, is our biggest strength. We have the world’s largest young population. We have Jio that’s putting 5G into the hands of a billion Indians. That tailwind itself creates a huge domestic market. There are very few countries in the world that can offer this massive advantage. In the U.S. for instance, the top hundred entrepreneurs are not Americans. A lot of them are immigrants. But the top hundred entrepreneurs in India are all Indians. We have an innate ability to understand our culture, our requirements, our demographics, our people and we’re the world’s largest market today. It is a privilege to be an Indian entrepreneur right now. And you’re going to see a lot of unicorns coming out in the next 10 years, and hopefully, we will be seeing a lot of them going public. That will help the tech ecosystem grow rapidly.

What’s next for Dream Sports and Dream11: For Dream Sports, we’re focusing on two things. We have recently pivoted our VC strategy to a PE one and now want to add more value to the sector. We will focus on companies that are at the cusp of Series C where they’ve gone beyond product market fit and are now looking to scale. We can help them get access to 220 million users, the best tech, product, marketing, and design. So, for us, it’s crucial to try to expand our products and services within the sports and sports-related domains. Our company name in India is Sports Technologies Pvt. Ltd., which stands for Sports Data. So, we always say we’re not a fantasy sports company. Fantasy sports is just the first product that worked. We’re a sports data company. And we have to solve for the sports fans.

One entrepreneur in India I really look up to: It would have to be Mukesh Ambani.

What kept me going despite the Dream11 proposal being rejected 150 times: My family. My parents, my sister, and my wife; everyone played an incredibly important role in not allowing me to get bogged down by rejections. My wife for example accompanied me to many pitches and waited in the parking lot for me, if it didn’t work out she would spend another hour with me convincing me that we must try again. In addition to all the persistence, tenacity, belief and hard work, you need family members who keep pushing you to keep at it despite the hurdles. That’s what I was fortunate to have. Not having a supportive family where people tell you that it’s not going to work, does demotivate you after some time and you think of giving up.

Tags : #IMPACT #IPOY #HarshJain #Dream11 #IMPACTPersonOftheYear #DreamSports