It seems like India has always had a special relationship with sports, be it cricket, football, tennis or badminton. And in a land where these aren’t just games, but closer to a religion and where the echoes of a billion cheers reverberate stadiums and sofas, it seems like these sports have captivated the hearts of many an Indian. With the Indian sporting landscape continuing to evolve, the burgeoning startup ecosystem seems to be the realm of digital innovation. In the startup ecosystem what does it take to build synergy between technology, sports and entrepreneurship rapidly redefining the Indian sporting narrative?
And what draws people to entrepreneurship?
According to Harsh Jain, CEO & Co-Founder at Dream11, “I didn’t actually go looking for entrepreneurship, though I was very inclined towards it. 15 years ago, entrepreneurship wasn’t s*xy and cool the way it is today. It wasn’t celebrated the way it is today; entrepreneurs who started a business and failed were called ‘failures’. They weren’t seen as the cool people who had the guts to try something and someone who learned a lot of lessons… I was always keen on new ideas. When the IPL started, I went looking for fantasy cricket and it didn’t exist. The fact that India with a billion sports fans did not have fantasy cricket, while, in the US and UK, fantasy football was life for football fans: that thought never left me and so, I thought of doing this in India”.
“The non-criminal risk is, basically, a founder or entrepreneur’s biggest competitive advantage, because, usually, founders, who are disrupting things, have some level of risk attached to what they’re doing by virtue of disrupting an industry”, adds Jain.
What about from an investor perspective? What do they look for in founders?
Jain remarks, “In early-stage ventures, I would look at TAM. The idea has to be something that piques your interest and that solves a problem for a very large addressable audience. The larger the market, the more you can get away with making mistakes. The market for cricket and fantasy sports was, essentially, like a billion people in India, so we could get away with going wrong for 4-5 years, making a ton of mistakes and still having the ability to come back. If your market is small and you go wrong, you can die very quickly, so I think the TAM for your idea has to be very large and the team has to have a very core reason for why they’re working on it”.
Jain adds, “We’re investing in people, because you can have a great business and a wrong person can really take it sideways. Or you could have a very simple idea, but the right founder can just out-execute everyone and make something amazing out of it”.
“For early-stage ventures, it’s all about founders and their grit and their passion. For mid-stage and late-stage ventures, you’ve proved credibility by having years and years of entrepreneurship under your belt. Then, it’s a little bit more about your numbers, vision, growth, contribution margin, gross profit, unit economics and more”, states Jain.
“Every founder is going to have a roller coaster with a larger number of ups and downs. Everything that can happen will happen. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Tenacity is the only thing that will keep you going. So, if you’re not deeply passionate and if you don’t care about the idea, then, I don’t think you’ll make it”, quips Jain.
Watch the full interaction here:
