Harsh Jain LIVING THE DREAM

The co-founder and CEO of Dream Sports talks about the correlation between academic mediocrity and success, setting the culture at the organisation, and the boom in fantasy sports in India

- Arun Janardhan

A common trait among many successful entrepreneurs, says Harsh Jain quoting a study, is that they were average academic students. "When you're an entrepreneur, you can do your market sizing, research, etc. and yet, it (the venture) may not survive. The only thing that I can guarantee you is failure. They (the entrepreneurs) learnt how to deal with failure early. You have to just keep evolving and pivoting."

Jain, 38, the co-founder and CEO of sports tech company Dream Sports, which includes the fantasy sports platform Dream11, admits to being a terrible student in school. This only provides ballast to his theory about successful founders: Dream Sports was last valued at $8 billion in 2021, having come a long way from what began as a failed start-up.

Founded in 2008 by Jain and Bhavit Sheth, Dream Sports has over 250 million users, a workforce of 1,200 employees in Mumbai and a diversified portfolio of companies that includes Fancode for sports content, Dream Set Go for sports travel and Dream Sports Foundation to work at the grass-roots of sports. Post-acquisition by Dream Sports in 2021, Roloc-ule Games, a mobile game developer, was rebranded as Dream Game Studios, which launched Dream Cricket for a free-to-play mobile game.

"Sports content, sports data, sports gaming and sports commerce, to a small degree, are the four businesses that we are really keen on. But out of this, sports content, gaming and data are the things that we see still under-tapped in India," says Jain.

He is seated in a conference room named Manchester United, after his favourite football club, in the Dream Sports office at the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai. Their offices, on two floors, are filled with sporting symbols, photographs, and rooms named after Real Madrid and Kolkata Knight Riders, among others. Having just come from an office football game, dressed in a lavender shirt and white sneakers, Jain tucks into some home-made food as he chats.