Kiran Mani THE PROBLEM-SOLVER

The CEO of JioStar on staying close to the customer, how the company's bread and butter is general entertainment and not just IPL, and bringing good people and interesting problems together

- Lata Jha [e-mail]

The running joke in Kiran Mani's family is that pitching business ideas is simply his way of getting new jobs.

The chief executive officer at JioStar, heading oversight of digital platforms (JioHotstar and Cricinfo) and outcomes (consumer, content and revenue), has examples to illustrate this. At two crucial points in his life, what was supposed to be a pitch for an entrepreneurial venture he planned to start turned into job opportunities.

The first was in 2010 when he pitched Fosbury Flop, an ad-tech platform for lastminute media buying and crowd-sourcing marketing solutions that he had co-founded, to Google. The technology company, in turn, offered him a role as head of sales for India, which he accepted. The second time was in 2023, when he met Uday Shankar, the current vice-chairman of JioStar, to pitch a new platform for creators where content opportunities and revenue models could go beyond YouTube. Shankar was quick to ask Mani, who was at the time working with Google and based in Singapore, to come to Mumbai to attempt all those experiments for JioHotstar, the video-streaming platform that was to take shape post the merger of Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd, and The Walt Disney Company.

"The world of creativity has somehow always found its way to me," says Mani, 50, who refers to himself as a typical TamBrahm boy from Palakkad, Kerala, who grew up in a household which "had enough food on the table and enough books around, but anything beyond that was a luxury".

Studying to become a chartered accountant, Mani, who had also been writing travelogues for a local newspaper for