Thread by @vishalmisra

A story, and some personal news at the end of the thread:

Sometime in mid 2013, I got a knock on my office door. It was a young kid who was doing an MBA at Columbia, and was also simultaneously the CEO of a fantasy cricket website he had cofounded in India.

When somebody at the Columbia Business School (I think it was Will @porteous of RRE Ventures who also teaches here) heard the words entrepreneurship and Cricket, he reflexively said "go talk to Vishal in CS". So he came to my office.

I spoke to him, and he seemed very smart, driven and eager to learn. I liked his energy and attitude a lot and started helping him. For about a year I made introductions for him at Cricinfo, WillowTV, my VC network etc.

At that time he was trying to raise a couple of million dollars for his company and also trying to be the official fantasy game for Cricinfo (and advertise there). He was made to run around a lot and had to sign some deals that he wasn't very happy with but took a chance.

One of the VCs I had introduced him to (a tier-1 VC from the US who has an India office and billions invested in the top startups of the world) gave him a term sheet. A few days before closing however, they pulled the term sheet.

Fortunately, Vani Kola at Kalaari & Shashin Shah at Think Investments were championing the company and they stepped in for the Series A investment.

Anyway, in summer of 2014, he was graduating and wanted to take me out for lunch to thank me for all the help I had given him the past 15 odd months. I said no need but he insisted. During lunch he asked me what I thought of the recent elections in India (this was May 2014).

I said given all the scams that have been in the news, it seems good that the Congress had lost but I wasn't sure of Modi given Godhra and also he seemed very close to business houses like the Adanis and Ambanis. He said "actually my family is also very close to the Ambanis"

I said "oh yeah? Which one - Mukesh or Anil?". "Mukesh" he said, "we have been family friends since my childhood”. Then I sat up and thought "who is this guy?" (his name is Harsh Jain).

On my walk back home after lunch I Googled "Mukesh Ambani Jain Friend". First hit is Anand Jain. I go to his wikipedia page and under children I see the name Harsh.

Anand Jain was the financial genius who helped Reliance crush the bear cartel in the mid 80s and played a pivotal role as a confidant of Mukesh in helping RIL grow for the last 30 years. He is independently successful with Jai Corp, a regular in the Forbes richest Indian list

So I thought why is this guy running around trying to raise a couple of million dollars, and taking sh*t from Cricinfo sales people when his father can probably write him a 10 million check in his sleep?

I emailed Harsh "Are you Anand Jain's son?". "Yes," came the sheepish reply immediately, "but I don't tell people that and keep Jai Corp and his name away from Dream11 - I want to make it on my own and make Dream11 independently successful"

I liked him even more after that, and continued to help him in any way I could. Dream11 has since grown massively and Harsh, Bhavit and the team have really taken it to spectacular heights.

From getting a term sheet pulled under his rug and scrambling to raise a couple of million dollars, in September Harsh announced an investment of 100 Million dollars, led by Tencent. After a successful IPL, they took the *entire* company to Barcelona for a paid vacation

We have remained in touch (I owe an autographed bat from Tendulkar to Harsh!), and over summer this year Harsh threw out the possibility of my being more involved with Dream11.

I had recently experienced two of my worlds merging, cricket and research, with cricketML (cricket.mit.edu) and Dream11's business model, wealth of data and technical details sounded really intriguing. It is a whole new revenue model, besides the cricket angle of course.

So I have formally signed on as an advisor with @Dream11, together with my partner in crime of cricketML, Devavrat Shah of MIT. It is really a terrific place to work for interested data scientists with a whole slew of challenging data science problems to tackle.

If you are doing data science and are interested in a job in Mumbai, you should definitely apply to work @Dream11

Here is a link to job postings @Dream11 gamechanger.dream11.in/careers/