Harsh Jain, Co-Founder & CEO Dream Sports chats with Amit Somani, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Harsh Jain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dream Sports, India’s leading sports technology company, with over 140 million users across brands such as Dream11, FanCode, Dream Capital, DreamSetGo, DreamPay and Dream Sports Foundation in its portfolio. He founded Dream11 in 2008, along with co-founder Bhavit Sheth, and led it to become the world’s largest fantasy sports platform.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

02:30 - Dream & Desire to Solve a Personal Problem

08:30 - Raising Money: Analysing Rejections & Building Relationships

14:00 - Importance of Large TAM for B2C Hypergrowth Opportunities

24:00 - Tier 2,3 Consumers: Think Sachets Not Bottles

28:00 - Web3, Play to Earn & Sports NFTs

31:30 - Make Yourself Redundant & Keep Evolving

Read the complete transcript below

Amit Somani 01:10

Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast. I’m your host, Amit, and I am delighted to have with me Harsh Jain, founder and CEO of Dream11. Harsh, welcome to the show.

Harsh Jain 01:20

Thanks so much. Great to be here. It’s been a great journey seeing you build up Prime Ventures. I remember when we met many years ago, when Dream11 was still unknown, Prime Ventures was still starting up, and it’s been a great journey for many years now.

Amit Somani 01:35

Absolutely. I remember our meeting very vividly, Harsh. We had met in my community here in Bangalore, and I remember this idea that you had and it actually looked like, and this was before I was at Prime, it looked like a real wild dream and you have obviously kind of made it happen. So love to explore a little bit about that. But how has it been for you? What was the kind of founding journey like? What inspired you to start up and did you even dream of this level of impact and success that you’ve gotten?

Harsh Jain 02:10

I think it’s very hard for… I mean, apart from a few very confident founders, I may not be one of them in that sense that I think it’s very hard for any entrepreneur to start off thinking that, “Oh, this is going to be way larger than even a billion-dollar company,” right? I think for most entrepreneurs, they’re actually solving… and I think the best ones, right? Are actually solving a personal problem that just has a very large market. A personal problem, which like I keep saying, you can’t go to sleep without thinking about. You wake up and think about it the first thing in the morning. You dream about it, excuse the pun, every day, all the time. And you literally cannot function unless you’ve solved that problem. It’s like this burning desire, and every minute you feel like someone else is going to steal my idea.

And because it’s such a great idea, you feel like, “Oh my God, if I don’t do it right now, someone else is going to do it before me.” And I think all the best ideas are born from that burning need to solve that idea if it has a large TAM. And I think those companies have the best probabilities of becoming larger companies. But yeah, honestly, I never even dreamt that this would become a billion dollar company, let alone $8 billion today, and now we’re looking at growing much more than that.

Amit Somani 03:35

No, I think you’re being very modest and humble, but I do remember your humility even back when it was just starting out. And it takes a lot, right? It’s not just the idea and the dream. You have to build on it and you have to kind of build the company. So what were some of the early days like? Because I know, for example, you pitched a lot of investors and didn’t find a lot of love. So what were some of the early days like, because a lot of the entrepreneurs that tune into our podcast are early stage, and they maybe have just gotten some rejection from some VC or the 10th one or whatever. So how was some of the early days like, convincing people that there’s an idea, and then also all the other regulatory and other challenges that perhaps you would have to deal with as a young entrepreneur?

Harsh Jain 04:15

Yeah. Look, it’s tough out there, folks. It’s not easy. It’s way easier today than it used to be seven, eight years ago in raising money. But in terms of capital, in terms of the ecosystem able to fund you, it’s way easier. But then seven, eight years ago, we were also like 100 startups vying for capital. Today there’s 10,000 startups vying for capital. So in that sense, competition will always be there, right?

And you’re always competing for a VC’s interest and funds that they get, but I think, generally, the ecosystem has evolved a lot. How to raise money, whom to go to, where to go, to connect to the VCs is way easier today. Learnings from almost 100 unicorns in India, there’s a lot more data. Those, whatever, 70, 80 unicorns and 500 soonicorns or whatever it is, have also paved the way for a much larger digital audience, much more clarity on ARPUs, retention metrics, all of that in India.

There’s also a much larger tech ecosystem, so you can hire engineers who’ve seen scale before. But all of this also comes at the cost of competition. Everything that I said is also much harder to do because of the simple fact that there’s so much of tech happening, right? But I think that we went through…. So, let me tell you a bit about the journey for the benefit of the… I think you know, Amit, obviously, but for your listeners’ benefit, is that we started… Me and my co-founder went to school together, so I’ve known him. Literally, he’s been a friend since we were like fifth or sixth standard or whatever. And we both were crazy Fantasy Football fanatics. So any EPL fans out there, well, me and my co-founder are diehard Manchester United fans. And so I got hooked onto Fantasy Football when I went to London for my high school, 11th and 12 standard. And that’s when I got introduced to Fantasy Football.

And so in 2001, I started playing Fantasy Football. So we’ve been playing for 20 years now, and that is still my biggest passion in terms of just a passion for fantasy has to come from there. Then in 2008, after studying abroad for engineering as well, I came back and the IPL was launching. So sitting with friends around, we said, “We have played fantasy footaball, but let’s go play fantasy cricket game for IPL now,” and it wasn’t there in India. We were looking for super selector. If any of y’all remember… I’m afraid a lot of your podcast listeners might not even know what Super Selector was, but anyone in their mid-30s to mid-40s will know that there was this thing called Super Selector in the early 2000s, which was all the rage but perfect example of the right product, wrong time. And Super Selector shut down after three, four years of wild success because it just couldn’t scale and just couldn’t continue.

So in 2008, there was no fantasy sports in India. So we jumped into it blind, purely chasing our passion, chasing our need to have fantasy cricket for IPL. And saying that 1 billion Indians are there, a hundred million of them at some point will come and play, right? Because it’s so big in the rest of the world. And we went asking for advice from all kinds of gurus and all in the ecosystem. Everyone told us what a terrible idea it was and how it would never work. And we launched anyway. And then we spent four years in accepting that they were right. It was a terrible idea, right?

And a season-long fantasy game with a free-to-play model and sponsorship driven prizes was a terrible idea. But we knew through our passion that there was something here that India has to have fantasy cricket. And so we just kept at it. We actually, in the middle, ran out of money. So we started a digital agency on the side to get some servicing money going and got that money pumped back into the product dream and kept that alive until 2012, which is when, after four years, we launched what you see today. Then we spent the next two and a half years across Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Silicon Valley, New York, London, trying to raise money, but we were not successful. And once we had counted… and I think I’ve said this multiple times, we counted about 150 pitches that we had done over two years.

But then each one actually taught us a little bit more about our business. Someone taught us about gross margins. Someone taught us about scale. Someone taught us about regulatory. Someone taught us about unit economics. Someone taught us about lifetime value, CAC. Someone taught us about team, hiring, and leadership. Everyone had a reason that they would tell you. If you push hard enough, they’ll always give you reason of like, “Why didn’t they fund it?” And they’re pretty generous with their advice and you can go back and either you can say, “Oh, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” Or you can say, “Look, these guys are looking at a thousand companies a month.” And whatever advice I get from them, let me see if it relates to me actually and if I agree. And that’s what we did and we kept evolving. And I think it’s more like Edison. I think Edison said that “I didn’t figure out one way to invent a light bulb. I just figured out a thousand ways not to do it.”

Amit Somani 09:58

Correct. Before he figured out the way to do it.

Harsh Jain 10:00

Right. He figured out a way to do it. He just cut off a thousand null hypotheses, right? And so for us, it was also that, right? At some point, there wasn’t a reason to say no anymore to us.

Amit Somani 10:15

Absolutely. No, I think you made a very, very… I mean a lot of very astute observations, but I would love to pick up on the one that you last said. Which is that even if you’re getting rejections, find out why and have the humility to say, “Okay. You may not agree with it. That’s fine. But just make sure you get that.” And I think some of the best investors will be very thoughtful and candid and direct with sharing that. And you are the… as your job as the entrepreneur is not to necessarily agree with everything they’re saying, but at least take their input. Have that combination of like, “I have courage of my conviction, but let me just hear what you’re saying.” And it just gets better and better as you go along. Rather than that these guys are bozos, they don’t know anything.

Harsh Jain 10:55

Exactly. And it’s very important to have this relationship with investors way before you need to raise money. And that’s something a lot of entrepreneurs don’t do. They go to meet VCs for the first time when they’re like, “This meeting, first time I’m meeting you. Either write a check, say yes or no,” right? That’s not how you need to do it. There’s a funny saying, which is that ask for money, you get advice, and ask for advice and you’ll get money, right? So you need to go to VCs when you’re not raising money and they’re happy to meet you because that’s part of their pipeline that they’re building as well.

And you need to connect with warm introductions through people, ideally not cold emails, and you need to then go meet them, talk to them about your idea, get feedback, work on that feedback. Every three months, get back to them saying, “Here’s what you said.” And Amit, just like you’re saying, right? “At this stuff, I agree with. This stuff, I still like to believe in what we think is right.” And get back to them saying, “Look, I heard you. I acted on it and this is what happened.” And I think that’s when relationships start getting built because at the Series A stage, or nowadays whatever you call a seed and pre-seed and pre-revenue. I don’t know. It’s all those fancy words.

Amit Somani 12:10

Pre-idea. The latest one is pre-idea, pre-team-…It’s an inception moment in my head. Can you fund me?

Harsh Jain 12:16

I think the only thing left is for VCs to actually go and start funding people that are already working at companies to create an idea. The pre-EIR, right?

Amit Somani 12:27

Yeah. You’d be surprised.

Harsh Jain: 12:35

So I think it’s very important to build that relationship because for a VC, I believe that they’re only betting on the team and the TAM. They’re only betting on the people and the total addressable market. And that’s about it. They’re not actually betting on your business model today or on your economics today or on your numbers today because everything’s going to keep changing.

Amit Somani 13:00

Yeah. Absolutely. You make the TAM point quite a bit and I'd love to double click on it from your point of view. And I know that you're also actively now investing in startups through your family office and so forth. So oftentimes, I see entrepreneurs that are very good with the, "It's a personal problem. I'm a missionary founder. I love fantasy sports or fantasy football, and therefore I want to do this." But very few people really figure out not a top-down TAM. I'd love to call it sort of bottom-up like a SAM or a SOM, right? To say, what is the real addressable opportunity? Because you can say, "Hey look, sports is, I don't know, whatever 10% or 5% of our GDP. Travel is 10% of our GDP. So it's a trillion market." No, no, not really. That is not TAM. So can you talk a little about, especially in your investing journey, not just your founder journey, kind of how you would advise people to think about their personal problem that they're solving. Could it really someday become a meaningful business?

Harsh Jain 13:55

Yeah. So look, I think first of all, large TAMs are very important for B2C hyper growth opportunities because they're very forgiving. We're always going to make a ton of mistakes along the way. And if you have a small Total Addressable Market, it's likely to be very unforgiving because people will remember the product which was not very good or a service or whatever, and they might not come back. But with a large TAM, you can make mistakes and you will make mistakes and you lose customers, but you'll learn. And there'll always be a large amount of users that are still trying your product out for the first time, who will then convince the earlier guys to come back because now it's much better. So I think large TAMs are very forgiving for all this adaptation and... sorry, adoption and this flexibility that you have to have as an early age startup.

On the second part, I think to actually measure TAM, it's important. I believe it's important to go top-down and bottoms-up. Too many people go top-down, right? Like, "Oh, there are 6 billion people on the planet or 1.5 or whatever, 1.4 billion people in India. We are targeting, let's say, females, right?" "Okay. There's 700 million females in India. Out of that, if you get even 10% of people on our product, then 70 million. Great. Amazing." Right? It doesn't work like that. You can have some basic top-down, but it also needs to be bottoms-up.

So for example, when we were talking about fantasy sports, we said, "Okay. There's 700 million sports fans in India. And the US has 40% of online sports fans." I think it was 40% of the time playing fantasy sports, so there's 700 million. There are 200 million online, whatever... hundred million at that time, right? This was a few years ago. A hundred million online sports fans. Today, it's now 500 million online sports fans, but there's a hundred million online sports fans out of which 40% will come. Because the US has 40%, so we will reach 40 million fantasy players. So that's fine and it'll grow to 200 million. But we also have to say, "Look, these are the number of users in that online segment, online fantasy sports, which are engaging with sports in different ways, which are doing eCommerce. So they are online digital paying users where they are in tier one cities or tier two cities, but not tier three to start with. Where they have shown on Facebook groups that this is the size of users, following teams, and players." And so you have to have a whole bunch of bottom-up metrics so it supports that thesis.

Amit Somani 16:45

Absolutely. We always say that the top-down TAM is for feeling inspired, that there's a lot of optionality and so forth. But the bottoms-up TAM is how you're going to build your business and company. And you may get a serendipitous, positive surprise along the way. If you just dream like, "Oh, I'm just building for women or I'm building for sports or I'm building for travel," that is probably not good enough.

So switching gears, Harsh. Let's talk about sports in general, even beyond Dream11 since you're so close to the action. How do you think about just the evolution of sports and the commercialization of sports, right? Not just fantasy or e-sports, but that of course I know you're very close to. But in general, I see five, seven, eight, years ago, there was no Kabaddi League. So things that used to... I spent a lot of years in the US myself. Everything was... Even [PV Football League, right? American football, everything was commercialized, right? And it has a positive and maybe a little bit of a negative angle as well. But what do you think about this overall commercializing of sport and getting it to the masses in...

Harsh Jain 17:50

Well, I think it’s very positive. Everything in life has positive and negative, obviously. Right? Now, even if you look at blockchain, right? Now, blockchain is obviously a positive in terms of technology, but can also be used as a negative. Any technology can also be used negatively, right? And sometimes the negative parts get highlighted more than the positive. Ample large use cases get done. The internet was developed as a defense project. You can look at that as negative because it’s for war and defense, but obviously, today, we can say that the internet is a positive. So I think it’s very positive because if you can commercialize sports, then you start getting that flywheel going. Today, if you look at IPL, for example, we’ve gone from… 13 years ago, IPL wasn’t existent, right? And today we have an IPL, which is potentially going to get over $6 billion of media rights.

Now, that $6 billion is going to flow into BCCI coffers, as well… more importantly, into every one of those 10 teams. Those 10 teams are going to spend it on players and infrastructure. Those teams are also going to spend on grassroots with the BCCI to develop the next line of players. And now, India has a way stronger Indian cricket team in terms of bench as well, because there are now 200 players at the top level in IPL. 200 Indians playing at the very highest level from which we select 11 for the national team. And so even our bench is better than many other teams in the world. And so this entire flywheel starts kicking in because of the money that comes in at the top going all the way down. And this is what America’s done well. Their grassroots sports ecosystem and infrastructure are amazing.

And this is what now BCCI is doing amazingly, spending money a lot on grassroots because it gets those commercial rights for global prices right now. I think that it’s very important for these ecosystems to build up. And we’re seeing the IPL now becoming a gold standard where PKL, ISL, and all these other leagues have come up. And they’ll take some time to mature, but we can see that they’ve already started helping those sports a lot. So for example, Kabaddi. Even today, many of these players actually have day jobs in that sense that, but once Kabaddi starts becoming a 12-month activity, they will leave those jobs and focus only on Kabaddi because they’ll earn enough from there. And then because of that, more kids will think of becoming Kabaddi players and more parents will be okay, more importantly.

In India, what happens if parents used to say, “What is a chance…” It’s like probability. “What is the chance of my kid, even if he’s amazing at cricket, becoming one of those 11 Indian cricketers. And even out of 11 Indian cricketers, only four, five of them really make it big.” Now comparatively, your kid can become one of 200, 300 IPL players, and they’ll earn a very good living. So the probability has completely changed.

Amit Somani 21:05

Yeah, absolutely. I have a 14-year-old who plays cricket and he’s right about at that age. And he does quite well and we are like, “What are the odds of being one of those 200.” And tomorrow, I’m assuming by the time he’s of age, it might be 2000 that a professional commercial cricketer making a handsome living. Not to mention all the other activities around cricket that could be quite interesting.

Harsh Jain 21:25

And so you asked about the ecosystem. That’s a great example. And you as a parent also can think of it’s… If he makes it to professional cricket, there’s a good chance he’ll learn a decent living and he’ll learn unbelievable life lessons and foundation lessons about teamwork, about hard work, about discipline, about pressure, performance. And even if he has to retire at 34, 35, he’ll be able to do greater things after that. But at the same time, I think it’s important for the entire ecosystem… So we are Dream Sports now. We have Dream11, which is fantasy sports. But after we crossed a hundred million users, now we’re at 140 million users. As a group, we started focusing on what else we can solve for users. And we saw that tier one cricket and many of the other sports as well, tier one matches are well taken care of. High production value on TV, good rights, packages, teams coming up, players getting paid well, et cetera.

But tier two and three has been largely untapped, but that’s also because there’s no commercialization there. There’s no revenue potential there, so most people who have taken that up even have said that, “You know what? There’s very little commercial options.” They’ve tried it, but they don’t make any money out of it. They lose a lot of money investing into it. We think that there’s a larger ecosystem play around this. So we have today a fantasy sports company which is Dream11, but we’ve also launched incubated sports content and sports commerce, which is sports memorabilia and merchandising in FanCode, which has already hit 20 million users. We’ve incubated DreamSetGo, which is sports, travel, and experiences. So the next time you are looking for tickets for a match, and let’s say, you want to go to Australian, the T20 World Cup in Australia, you have a trusted brand that you can get tickets from and create a whole experience for you there.

We’ve just got DreamSetGo as one of the official travel agencies for the travel partners for the World Cup. Then you have Dream Game Studios, which is creating mid-core, hardcore cricket games, sports games. We’ve invested in Elevar, which does sports sneakers and bats-like equipment, right? We have invested in Fittr, which is a great fitness community. We’ve invested in KheloMore, which is an amazing sports venue booking platform so that when you want to play sports with your friends, you can use that. We’ve invested in SoStronk, which is an eSports company. So the idea is that let’s look at the entire sports ecosystem in India and solve user products, user problems with amazing sports products and services.

Amit Somani 24:15

Yes. I think the opportunity is ginormous and I’m really glad to see that you’re investing in this as well. You mentioned about tier two and tier three. Can you talk a little bit more about those consumers? Not just the players there, right? But the consumers there. What are some of the things that they are looking for and how do you kind of… For entrepreneurs listening in, if they want to serve that audience, are we there yet with respect to, say, just building for tier two and tier three, building for Bharat first and then tier one later? For tier one, of course, folks like you and others are going to be dominating and you are well-capitalized, but should people who are like you were, say, 10 years ago, would really try to go deep there and try to understand what are the set of opportunities? Any thoughts on that?

Harsh Jain 25:00

Absolutely. I think today with… I joke about this with some other entrepreneurs that every tech entrepreneur in India should send 1% of the cap table as a gift to Jio, right? Jio has completely changed everyone’s TAM, right. It’s completely changed from five years ago to today. There’s a drastic shift in companies being able to only build for tier two and three, because that is Bhārat, that is India. And that is where the government’s also done a great job of pushing entrepreneurs to build for Bhārat, now giving us a chance, make in India, startup India, digital India. Even the government is seeing that there’s this $1 trillion economy to be built only on digital and they’re pushing us to do that. So I think I would definitely say that… I would actually say the larger opportunity today in India is building for Bhārat rather than building for tier one. And a majority… I can say that more than 50% of our users, a majority of our users are coming from tier two and three, not from tier one. It’s an overwhelming majority that comes from tier two and three. Tier one has been left behind far long ago.

Amit Somani 26:15

Yeah. And maybe it’s a little tangent, Harsh, but related. Are you seeing that opportunity not just in sports but in every vertical? I know e-com is quite penetrated, content and gaming is quite penetrated, right? Because you must study these users and talk to them or people on your team and product managers and so forth. So are you seeing the appetite, and in particular…slightly related question, something I asked to somebody in China many years ago is that the per capita is so low there. So how are they going and affording it? And clearly, Dream11 and Dream Sport have shown that they have for things that really mean something to them. They have an appetite to spend. So maybe just a little bit on that as well.

Harsh Jain 26:55

Yeah. So I think that you have to have a product. If you’re going to reach out to tier two and three India, your product has to have very low ticket size. You can’t go with the shampoo bottle, you have to go with the sachet, right? You have to go with something very high engagement because time is something that tier two and three have much more than tier one. So they want time. They have the time to invest, but they don’t have as much money to invest. But they have higher aspirations because any product or service that you can offer them, which can enhance their lives, has a higher Delta for them than a tier one user. So I think that in terms of engagement, you can have far higher stickiness and engagement than a tier two and three, because tier one is generally spoiled for choice, and they’ll spend more money but they spend fewer time. Whereas your tier two and three will be much more frequent, much more engaging, and you can build large communities there, but your ticket size has to be low, engagement has to be very high.

Amit Somani 27:55

Absolutely. I often tell product managers, “Think about how the user is paying because they’re often paying not just by money but by time, but by attention, but by what they put into the product, if it’s co-creation.”

Harsh Jain 28

Yeah. Absolutely. And exactly onto your point, this is why we are also, as a company, investing in Web3 because Web3, with decentralization… And for example, the aspect that relates to sports, sports NFTs. And we’re investing in a big way in sports NFTs, we are looking at play to earn models. And that’s exactly what you are talking about, play to earn models. It can approach paying with time, rather than paying with money, which is play to win. And this is the way that we can actually have a completely transitional shift like a step function change in the way consumers engage with the digital economy in India.

Amit Somani 28:50

Harsh, this is fascinating. As we kind of wrap up here, I’d love to know about the evolution of Harsh as an entrepreneur or as even an individual or a professional. So what have you learned about yourself in this journey over the last 10, 15 years? And what is it that you wish you knew 10 years ago that you know now? Maybe that’ll benefit some of the younger folks or the earlier folks in the journey who are starting out.

Harsh Jain 29:15

I think a little bit of less anxiety and more calmness would’ve helped earlier on in the journey. At that point, you’re like literally, “Everything has to be done now. Everything has to be done one minute ago.” And everything that doesn’t happen is like a catastrophe, right? So I think a little less volatility. But sometimes I believe that in the young entrepreneurs’ journey, that urgency also creates that pressure to build something great. But then I think as entrepreneurs, we all have to mature into a little more chilled out, little more thinking with first principles, macro level thinkers. But sometimes people are told at their young entrepreneurial journey that, “Think first principles, think macro, think all of that.” I actually disagree to a point.

And as a young entrepreneur, you’ve just got to go, go, go. Right? You’ve got to be obsessed with work. There is no work-life balance. There is nothing else in your life apart from that thing that you have to solve that burning need every day wasted… every day you don’t do something is a day wasted, right? That burning need has to be there to build something so that you can mature then to a little more work-life balance. Because then you need to run that sprint at the start, but then you also need to evolve that sprint into a marathon. Because if you keep running that sprint even 10 years later, you’ll just burn out. And I think it’s very important.

I was hands on to another degree when we started, right? Every pixel of every design, I was on it. But I think we have to mature to hand over the reins, build teams, hire people way better than us, and get out of their way. Let them make… Even if you think that they’re making a mistake, let them make a mistake. As long as it’s not an existential mistake, because sometimes you’ll be wrong, sometimes they’ll be wrong. But the whole process of learning, evolving, growing is very important. And I think over time as an entrepreneur, your only job is to make yourself redundant and push that forward. Push that down to every CXO on your team, make yourself redundant, hire great people, get out of the way. Make sure you are no longer required for what you used to do so that you can then work on growth.

Amit Somani 31:30

So let me push you on a little bit on that because we see this in entrepreneurs and we see them struggling with it. Lot of early stage entrepreneurs, as they’re going from their seed round to series A building the first set of senior hires, they struggle with letting go. And since you said you kind of overcame it and you went from this anxious, want to do everything, manage everything, micromanage everything, whatever, to being like, “Okay, I’m going to delegate. I’m going to build great teams.” What led to that transformation for your own journey? What was the trigger point or what was some of the learnings or people or books or whatever was the trigger to get you to be that way?

Harsh Jain 32:05

Yeah. Now that I’ve had a kid… my kid is four years old. I think it’s a little bit like kids, right? You’re fully hands on, but at some point, if you don’t start letting go and let them grow up, then you’re just going to suffocate them. Right? They won’t be able to do anything without you and that’s not how you want to raise something. So I almost feel like, as an entrepreneur, the company’s almost like your kid and you want everything to be done perfectly and exactly right, but you need to just make sure that there are not such big problems that… Let the kids fall, let them learn, let them get scratched and bruised, and let them learn and grow up, right? Just make sure they don’t lose an arm or a leg or something, right?

 

So I think it’s important for us to evolve to a place where it’s okay to make mistakes, not everything has to be right. And to realize that the people you hire might actually know better than you… they should in their area. And that’s the only way you have to grow, but it’s very hard. It’s very hard to let go. It’s very hard to step aside. And honestly, I’ve been on it for 14 years, so I’ve had a bit of time in getting there, but it takes a long time. It’s a very hard thing to do.

Amit Somani 31:35

Wonderful, Harsh. I think we could go on for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time. Thanks again for being on the Prime Venture Partners Podcast and being so humble and so candid. So thank you for being on the show.

Harsh Jain 33:45

Thanks a lot for having me, Amit. Looking forward to catching up in person sometime now.

Amit Somani 33:55

Absolutely. I need to book one of those tickets to the World Cup in Australia. So maybe I will… I know where to go to book it now and I will catch up with you soon. Thanks, Harsh.

Harsh Jain 34:05

Thanks, Amit. Thanks, everyone.

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