How Harsh Jain Built Dream11 and Introduced India to Fantasy Cricket

Over the past decade, fantasy cricket has emerged as a new form of entertainment. You pick 11 players from two teams playing an actual match, and earn points depending on how those players perform.

There’s money at stake for the users, but at best, it’s a popular pastime, encouraging social engagement. Harsh Jain of Dream11, the CEO and founder of the leading brand in this sector, got introduced to the concept back in 2001 while he was studying abroad. A football fanatic, he started playing Fantasy Football League with his friends back home.

Jain, along with his friend and business partner Bhavit Sheth, would start Dream11 in 2008, with the advent of the Indian Premier League (IPL), plugging a gap in the market which was only filled for a short time by ESPN’s Super Selector. It wasn’t an instant success; the product needed some tweaking, like making it much simpler to navigate than existing Western models. But since 2014, when Dream11 took off, it has navigated the grey area between fantasy sport and gambling, spawning an industry all of its own, attracting several competitors.

Dream11 is now a Unicorn company — valued at over $1 billion in 2019. Jain’s net worth is estimated at $8 million. An engineer from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia University, the self-avowed sports, tech and gaming geek speaks about the pleasures of fantasy sports and the requisite skills to master it.

THR: Why do people play fantasy sports?

Harsh Jain: Everyone in India believes that they know cricket. They will tell you how Virat Kohli should’ve let that ball go, or how Bumrah should’ve bowled that slow yorker. Fantasy sports gives that passionate sports fan an ability to put their money where their mouth is — to actually make a team. You have to do the research and pick players based on their form, who they are playing against and pitch conditions.

THR: People play it for fun; people play it to make money as well. Who does Dream11 cater to?

HJ: 80 per cent of our users don’t play for money. In fact, when we started Dream11, we didn’t have any money at all. It was only for free. The best analogy for THR would be that this is the popcorn to your movie. You don’t eat popcorn if you are hungry. If you put a movie on, you’d want popcorn. Because it makes your movie better. That’s what fantasy sports does: it makes your match better. It converts you from a passive audience to an active audience, that cares about each run, each ball, each wicket.

THR: I play it with some of my friends. And it’s like reliving the days we would play actual cricket tournaments.

HJ: You hear that all the time. Everyone who wants to relive their cricket dreams or sports dreams, it becomes another competition for cricket. You show your cricket knowledge and skill. And that’s why it’s a game of skill. No game is 100 per cent skill. Even in chess the toss creates a 51 per cent probability versus 49 per cent, purely based on white and black. But the fact that you can take 11 players, you have to lock your team before the match begins means that it’s a game of skill.

THR: Fantasy sports, for the longest time, was a Western concept. How did you make it go mainstream in India?

HJ: By simplifying it. By making it easier and easier to understand and comprehend. In the West, they have decades and sometimes generations of people playing fantasy sports. They are purists. We had gone the purist way — drafting a team, either auctioning or drafting players, managing one team for the entire league, making changes every day to that team methodically — and it didn’t work for the four to five years we tried it. The new generation doesn’t want to commit to 74 matches in the IPL. But they don’t mind ten to twenty matches. So, we pivoted to a daily, single-match fantasy model. As I keep saying, the masses in India need a shampoo sachet, not a bottle.

The Fantasy Premier League, which has been on for 25 years, today has 10 million people playing. We have 250 million people playing. It shows you the difference in interest, a generational thing — like watching a film in a theatre versus watching something on Netflix.

THR: What do you prefer?

HJ: I’m a purist. I play Fantasy Premier League and try to play in the top 95 percentile of the world, every year.

THR: Why did the IPL serve as a trigger to launch Dream11?

HJ: It was the first time cricket was becoming the league format. To play fantasy sports, you need to have a schedule, and teams which remain for a while. Otherwise, we were playing three India-Sri Lanka matches, then three India-South Africa matches, then five India-England matches. What you can have a fantasy game for is 74 matches, all of which have been played within a group of teams during a fixed period with a fixed schedule. Which is why if you were a sports fan, you’ll remember Super Selector back in the day. Right product at the wrong time. They didn’t have a league.

THR: How did you find loopholes in the law to legalise fantasy sports?

HJ: There are laws in every country. Our laws clearly indicate, as do those in the US and UK, that your game is either gambling or not gambling. Now, who decides? The law decides. And the law clearly indicates that any game where the preponderance of chance is greater than skill is gambling. Any game where there is a preponderance of skill over chance, is not gambling, it is a regular business. You can’t randomly pick players. You have to take into account pitch and weather conditions. When it’s Mitchell Starc versus Virat Kohli, you have to know that Starc has never got Kohli out. If you don’t know these stats, then you are a sitting duck. There are many factors where you can prove whether a game has more skill than chance. We don’t make the law, but we do follow it.

THR: How much of the fantasy sports market does Dream11 hold?

HJ: It’s difficult to assess. Last we counted, we had 250 million fantasy sports competitors. It’s safe to say that we have a majority market share. But now there are many large players in the market, which have a substantial market share, like My11 Circle to Vision11 to Howzat.

THR: What’s your core business model?

HJ: Out of the total money that comes in, 28 per cent goes to the GST department. We keep about 15 to 20 per cent service fee. Rest of it goes to users.

THR: How do you see the fantasy sports landscape evolving in India and globally over the next five to 10 years, and what role will Dream11 play in it?

HJ: It will keep growing. We have 250 million users, which is a huge number, but it’s still a fraction of the 800 million who watch cricket in this country. Globally, fantasy sports has capped off, because many countries now allow sports betting, legally. Fantasy sports globally is now restricted to tens of millions of users as a niche community, but it’s the most evolved sports fan base.

THR: What’s the next frontier for you guys?

HJ: Expanding as a sports company. So from fantasy sports we launched a product called Fan Code, for sports content. We have DreamSetGo, Dream Cricket, a free-to-play mobile cricket game. Dream Sports Foundation helps about 8,000 athletes in India. They’ve won about 300 medals for India, and three of our athletes went to the Olympics. We have Sixer, which is another virtual trading platform for sports.