Three times the ground moved

2000

the birth of commercial cricket

I got there through cricket rather than through advertising. I played three years in the Durham University first XI in the mid-nineties, alongside Andrew Strauss, Jeremy Snape and Matthew Windows, all of whom went on to play for England. I played invitational games for Surrey Seconds and for the MCC, and club cricket in the Surrey Championship for Wimbledon.

So after attending Durham University I started in advertising and very quickly found myself as a sports agent, managing athletes who were, by any sensible measure, more famous than anyone I had ever met. My father spent his entire career at Unilever — one job, all his life. My mother worked at an agency. When I went into sports marketing he was quietly embarrassed. Then Jerry Maguire came out and it became the fashionable thing to do.

Between 1996 and 2001 I worked with Mark Mascarenhas at WorldTel. We had sixty percent of the top cricketers — Shoaib Akhtar, Sourav Ganguly — and Sachin Tendulkar was top of the heap. Mark knew how to package and sell sportsmen. It was a massive deal when he signed Sachin, but it was never about the money for him. He made his debut in cricket with the 1996 World Cup rights and he was passionate about the game.

The trend nobody was pricing correctly was simple. Doordarshan had been the only way to watch cricket in India. Cable and satellite were arriving, and the moment a viewer had a choice, the economics of attention inverted. Rights stopped being a broadcast cost. They became the asset.

A few things on commercialization and sport that I still think about.

The first was that in 1998 we put a live streamed cricket match on the internet. The company we worked with was called Jagged Internetworks — run by none other than Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones. It was, as far as I know, among the first.

The second was the exponential increase in revenue that happened in the late 1990s. Sachin was at the forefront, but so was the introduction of new satellite channels like ESPN-Star and Sony. To give you an example, SmithKline Beecham was paying Sachin a few lakhs in 1996. By 1999 it was multiple crores. Selling broadcast rights was the same. From selling the signal to TV broadcasters for a few hundred thousand in 1995, the amount jumped to double-digit million dollars in 2000.

The third was introducing national anthems in international cricket matches in the 2000s — an idea I pitched to Campbell Jamieson of the ICC (International Cricket Council) that became a reality. Imagine being at the ground where the Indian national anthem was sung for the first time. Surreal.

2010

five operating systems, one screen

I transitioned from sports and into a world I had no idea about — mobile and internet — but around sports, news and advertising. July Systems was a cross-platform mobile company that eventually was acquired by Cisco. We built and ran the mobile presence for the PGA Tour, NBC Sports, ESPNcricinfo, CBS Sports, the NFL, and the IPL. As well as major news outlets like the Wall St Journal, NDTV, CNBC and others.

The trend at that time was fragmentation. Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows, BlackBerry — five different operating systems fighting over one piece of glass, and every publisher on earth having to build five times.

The IPL work is what I would point to. In 2010 we launched the IPL's mobile internet service, streaming matches clip by clip over 2G, because 2G was what India actually had. And the way most people reached it was a missed call to a toll-free number.

Data was expensive and smartphones were rare, but every single person in India understood a missed call. So the interface was the missed call. You do not drag the user to your technology. You go to the medium they already hold in their hand and you meet them there. A functional, well thought-out product.

Sixteen years later, our agents read handwritten order lists from pharmacists and voice notes from grocers. Delivered over WhatsApp. Same instinct. The pharmacist is not going to log into your dashboard. The list is the interface.

2020

commerce, advertising and retail collapse into one thing

In between, I co-founded PHAR and spent eight years building ancillary revenue for airports, airlines and transit systems across Southeast Asia — Jewel Changi, KLIA2, AirAsia, Jetstar, Qantas, and the rejuvenation of Manila's oldest light rail line in a joint venture with the Ayala Group. Advising Singapore's Land Transport Authority on commercialising the Thomson-East Coast Line — the advertising and retail concessions — generated $150 million. We also built an audience-buying platform for the airlines.

What that decade taught me was that a train station and an e-commerce checkout are the same problem wearing different clothes.

Somebody is paying for attention. Somebody else is selling a thing. Almost nobody can prove the line between the two.

Which brings me to the third trend, and to Graas.

What got me into commerce was Covid and the emergence of eCommerce. It pained me to see merchants and brands unable to compete with the sophisticated algorithms of Meta, Google, Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and Flipkart. I knew that advertising would become an integral part of commerce. Eyeballs, traffic, conversion, revenue. One clear line. So I decided to buy, not build. Acquired two companies — Shoptimize and SELLinALL — and got started on building a tech stack that could deliver results for brands.

Then came AI in 2024 and specifically the emergence of LLMs. We decided to go all in and bet the house on it. From building agents, to then building Knowledge and Context Graphs. To banking on outcomes — revenue uplifts, cost reductions — not advertising or subscriptions.

AI is a paradigm shift. And the ambiguity of navigating this shift while it is still happening is what I love.

Three distinct phases. I moved from television, to mobile internet, to AI. All tectonic shifts. And personally, I transformed from a salesperson, to a product person, to an M&A person. And I'm not finished.