Six hours to beat Sony and Google.

In 2011, a company most people filed under “news website” outbid Sony and Google for the global digital, broadcast and radio rights to the IPL. The winning number was 261.6 crore rupees. For scale, a decade later the digital rights alone sold for 20,500 crore, and the full set of IPL rights crossed six billion dollars. We were the outsider nobody had invited to the table, and we assembled the whole bid overnight.

I was running Times Internet / Indiatimes at the time. We had no business winning, and we won anyway, because we were just about crazy enough to believe we could. This is how it happened, and why it is still the most useful story I know about teams.

The youngest person in the room

I had become CEO of Times Internet / Indiatimes in 2009, at thirty-four, the youngest person to run a major media company in India. The old guard was always older; that was the rule, and I was the exception nobody had quite signed off on. By 2011 I was into my second year, and Times was a strange animal: famous for news, a serious internet company, and yet trailing Yahoo and Google on every chart that ranked India’s top web properties.

I believed one thing without hedging. In India, cricket is a religion. If you want to build an audience that comes back every day, you go and stand where attention already lives. In this country, attention lives at the crease.

He gave me the room

The rights had come loose in the chaos after the Lalit Modi era. Much of the value had quietly been spoken for; then the BCCI tore up its contract with its marketing agency, World Sport Group, the agency took the fight to the Supreme Court, and the digital future of the tournament hung in limbo. The court cleared the BCCI to re-tender only on the Friday, forty-eight hours before the auction, with the season due to start on the eighth of April. Suddenly the most valuable property in Indian media was back on the table, and there was almost no time.

Vineet Jain, who owns Times, sent me to Chennai to “monitor” the auction. He gave me half a permission, and I am fairly sure he thought our odds were slim. But he did the one thing that mattered: he gave me the room to make the call, and the understanding that I would deal with the fallout later.

The call before the flight

Our prize was the digital and streaming rights. But the tender bundled in television for overseas territories, so we needed a broadcast partner to carry that piece. Sony, which held the India television rights, had always wanted digital. They came to us. We started negotiating an arrangement, and they asked for a back door: if we won, they would still get the international television rights out of us.

Then, minutes before I boarded for Chennai, the Sony CEO called. They were going to put in their own bid after all, with Google, mostly, he said, to stop Google from going after it alone. Nothing to worry about. They would indirectly let me know their number so we did not collide.

Somewhere over central India it landed properly. I had just been cut out by the people I had spent weeks negotiating with, and nobody back home knew yet. Half a permission, a partner who had quietly turned into a rival, and two hours alone with it. Then I stopped feeling sorry about it and did the arithmetic. Sony and Google were tied together across half the world: PlayStation, content, distribution, deal upon deal. The odds that two giants with that much shared business would honestly hand a smaller partner their number, and then not simply take the prize themselves, were not good. By the time the wheels touched the tarmac in Chennai I had a second plan, and I had decided to bet on it, quietly, from the moment I stepped off.

Six hours

Then it was a sprint. I pulled in the people I trusted most and put them on the next flights: Harshavardhan from my core team, Pandurang Nayak running the technology and infrastructure, who today is a leader at AWS, and Ranbir Singh, a young lawyer about to be handed the biggest night of his career. Newly arrived at Times Internet and firmly in our corner was Satyan Gajwani, who would go on to run the entire Times Group. I called Yannick Colaco, a friend who ran a rival broadcaster, Nimbus, and asked if they would partner with us on the television piece. Assembling a bid like this normally takes weeks. I had about six hours, and I had to do all of it without Sony noticing, because we were still, on paper, negotiating with them.

Every serious bidder was in town, which made the secrecy harder. The sealed bids were due by nine the next morning. I set up an action room next to mine, and the team broke into building the thing: thousands of pages of documentation, structures, guarantees, all of it, while a hard negotiation with Nimbus ran in parallel. Ranbir, the youngest in the room, spent the night drafting clauses that would bind a global rights deal, and did not blink. Pandurang costed out streaming we did not yet own. At two in the morning the deal was struck, and the head of Nimbus flew in to shake hands and sign.

The breakdown

I still had Sony to handle. Their lawyer had been calling all night, and if they sensed we had a partner and a finished bid, the morning would have gone differently. So I walked into the common room where the head honchos were drinking, the who’s who of the cricket world mingling late. And I had a breakdown, on purpose, in front of them. I let them watch me be disappointed, then disgusted, at the back-room double cross. I acted like we were finished, like the relationship was over and there would be consequences across everything we did together. If any one of them had read it as theatre, the night was over, and probably so was I.

They laughed. Told me to go sleep it off, that I was taking it too hard. And as they calmed the upset young man down, they told me their number.

I left, dropped the act at the door, and went back into execution. The easy move was to take the number they had just handed me and pad it by ten percent. I chose not to. They had every reason to manage me, and I was not going to stake the whole thing on a figure passed to a kid they were busy calming down. So to protect myself, I went with the number our own math had already landed on, and set the bid at 261.6. The point six was deliberate. I did not round it, because whatever the other side put down, if they settled on a clean round figure, that small tail would carry us over the top of it. The team got to work, and we were ready minutes before the sealed bids had to go in. They had no idea Plan B had been running since the second I landed.

They thought they were managing a kid. I had a war room running next door.

The number looked reckless and was not. We could go higher than Google because we were counting value its model left out. Mobile is most of digital monetisation in India, and Google had no real ecosystem for it here, so it left mobile out of its sums. We did not. This was before 4G, the smartphone barely arrived; the explosion had not happened yet, and we were betting on the near-certainty that it was about to. Google priced the property at what it was worth to Google. We priced it at what it was worth to us, and it was more. The underdog usually wins on exactly that: it values the prize by a truer measure than the incumbent uses.

261.6

We printed the contracts at around half past four in the morning and had the full package assembled by 8:35, with the sealed envelopes due across town at the ITC Park Sheraton by nine. Our taxi never showed. So we crossed the road, pushed five hundred rupees into the hands of an auto-rickshaw driver, and he drove like the wind. We made it with ten minutes to spare.

We bid 261.6 crore. Because of the legal fight between the BCCI and World Sport Group, the sealed bids were opened in front of an independent observer, the former chief justice Mukul Mudgal, with the IPL governing council watching.

The Sony and Google bid opened first, at 255 crore, comfortably above the number they had let slip to me the night before. Ours opened next, at 261.6. For a second the room went completely silent. And then my team let it out, a shout I can still hear: Harshavardhan, Pandurang, Ranbir, the young side I had built out of product, infrastructure and legal, who had just helped a news website take the most coveted rights in media off Sony and Google.

Forty days, and turning the rival into the ally

It landed like a shock across the industry. Indiatimes was never thought of as a serious contender, and certainly not as a company that would take a swing this big. Vineet had given me the room, but I do not think he expected to wake up to this. Even the win came wrapped in the lawsuit: the court ordered our payment into escrow, and the BCCI could draw only what the old contract would have paid until the cases were settled.

Then the easy part was over. We had about forty days to the first ball to build the streaming, work out the monetisation, and sell the overseas television and radio. All of it now ours to deliver.

Two things saved us, and one of them is my favourite move I have ever made. Google had been so certain it would win that, the year before, it had already pre-sold much of the advertising. That inventory and that appetite did not vanish when they lost; we could activate it. So we did the unthinkable. We partnered with Google to stream off YouTube’s own infrastructure, and we sub-licensed the live stream onto branded Indiatimes pages. For the first and only time in YouTube’s history, the property was handed to a third party to sell. We sold the IPL on Google. We turned the rival we had just beaten into our distribution. Seventy-four matches, live to most of the world, with All India Radio carrying the commentary on the audio rights.

It became the biggest live streaming event the country had seen. It put Indiatimes back in the light, and it set up everything we built after.

Never bet against the underdog

What made it possible is the point of this story. A young team, given permission to make the call and the room to deal with the consequences afterwards, will move at a speed an incumbent cannot match. They have nothing to protect and everything to prove, and nobody has told them the thing is impossible yet.

The giants underestimated what a thirty-something with a hungry team could pull together between a flight and a nine a.m. deadline. People do that. They read youth as inexperience, and they read a small company as a small bet. Both readings are usually wrong, and both are where the opening is.

The thread held. When the rights came up again in 2022 and the whole set crossed six billion dollars, Times Internet won the overseas packages once more, for the Middle East, North Africa and the United States. Then Times went further and came in as co-owners of Royal Challengers Bangalore, who have just won the 2026 IPL, this very season. Satyan Gajwani, who had been in our corner that night and now runs the Times Group, texted me about it, joking that it was all my fault. He was not entirely wrong. The whole journey started with one bid a little internet company had no business making, because we were crazy enough to believe we could.

There was no AI in that room in 2011. The edge was entirely human: a team that was young, talented and hungry, empowered to decide and too green to be told the odds. What is new is that the tools now multiply it. At Antfarm we take the same formula, a young team with real authority and nothing to protect, and give it AI that lets a handful of people move like a hundred. They are the ones who would otherwise be coming for your business. Better to have them building it. Give a founder the room and the right to make the call, and six hours can still change an industry, and the future of cricket as we knew it. I have seen it happen, with the machines and long before them.