In India, cricket has long been the country’s most popular sport, with the top league drawing more fans on average than Major League Baseball does in the U.S.
Vijay Srinivasan and Sameer Mehta showed that rabid cricket fans could create a profitable business in the Bay Area. The two came to Silicon Valley to partake in the computing revolution and found themselves yearning for the beloved sport they left back home.
The engineers built and launched Willow TV in 2002, a streaming service for cricket matches, and obtained exclusive broadcasting rights to top leagues around the globe and the Cricket World Cup. By the time the pair sold their site to the Times of India Group in 2016 for $100 million, the service had amassed more than three million annual users.
They — along with the Unicorn team owners —were part of the original brain trust that dreamt up what a new, successful professional cricket league could look like in the U.S.
“We knew it needed big funding, big players, and most importantly, the best product,” said Access Healthcare CEO Anurag Jain, who was also part of the group. Together with billionaire Ross Perot Jr., he co-owns the Dallas team in partnership with the Indian Premier League side Chennai Super Kings.