With 300MM+ Monthly Active Users, and 28MM+ paid subscribers accounting for over 30% of Disney's entire customer base, Hotstar is arguably the most popular OTT platform in India, and that too by a margin. In this episode with Ajit Mohan, we dive deep into Hotstar's meteoric rise, starting right from ideation to building it into what it is today, and learn from Ajit's experiences of building a massively successful company, ground up.  

Quotables:

"A few months into running starsports.com we had 100,000 paying subscribers, and I remember James saying, "Why don't we just open this up for free?" It was clear that if we had to change the space, we had to do something fundamentally different."

"We believe in building one great product, rather than multiple products, which means attracting great engineering talent from India."

"Very often, you can be influenced by your historical legacy success (which is probably credible), but sometimes you just have to break away from that legacy to build something even better for the emerging world."

"One of the great markers for leaders is - how agile and open are you? People who are militantly open tend to be the ones that chart new frontiers. Can this founder find a way to make decisions? How open and agile are they? I also believe in diversity and to look for people that are not like you. Finally, aggression of ambition and the impact they make on the world."

Episode notes and transcriptions available on:
https://lightbox.vc/newthinking/subcategory/season-1