Source : http://www.espncricinfo.com/cricinfoat20/content/story/674579.html
\’We were burning through a million dollars a month\’
In part two of his account of Cricinfo\’s first decade, Badri Seshadri looks at how the site changed hands during the years of the dotcom boom
The first £100,000
Peter Griffiths brought a very strong connection from the scoring and statistics side of things. He was at that time probably the Secretary of Cricket Scorers and Statisticians. Alex Balfour was doing all kinds of jobs, one of which was freelance journalism. He did a story on Cricinfo. That drew him into Cricinfo and he started working as a volunteer. He was always ready to write copy for any document we had to write or presentation we had to make. In addition to that, he was well connected in London with the financial side, because he was doing a lot of research work during the dotcom period.
One such company that was brought in by Alex was called Pangolin. It later renamed itself as sportal.com and then collapsed eventually. They were a company run by a bunch of sports executives who were in some television company or the other, into rights negotiations and broadcasting. It was primarily driven by soccer. They had the idea of putting together a pan-European mega sports network. They said they would give us £100,000.
It was our first proper funding in return for virtually nothing. Amazing deal. They said they would give us the money in return for us to write a business plan. If they liked the business plan they would invest in us at the agreed valuation. If they didn\’t like it or we didn\’t like the offer, we were to return the money, and if we didn\’t have the money to return – because obviously the moment you take £100,000, you start spending it – they would take advertising on our site, since they were building a sports network and they needed advertising and they knew we had a good audience base.
We said, fine. There was nothing to lose. Cash for advertising, and that as a last resort. So we took the money and started using it. Simon set up an office in a place called Hartham, and I went there quite often. Alex would come in for a day or two a week for small money, to do some work, and me going there, staying there for a month and coming back – that sort of thing.
But now we could employ more people in India. With that kind of money, if we even allocated a couple of thousand pounds we could hire people in India to do scorecards and other things. So that\’s how the Indian office was set up. Even before that, in \’98, when I started travelling to UK, we tracked Murari Venkatraman, who had been one of the admins before me. We got Murari in, and quite a few other employees. In hindsight we probably should not have hired most of those people, but we ended up hiring about 60-70 people, lots of them typing scorecards, which was the starting point, whereas in UK we had just one employee.
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A \’real\’ case study on FUNDING : Cricinfo.com – \’We were burning through a million dollars a month\’Read More »
