I started Ninety-Eight Entertainment in January 2020 — first as a freelancer running social and design for a Delhi nightclub called Esquire, soon after as a one-person agency working out of a 300-sq-ft office. The first stable client was a cloud kitchen. Most early calls were cold ones. The first pitch I ever made was to Pratima Singh — former India basketball captain, from one of the country's most decorated sporting families — and that's the door that eventually opened to signing cricketer Ishant Sharma as exclusive talent.
By 2023 we were running social, talent management and brand campaigns for 55+ clients across Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore — a team of 18, a roster of 12 athletes and 500+ influencers. I architected Ishant's RuPay × IPL '22 partnership (300M+ impressions), ran award-winning campaigns for Happy Dent and Borges, and built a hyperlocal influencer engine that brands like TrulyMadly and Slay Coffee rode for growth.
Then I closed the agency at the top, took the year at ISB to put structure under the practice, and spent the year after operating across enterprise GTM and founder's-office work.
Now I'm restarting Ninety-Eight as 2.0 — a creative-and-strategy practice for founders who need a thinking partner across consulting, marketing, advertising, financial modelling and market research. Not operational consulting. Business partners for hire who've built and scaled the thing themselves.
On the side: GenZ Economics, a blog written with Professor Prasanna Tantri at ISB on what India's transition decade looks like through a Gen-Z lens. A documentary on influencer culture in development. A founder playbook in progress, for people my age making sense of less-privileged starts.
Off the clock you'll find me on a golf course (12 handicap, swing still inconsistent), in a notebook designing something, or two books deep — one history, one operator memoir. I keep a watchlist of films from places most people skip past on the festival map. Born in Ratlam (population ~270K, on the Mumbai–Delhi line, on no one's map) and still mildly surprised when people don't know it.
