A few years after the Josh Talks keynote — the one about turning ₹24,000 into a multi-crore agency — I noticed something uncomfortable.
The talk had millions of views. The playbook in it was useful. But most of what I’d actually learned in those four years lived as half-memories: the deal that almost killed us, the campaign that worked for reasons I couldn’t fully explain, the hire I should have made six months earlier than I did. The 80% of operating work that never makes it into a deck.
This page is a slow project to write that 80% down. Operator notes from bootstrapping a marketing & talent agency from zero to a national practice, signing one of India’s most prominent cricketers, a year operating across enterprise GTM and founder’s-office work, and watching where the next decade of Indian sports is going.
Topics queued up to write through:
- Bootstrapping in an emerging market — segmentation, partner-led GTM, hyperlocal influencer mechanics, and what actually moved the needle.
- Talent management — what works in India, what doesn’t, what I learned signing Ishant Sharma and architecting his RuPay × IPL play.
- Founder’s Office — the operating cadence that actually scales a small team: 1:1s, OKRs, sprint hygiene, FinOps, and what would have made it stick faster.
- Indian sports — soft power, sovereign-wealth flows, the operator gaps in franchise/league/federation roles, and why the next decade rewrites the industry.
- Strategy beyond the deck — sports washing, multipolar capital, where Saudi/UAE money should actually go, and what India can borrow.
- The reading list — Mandeville, Frankl, Tuesdays with Morrie, and the less-obvious books that rebuilt how I look at operating work.
Aiming for honest more than polished. If a piece holds up six months from now I’ll keep it; if it doesn’t, I’ll rewrite it.
If something here lands or doesn’t, write to me — the email’s at the bottom of every page.
— H.