Siddharth Kedia
Former CEO
Nodwin
Under my leadership, NODWIN became South Asia’s largest esports company. The revenue grew 10X and the value of the company grew by 28X in the last 4 years. Gaming & esports is the perfect storm where interactivity meets ‘digital entertainment’ meets ‘dreams becoming reality’.
I am always curious about changing consumer behaviors and business practices and have taken unconventional risks to capitalize on them. In the early 2000s, I joined the nascent payment services Industry in an early-stage VC backed startup that changed the Fintech landscape. In 2004 at efunds, I built one of India’s first award winning analytics practice, which grew into a data science vertical globally.
In 2007, I co-founded Ambit Pragma Ventures – a US$150 million PE fund, which had a unique model of taking a significant minority to controlling stakes in high growth companies in select few sectors and creating value through high operational involvement. I built Media practice for the fund.
After having spent almost a decade analyzing changing consumer trends and preferences from Gen X to Millennials, I could foresee that cheap and ubiquitous bandwidth with affordable and powerful smartphones at the disposal of masses would cause serious disruption to hitherto prevalent media distribution models. On the anvil of the launch of Jio by RIL, it was an opportune moment for me to join the company for Jio was set to change the media landscape forever by not only democratizing content creation and access but giving rise to business model and distribution disruptions. Unicorns across edtech to healthtech to new media exist today because of this seminal moment.
During my stint at RIL, I led turnaround/restructuring of all of the Capital 18 portfolio companies and advised RIL’s chairman’s office on media M&A opportunities for Jio. As the Head of Strategy for Viacom18, other than looking at Corporate Strategy and M&A, I constantly pushed the envelope and challenged the age-old paradigms of the traditional TV business, whether it was geo-splitting ad slots or using data science to make creative decisions. My next career move into gaming and esports was conceived as one of the aha moments while I was evaluating the next big thing in entertainment.
