JioStar CEO Kiran Mani on why ‘being boring’ is good for his job
The CEO of JioStar on staying close to the customer, how the company’s bread and butter is general entertainment and not just IPL, and bringing good people and interesting problems together
The running joke in Kiran Mani’s family is that pitching business ideas is simply his way of getting new jobs. The chief executive officer at JioStar, heading oversight of digital platforms (JioHotstar and Cricinfo) and outcomes (consumer, content and revenue), has examples to illustrate this. At two crucial points in his life, what was supposed to be a pitch for an entrepreneurial venture he planned to start turned into job opportunities.
The first was in 2010 when he pitched Fosbury Flop, an ad-tech platform for last-minute media buying and crowd-sourcing marketing solutions that he had co-founded, to Google. The technology company, in turn, offered him a role as head of sales for India, which he accepted. The second time was in 2023, when he met Uday Shankar, the current vice-chairman of JioStar, to pitch a new platform for creators where content opportunities and revenue models could go beyond YouTube. Shankar was quick to ask Mani, who was at the time working with Google and based in Singapore, to come to Mumbai to attempt all those experiments for JioHotstar, the video-streaming platform that was to take shape post the merger of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd, and The Walt Disney Company.
“The world of creativity has somehow always found its way to me," says Mani, 50, who refers to himself as a typical Tam-Brahm boy from Palakkad, Kerala, who grew up in a household which “had enough food on the table and enough books around, but anything beyond that was a luxury".
Studying to become a chartered accountant, Mani, who had also been writing travelogues for a local newspaper for pocket money, lasted in his first job at Citibank for three weeks before he moved to a copywriting role at advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1998. Realising that he needed more money to pay the bills, he switched to technology, joining IBM as brand manager for its consumer PC and workstation offerings in 2000 and moving to vice-president, strategy, marketing and operations, South Asia, over the next eight years that he spent at the company.
Two more roles, as senior director-marketing, strategy and operations at Microsoft, and co-founder of Fosbury Flop, followed before the Google stint where Mani joined as head of sales for India and then became managing director and global client partner; managing director, US retail; and finally, general manager, Android, Google Play, Asia Pacific and Japan.
“Whether it was as a copywriter, the role at IBM, or at Google, which was very much a consumer-centric company, no matter what you did, you stayed close to the consumer. This whole bit of staying close to the consumer and not just focused on numbers, is a narrative that’s been common across stints," says Mani.
While drawn to the opportunity of coming in and building something from scratch at JioHotstar, then JioCinema that eventually merged with Disney+ Hotstar, Mani calls the Indian OTT market a phenomenally exciting opportunity. “Two years ago, OTT was restricted to what one may call the Indian who looked like a European or American. We needed to expand that definition and building an OTT that spoke to every Indian was important. For us, that scope of access and inclusiveness was a lever, which are issues that I believe in the last two years, we have been obsessively focused on solving. It’s about the fact that when we put the right product out there, at the right value point, the market just exploded or expanded," Mani says. Connected devices are growing in the country, Mani points out, and watching premium, long-form content—web shows like Criminal Justice or The Night Manager—is now a habit.
In February last year, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and The Walt Disney Company formed a joint venture that combines the businesses of Reliance’s associate company, Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd, and Disney’s Star India. This includes the two companies’ media assets across the entertainment (TV channels such as Colors, Star Plus, Star Gold) and sports segments (Star Sports and Sports18). It also fused content streaming on its OTT video platforms, JioCinema and Hotstar, which together reach more than 750 million viewers across India. The combined Reliance-Disney streaming entity is three to four times bigger than the likes of Netflix in India in terms of total hours of programming and may even look at acquiring smaller, niche language-specific entities that are struggling to survive, according to industry experts.
JioHotstar crossed 300 million paid subscribers, parent Reliance Industries said at the company’s annual general meeting earlier this year. In contrast, according to industry experts, paid subscribers for Amazon Prime Video in India currently stand at 21 million compared to 12-15 million for close rival Netflix in the country.
That said, while JioHotstar comes with the advantage of IPL (Indian Premier League 2025 attracted 1 billion unique viewers across TV and digital), entertainment SVoD (subscription video-on-demand) in India is dominated by the likes of Netflix and Prime Video, which have rolled out premium, long-format shows for far longer.
“IPL is the Burj Khalifa of everything that we do, but I genuinely believe our identity is not driven by IPL at all. We are the digital arm to a company which has a hundred television channels. The television content has a rich and sustained audience viewership on the OTT side. Serials like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Anupamaa have defined households and behaviour patterns in India," Mani says, adding that while IPL is a big story to be talked about, the company’s bread and butter is general entertainment.
Other than reality programming dominated by the likes of Bigg Boss and web originals such as Criminal Justice and Special Ops 2.0, he points to the firm’s large library of Hollywood content, including slates from Peacock and HBO.
“Cricket has been a very important propeller to build big viewership, but we are a 400 million monthly active user platform clocking a billion hours of watch time. That doesn’t happen just because of cricket," he insists. One of the things with the Indian audience, Mani points out, is that you cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach. “The content diversity is massive. Indian audiences are five years ahead of every other global audience in technology adoption. At the same time, Indian audiences are about five years behind in economic unlock (propensity to pay). The greatest challenge in India is bridging that decade gap. You have to be ahead on the technology curve, but you have to adopt your business principles to ensure that even though they are 10 years behind (economically), when they catch up, they yield phenomenal returns. So it’s about squeezing and bridging that gap. That’s really the unlock that we constantly work on," he says.
Referring to himself as a hands-on leader who likes to be in the thick of things, Mani says most of his schedule revolves around problem-solving. “If you look at my calendar, 80% of it will be filled with two types of meetings in a week. First, listening to big ideas and seeing whether or how I can make them happen. Second, executing those big ideas and finding out where issues or cracks come in. It’s never about ideating myself or telling people what to do," Mani says, admitting he doesn’t really watch a lot of content but is quick to spot issues with UI/UX (user interface/user experience) on the app.
He’s also not a very big believer of too many one-on-one meetings. “Most of my leaders never do one-to-ones with me, but they speak to me five times a day. Rather than set calendars of half-an-hour meetings, call me, chat with me, WhatsApp me. I think in that way, we keep it very flexible so that something that can be solved in two minutes, you don’t wait for two weeks and set up a half hour meeting for."
Having lived in different cities—from Chennai and Gurugram to Singapore, and New York and Fremont (California)—Mani says he finds his happiness index to be far higher in India than anywhere else in the world. His daughters, aged 14 and 10, are Americans, he’s quick to add laughingly. “I’m very much a family man, conscious about where I spend my time and I don’t see my identity purely at work. I would say that I’m a pretty boring human, very much a victim of my own routine. I don’t have a game that I’m too passionate about though I play tennis. I don’t like restaurants and food in a big way. As I say, I do a job which requires me to lead a bunch of very passionate people, but leave me to myself and I’m the introvert who likes to stay behind and just watch all the fun unfolding, whether it’s at home or work."
Calling it a deeply personal philosophy and insisting that he wouldn’t urge anybody to do this his way, Mani says he’s sorted through life’s chaos with some foundational principles. “People are the first lever that I pulled through. Whether it is at home or at work, I need to wake up and say that I love the people I am with. It begins with that. Second, I am the kind of person who will always gravitate towards the biggest problem rather than the biggest job. I like problem-solving. And when you bring good people and good (interesting) problems together, I have found that my job is not to solve the problem. It is to let the people solve the problem but worry about the process," he says.
His day-to-day job, Mani insists, is probably boring and dull because he simply ensures that passion does not overspill, emotions stay under control, and things that are falling through the cracks are built in. “Great people solving big problems, putting those people in problems together in the form of good processes—this is essentially what I’ve done for a living."
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