Business Today| 16 January 2023
"Recession is the best time to start a company,” Baskar Subramanian, CEO and Co-founder of media-tech unicorn Amagi, repeats the often-stated assertion and substantiates with his own story. Subramanian, along with his long-term colleagues Srinivasan K A and Srividhya Srinivasan, founded Amagi Media Labs, a cloud-based broadcast network, in 2008, in the thick of global recession.
“In 2008, we truly felt we can disrupt the market. We were in the television business, doing geo-targeted advertising. In a normal scenario, when channels running full on inventory, they wouldn’t have listened to a start-up like us. In 2008, they were all trying to sell the inventory, that’s why the opportunity opened up. This helped us a lot in terms of fruition of our thesis. We could actually meet CEOs of all the TV channels in India which as a small company, we would’ve been able to do in a bubble environment,” he says.