Tech exec tells whirlwind tale of starting SF Unicorns, Bay Area’s cricket team in new U.S. league

LOS ALTOS — When Anand Rajaraman first came to the Bay Area to attend graduate school at Stanford in the 1990s, he kept his connection to his home of India by playing cricket with a tennis ball on Stanford’s oval lawn.

After 30 years in the tech industry all in the Bay Area, Rajaraman is now hoping that the region is ready to embrace the sport that he has always loved.

Rajaraman is a co-owner of the San Francisco Unicorns, one of six inaugural teams in Major League Cricket (MLC), a brand new league forming in the United States.

“Over the past 25 years, more people from cricket-loving countries have come to the U.S.,” Rajaraman, 52, said. “Now, I think there’s enough of an audience for it to be the right time.”

MLC will play a shorter version of cricket, popularized in the last 20 years, that may be more palatable to the American audience. The normal version of cricket often takes days to complete a four-inning game. MLC will use the Twenty20 (T20) version of cricket, which consists of one inning with a maximum of 20 overs for each team.

“The five-day games, it’s very much an acquired taste,” Rajaraman said in an interview at the Los Altos office for his venture capital firm, Rocketship.vc. “But Twenty20, it’s completely action-packed throughout those three hours.”

Cricket was already massively popular in India in Rajaraman’s youth, but the formation of the India Premier League, which plays T20, has helped the sport grow even bigger. And instead of sticking with cricket’s traditional all-white uniforms, the IPL looked to the United States for a different feel.

“When they launched it, there was a very deliberate attempt to model it off of American sports,” Rajaraman said. “They were trying to, in fact, Americanize cricket for the Indian audience.”

Now, Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, co-owners of the Unicorns and Rocketship partners, are hoping that the Americanized version of the sport they love can catch on here in America, too.

Rajaraman has worked in Silicon Valley for a quarter-century, including in several successful startups and as an early top executive at Amazon. That background is half of the inspiration for the team name.

In the startup world, the word unicorn is used to describe a business with the potential to be worth billions. In the sports world, a unicorn is an exceptionally talented and unique athlete.

“It reflects the San Francisco Bay Area of today, it’s about tech and sports,” Rajaraman said. “It’s not about gold mining or gold rush anymore, so we can’t call it the 49ers. It’s about tech.”

While the San Francisco Unicorns will bear the region’s name, they won’t be playing here locally in 2023. All MLC games will be played in two cricket stadiums this season (located in Grand Prairie, Texas and Morrisville, North Carolina) as other locales build stadiums to host the sport.

The Unicorns have plans for a 15,000-seat stadium at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds and signed an exclusive negotiating agreement with the county in January 2022. But 18 months later, Rajaraman says they are still waiting on various approvals before they can start building.

“We are committed to building a stadium here in the Bay Area,” Rajaraman said, adding that the Unicorns hope to host matches locally in 2024 by building a temporary stadium on rented property.

Potential fans will get a chance to meet the players on Saturday, when the Unicorns put on a free cricket clinic at Fremont’s Central Park from 5-8 p.m.

It’ll also be a meet-and-greet of the team’s star-studded global roster, led by head coach Shane Watson, a three-time Cricket World Cup champion and two-time IPL MVP. The team has several Americans, including San Jose State student Sanjay Krishnamurthi.

The names known in the cricket world are all international stars, including three T20I world champions from Australia in captain Aaron Finch, Marcus Stoinis and Matthew Wade, Finn Allen from New Zealand, Qais Ahmed from Afghanistan and Shadab Khan from Pakistan.

It should be quite the introduction to cricket fans — if the players get here, that is. Rajaraman said the three-year process of starting this team, including obtaining the visas required for non-American players, has made this undertaking unlike anything he’s experienced.

“I’ve started two companies and worked for many, many companies, and whenever you launch a new project, there is a little bit of chaos,” Rajaraman said. “But that was super organized compared to the chaos that is launching a sports league.”

That chaos will be worth the hassle if MLC helps bring Rajaraman’s beloved sport to America, once and for good.