Harit Pathak

Meet Harit Pathak (MBA ’23), co-founder and CEO of EssentiallySports, one of the leading independent digital sports media companies. What started as a college dorm-room idea has grown into a bootstrapped, profitable platform reaching more than 30 million monthly readers. His journey reflects a lifelong passion for sports and the leadership and entrepreneurial insights he gained at Darden.

Which Darden courses and/or activities have had the biggest impact on your learning and career post-MBA?

“Leading Organizations” in Q1 with Professor Peter Belmi had a large impact, pushing me to ensure that my company’s design matched its goals. His blend of behavioral psychology, leadership principles that apply on the ground, along with Professor Belmi’s energy in class, created a unique experience.

I really learnt a lot from Professor Scott Snell’s “Strategic Execution”. The 4As framework remains central to my entrepreneurial journey. In an operationally heavy, fast-changing digital environment, it gave me a method for asking intentional questions about progress and impediments.

The biggest impact, however, came from Professor Damon DeVito and his selfless interest in his students’ ventures. The “Venture Velocity” class was a great vehicle with core entrepreneurship principles put into action, but the personal mentorship he provided over the two years stayed with me, something I will be very grateful to the Batten Institute for.

What advice would you have for current Darden students who are interested in pursuing an entrepreneurial career and/or founding their own venture?

One book I recommend to every aspiring entrepreneur is Good to Great by Jim Collins. The book is a research effort comparing 10 emerging winning companies to their counterparts that failed at a pure empirical level. My favorite lesson—and the advice I’d share with Darden entrepreneurs—is: “Confront the brutal facts yet never lose faith”. This is the toughest lesson as an entrepreneur to embrace amidst the highs and lows of building something. Often, you’ll find no corroboration or proof of what you are looking to build, and many a time you will get validation from the most remote of sources. Your growth in your journey should be measured by your own inner scorecard, and a strong fact-checking filter that evolves over time - one in which you keep calibrating but continue to have faith in your hypothesis. It will also help you evolve your business moat and keep your eyes open to moats that don’t exist when you create that first business plan.

Tell us more about EssentiallySports!

EssentiallySports is one of the top 10 independent sports publishers in the U.S., reaching over 30 million monthly readers. We focus on niche/less covered sports with passionate, underserved  fan bases—motorsports, tennis, golf, combat sports, track & field—alongside in-depth storytelling of mainstream sports. This strategy allows us to dominate underserved audience segments that bigger publishers often overlook, giving advertisers highly engaged, targeted reach.

Beyond editorial presence, we’ve built one of the fastest-growing sports newsletter networks, crossing one million subscribers in under a year without spending on performance marketing. At its core, EssentiallySports is a fan-first, data-driven company built to combine scale with authenticity and prove that independent sports media can thrive, profit, and lead the conversation in an era dominated by corporate-owned giants.

Name a trend—in tech or business—you’re watching now that intrigues you, and why current MBAs should be interested in it.

One trend I’m tracking closely is the transformative role of AI in sports media. We’re entering an era where AI is beginning to reshape how stories are discovered, crafted, personalized, and distributed. In sports media, where speed, accuracy, and cultural relevance are everything, AI can process live data feeds, pull historical insights, and produce structured first drafts within seconds—but the real opportunity lies in pairing this computational speed with human editorial judgment.

Sports media has traditionally thrived on mass appeal and reactive, real-time coverage. AI changes the game by enabling precision in storytelling, predicting what specific audience segments will want to read, watch, or engage with, before they even seek it out. It’s no longer just about covering the score; it’s about delivering the exact narrative, in the right format, at the right moment.

At EssentiallySports, we’re experimenting with AI to automate repetitive but critical workflows like tagging, metadata creation, and real-time summarization, freeing our editorial team to focus on what can’t be automated: authentic storytelling, cultural context, and emotional connection. AI also reveals hidden patterns in fan behavior, allowing us to design content strategies that feel tailor-made for each community we serve.

That said, AI without strong human oversight risks producing generic or even misleading narratives. The future belongs to publishers who treat AI as an accelerator, not a replacement, using it to scale reach and insight while keeping human creativity and credibility at the core. For MBAs, this is a space worth watching because it sits at the intersection of technology, consumer psychology, and trust. The companies that master this AI human collaboration will own the next era of fan engagement and unlock new, defensible business models in an increasingly competitive attention economy.