The Story
CricHQ was a Wellington company building the leading cricket scoring and social platform — founded by Stephen Fleming and Brendon McCullum. You could score an entire match ball by ball: wagon wheels, pitch maps, commentary, full statistics.
They opened an engineering office in Chennai to push into the Indian market and chase the IPL. I joined on the first day, alongside my friend Karthik, and a year later was promoted to lead the iOS team.
Core Engineering Work
- 01Worked on CricEngine, the C++ core shared across iOS, Android, and backend — fine-tuning how cricketing events were injected and resolved into outcomes.
- 02Built the Duckworth–Lewis calculator from scratch, doing the mathematics for rain-affected target adjustments with the New Zealand team.
- 03Drew player profiles, pitch maps, and wagon wheels by hand with Core Graphics — custom statistics layouts, not stock charts.
- 04Built the social feed: following players, connecting with fans, activity streams across iPhone and iPad.
Analytics & Retention
The company's growth plan rested on landing the IPL contract through Fleming and McCullum's connections. It didn't come through, and the Chennai office was wound down not long after my promotion — a hard but formative first taste of a startup shutting down.
