MAM
All hands on deck as The Lifeboat sails into deeper waters in Season 3
MUMBAI: When success stories start sounding too polished, The Lifeboat prefers choppier seas. The long-form conversation podcast, ideated and hosted by Vinayak Burman, is returning for its third season on December 30, 2025, promising deeper dives into resilience, reinvention and the quiet moments that rarely make it to LinkedIn posts.
After strong engagement across its first two seasons, Season 3 widens the emotional lens. The new chapters move beyond career milestones to explore vulnerability, purpose and the internal recalibrations that shape founders, creators and leaders when the spotlight fades. The intent this time is intimacy over instruction, reflection over rhetoric.
The upcoming season features a diverse slate of voices spanning entrepreneurship, investing and creative industries. Among those stepping aboard are Karan Motwani, Gynoveda founders Rachana Gupta and Vishal Gupta, Neo Group founder and managing director Nitin Jain, and actor-turned-entrepreneur Pooja Bedi, alongside others. Each episode traces not just professional decisions but personal value systems, inflection points and moments of unlearning.
The Lifeboat first launched in November 2023 as a candid space for entrepreneurs and investors to speak plainly about the realities of building businesses. Season 1 featured founders such as Shashank Kumar of Dehaat, Vikas Lachhwani of mCaffeine, Josh Talks co-founders Supriya Paul and Shobhit Banga, Smriti Chandra of Abler Nordic India, and Kaushik Mukherjee of Sugar Cosmetics, with conversations centred on navigating early uncertainty and growth pressure.
Season 2 pushed the format further, shifting focus to leadership, communication, spirituality and personal evolution. Its guest list included Shweta Shalini, Priyavrata Mafatlal, Arjun Vaidya, Vineet Rai, Koreel Lahiri, Geetanjali Saxena, Aditya Hegde, Rohan More, Mrunalini Deshmukh and Avanne Dubash, signalling a move from boardroom lessons to inner work.
Burman says the third season raises the bar on honesty and depth, with more diverse perspectives and stories that feel less rehearsed and more lived-in. The aim, he notes, is not motivation-by-numbers but conversations that linger after the episode ends.
Season 3 of The Lifeboat will stream across Youtube and all major podcast platforms, inviting listeners once again to step away from smooth sailing and listen to what happens when the waters get real.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
