Harshit Jain and the unfinished whiteboard

When Harshit Jain returned to his office in 2020, one of the first things he did was write on a whiteboard. After months of working from home, he wanted the familiar business of putting ideas somewhere other people could see them. He had boards in his discussion room and his own work area. A founder of an advertising technology company, surrounded by digital possibilities, had missed a surface and a pen.

“I have a habit of scribbling things,” he said. There is something pleasantly unceremonious about this. Company biographies tend to arrive wearing medals. Here was an explanation in shirtsleeves: he liked to write things down, in a room with people.

The detail offers a useful entrance to a career that can otherwise become a procession of titles. Jain is the founder and Global CEO of Doceree. Before that came leadership roles at McCann, international assignments and advertising awards. Alongside the company sit books, a video podcast and an expanding collection of public conversations about artificial intelligence. The whiteboard helps bring all that activity back to a person trying to work something out.

A career that refused to stay in one room

Jain’s move into advertising was a change of profession, accompanied by the familiar suspicion that a sensible career ought to proceed in a straight line. He has described encountering doubts about the decision. He also credits his parents with encouraging his ambition. Their support mattered because the move required him to exchange an established professional identity for work whose results he would have to demonstrate.

Advertising gave that decision a practical education. At McCann, he held roles including country head, marketing director and innovation lead, with experience spanning Asia, Europe and America. These were jobs in which creativity had to meet the demands of clients, colleagues and different markets. An interesting idea still needed a way to reach its audience.

There is a useful distinction between having an unusual background and knowing what to do with it. Jain’s account of his agency years repeatedly returns to observation: noticing a difficulty, asking why it persists, and trying a different approach. The job titles describe authority. The repeated emphasis on experimentation tells us more about how he wanted to use it.

His later leadership interviews keep that emphasis. He talks about listening to clients, encouraging calculated risks and giving teams room to experiment. These principles put a reasonable burden on the person making the statement: a team needs permission to revise an idea if experimentation is to mean anything.

A pencil, then a different brief

In 2017, the work received a conspicuous public marker. The Immunity Charm, a campaign Jain co-created at McCann, won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Good and a D&AD Black Pencil. The latter was the first Black Pencil for McCann Worldgroup India. For someone whose working life involved persuading others to try an idea, these were significant acknowledgments from the advertising profession.

The credits matter. The campaign was a collaboration, with Daniel Carucci named alongside Jain as a co-creator. The wider team included colleagues across McCann. Awards can make a career look solitary when their shorthand attaches a trophy to a single biography. The actual work, and the contemporary announcements celebrating it, have more people in the picture.

Success is never a solo effort; it requires teamwork.

Harshit Jain

Jain’s own explanation of team success is consistent with those shared credits. In an interview about his business, he stressed collaboration, open communication and the freedom to put ideas forward. It is an appealing philosophy for an advertiser. It is also a demanding one for a founder, who must decide which ideas receive time, people and money.

By 2020, Doceree had launched. The next brief involved building a business around advertising technology. A successful campaign could provide experience and credibility. The company would need an organization capable of continuing after the presentation ended.

The idea has to survive Monday

Doceree works in programmatic advertising, the automated buying and selling of digital advertising space. That places the business in a different relationship with an idea. A campaign may have a concentrated period of activity; a platform has to keep serving customers. Software, commercial relationships and everyday operations become part of the promise.

Jain’s remit grew accordingly. As founder and Global CEO, he describes responsibility for business growth, global operations and making good use of the people on his team. The language is less glamorous than an award announcement, but it gets closer to the work of running a company. Someone has to turn an ambition into decisions that colleagues can carry out.

The financing introduced another set of relationships. Investec advised on the transaction. The named investors brought the company into the familiar territory of growth capital: a business has persuaded people to finance its next stage, and now has to do the work that stage requires. The dollar amount records the transaction. It cannot do the operating.

Jain’s comments about hiring are more revealing than a headcount. He cautions against treating a larger workforce as the answer to scaling. His emphasis is on selecting people who share the purpose of the business. This makes recruitment part of the founder’s central argument: the problem must be clear enough for other people to choose to work on it.

His discussion of mistakes adds a welcome complication to the polished version of entrepreneurship. He describes stumbling, getting back up and learning again as things a business should accommodate. A whiteboard is useful for precisely that kind of work. You can cross something out without convening a ceremony.

The founder takes the other chair

Writing created another way for Jain to develop his argument. His first Next Marketing book appeared in 2022. In 2026, Entrepreneur Books listed The Next Marketing: From Molecule to Mindset. The format allows a longer explanation than a campaign or a product presentation. It asks the writer to give an idea sequence, definitions and enough substance for a reader to stay.

The newer book develops the idea of a nudge, a modest intervention that guides a decision while leaving the choice open. It brings behavioral economics into Jain’s discussion of marketing. That interest fits the larger question running through his work: how much depends on the circumstances in which a message arrives? A message can be carefully written and still ask too much of its audience. The book gives him space to examine the moment around the message, as well as the message itself.

The Next Marketing with HJ moves the exchange onto camera. By its second season, the series was working with Fierce Pharma. Guests included Mark Pappas, executive vice president of innovation at CMI Media Group, and Andrea Palmer, CEO of Publicis Health Media. These are conversations with people who have their own responsibilities, customers and opinions about what technology can accomplish.

The Pappas episode asked whether AI strategies were addressing real marketing problems or merely supplying the appearance of progress. That is a useful question for a founder to entertain in public. Once a technology becomes fashionable, a familiar vocabulary can make quite different ideas sound interchangeable. Asking about the actual work forces the conversation to become more specific.

The Palmer conversation returned to practical applications and what had changed in how organizations worked. Together, the episodes show the subject Jain wants to keep examining: the distance between a technological possibility and something useful enough to become part of a working day.

His public position has continued to develop. In an October 2026 Q&A, he argued for AI extending a sales team’s reach while people retain responsibility for relationships. The distinction gives his ambitions a human scale. Commercial work still contains trust, familiarity and judgment, even when more tasks can be automated.

Recognition has followed him into this phase too. Digiday named him Technology Founder of the Year in 2025. Set beside the advertising awards of 2017, the title describes a change in the kind of work being recognized. The interval contains a company launch, a book and the accumulation of operating responsibilities.

Room for one more idea

The public schedule can seem crowded: company leadership, writing, recording and speaking. Jain’s personal details provide a quieter measure of how he wants his time to feel. He has described weekend badminton with his son. It is a small, specific activity, with no obvious need for a business lesson attached.

When he spoke about returning to the office in 2020, he also described recovering a clearer boundary between work and home. Being near his family while working had not guaranteed time with them. A separate workplace gave the day a more definite division. The observation is ordinary, which is part of its value in a founder’s biography.

There is a temptation to read every early detail as preparation for the final title. Jain’s story is more interesting with the uncertainty left in. The decision to enter advertising came before its awards. The decision to launch Doceree came before its funding milestones. Writing and hosting required him to choose yet more ways of putting an idea before an audience.

The unfinished quality suits the whiteboard. It is a place for a thought that still needs testing, a question someone else may answer better, a plan that might need another line. Jain’s career has acquired plenty of finished objects: campaigns, books, recorded conversations. His description of how he likes to work leaves room for the next scribble.