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- 🤯 The China’s Netflix of Sports Died
🤯 The China’s Netflix of Sports Died
How LeSports went from $3.5B to $0 (hijacked by its parent company politics)
Admond Lee
June 15, 2025
Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.
Today’s story is about how a China’s largest sport streaming platform died because the core business got hijacked by parent company politics. Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → LeSports
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Spent too much, grew too fast
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Never let your core business get hijacked by parent company politics
🔗 The Runway Insights → Jenni AI: How to get your first customer (and millions more
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Sleek raises $23M (Series B) to expand digital corporate service
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☠️ 1 Failed Startup: LeSports
🚀 The Rise of LeSports
🇨🇳 Founded by Lei Zhenjian in March 2014, LeSports was a spin-off under LeTV as a sports streaming platform (like its own TV channel) with ambitions to be a complete sports ecosystem.
The Problem — 🥵 Back then, finding live streams of top leagues was a nightmare — fragmented, low-quality, or just illegal.
Chinese sports fans were stuck with limited options for watching international sports, poor streaming quality, and fragmented services.
There wasn’t a centralised place for premium sports content and related services, including ticketing, gaming, e‑commerce, even sports betting and gadgets.
The Solution — 📺 LeSports provided a sports streaming platform as a one-stop shop for live games.
It combined event operations, streaming content, smart devices, and internet services all under one roof.
Think of it as the Netflix, ESPN, and Apple of sports all rolled into one.
🇨🇳 Lei's vision was ambitious:
From viewers to users, from free to paid, from passive to interactive, and from single events to the full ecological sporting experience.
 LeSports acquired the online multimedia rights to the Chinese Super League (CSL) soccer division | ⚽️🏀🏓🥎🏐🏸🏄🏻♂️🥋 Thanks to that vision, LeSports quickly took off. 💰 By May 2015, LeSports raised over $123 million (Series A) — just over 1 year after founding. Not just that, it snapped up massive media deals — exclusive rights for over 200 sports events (some 10,000 matches) including top leagues like the NBA, Chinese Super League (CSL) and UEFA Champions League. |
LeSports would accelerate the development of its sports ecosystem by leveraging content and growing its user base.
🌟 High-profile partnerships piled up.
In early 2016, LeSports became Major League Baseball’s official Chinese partner, livestreaming 125 MLB games per season to China.
💰 By April 2016, LeSports pulled off what seemed impossible at the time by raising $1.2 billion (Series B). This wasn't just big money — this was record-breaking money. According to the announcement, this was "the biggest amount ever raised by an internet-based sports firm".
This round vaulted LeSports’ valuation into the multi‐billion‐dollar range and drew envy around the internet. Investors as big as HNA Capital and Chinese celebrities piled in.
🤯 By early 2017, their valuation had reached an astronomical $3.5 billion. Lei Zhenjian was being hailed as a visionary, and LeSports looked unstoppable.
📉 The Fall of LeSports
Well… Behind the scenes, LeSports’s spending was also unstoppable. It was bleeding like crazy after bidding huge sums for sports rights and racing to expand internationally.
💸 They overpaid for leagues (like $100M+ for Chinese Super League rights), betting ad revenue would cover costs.
It didn’t.
Worse, parent company LeEco imploded in 2016, dragging down all its subsidiaries, including LeSports.
📌 Here’s what happened to LeSports:
⚽️ 🏀🏓 The Sporty Days
Mar 2014 — LeSports was founded by Lei Zhenjian as the sports arm of LeTV (rebranded to LeEco later).
Jia Yueting was the founder and controlling shareholder of LeTV/LeEco.
2015
May — Raised a $123 million (Series A).
Aug — Rolled out its first smart fitness device (“Super Bike”) and inked major media deals. By late 2015, it had rights to ~200 events (10,000 matches).
2016
Jan — LeSports became MLB’s China streaming partner, broadcasting 125 MLB games per season to China.
Also, LeTV officially rebranded to LeEco around this time.
Apr — Raised $1.2 billion (Series B).
Launched paid membership service targeting premium sports content.
🥊 When Reality Hit Hard
Nov 2016 — 🚨 Suddenly, Jia (LeEco’s CEO) issued a letter warning of LeEco’s “big company disease” after over-expanding.
He announced cost cuts and lay-offs to stabilise finances.
🤯 In fact, insiders later revealed that ~50% of LeSports’ $1.2 billion 2016 funding was quietly diverted to shore up LeEco’s other units (wait, what?).
In practice, much of LeSports’ war chest fuelled LeEco’s other dreams (smartphones, EVs, movies, etc.) rather than profitable growth.
In short, LeSports money was bailing out its parent.
2017
Feb — Asian Football Confederation (AFC) terminated LeSports’ 4-year AFC Champions League deal (2017–2020) for non-payment.
⚠️ This was LeSports’ first major rights reversal.
LeSports sheepishly apologised on social media and promised refunds to angry subscribers.
May — LeSports’s livestream of Champions League (UEFA) soccer game match mysteriously blacked out due to a missed satellite transmission fee.
Industry watchers confirmed it also defaulted on multiple sports (AFC, ATP, CSL, etc.).
🤬 Angry customers filed complaints about service glitches, and creditors began circling.
May — Reuters reported LeSports valued at $3.5 billion (peak valuation) after a new funding round, even as LeEco restructured to cover a cash crunch.
Dec — 👋🏻 Making matters worse, Jia Yueting (the founder and controlling shareholder of LeEco) fled to California to promote his EV venture and never returned to China, despite court orders to do so.
This left LeSports essentially orphaned and without the financial backing it desperately needed.
Mar 2018 — 🚨 LeSports’ Hong Kong streaming subsidiary abruptly shut down over unpaid rent, amid complaints and a winding-up petition.
31 Dec 2018 — ‼️ Failed to meet IPO deadline as agreed with Series B investors.
The funding agreement included a clause that if LeSports couldn't list by that date, the original shareholders (including LeTV and Jia's companies) had to buy back all investor shares in cash at the agreed price within 2 months.
2019 — 👨🏻⚖️ Investors filed arbitration cases demanding share buybacks worth up to 11 billion yuan ($1.6 billion).
But by then, LeTV was claiming that Jia Yueting's personal actions shouldn't saddle them with this massive buyback obligation.
LeSports was effectively defunct.
LeSports was essentially paralysed. With no hope of going public, massive debt obligations, and a parent company in financial free fall.
💔 The dream was over.
You know what’s the saddest thing?
🤦🏻♂️ LeSports's downfall wasn't due to a bad product or lack of market demand – Chinese audiences genuinely wanted what LeSports was offering. Instead, it was killed by:
Financial mismanagement
Overspending on content rights they couldn't afford
Catastrophic collapse of their parent company LeEco
🚢 When Jia Yueting abandoned the ship and fled to the US, he left behind a trail of unpaid obligations that ultimately buried LeSports.
It's a sobering reminder that in the startup world, having a great vision and raising massive funding doesn't guarantee success. Sometimes, the very ambition that makes you soar is what brings you crashing down.
Be ambitious, stay grounded and frugal, my friend.
Want to learn more about LeSports’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
LeSports Founder (Lei Zhenjian)
Mistake 1: Spent too much, grew too fast
🔥 LeSports went all-in on acquiring exclusive rights to major sports leagues — spending hundreds of millions before they even figured out how to monetise it sustainably. They were betting future ad dollars and subscriptions would just magically show up.
The result? They locked themselves into massive fixed costs with no clear path to break even.
📺 When they couldn’t pay, leagues pulled the plug, and users were left with blank screens.
😬 LeSports tried to do everything at once — streaming, event management, smart hardware, even electric cars via its parent LeEco — trying to become the “Apple of China”.
Instead of dominating one niche, they spread themselves thin, lost focus, and couldn’t execute well in any domain. Their expansion into unrelated businesses drained resources and attention, making them vulnerable when things got tough.
Mistake 2: Financial mismanagement
🤑 LeSports was a subsidiary of LeEco, whose CEO Jia Yueting had his hands in everything — from electric vehicles to smartphones to movies. At one point, Over half of their $1.2B Series B funding was siphoned off to bail out other LeEco ventures.
When LeEco imploded, LeSports lost its financial lifeline and was left to drown in debt and lawsuits.
Sadly to say that but it seems like LeSports was just a side character in someone else’s chaos.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Know your unit economics before going big
LeSports made the classic “scale first, monetise later” mistake — which works for software, but not for content-heavy businesses like sports streaming.
They paid $100M+ for CSL rights, then defaulted on payments to AFC, UEFA, and ATP.
Why? Because they had no sustainable model behind the paywall.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
☝🏻 Know your numbers before scaling
Don’t buy that next big content deal, marketing campaign, or product launch until you know you’re making money (or at least breaking even) on each new customer.
Compare that to a more calculated competitor like Tencent Sports.
Tencent didn’t try to outbid everyone in every league. They focused on smart partnerships (like with the NBA) and monetised through WeChat ecosystem integrations, mini programs, and community engagement — lower CAC, smarter monetisation.
Before you go big, get granular. Know your unit economics down to the last dollar. Only then can you scale with confidence, outlast your rivals, and avoid the fate of LeSports.
💵 Run a breakeven model before spending big
Map out:
CAC (How much it costs to acquire 1 paying customer)
LTV (How much that customer is worth over their lifetime)
Gross Margin (After cost of delivery and content)
If LTV < CAC, stop scaling. Optimise first.
Lesson 2: Never let your core business get hijacked by parent company politics
♟️ LeSports didn’t implode because of the product or market. It died because it was a pawn in a larger empire’s collapse.
LeEco’s founder Jia Yueting was running around chasing his EV fantasy in the US, while LeSports defaulted on vendor payments back home.
🤷🏻♂️ Half the funds raised by LeSports were misused to support unrelated ventures. When things got ugly, LeSports had no independence to pivot or defend itself.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
📝 Negotiate terms that protect autonomy
When joining a parent company, negotiate protections:
Right to veto fund reallocations
Board seat guarantees
Carve-outs in shareholder agreements for critical IP or revenue streams
This isn’t just legal stuff — it’s startup survival insurance.
🤝🏻 Keep financial firewalls between business units
Make sure capital is clearly allocated. Don’t rob Product A to fund Product B.
If you’re a subsidiary, insist on transparency:
Separate bank accounts and financial reporting
Budget independence
The right to make key business decisions — especially around spending, hiring, and strategic direction
Clear terms for inter-company loans or resource sharing
Lesson 3: Compete smart, build moats
At its peak, LeSports had the NBA, UEFA, CSL, and MLB rights. That’s an insane portfolio.
LeSports tried to outspend all of them without building a defensible moat. No strong tech layer, no unique distribution channel, no fan community platform.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
📺 Leverage data and create switching costs
Make it painful for users to leave.
Collect user data ethically and use it to serve ultra-personalised experiences.
This could be through personalised recommendations, watch history, social features, or exclusive content that’s unique to your platform (like original shows, behind-the-scenes footage, or interactive experiences).
For example, Netflix’s recommendation engine and originals keep people hooked, even as competitors emerge.
💟 Build community and engagement
Sports fans love to talk, argue, and share.
Give them forums, chat, fantasy leagues, or live polls.
The more users invest in your platform (friends, stats, achievements), the less likely they are to leave.
FuboTV and Twitch have built strong communities around live content, not just the content itself. That’s how they win.
🔗 The Runway Insights
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
Sleek raises $23M (Series B) to expand digital corporate service (Link)
Clean Kinetics raises $3.34M to deploy more renewable energy projects in SEA and the Middle East (Link)
bolttech, the fast-growing global insurtech, bags $147M (Series C) to drive continued expansion (Link)
Atome secures $75M facility to expand BNPL reach in Philippines (Link)
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That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
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