On the Contrary

About the author

Mahesh Murthy has 24 years of marketing and communications experience, of which 12 are in online marketing. After dropping out of college, Mahesh sold vacuum cleaners from door to door, worked in advertising with Grey in India and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, where he won notoriety and awards as a creative director on HP, Microsoft, The Economist, Pepsi and MTV - for whom he wrote and directed a spot voted “Asia’s best commercial of the decade”. He then moved to a Silicon Valley firm, CKS Partners (later, USWeb/CKS) as Creative Director, General Manager and Partner – where he helped create and launch the first commercial version of Yahoo in 1995 and the Earth’s Biggest Bookstore campaign for Amazon.com in 1997. After a successful NASDAQ IPO for CKS, Mahesh moved to head marketing at iCat, an e-commerce firm in Seattle subsequently acquired by Intel. Mahesh then returned to India to run Channel V, a rival to MTV, till its sale to Newscorp in 2000 and then founded Passionfund to invest in startups. Some of his investees include Geodesic (a 300-bagger), Compassbox – acquired by Careerlauncher, Cypherix, Indiaproperties and Webdunia. Mahesh penned a reasonably infamous column for India’s leading business magazines, Business Today and Businessworld, and played the Donald Trump-equivalent role in Business Baazigar, a game show similar to The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans. While running search marketing campaigns for his favourite charity in 2003, Mahesh believed there was a huge unmet need for a pay-for-performance online marketing company - and set up Pinstorm in Bombay. With over 110 people across 6 offices in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China and the US, Pinstorm is today among the world's leading digital marketing firms. Mahesh has a passion for early-stage investing and teamed up with Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob (ex-Infinity) in 2006 to set up Seedfund, which aims to be the leading early-stage venture capital fund in India.