Mahesh Murthy is an Indian marketer and investor specialising in early-stage startups. He is the founder and Chief executive officer of digital agency Pinstorm, and managing partner of early-stage fund Seedfund.
After dropping out of college, he worked as a vacuum cleaner salesman for Eureka Forbes and subsequently founded his first company, a cleaning service called Vaclean. He worked for FCB and Grey Advertising in India, where he won awards for work done on clients including Network copiers. He then moved to Ogilvy & Mather, Hong Kong where he worked for clients like Unilever, The Economist, HP, Microsoft, Pepsi, and MTV. In 1994, he directed a set of six films for MTV with Shashanka Ghosh, for which they won the New Directors Showcase award at the Cannes Lions. He then moved to CKS Partners, Portland where he most notably worked on Yahoo!, and on Amazon's 'Earth's Biggest Bookstore' campaign. He then went on to work in the e-commerce domain, as vice president of marketing for iCat, a publisher of e-commerce software that was acquired by Intel. Murthy then ran an Indian music television channel- Channel V – as acting GM for India, and was instrumental in repositioning it as a youth channel, and in launching its website, vindia.com. In 2000, Murthy founded angel fund Passionfund which funded companies such as Compassbox, Tulleeho, WebDunia, Geodesic, EBSDirect He founded digital marketing firm Pinstorm in 2004, and in 2006 co-founded early-stage fund Seedfund with Pravin Gandhi and Bharti Jacob which funded and advised companies such as Carwale, Voonik, RedBus, Chumbak, Done By None, MyDentist, Heckyl, and Edusports. Murthy was one of the Top Writers on Quora in 2014
Pinstorm
Pinstorm is a digital advertising firm headquartered in Mumbai, India with offices in New Delhi, Bangalore, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Zurich and Santa Clara. The company was founded by Mahesh Murthy who was also its COO until recently, and in 2005 stood amongst the "Asia's Top 100 Technology Companies" in first "Red Herring 100 Asia list" published by Red Herring magazine. In March 2008, Pinstorm announced a non-equity partnership with the Lintas Media Group in India. Pinstorm has similar relationships with other advertising agencies. Pinstorm is now known for its marketing efforts using Twitter and social media networks at the first 140Conf in New York City Murthy claims that Pinstorm was the world's first advertising firm to implement pay for performance advertising.
Opinions
Murthy has been an advocate for net neutrality in India, and also clashed with Marc Andreessen on the subject. Murthy has attacked the high salaries paid to executives of Indian online companies such as Flipkart, arguing that such practices encourage economic protectionism. In late 2017, the Mumbai police registered a case of sexual harassment against Murthy after India's National Commission of Women wrote to them about complaints they received from various women. Murthy has denied the allegations.
