Mahesh Murthy
Founder,
Pinstorm

Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO Pinstorm Technologies, has 20 years of marketing and communications experience - of which over 10 years are in online marketing. After dropping out of college, Mahesh sold vacuum cleaners from door to door and then found a home in advertising with Grey in India and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, where he won international notoriety and awards as a creative director on HP, Microsoft, Unilever, 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 eventually, 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, which was 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 and guide startups. Some of his investees include Geodesic, Compassbox - merged into Careerlauncher, Cypherix, Indiaproperties and Webdunia. Mahesh penned a reasonably infamous column for India's leading business magazines, Business Today and Businessworld, and is playing the Donald Trump-equivalent role in an Indian rip-off of The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans.

While running search marketing campaigns for his favourite charity in late 2003, Mahesh believed there was need to solve some big issues around technology and business models - and set up Pinstorm with a bunch of great people to do so. His sole value-addition to the business these days is to decide what music plays in the hall around lunchtime.