Ashwin Navin
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Ashwin Navin is the President, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of BitTorrent, Inc. He joined Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, in 2004 and reportedly handles strategy, business and company-related matters while Cohen focuses on engineering and product development.
Prior to BitTorrent, Navin worked at Yahoo! from 2002 to 2004 in its Corporate Development group which handled corporate strategy and acquisitions. Before Yahoo!, Navin worked on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch both as an investment banker and research analyst.
In 2000, Navin helped start a technology-based financial services company called Epoch Partners. Epoch was essentially the investment banking arm of several online stock brokerages including Charles Schwab, Ameritrade, and TD Waterhouse. Epoch Partners was eventually acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2001.
Navin reportedly evaluated Cohen's invention for Yahoo! in 2004. Although it was an important development for the Web, BitTorrent was widely considered to be the bane of the film industry, because it made the Web cost effective for large file distribution -- in many cases BitTorrent was used for distribution of pirated movies and TV.
Cohen entrusted Navin with the responsibility of bringing BitTorrent out of the fringes and into the mainstream. Navin began by engaging movie industry executives directly. His strategy is apparently paying off, as the company recently announced a relationship with Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Lionsgate, Kadokawa Pictures, and others. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002464855 http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/003208.html
The company intends to open a video store featuring mainstream movies delivered with the BitTorrent protocol. http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=88843
