Mahesh Murthy

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Mahesh Murthy

Mahesh is one of Asia's acknowledged marketing gurus. Born in Secunderabad, India on September 11, 1965, Mahesh grew up around India - his father was in the armed forces. Mahesh spent a year doing his B. Tech. at Osmania Universitry in Hyderabad before dropping out and working as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

He then moved to advertising as a copywriter, working with ASP and FCB Ulka in Hyderabad, Trikaya Grey in Bombay and Delhi and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, winning awards for his work on HP, Microsoft, Pepsi, The Economist and Unilever across Asia. His work for MTV won The Best Commercial of The Decade at the Asian Advertising Awards.

Mahesh moved in 1994 to a Silicon Valley firm, CKS Partners (later, USWeb/CKS), as Creative Director and Partner. He helped launch Yahoo in 1995 and Amazon.com in 1996. He worked on interactive marketing for Nike, Microsoft, MCI and Coca-cola.

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 returned to India in 1999 as the Country Head of Channel [v], a rival to MTV. This channel which was later acquired by Star TV, part of Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, in 2000.

Mahesh then founded Passionfund to invest in startups, and had a good record, backing Geodesic (which went public successfully), Compassbox (acquired by Careerlauncher), Indiaproperties (sold in a MBO), Webdunia, Cypherix, Tulleeho, EBS Worldwide and Pinstorm.

He also wrote columns in two of India's leadinng business magazines - Business Today and Business World for four years and lectures often at technology and business schools around India. [1]

Pinstorm is now among the world's bigger search engine marketing firms and Mahesh has also set up Seedfund along with two people from erstwhile Infinity Ventures to back early stage startups in India.

Mahesh has spoken at Internet World Chicago, CNET/LA and other net conferences and won the world’s top awards at Cannes and Promax.