Four decades. A slightly odd career.

Mahesh Murthy is a marketer, investor and businessman with an unusual range of experiences. He started by selling vacuum cleaners door to door in India, moved into advertising, and won Copywriter of the Year in India before an Ad of the Decade in Hong Kong and Best Young Ad Filmmaker at Cannes.

He then moved to a Silicon Valley firm, where he helped design the Yahoo.com directory and the first Amazon.com website. Along the way came campaigns for Pepsi and Nike across forty countries, a stint turning around MTV and Channel V in India, and two decades of building companies rather than only marketing them.

Pinstorm, set up in 2004, was among the first marketing firms to pay for its clients' media itself and only get paid when they grew. Seedfund, co-founded in 2006, backed redBus and CarWale. Satellize sent five satellites into orbit. Unstrat now works on defence and strategic procurement across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

He has written for the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWorld and Business Today, appeared as an investor on three television shows, visited 110-odd countries, and is currently based in the UAE.