Serial Entrepreneur

In 1983, Mahesh Murthy got his first job selling Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaners door-to-door in India. It was commission-only. He learned quickly that you do not sell a vacuum cleaner. You sell a cleaner home. That framing — focus on the outcome, not the product — has recurred in every company he has built since.

Advertising followed. Copywriter at ASP, then FCB/Ulka, then Grey, then Ogilvy & Mather. In 1992, he was managing MTV India as a country consultant and helping the channel figure out what Indian youth television should look like. From there, Hong Kong: managing Pepsi, Microsoft, and forty other brands across Asia Pacific for CKS Partners.

The mid-1990s took him to Silicon Valley, where he spent three years at the intersection of technology and brand. He worked on the early visual design of Yahoo! and helped launch Amazon.com. He ran early e-commerce for Bloomingdale's and 1-800-Flowers. None of these were household names at the time. The work was figuring out what digital brand building could mean.

India called again in 1999. He was hired to turn around a group of struggling youth television channels — MTV and Channel V. Channel V was running at 90% losses. Within two years, it was near-profitable. The method: stop trying to be everything to every young person, commit to a specific audience, and build programming around them.

Pinstorm came in 2004, born out of frustration with an advertising industry that charged clients for media regardless of results. The pay-for-performance model Mahesh built was, at the time, unusual. Pinstorm pays for the media itself; it only makes money when the client grows. That alignment has attracted clients — and kept them — for twenty years.

Meanwhile, Seedfund (2006) was backing the companies that would define India's first internet generation. And in 2015, Mahesh moved into space — co-founding what became Satellize, which put India's first private satellites into orbit in 2019.