Pinstorm has a mix of client service folks, strategists, copywriters, designers, programmers, and global support staff in Finance, Information Systems, People Care and Administration.

The firm was founded in 2004 by Mahesh Murthy, an advertising professional, marketer and investor with over 24 years of international brand-building experience.

Here are key members of the management team:

Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO, has 24 years of marketing and communications experience – of which over 14 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 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”. Mahesh then moved to a Silicon Valley firm, CKS Partners (later, USWeb/ CKS) as Creative Director 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 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. Among his investments were Geodesic, a mobile software firm with a 2008 market cap of over $500m; EBS Direct, a multinational loyalty and marketing services firm; Compassbox, acquired by CareerLauncher and WebDunia, India’s leading multilingual portal. Mahesh pens reasonably infamous columns across various business publications and has played the Donald Trump-equivalent role in an Indian rip-off of The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans. While running digital marketing campaigns for his favourite charity in late 2003, Mahesh saw an opportunity to change the basic business model in advertising and set up Pinstorm with a bunch of great people to do so. As the company has grown and better people than him - like others listed here - have come on board, his contribution to business is increasingly restricted to deciding whose lunch box to raid at the communal table. Mahesh co-founded his second fund, Seedfund in 2006 with the backing of investors like Google and Motorola to create and guide even more revolutionary companies.

Ansoo Gupta is the Global Head, Business at Pinstorm. Apart from picking up after Mahesh’s constant gaffes, her role is to help clients with creating and implementing their digital marketing strategies – and to keep them happy and smiling all the way to the bank, from across all of Pinstorm’s offices around the world. Ansoo has 14 years of experience across marketing and advertising sales in print, online and television media across India and South East Asia. Prior to joining Pinstorm, Ansoo worked with brands like The History Channel, National Geographic, Star TV, Channel V and First City Magazine. In fortunate contrast to her company’s founder, Ansoo is not just a graduate but also an MBA – and uses this as a trump card often to convincingly end – and win - debates with him. Ansoo is usually found glued to a phone, a laptop, an airplane seat, or all three. Her few moments away from these three crutches are marked with her interactions with her teams where, over time, the phrase “the fear of God” has slowly come to be displaced by the far more real and horrifying substitute: “the fear of Ansoo”.

Ratan Kanth is the Global Head, People, Process and Culture at Pinstorm. He further tilts the balance at Pinstorm towards the educated end of the scale, coming with a degree in engineering and a MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. Neither of this however comes in the way of his intense analysis of every single variable that can possibly improve the average satisfaction levels for each Pinstormer, much to the chagrin of his other partners, who try in vain to convince him of the importance of intangibles. In Ratan’s world, an intangible isn’t an intangible till it’s labelled and quantified, preferably on a spreadsheet, and to three decimal places. Ratan has inflicted his peculiar combination of microscopic attention to detail with infectious belly laughter for over 13 years now – across a range of positions, from pre-sales in a SAP company to offshore delivery center management, supervising over 700 people for Apple, Microsoft and Gateway. Ratan lives in a TLA world, where CMM, SOX, KRA and GAP combine with TLC and without CYA to create an environment where people love to work, hang out and be with each other, and in the process, creating and placing great advertising.

Sandesh Desai is the Global Head, Finance at Pinstorm. A Chartered Accountant by education and subsequent 20 years of experience, Sandy – as the girls affectionately call him – makes sure that the bets taken by the company on a daily basis end up paying off for both client and Pinstorm. Prior to mistakenly, as he claims, stumbling into the Pinstorm head office in 2005, Sandy ran his own accountancy practice – and prior to that, spent 5 years in mergers, acquisitions and corporate finance at a leading Indian media company. Sandy is an accomplished tabla player and this penchant for banging the heel of his palm repeatedly and rhythmically into stretched skin has curiously resulted in low levels of delayed payments by clients and other business partners.

Dr. V. Vinay is the Chief Technology Adviser to Pinstorm. A Ph.D. in Computer science with operations research as his focus, Vinay has spent 25 years doing some of the more inventive work in the Indian computer science ecosystem. Vinay co-invented the much-acclaimed Simputer, India’s first indigenously-produced hand-held computer and is also the Group Chief Technologist at Geodesic - a company Mahesh co-founded. Vinay spends his free time leading the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS), a body of top researchers from universities across India. His research interests are in algorithms, computational complexity and the art of writing ads like Neil French. Vinay moved to the world of business after stints on the faculty at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Yale and Rutgers. Prior to this, he was at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and with the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Vinay was one of the first winners of India’s top informatics prize, the Dewang Mehta award and has also won the Sir C. V. Raman award for excellence in science and engineering. Despite these somewhat abundant qualifications, he still seeks advice from random passers-by on how to justify his mad-scientist hair to his wife. She however remains unconvinced.