Manish Maheshwari is an Indian technology entrepreneur and executive. He is currently a Mason Fellow at Harvard University, focusing on public policy implications of AI.[1]
Maheshwari was elected to serve on the Governing Council of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). He additionally served on the Executive Council as a Treasurer, a role of significant national responsibility.[10]
After earning an MBA with honours from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, supported by a Ford Research Fellowship, Maheshwari briefly worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he advised the Government of India on higher education system reforms.
Maheshwari is a TEDx speaker, an active MENSA member, and a PADI-certified diver.[11]
Early life and education
Maheshwari went to Shri Ram College Commerce at the University of Delhi for undergraduate education. There, he served as editor for the college magazine. He won the student body elections and served as the president of the History & Political Science Society. He has also won the Principal Madan Mohan Medal.[12]
In 2004, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania accepted him into the two-year full-time MBA program. There he was elected co-president of the Asia Club, one of the largest student-run clubs on campus. During the summer break, he volunteered in East Timor under the Wharton International Volunteer Program.[13] He graduated with honours while also winning the Shils-Zeidman Award, the highest award for entrepreneurship at Wharton.[14]
After earning MBA at Wharton, he started at McKinsey & Company in New York, where he advised Fortune 500 companies on new market entry and growth strategies for emerging markets.[14][16] He then moved to the Bay Area to join Intuit, a consumer software company headquartered in Mountain View, California.[16] There he worked with Intuit's founder, Scott Cook and Intuit engineers, Manish Shah and Clinton Nielsen to explore a text-based mobile platform for information and news. In 2011, he, along with Scott Cook, Manish Shah and Clinton Nielsen, co-founded txtWeb, an app development platform for which they hold a patent issued by United States Patent & Trademark Office.[17][14]
At its peak, txtWeb had over 11 million users using one or more of the 3500 active apps built by developers and businesses.[18] It grew to 1 billion transactions by 2014.[19][20] It was recognised by GSMA as a global case study on empowerment through access to information.[21] It helped voters make an informed decision in the Indian general election in 2014.[22] txtWeb went on to win many innovation awards. Notable among them were mBillionth Award South Asia[23] and NASSCOM Innovation Award Runner-up in 2013.[24]India Today magazine recognised Maheshwari as one of India's top 10 innovators in the year 2014.[25] Snap's founder, Evan Spiegel, briefly worked as an intern on the txtWeb team.[26]
Maheshwari was then hired by Flipkart to set up and grow Seller Ecosystem for Flipkart's marketplace.[27][28] Under him, between February 2015 and February 2016, Flipkart's seller base grew tenfold.[29] He worked on making selling online a mass movement in India by training sellers in areas such as the functioning of the market place, cataloging, order management, promotion of products and providing quality service to customers.[30] He started initiatives such as ‘Flipkart Seller Campus’ and ‘Flipkart Helping Hands’ to empower and prepare small sellers during the peak festive demand season by creating a pool of trained manpower across the country who can be deployed under the plug-and-play model.[31] He also pioneered global brand licensing for Indian sellers.[32][33]
In April 2016, Maheshwari joined as the CEO of Network18 Digital to grow its online offerings which included Moneycontrol.com, Firstpost.com, News18.com, CricketNext.com, CNBC-TV18.com, Yatra.com, Homeshop18.com and BookMyShow.com.[14][34][35] He pushed the group beyond just web to encompass a gamut of digital services enabled by mobile, machine learning, programmatic ad buying, Augmented reality (AR), and Virtual reality (VR).[36] The group became the most visited and viewed media network on YouTube as per Vidooly's News Network Report for September to November 2017.[37] Moneycontrol also launched India's first smartwatch application to have voice search for stocks enabled on the Apple watch.[38] Maheshwari is credited with the regional expansion of the group through growth in 13 Indian languages resulting in a three-digit increase in traffic across platforms with corresponding growth in revenues.[36] He pioneered a subscription model for Moneycontrol wherein subscribers paid a small premium for business research and stock reports.[36] In two years after his joining, the company crossed the threshold of 100 million unique digital visitors per month with well-diversified revenues encompassing advertising, subscription, branded content, and syndications.[39]
In April 2019, Maheshwari joined as the head of Twitter's India business to oversee Twitter India's teams in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.[40][41] He worked with a cross-functional team amidst COVID-19-related operational challenges.[42] When the coronavirus pandemic ravaged India, Twitter became the virtual helpline to organise and manage relief operations across the country.[43] He pushed for localising the product for India and adding a preferred Indian language option on the platform, which helped algorithms surface content in that language to the user. Non-English tweets in India grew to 50% of overall tweets.[44] India became one of the fastest-growing audience markets for Twitter globally and saw its fastest revenue growth in India in five years.[44][45]
Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, Maheshwari has been vocal about his concerns with respect to significant layoffs in India, change in verification policy, and its detrimental impact on the two-sided network effect, which made Twitter influential in India.[46][47] He is an expert commentator on latest developments in the area of digital technology, digital content and social media. His articles are featured in leading publications and he is invited for interviews and panel discussions on technology trends by top media outlets such as CNBC, The Indian Express and The Economic Times.[48][49][50]
Maheshwari also co-founded Invact Metaversity, an edtech platform integrating education and the metaverse. The startup sought to innovate through the use of metaverse technology in education and related sectors. However, in mid-2022, irreconcilable differences emerged between the co-founders regarding the company's strategic direction—whether to focus on edtech or prioritize metaverse aspirations which culminated in Maheshwari stepping down as the CEO.[51]
In early 2023, Maheshwari came out of stealth mode with an AI-enabled copilot for creators, called Fanory.ai.[2] It enabled creators to generate incremental revenue in addition to what they can continue to earn via brand endorsements and advertising.[52] Fanory.ai received a majority investment from JetSynthesys and was backed by the family offices of cricketing legend, Sachin Tendulkar, Serum Institute of India's Adar Poonawalla and Infosys Co-founder, Kris Gopalakrishnan.[5][6] As part of the investment transaction, Maheshwari was appointed President of JetSynthesys.[53][54]
In 2024, Harvard University selected Maheshwari for Mason Fellowship to research AI’s role in empowering individuals and improving the financial security of marginalized creators.[55][1]
Notable Event
In May 2022, Maheshwari publicly acknowledged through a series a tweets that the Metaverse education platform that Invact Metaversity was building has failed to deliver a significantly differentiated learning experience for students.[56] He admitted that the vision to use the Metaverse to make education accessible and interactive for students was not getting delivered at a level it was envisaged and therefore the Metaverse-based course would be cancelled and any fees paid by students shall be refunded along with interest and unqualified apology.[57] This received widespread media coverage in India given Maheshwari’s stature and unusually transparent nature of this public admission of Metaversity's failure.[58][59]
After this admission, news outlets reported disagreements within the organization about the future direction — whether to focus on edtech or prioritize the Metaverse aspirations.[51] Invact also explored sale option but could not find a buyer.[56] The Metaverse-MBA course was cancelled.[60][61]
Maheshwari's decision to cancel the Metaverse-based course citing technology and ecosystem challenges while solving accessibility on devices currently used by students proved to be prescient.[56][57]Metaverse failed to take off globally because of issues related to technical feasibility and poor user adoption.[62][63]VR headsets were expensive, limiting adoption. The Quest Pro, for example, launched at $1,500, making it inaccessible to average student.[64] A truly immersive Metaverse required high-speed internet, powerful computing, and better user interfaces—all of which were still evolving.[65]Meta, the biggest proponent of Metaverse, also quietly deprioritized the Metaverse as Horizon Worlds, Meta's flagship metaverse platform, reportedly had fewer than 200,000 monthly active users in late 2022, a small fraction of Meta's total user base.[66][67]
↑ US 8566408,Shah, Manish R.; Nielsen, Clinton& Maheshwari, Manishet al.,"Method and system for providing a stateful experience while accessing content using a global textsite platform",published 2013-10-22, assigned to Intuit Inc.
1 2 3 "BUILDING NETWORK18 DIGITAL IN 18 MONTHS". Impact is weekly print magazine publishing information on Advertising and Ad Marketing news specifically targeted towards Agency & Business Managers. Retrieved November 26, 2022.
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