Announcing the appointment, Adil Zainul bhai, Chairman, Network18 Group, said, “Manish brings with him a good mix of Silicon Valley tech product culture and an understanding of ground realities of India. Both these qualities will be crucial as we take Network18 to the next level of digital transformation. He has a proven track record of taking up projects and achieving a scale of tens of millions, building cross-functional teams that deliver in large setting with an unflinching focus on customer experience.”
Prior to this, Maheshwari was previously head of Flipkart’s Seller Marketplace and Ecosystem. As CEO of Web18, Maheshwari’s immediate priorities will be to drive content, monetization, new business, inorganic growth, and product portfolio management.
Earlier, he Co-Founded txtWeb and grew it from scratch to become the world’s largest marketplace for text-based apps with over 16 million mobile users in India alone. Prior to txtWeb, he was the Head of New Markets, Global Business Division at Intuit, a NASDAQ-listed technology company, the world’s leading provider of personal finance software products such as TurboTax, Quicken and Mint.com.
Maheshwari relocated from California to India in 2011 when txtWeb, which he co-founded while in the Bay Area, started taking off in hundreds of tier 2 and tier 3 towns across India. A Wharton MBA graduate, he previously worked at the New York office of McKinsey, where he advised Fortune 500 companies on new market entry and growth strategy in technology, e-commerce and consumer spaces.
In the early part of his career, he worked at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in India, starting his career in Mumbai and then taking on Asia-Pacific roles in the Philippines, China and Singapore.
