Network18 appoints Flipkart's Manish Maheshwari as CEO of Web18

In a move to aggressively grow the Digital business, Network18 Group has roped in Manish Maheshwari as CEO of Web18. Maheshwari was previously the Head of Flipkart’s Seller Marketplace and Ecosystem.

Under the new mandate, Maheshwari will lead Network18’s digital and e-commerce assets. These include digital portals such as moneycontrol.com, ibnlive.com, in.com, firstpost.com and various other ideas that have been seeded in the network to help it grow as a leader in digital space.

Commenting on Maheshwari’s appointment, Adil Zainulbhai, 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.”

Network18 has been in an expansion mode with specific focus on digital content. The company has been aggressively hiring senior employees to strengthen its technology, product, sales and business development teams. As the CEO of Web18, Maheshwari’s immediate priorities will be to drive content, monetisation, new business, inorganic growth, and product portfolio management.

He can be credited with growing Flipkart’s marketplace by 10x: from 10,000 sellers in February 2015 to over 100,000 sellers in February 2016. Prior to that, 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.

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, Maheshwari previously worked at the New York office of management consulting firm 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.