Akshay Kothari
Akshay Kothari
Akshay Kothari is an Indian tech entrepreneur and executive based in Bengaluru, India. He is currently the Head of LinkedIn India. Akshay is well known for co-founding and serving as the CEO of Pulse a news aggregation app that was acquired by Linkedin for $90 million in April, 2013.
Early Life
Akshay Kothari's grew up in a middle class family in Churu, India with his father working as a businessman. Akshay attended studied at St Xavier’s Loyola Hall in Ahmedabad until Class 12. Akshay always considered himself an average student and during a conversation outside of Linkedin's Mumbai office he had said, “I grew up in a middle-class family [in India]. I wasn’t the smartest kid in the school. In a class of 60 people, I was an average kid. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the experience of going to US, studying at Stanford, starting a company, selling it to LinkedIn. It was clearly not because I was the smartest guy. Deep down, I feel like I just got lucky."
Career
Akshay Kothari has been the Country Manager and Head of Product for LinkedIn India based out of Bengaluru, India since January, 2016. India is the company's second biggest market, with 42+ million members and 750+ employees. He is also currently an Advisory Board Member at his alma mater, Purdue University advising the university's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. [1]
From April, 2013 - Decemeber, 2015 Akshay worked as a Principal Product Manager at Linkedin in Mountain View, California after they acquired his news aggregation startup Pulse for $90 million in April, 2013. During this time he was the product lead for major content initiatives at Linkedin, including the LinkedIn Pulse app, LinkedIn Publishing Platform, the Linkedin Influencer program and Newsle. Akshay also led the integration of Pulse content into the LinkedIn product, across desktop, mobile and email, making Pulse one of the fastest growing consumer products inside LinkedIn. He grew the publishing platform at Linkedin from 1,000 writers to 1 million writers in a year, growing original posts published on the platform from 500/week to 150,000/week. He also sourced, evaluated and helped close the Newsle acquisition, which alerts members when their connections are in the news. [1]
In May, 2010, Akshay Kothari co-founded Pulse, an award winning news aggregation app for iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, that allowed users to easily access content from traditional news sources on blogs and social media with his close friend Ankit Gupta in San Francisco, California. They launched the app only a month after Apple Inc launched its iPad while there was very few apps in the device's app store. In a keynote speech Apple CEO Tim Cook called Pulse a a “wonderful Rss reader,” as he talked about the latest apps on the iPad. That week, the company made $120,000 selling the app for $3.99 a download. “That was our seed round in some ways. It became less of a class project and more of a company,” says Kothari. The company went on to raise $10 million in Series A funding in 2011. It grew over the next three years to 30 million users and 28 employees, adding nearly a million users per employee. In April, 2013, “The company was at a crossroads where it could have raised Series B or gotten acquired,” said Kothari. They decided to do the deal with LinkedIn for $90 million, which happened in four days including a weekend.
From June, 2007-May, 2008, Akshay Kothari was an Investment Analyst at SDL Ventures an investment firm based in Los Altos, California. The firm was founded by Dr. Donald R. Scifres, formerly the founder, CEO and Chairman of SDL, Inc., a NASDAQ 100 company. In this role, Akshay worked as a sole analyst, sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities. [1]
Akshay also has an experience of being a Summer Intern at Infosys in 2006 and at Lutron Electronics in 2005. [1]
Education
From 2008-2010 Akshay studied at Stanford University and graduated with M.S. in Electrical Engineering. [1] Prior to that, Akshay received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. [1]
Publications
Radiating sensor selection for distributed beamforming in wireless sensor networks, MILCOM, 2008. [1]