Founders & Mantra Team

Founders

Uday Zokarkar (Founder & CEO)

 

Fascinated by Media and its characteristics, Uday Zokarkar has worked on the business side of media for almost 25 years. He founded Mantra Media Pvt. Ltd. in December of 2008 and since then the company has successfully worked on interesting and challenging assignments. Mantra Media was credited with conceptualizing and implementing India’s first virtual property fair for CREDAI (Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India, formerly PBAP) Pune. Mantra Media has been set up to help companies leverage from digital medium. The company works with its clients to reach out to their relevant target audiences and help them to monetize by way of designing and implementing effective and sustainable web strategies and online business models. The mantra of the company is to ‘co-create value on a sustainable basis and make a positive difference'.

 

Just before founding Mantra Media in December 2008, Uday worked with Consim Info Pvt. Ltd. (brands such as BharatMatrimony.com and Clickjobs.com) for three and half years. During his stint with the company and as a part of the senior management team, Consim went through two rounds of VC funding and secured almost USD 20 million from Yahoo Inc., Canaan Partners and Mayfield Inc. of USA. As the Business Head of BharatMatrimony.com, he aggressively worked on growing the revenues of the company at the rate of 100% plus on year on year basis. He spearheaded the project of BharatMatrimony Centers to setup 110 brick and mortar centers within a period of one year. He worked with the Founder & CEO of Consim on developing India and International markets and during this tenure, the company grew from less than 75 employees to about 900 plus.

 

Prior to joining BharatMatrimony, Uday worked in US market for about six years. In the US, he co-founded Mantram Magazine, a business technology and lifestyle magazine targeting South Asians in North America. Mantram eventually got acquired by SGA Media Inc. (a subsidiary of Network 18 Group of India). He worked with Late Mr. Gopal Raju (founder of India Abroad, Indian American Center for Political Awareness, IACPA), as COO of News India-Times Group. Uday took the challenge of reviving America’s first and only (then) 24/7 Indian American FM station WCNJ 89.3 FM branded as Dhoom FM 89.3.

 

During this time, Uday handled many independent projects like consulting Dish Network (part of EchoStar Communications Inc., a multi-billion dollar company) for their South Asian Channels, launch of Sun TV at New York on Dish Network.

 

He also acquired exclusive rights of advertising of the highly sensational India–Pakistan Cricket- Series for US market, when Team India visited Pakistan in the year 2004. He worked intensely with other media professionals to market Indian American ethnic market to the mainstream America. He was actively involved with the Indian American community for various causes and was part of Executive Committee of TiE tri-state NY-NJ-CT Chapter.

 

He has been interviewed by many leading media houses including TIME Magazine, USA,  for his expert knowledge in his domain.

 

Earlier, Uday worked with the Times of India Group (India’s largest media conglomerate) in M.P. Market as Response Head. He enjoys interacting with the management students and has been visiting various campuses like IIMA, MICA, BIMM-Pune to name a few. He was associated with Hindu’s Business Line Club, a forum that facilitates Industry – Institute interactions.

 

Uday’s learning has been that it’s the ‘People’ in any organization that make the difference. Competition can catch up with you in any area of business but the only differentiating factor is going to be the people, as competition cannot have same set of people.

 

 

Z. Santosh (Creative Head)

 

Senior Communications professional with over 20 years of experience in Integrated Marketing Communications, Corporate and Brand Reputation Management. With expertise in Advertising, Design, Branding and Positioning, Public Relations, Digital, Community and Stakeholder Management, Santosh enjoys diverse experience across Corporates, Industry Body, Media House, and Communication Consultancies.

 

 

Farhan Khan (Head-Technical & Indore Operations)

 

Farhan Khan, a software engineer enjoys qualitative experience of successfully completing many challenging projects for national as well as international clients. Farhan has acute business sense with expertise in PHP, Android, Java,  c,  c++,  Python basic. Farhan, a passionate and hard core coder,  has  an amazing sense of commitment of achieving targets within deadline. He is always eager to find solutions for the real world problems via technology. Farhan, a postgraduate in IT successfully heads Indore operations of Mantra Media.