

BitTorrent Inc. is the firm responsible for the peer-to-peer protocol notorious for helping people illegally download music and movies. Since 2004, when it was launched, the hero of Internet pirates who made copyright lawyers froth at their mouths is Ashwin Navin, co-founder and, till recently, president of BitTorrent. Ashwin, who describes himself as an “entrepreneur, investor, operator, dealmaker, dog lover, family guy, traveller and collector of life experiences”, graduated from Claremont McKenna College, California, in 1999. Since then, he’s worked as an investment banker and a research analyst at Goldman Sachs & Merill Lynch, before joining Yahoo in 2002. In 2004, he joined Bram Cohen to co-found BitTorrent. While Bram wrote the P2P protocol, Ashwin handled its finances, and brought BitTorrent into the mainstream by formulating a good business model. He was behind the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, that brought Hollywood studios on-board. Ashwin is now working on his new venture ‘Flingo’, an Internet TV service.