Richard will Oversee Media Businesses in Times Group’s Growing International Portfolio
Times Bridge is Bennett Coleman’s international investments and partnerships division whose mission is to bring the world’s best ideas to India and India’s best insights to the world. Its existing portfolio of investments and partnerships include Airbnb, Coursera, Uber, Vice, HuffPost, Business Insider and other world-class media and technology products.
In his role with The Times Group, Thane will shape content strategy for Times Bridge’s media businesses, while also attracting more of the world’s leading storytellers to the Indian market.
“Thane’s record of entrepreneurship, creativity and storytelling, in the United States and India, is of an exceptional quality,” said Rishi Jaitly, CEO, Times Bridge. “I cannot think of a leader more well-suited to advancing our mission of bridging world-class media to, and within, India, setting new standards along the way.”
Thane Richard is a media entrepreneur and journalist with unique exposure to technology in both India and the United States. A graduate of Brown University, Thane began his career in India as a strategy manager at Mahindra and Mahindra where he independently launched “Tiffin Talk,” a news and current events podcast. He subsequently recruited some of India’s top journalists to pioneer more unique content across a wide range of contemporary Indian topics under the banner “Dabba Radio.” In 2014, he returned to India to cover the general election for Quartz while they opened their India division.
More recently, in the United States, Thane led marketing and then the editorial efforts of Chicago-based startup Outernet, which aims to broadcast free data from space to billions of people without Internet access. While there, he led one of the most successful hardware crowdfunding campaigns at the time and forged partnerships with leading global media and Internet companies.
After leaving Outernet in 2016, Thane, an avid coder, became the first Data Journalist in the Quicken Loans Family of Companies, building a significant portion of the data-processing logic for StockX. Thane is a passionate creator and has also founded a tactile-journalism start-up Jaunt, the Detroit chapter of the Awesome Foundation and education non-profit Project Empathy.
“The Times Group has had great success in building bridges to India for the world’s best media brands,” said Richard. “I intend to build on that success by honing the existing portfolio and expanding it to include more world-class ventures, all the while ensuring we are standard bearers of what it means to advance quality, reach and impact in the world’s largest democracy.”