Behind the scenes of InMobi’s journey to unicorn

This article is from an episode of Matrix Moments by Matrix Partners India, a podcast featuring candid conversations on what it really takes to survive the startup world. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here. 

Naveen Tiwari, co-founder and CEO of InMobi / Photo credit: InMobi

Naveen Tewari, co-founder and CEO of mobile advertising platform InMobi, unraveled the journey of building a unicorn. He talked about how the team expanded to international markets, what challenges they faced, and how to create a family-like work culture.

What are the highlights of InMobi’s early days?

InMobi started as mKhoj almost 11 years ago, and it was very lonely in the beginning. Nothing seemed to make sense. When you have very limited reasons to continue your quest and your rational mind won’t allow you to keep going, that’s when you want to give up. Personally, I wanted to give up many times.

When we were starting, I didn’t think the idea for mKhoj was big. So now I say that if you’re trying to start a tech company, remember that it’s going to be very tough. It’s not going to be easy, so go for something big instead of trying to do something small.

What are some lessons you learned from building a global company?

When we decided to go for an international market, it was more of a forced decision for us. Around 2010 or so, the digital markets in countries like India, and even in Asia, were relatively smaller. So, we were forced to figure out this problem, which seemed like a daunting task to begin with.

But I realized it wasn’t that hard. First, if you set your mind on a few markets, you can actually solve it. We had to figure out whether we need to change our go-to-market strategy or have a different tech or organizational strategy for each market.

Second, we never sent anybody from India to set up in those markets. We always hired a local person to lead the team. In some cases, it worked brilliantly. But when we got the wrong person, it failed miserably. We realized it had nothing do with the market or its size or anything like that. It just literally boiled down to the leader in the market.

Maybe we could’ve done a better job by sending a few people from India to the new markets to establish a strong connection back to the “mothership.” We didn’t do this then because we didn’t have enough people who could take on this kind of role. Or maybe we just didn’t get it. But things certainly worked out well in the end.

How did you build the culture at InMobi?

It wasn’t like this on day zero. There was a time when we realized we needed to be a different company.

In 2012 or 2013, we had a massive funding and we started growing fast. We were hiring people. Our team grew by about 40%, which isn’t bad, but our attrition rate was like 30% to 35%. Our company became like a revolving door.