Naveen Tewari - InMobi The Next Decacorn

Halo Drop

On today’s episode we are super excited to chat to our mentor and inspiration, Naveen Tewari, the awe-inspiring Indian entrepreneur, founder and CEO of InMobi, a global provider of enterprise platforms for marketers.

“If you are somebody who is able to see the patterns, then you'll do well, by the way, but if you are able to actually break the pattern, then you’ll do exceptionally well.”

Naveen’s entrepreneurial journey is a notable one, having started his career as a business analyst with McKinsey and Company before studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was awarded the Dean's Award for exceptional leadership and contribution.

Along with Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta and Mohit Saxena, (‘The Boys with PowerPoint’), they started their first business, mKhoj, an SMS search engine, which failed shortly after launch. Undeterred, they pivoted the business, before pivot was even a term, to a mobile advertising and technology platform - InMobi.

“If you're not optimistic about it, there is no way it's going to happen. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we're trying to do things which most people when they would look at it say, ‘You're crazy to try and do this, and it's not going to happen’.”

From the personality traits of an entrepreneur and what it takes to have the tenacity to be successful, to how he remains optimistic and happy, and why his family thought he was crazy to launch a startup. The frameworks they used to pivot from mKhoj to InMobi, why he invests in his people, hiring internally 90% of the time to create a high performing culture, and his tips for other entrepreneurs looking to follow in his footsteps.

“The way I think about this is very simple. You know, if I'm going to spend the majority of my life working, I want to do that with people that I want to hang around with.”

This incredibly in depth episode is jam-packed full of insight from the Indian version of the PayPal mafia. Miss it at your peril.

On today’s podcast:

• How to stay optimistic
• Raising finance for InMobi
• Creating an environment of innovation
• The future of InMobi
• Why he’s not in the space race

Links:

• LinkedIn - Naveen Tewari
• InMobi
• Twitter - @NaveenTewari

Hosts Twitter
Vishal - https://twitter.com/vgurbuxani
Krishna - https://twitter.com/ksub15
Sunil - http://twitter.com/vermasun

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