Naveen Tewari - InMobi The Next Decacorn

**Naveen Tewari** (0:00)
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.

**Vishal Gurbuxani** (0:34)
Thank you for watching! What's going on? Welcome to Halo Drop. We're super excited. Krishna, Sunil and I are very excited today to have one of our special friends and a guest host who's taking India by storm by building the next multi, multi-quadrillion billion dollar holding company, which we're really excited about. So as everyone knows here, we started Halo Drop to go from always big ideas, bold ideas and go all the way down to what really makes an entrepreneur successful and what are some of the tips that an entrepreneur can share along the way. So before we get started, let me just kick off with a quick introduction on this provision on it we have to have Naveen here. So Naveen began with McKinsey & Company as a business analyst from 2000 to 2003 And then of course in 2004, he was an associate at Charles River Ventures. And then from 2003 to 2005, he studied at HBS, Harvard Business School, got a master's degree in a business administration MBA, where he was awarded with the Dean's Award, because of course, you know, it was very easy. And then he had exceptional leadership and his contribution also helped start a non-profit. And then in 2007, when Naveen started his entrepreneurial journey with.
Abhay, Amit and Mohith from a shared apartment in Mumbai, he's known as the boys with PowerPoint. So that's kind of the slogan. They started their first business, M-Coach as an SMS search engine, and then they've pivoted for their business before pivot was a word to mobile advertising technology platform called InMobi.
They moved their base from Bangalore to Silicon Valley, which is the Silicon Valley of India to be the hub of talent and technology. Softbank, Kleiner Perkins, and many other key investors helped really evaluate and bring up Naveen's dream from dreams to reality.
His philosophy of constant innovation and disruption is embedded deep into the DNA of InMobians and resonated across InMobi. His dream to reimagine advertising is truly user first and it locks the true potential of the mobile ecosystem.
Naveen is involved with fueling around 50 plus startups in India and has personally invested in several startups like Nest Away, Slide Rule, Money Sites, Bombay Canteen, Razorpay, Paydom, just to name a few. He believes and almost you can almost argue helps start the startup ecosystem in India, basically building the first unicorn before unicorns had a word. He also founded and started a US based non-profit called India School Fund, which I'd love to learn more about. And he helps set up schools in rural India. He's received several awards, I'll just name a few. He's Fortune 40 under 40 He's the Pathbreaker of the Year. He's one of Forbes India leadership. He's one of the 100 most creative people. He's probably the seventh most important person in the mobile power list. This is a while ago. Now he's probably the first.
He's also the mobile top 50 Welcome Naveen to the show.

**Naveen Tewari** (3:01)
Thank you so much, guys. And I have no idea who gave you all of this, but I'll look it up.
I can make some changes to this pretty quickly.
But thank you guys, Sunil, Krishna, Vishal. It's absolute honor and pleasure to be here at your show. And so good to connect with you guys. We've been, as we were chatting prior to your show, we've been going through our own entrepreneurial journeys together since we both, all of us started together many, many years ago. So glad to be here.

**Krishna Subramanian** (3:30)
Yeah, we're extremely excited to have you here and reconnect and maybe take a little time travel back and just sort of see how things have gone over the years and generally catch up.

**Vishal Gurbuxani** (3:42)
Awesome. The idea, Naveen, is we're going to kind of just ask you some questions, kind of go into some interesting things. Krishna, Sunil, we spent a lot of time looking at all these amazing interviews you already have and we kind of almost put them into themes.
So I think one is the theme you did around kind of beneath the surface, which I thought was really a really good reflection on some of the, almost the personality traits and what it takes to have the tenacity to be successful. And then we kind of went in through the, you know, that story you shared from failure to success and kind of dig deep into what were some of the big things that really made an impact.