The Man Behind India's First Unicorn | Naveen Tewari of InMobi

**Naveen Tewari** (0:00)
People who have an insane ability to deal with pain is really important. I enjoy pain, I enjoy creation, I enjoy disrupting things. In all of this, the thing that I truly enjoy is making something really big. The effort required to build for a small market, like India, or the effort required to build for a global market, the delta between the two is very small. Everybody is expecting you to do the obvious. The game is all about not doing the obvious, but you got to play that game at that moment when you could clearly see it's not going to work out. So I had about four failed startups before InMobi, which was my minus one to nothing. Zero is an amazing place to be at, is what I would say.

**Prateek Mehta** (0:47)
Who we have on the stage today is Naveen, and he doesn't really need an introduction, right? But I usually do this, so I'll still go ahead and make one. Right? Of course, he's the eponymous entrepreneur who put India on the tech map, right? So India's first unicorn, of course, now with the Glance and Glance AI, and Ruposo and Nostra. He is, I think he built the first unicorn even before unicorn was a dinner table word, right? So, and before VCs or, and actually world building was not even part of the lexicon, right? And kind of set the way out there. And while in 2007, he was already pioneering mobile ads, and actually going up against Google at that point in time in some ways, right? There were, of course, millennial media and bunch of other guys. And today InMobi is profitable, seven years in counting and ten years in counting. I'm sorry. I think, you know what? I'm really sorry. You know what? My interns, I had like four interns working with me on this, which is Gemini, GROK, Mr. Claude and Ms. 4.0. But hard at work, we all, but still we got something wrong here, right? Naveen is an IT Kanpur and Howard Business School alum. He spends his time not only building companies, but also mentoring the next wave of founders, people who are set on transforming the economy, one big idea at a time.
You know what? When I asked 4.0, that what should be a title, right? 4.0, not 4.0, I think somebody will kill me for that, but maybe in this crowd only. But 4.0, what should be the title of this talk, right? And we typically do this as minus one to now, which is the reason why we call it minus one to Naveen. But 4 had a suggestion that it should be conviction before consensus, right? And I thought it was interesting. And maybe let's start off with personal convictions. And all of us are, while we all in this community, we are trying to figure out our own minus one to zeros. But original stories are almost always interesting. So maybe we can start off with a bit of original story. And maybe if you were to turn the clock back, and you can talk about what are the pivotal moments that influenced your value system in the way you think, and possibly got you to the point where we are today. It might be interesting to start off there.

**Naveen Tewari** (3:18)
Thank you for inviting. I think if, and when I started the company, if some such community existed, I would be so amazing.
Look, I started trying to do my startup in 2005 So, I had about four failed startups before InMobi, which was my minus one to nothing phase. Zero is an amazing place to be at, is what I would say firstly. So, if somebody gets to zero, that's why you should congratulate yourself that you have gotten to the zero, because that's zero, right? But I had minus one to nothing, bunch of those phases where, I thought I'd build on some very cool ideas. So, my first one, which I, it was a company called Vcube, okay? And it was a voiceover IP. So, I would take, my team would do all these codecs and they would build them. And the networks were not 3G then.
There was an era where the networks were not 3G. So, it was like 2G networks. This is the US, not India. In the US, 2G networks. So, I would take the, I would take my phone, which would be turning hot because this system was running on it. And I would walk, I would take my car and, you know, whatever, go down San Francisco roads and make phone calls. And I would sound weird on the other side all the time. So, I did this for almost nine months and I thought I had something very good. And then, you know, once we got the product to a certain stage, I went to, you know, some renowned people called the investors, right? So, I reached out to them and I said, hey, and I knew a lot of them because I used to work for a venture firm, right? So, I knew a lot of people. So, I reached out to them and, you know, they would all welcome me inside. And one of them kind of sat me down, heard my pitch, and then rammed me so hard, so hard that my co-founder quit end of that meeting. Okay. He quit at the end of that meeting. And I was like, damn. So, I, you know, I had, you know, I, you know, resilience, right? So, I kind of resisted for like a whole week. And I thought about what he told me. Like, he basically told me, Naveen, what your, and this is like tier one plus, plus, plus venture capitalists. So, they're supposed to be smart, right? So, they're basically telling me, Naveen, if you do really think Voice over IP would ever work in the world? I said, why not? Like, it's free call. And my reason of, by the way, being excited about this, I'll tell you, was because I would call India, like my parents and family, it was very costly. So, I was like, this is such a cool thing, I can call overseas like for free, right? So, that was the whole genesis. So, they basically said, hey, Voice over IP will never take off because the minute telcos and carriers, and everybody realizes that you're riding on their data pipe, they would build this themselves and they would kill you. Very logically, very logically. So, I gave up. I gave up. And my first lesson in life, which I learned much later, was that you got to have your own conviction, and you got to stay to it. Not that I, in hindsight, I worry about the fact because I think I did well, but that's not the point. I think the point is, I gave up because some idiot who was sitting on a porch just because he had a pile of money thought that my idea was bad. I think I should have taken his input and but stayed at it, because I worked on it for maybe a little less than 12 months, 9 months for sure, and I gave up. And I wouldn't say I regret it, but I just have this thing to say, I don't listen to people anymore. I don't. It's not, let me rephrase that. I don't get influenced by people easily. I hear what people say, I kind of put it in. But I think there is one thing I've built with that experience is, I have a very high level of conviction. And I back it.