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Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari
Description
Most founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two.
InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no.
Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again.
Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US.
The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago.
If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you.
00:00 - Trailer
00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder
03:26 - How co-founders met and came together
11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi
15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption?
16:12 - Expanding globally before the US
18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market?
20:53 - What is Glance?
23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years
25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public?
29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi
32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills
38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round
43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C
45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa
53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India
54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C
58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance
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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.