Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari

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
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.

This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?

We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You were the first unicorn from India.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

It hit me. The world's best venture capitalist. Just under this. I walk into second meeting with China and round. 15 minutes into it is like, we are willing to give you 7 million dollars. I have 20,000 in my bank account. I am multiplying the 7 million to come up with what that does really mean.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

That soft bank round happened. They put in 200 million dollars.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I want to build one of the largest advertising platforms. Masa is listening, listening, listening, listening. And then he's like, how much do you want? Now I had come prepared with everything to say $50 million. Because I had a $40 million term sheet, $50 looks good. I said $250. Mohita was sitting there was completely ghost bizarre. Masa negotiates a little bit and says I'll put in $200. That was it.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Hi Naveen, welcome to the Nuan Show. I'm so excited to have you with me today. And as I told you that you have been one of our dream guests since we started in 2018. Every year I would message you. So it feels so nice to be sitting here.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

I am so excited to be here, I must tell you. Um very happy to be here and congratulations on all the success. Your podcast is doing really well. Very big. Very excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Thank you so much. And you have an amazing journey. Started with Mcoach, then pivoted to uh In Mobi, built glance, raised from Soft Uh SoftBank, then raised from Reliance Geo. So very excited to cover all of that in today's conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

So we'll start with your origin, uh, the original journey, like four guys from IIT Kanpur, uh sitting in uh one bedroom house in Mumbai, building Mkoj. Like how it all started, what made you, you know, start?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I don't know what made me start or made all of us start. I I think the reason why you start is not a logical reason. You don't do entrepreneurship because like it fits a logic. It it is an illogical choice. Like you built your own company, like there is no logic to you built a podcast. There's no logic to this, right? There's no logic to like doing things that are not so easy to do, right? And so it's very hard to know why one does what one one of the way. And so you just go for it. And the way I think about this is there was that moment in our life when we just went for it. And I think of it as saying we are still going for it. Because just going for it may not seem logical, but it is exciting. And I think that excitement is what one looks for. You only are going to live once. You know, live it to the fullest of whatever you want to do. And I say this uh today because I can say it.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

And it sounds like, oh my god, it's very profound. But it's that's not the point. The point is you have to the maybe the point I'm trying to drive is when you start doing it, you know, it becomes like a nasha. And then you keep doing it.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Yeah, one's an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Well, it's very hard not to be one, right? Because it's it is fun.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

And how did you convince the other three of them to join with you?

SPEAKER_00 3:27

I think convincing is not the right way to say it. I I think everyone was already either on the edge or somewhat trying to figure it out in their own little ways. We just came together, right? That's the better way to say it. Um, everyone was excited about doing something. And you know, what happens again in the in the journey of entrepreneurship, it's it's like like everybody's looking for some support. So it's like a lot of things. So then you kind of start to come together, and Hindi. No. So I you know, so anyway, so you know, Sapku Darlaktai, otherwise make we came together, we all knew each other very well. So we came together. Uh, and it's been a journey of a lifetime together. We have fought, we have worked together, we have laughed, we have had highs, we have had lows, you know, and in the early days, the high and the low and the sadness and the fights and the happiness is all of that in a day. But you know, in the early days, it's all in a day. So I'm so glad that we came together. Again, serendipity plays a big role in why you come together. In you know, one of my founders, um Mohit, he was living in the Bay Area, and I said, Yeah, Ajao.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

And I'm like, solid conviction.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Can you imagine? And then I got worried.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

But idea discuss time.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

He did not care about the idea. He did not care about anything.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

And what was he doing?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

He was working for I think uh Virgin Mobile, uh, you know, one of the carriers. And you're you're sitting there, you're like, shit. Because now, you know, and they say this is getting real.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Because, you know, and these are just examples of uh, you know, why you come together. The the core of that was not, oh, he has a different skill set and somebody else's, it's trust. And that, you know, that is how these things come together. It's like, yeah, you know, I trust you, I think, you know, I trust you, you trust me, I think we'll have some fun. I, you know, I and I say this today in hindsight. Yeah, you know, in that moment, the the feeling is very different.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Um, but what drove drove you at that point in time?

SPEAKER_00 6:23

What drove me?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Like, why would I why would I do it? Now you know, and like we are second-time founders that first time they did it for money, uh want to do something big in life, second time they do it for purpose. Like now, looking back, what do you think? Why did you do it?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Very hard to know why you did it, okay? Part of it is you know, I was I for a brief period of time, I was a venture capitalist. And so, and I was just, you know, in college, uh, in business school, and I, you know, and I would go and meet founders. And actually, I was an intern uh at one of the you know tier one venture capital firms. So I would go meet these founders, and uh I realized that there are uh there are two things that happening. One is like they're really thinking about the world differently, not in a straight linear fashion, they had non-linearity in their thought that was very exciting, and nobody knew whether it was true or untrue, whether it's gonna happen or not, but it felt like that set of people for some reason had gotten themselves the license to dream crazily. And I say, I also want that license. What is this linear, you know, what is this? And on the other side, I'm not listening to their pictures, right? I'm listening to them speak because you know, apparently I have money to give them, right, as a venture capitalist. And they are they are, you know, for all the goodness in their hearts, they're asking me, hey, how do you think about doing this? How do you, and I have no answer. I have bookish answers because I've read some books, right? Right. So I can give them some bookish garbage that I'm trying to give them. And I'm like, I'm finding myself very shallow, right? And you realize that I cannot be a, I cannot be, I have to do this. If ever I have to be here, which is not to say that I wanted to be a VC, but it's like that is what I want to do. I want to have a you know, a playground that has no limits. That has no limits. I didn't have the notion of what no limits means then. Okay, I felt the notion of no limit is slightly better than what you have at a corporate environment. Yeah, but I think the beauty of entrepreneurship is the ability to redefine no limits again and again and again in their own context. Absolutely. And I believe this ability to have no limits is what entrepreneurship is about. It's the journey of entrepreneurship. Why you keep pick why does one remain doing more and more and more as an entrepreneur? Is because what they're effectively doing is they're redefining the no limits limit. They're redefining no limits, and you kind of keep going for it, and at some point you're like, oh, wait, I can even go for that. Uh what is the worst that's gonna happen? I'm just not gonna get there. But at least I have the freedom to go for it, and I think that freedom that no limits got me excited.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

And I said, It was so difficult to do that in your early 20s.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I I don't know what one had to lose. Well, I'll tell you one other thing, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the entrepreneurs are out there. The if you're very logical about things, you're not an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

If you are like one of those who's, you know, doing the SWOT analysis, or doing a two by two and you know, and analyzing and paralyzing, you're not an entrepreneur. Because an entrepreneur is effectively looking at an opportunity, not with the probability of conversion. An entrepreneur looks at the at the possibility of a conversion. If the possibility exists, he'll go for it. And that is the whole difference between an entrepreneur mindset or an entrepreneur and not an entrepreneur. It's the probability to the possibility. And I believe I look for people who go after the possibility. You know, I can hang around with few folks who deal with probability, but I don't enjoy it. Possibility is what you need in people around you because that redefines limits.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

So your friend came from US and then you started working on M Code. Can you just talk about more about uh Mcode and how you pivoted from M Code to NMovie then? What all happened?

SPEAKER_00 11:38

You know, in India those days, the you know, the our belief was that um a wrong belief, but the belief was that you know a lot of communication of our country will actually extend on the uh SMS rails. And the reason for that was well, it's well, okay, let me step back. The belief that was correct for us was that a lot of consumption or communication will happen on the mobile rails. Okay. The incorrect one was that it will happen on the SMS rails. And so we went down the path of saying, okay, let's build a system that in fact makes the SMS communication layer free for users. Because in those days, 2007-2008, SMS had a cost attached to it. So we said, what if we are able to subsidize the cost of communication of SMS, there will be more communication. What we realized very, very quickly, which is not so hard, that that's not a very effective communication rail. And trying to make it more uh threaded so that it can be longer and everything, is not something that the carriers really control. And so that was one thing where we realized you know it's not really the the rails to go after. But then we realized that wait a second, because iPhone had just come out, we were able to bet on a belief that internet communication consumption will slowly shift on mobile platform and beyond the rails of SMS. The assumption at that point of time was that it will happen mostly in Asian markets because the US already has a much more powerful uh platform of uh you know personal computing. And so, therefore, there is no reason for mobile computation to you know kind of overtake the the PC communication, uh uh the PC platforms. And so, therefore, we started in India, by the way, and we said, okay, this is the place to build this because what is what were we effectively trying to do? We effectively, when you build an advertising platform, you're effectively making a medium free.

unknown 14:05

Right?

SPEAKER_00 14:05

That's like how do you bring something into the hands of the pop at population scale is when you make that close to being free. And so there, that was that is that has been our purpose is to make pick a medium and make it available to the population. Of course, we were partly wrong in our assumption to say we were right in the assumption that mobile will kind of be a big one. Yeah, we were wrong that it'll only be Asia, and therefore, we expanded ourselves to not just be an India and an Asia company, but a global company. And of course, we know we today know where it is, and so therefore, our purpose has always been as an advertising platform to pick a medium that we think should go after, that that we believe should be in the hands of the pop, you know, of the world's population and go support it. So today, outside of the internet being on mobile rails, it's artificial intelligence. So we actually believe that artificial intelligence will not be something that consumers will pay for. But still it needs to, it is so such a powerful technology that the cost of inference has to be paid for by somebody. The cost of these foundation models has to be paid for by somebody. So who is gonna pay for this? Consumers are not gonna pay for this. And so therefore, we believe that we will be one of the few players in the world who will fundamentally subsidize artificial intelligence in a way that drives the adoption of artificial intelligence into every possible uh you know uh element of a human's life across the world. So that's what drove us, that's what drove our launch of Mcoach to the launch of Inmobi in uh Asia first, and then scaling that across the world. And now how we think about InMobi's you know uh future is driven on you know how to make AI accessible to everybody on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

But do you think that slowed down the journey for InMovi that initially you were just focused on India, Asia?

SPEAKER_00 16:12

The India focus, uh no, actually, on the contrary, no. So India focus was there only for six, nine months. We we expanded ourselves to Asia, you know, uh parts of well Africa also at that point of time, by the way. I actually think on the contrary, it was with without a design, right? It was not a strategically designed decision. I'll tell you that. Uh it was driven of the belief that you know uh the mobile computation would mobile rails would be bigger in Asia, was the driving factor. The outcome that we did not really envisage was that there would be nobody else doing this, or not really anybody else doing this in Asia. Yeah, so we had a free green field run to scaling ourselves. And we did that for four years, almost four years.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

From 2000.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Well, 2007, 8 to 2011-12. It was only in 2011-12 that we said, okay, let's go to the US. And therefore, in that time period, whereas in the US, there were like a bunch of companies that were coming in and saying, okay, we will do build the uh you know the mobile advertising platform for the United States, they were fighting with each other. Uh, somebody was getting funded, somebody else was not getting funded, somebody was getting shut down. Like there was like a lot of a lot of stuff happening there. We had nobody doing anything to us, and we were just like off on our own, building this out, scaling. So therefore, when I think about this, when I speak to a lot of the entrepreneurs who start companies, there is no bigger market than the US. So there's there's no disagreement on that. But maybe the path to get there can actually be different than the traditional path of just thinking to say, hey, you have a company, you know, let's go to the US. It could actually be that you could actually go out, and it depends on the context of the company, just to be fair. But you could go out into expand yourself into the whole of Asia, expand yourself into Europe.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

So expand yourself. Can you talk about categories like which type of companies you would advise that you have to be in US from day zero or one, right? Or for some companies, you start from India, build for other global markets, and then aim for US, like how in Mobi did.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

I would actually say that if you have a let's take SaaS companies to begin with. You could actually say, I am going to build for the first three years, I'm going to get to a minimum level of scale, possibly by working in across Asia, Australia, Japan, Korea, Europe, and don't touch the US. What happens in that period is it takes very less amount of capital, but you could actually make scale your business. And at that point of time, you could actually say, I have enough momentum and scale for me to actually go launch myself in the US in the biggest possible manner. Now there are scenarios in which it may not work. Like if you have the most innovative product out there, and you think that the only set of customers who you can go after are the ones who are going to be the cutting-edge customers, then you might actually start a better, it's better to start off in the US. Um, but I actually think it's a more capital-efficient model if you actually build your scale elsewhere and then use the momentum and get into the US. Uh, but something for I would say entrepreneurs to explore for sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

But would you do it differently now? Like the path you followed.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

No, I did not. Like when we built GLANS. No. When we built GLANS, we did it exactly the same way. We built GLANS first in India, we took it out into Asia. We we uh we kept on working on the product, the product was not fine enough. Yeah. So you could iterate on the product. That's the advantage, by the way, that you get. Like because the the the comp the competitive nature of the market in the US is unforgiving. And so, therefore, what you try to do is to say, okay, let me build my product. You know, I know it'll have it'll go through cycles of improvement, I will learn a lot. Let me do that in markets where my cost is low. And so when we build glance, we did exactly the same thing. And then when we thought it's absolutely ready last year, we took it into the US. And it's it's scaling beyond our belief today in the US. Beyond our belief.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Can we talk about some numbers for GLANS?

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Think about GLANS as uh what is GLANS firstly? GLANS is an agentic shopping platform. We are effectively adding intelligence in shopping. Think of it in a very crude way: GPT for shopping. Okay. But driven by, not driven through text, because text is a very primitive way of communication, usually used for knowledge workers. Shopping is a phenomena that the population uses. And so, therefore, the product is built on visuals, a visual uh uh dialogue. So the outputs are very visual in the manner. And so, as we launched this in the US, uh, we it's not even been, it's I think it's been nine or ten months that we launched. We are loving it. We've never seen, and the reason why that is so good is because the time when we launched, for that time, we had a near perfect product. Yes, the product has a lot of new things that we can add to it, but it was better than any other product that was even remotely close. In the market at that point of time until date. And that's the advantage that you basically get because the cost of my testing the product in Asian markets was about a tenth lower than the cost it would have had if I had to do the same thing in the US at that point of time. And so therefore, your cost of initial scaling and testing. And by the way, India is a great country for that. Why? India is a combination of very developed set of users, which represents their global citizens. You have a large middle class that resonates with a very large portion of a developing economy across the world. And you also have a set of users who represent a lower strata from an economic perspective that also can use your product and you can realize what where your product fits, where you need to make what changes, and you can do that at scale and then go out there and scale it. And so we, you know, glance is a great example where I did it again, and it was done exactly the same way as we built in Mobi. And we do every product that way, by the way. Every product we we launch first in and the advantage of launching first in India also is that Indian consumers get the first product.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Yeah, we we hosted UNUCommerce CEO Couple on podcast, and he said in India a product is pressure tested before it goes out.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Exactly. And every you know, category of users pressure tested.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. And Glance was incubated inside in 2015 it started, but the product was finally out in 2017 if I am not.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Finally, it was out in 2018. Uh but yeah, it was incubated in in-house. Uh built, built, built.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

What happened in those two, two and a half years?

SPEAKER_00 23:54

We just iterated on the product. We have so many iterations of learns that we threw away. Um, we would test it, test it, test it. There was, you know, it was a team of five, six people uh held in a room. And I personally would spend time with them every few days because we were very convinced that we would build uh something what today looks like GLUNS. We would build something phenomenally different. Uh so we were very excited. Innovation excites our company, by the way. If you go at Nmobi, one of the themes that you would see is that we love innovation. What is innovation? Innovation seems very esoteric or exciting, but innovation at the core of it is failures. In order to get that one great output, you have to be willing to fail many times. I'll tell you one story. I had a very public failure with a product that I launched ahead of GLUNS called Meep. It was a very public failure. I was down for months, if not years. I had, you know, you had these, you know, New York Times came out with an article on us on the day of the launch, and it was dead on arrival with the way they kind of positioned this, because then the whole media picked it up and said, Okay, this is this is garbage. Maybe it was not that big a garbage, but maybe it was a garbage. But it was painful.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

You got hyped because you publicly quoted a number that uh one billion dollar outcome from that one experiment, and then possibly, maybe I was naive, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Maybe I was overexcited. Yeah, possibly. Uh maybe I did not even quote a number, maybe the number got quoted. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Like it happened a lot with in movies.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Yeah. No, we would we would we would get quoted on a number. We know maybe we'd not quote so much because I think people are very kicked about like you know, big numbers coming out. Uh so we've been very careful now. We don't we don't say big numbers, we don't say numbers anymore easily. Uh but and but going back to that, you know, it was it was scary. It was scary. But then you kind of realize and you if you take the cricketing analogy, right? If you basically go out and you're you're supposed to bat aggressively, you are supposed to get out many times if you're supposed to bat aggressively. It's easy to say it in hindsight, but in the moment when you're going through it, when everybody externally and internally is looking at you and saying, Okay, you know, nice try. You really went for it, but haha, it is look at it, we told you so. Now we told you so is fine. I think we have to like figure out how not to let I told you so bother you. But we get very bothered by it.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Yeah, in that moment.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

In that moment, right? That the moment essentially becomes trying to prove them wrong versus to realize that you've got to do this again because this is the journey. I am far more comfortable at it because I have failed a few times trying to do this than I was when I was failing for the first time. And I can really, I would not be surprised if I would not have been surprised with myself if I had given up at that point.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

But when we failed, how what was going on in your mind? Like what were you thinking as founder? Um, there are two kinds of failures.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

One is like you know that you failed, and you know, a handful of people know that you fail, and then there is a New York Times level failure, right? There's a difference. Pressure is too much, the scrutiny is too much. Everybody asks all the right questions, right? All the things like, oh, you should be focused, oh, you know, this is B2C, you, you know, you're a B2B founder, you cannot do B2C, oh, you know, you have uh you did not really think it through, oh, you did not have you do not have it in you to essentially build, you know, an innovative product, you could you can build a software, enterprise software product, you know, all of those things. And you know, if you kind of think about it, you know, logically they're correct. It kind of goes back to the question of you know probability to possibility. And uh, you know, all of what they were saying was probabilistically correct. It's it holds true in a natural scheme of things, but you know, you're not built, you're not wired to follow that rule.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

So we continue to try years, probably.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

It was hard, I'm telling you. I was questioned by everybody. Everybody. It was hard.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

So, like that soft bank round happened, they put in 200 million dollars. Uh, and uh uh right after that uh fundraise in movie became unicorn overnight, right? Do you think that fame, because you were the first unicorn from India, um fame somehow got to me? No, uh it created a lot of pressure, or it helped you in that like when you look back, what role it played.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Why is that important? I'll tell you, because we were starting to get great talent to come and work with us. To me, the biggest advantage of that was like amazing, amazing, amazing people moved to say we'll work with you. So that was the biggest, I would say, the biggest gain. Where it did not help or cause the pressure, we did not realize that we had to grow much faster in our in uh and not as a company, individuals, because the company was growing really fast. What is the point? The point is we did not realize what would it take for the company to scale from a billion dollars to you know the next my big milestone. We did not realize what it would take, and we um did not solve for things that we had to solve for, like we uh created an organization with a lot of layers, we created a system with a lot of processes. What is what is the issue with a lot of layers? What is the issue with a lot of processes? Layers are required, layers create innovation doesn't happen. Innovation does not happen. But we are a tech company at global platforms. We have to innovate, we have to bring bring products out at a fast pace. My organization grew from 200 to 800 people in a year. I thought we would ship 4x the products, we shipped nothing. Nothing. My attrition before the round happened was you know very, very, very low. My attrition in the company after the round happened within two years, I don't know, like 40%. And so it took a few years. And by the way, there you realize there is nobody who can tell you stuff. Like there was nobody who has done this five years ahead of me, and like, hey Naveen, don't do these five things because we made these mistakes. There was nobody telling us that. Uh so everybody was learning along with us. We were also learning, everybody else was learning. So it was one of those uh things that you learned on the job.

SPEAKER_01 31:54

There were not many examples for you when the company was growing so fast, or do you think now the now the founders have a lot of examples so they wouldn't make the same type of mistakes?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Both, both, exactly, right? So at the time, at the point of time we were doing this, there are no example of anybody else who could come and say this is the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

And today I hope people are not going to make the mistakes that we made. I hope they don't, and I I believe they are not, because there are enough and more people who can tell them, here are the 20 areas we screwed up on. You don't, you you screw up the 21st, not the first 20. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

A lot of other interesting uh things happened that really set the example for other entrepreneurs, right? Like, let's talk about that meeting uh that happened in SF when a lot of Indian VCs said no to you. You went to SF on your maxed-out credit card uh to meet uh uh Kleiner Perkins, right? Tell us about that meeting.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

This is like this is uh 2008 time frame. You realize, like if I told you earlier, right, I was part of a venture fund. So I knew a lot of people in the venture community. I knew almost everybody in the venture community. So I went to India and I started to talk to people to say, hey, here is what we are doing. Do you, you know, can you fund, uh, can you fund us? So everybody knew me, so they would really invite me into there. Uh so you talk to them. But the challenge everybody had was I think India was not ready to take technology risk. India is not a place then for innovation. So everybody was looking for a model that has been proven in the US, and then you bring them to India. So I would ask them to say, hey, here is what's going to happen on mobile, and here's how the you know in the internet and and everything the computation fundamentally would move to the mobile phones, and therefore we are building something that would subsidize this consumption and computation. And people would say, no, it is never going to happen on mobile phones. They would look at me almost laughingly to say, this is never going to happen in India. It's never sorry, it's never going to happen in the world. It'll only and so I think I did like 40 such meetings. Meetings. I was so pro in hearing a no that I would know, I would sense a no way before the no is coming. So I was used to it. But we were running out of money. You know, we had uh I'm so thankful to the early people that we had. I went to them and I said, I have no money. Uh what do we do? And you know, not that anybody else had money, like in our teams, right? So, but everybody said, What do you think? I said, Yeah, I need three months. Maybe I'll make it happen, but you, you know, how do I get three months? So two or two or three months, and you know, the that's what trust is all about, right? There was no logical reason for any one of them to basically say, here it is, you know, why don't we start, you know, putting all of our credit cards on the table? Let's start to pay every bill through our credit card. Let's max it out. We'll pay the interest rate on it later on. It's a very high interest rate, it doesn't matter. So, and suddenly I'm looking at these guys. It's not that any one of us has any money, but everybody's credit cards came out. We ran the company for the next 90 days on those credit cards. I had no not enough money to go to the US. We bought our ticket in a very like fancy way on credit again and flew to the US again. You know, it was one of those things which, you know, today when you think about this, I I remember uh there was a there was some company that was getting formed and you know they they wanted to start an OTA, the travel uh, you know, for uh they were building an OTA for um like premium travelers. And so Abe, my co-founder, and they were they just launched, uh so my and and they only wanted to like talk to the CXOs. So Abbay, my co-founder became my assistant and he called them up and said, Hey, you know, my CEO wants to travel, and you know, what are the terms and what can it work? And this and they of course said, Look, we only book you know business class and first class flights, and we don't book anything else. And of course, of course, of course, my CEO does not travel anything else anyway. Uh and then they're like, Oh, okay, great, great, great. So, you know, and then they asked, uh started to ask him all the questions. And the only question he was interested in was the payment terms. He did not really care about anything else. So now they're asking him, and you know, hey, what kind of a wine does he like? And I went, and I'm sitting next to him, by the way, of course, like very eagerly listening. If I get a ticket or not, right? And he's like, What I I I don't care. Anything is fine, just say anything. And they are trying to ask, they are being very precise because you know, according to them, it's not just the red and the white. You have to basically give a deeper answer. We had no idea what to give. Anyway, so all of that happens. We get a ticket. Uh I travel. I'm at the airport. My ticket is 8 lakh rupees. 8 lakh rupees. My bank account has 20,000. This is 2008. My bank account has 20,000 rupees. My meaning, the company's bank account, mine had maybe similar amount. The company's bank account, like some 20,000, 30,000 rupees. And I'm sitting there and saying, what if I could resell this ticket right now? Change it for an economy ticket. I am pretty sure I'll make four or five lakh rupees. My company would run for another three months. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. Anyway, so that's those are like the things that you do. And of course, we reach to the US and um you know, you kind of again start going. Now in the US, the idea the the the conversation changed because in the US it was like, hmm, of course, everything is going to move to mobile. But you're in India. How do you fund an Indian company? Because there is no Indian company that has ever done this. So I again started to get no's. But the reason for the nose was different. So I felt a little better. So I can continued my my thing, and of course, you know, the beauty of fundraiser is you don't need everybody's buy-in. Yeah, you just need one person to say, I think I trust you. And that happened to be uh, you know, Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shiram.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Uh both What was your pitch to them?

SPEAKER_00 38:34

My pitch was exactly the same that I was doing throughout, by the way. The idea was that look, we'll build a mobile advertising platform for driving, you know, uh, you know, driving this for Asia. And they really bought that thesis. And we did say that at some point of time in the future we may come to the US, but we think Asia is the landmine of uh you know of this growth, and therefore we want to want to do this. And they truly bought that thesis and they said, yeah, that's the right thing to do. Now here's what happened. Remember, I have 20,000 rupees. Yeah, I have I don't have a return ticket. It was a one-way ticket. I don't have a return ticket. I have no money to go back. I'm staying at a friend's place. And I'm going from place to place to place to place, just pitching and getting a no. I still remember this day to this day. I walk into uh, you know, for the second meeting. I walk into the second meeting with Kleiner and Ram. It's happening in Ram's office. I'm making my first pitch to Ram. I make the pitch. I think 10 to 15 minutes into it, he's like, I like it. We are gonna fund this. We are willing to give you seven million dollars. Okay, but here's the issue with the seven million dollars. I have twenty thousand in my bank account. I am multiplying the seven million to come up with what that does it really mean, and I'm lost. Okay, I'm lost, and uh and he says, drop the pitch. I get it. You this is brilliant. We are gonna together, Kleiner and Ram, we uh you know, we're gonna put in seven million dollars. Tell me your product strategy and scaling strategy. I had none because by that time I was so desperate to just like get money that uh my ability to have a plan which was beyond survival did not exist. I don't know what I said. I have no clue. I'm pretty sure I said whatever could get me out of that room without screwing it up. That was my only thing that I was trying to do at that moment. And I remember coming out of that meeting, walking towards my rented car. I got into my car and I passed out for three hours. I, you know, in life you have these moments when the without sharing the news with your co-founder? No, because it was middle of the day for me in the US, and so they would have all been uh I had no, I I and I may have called them, yeah, but I woke up three hours later in the car. Two or three hours later. I i I just passed out. It was one of those things in life where you you know, I've been, you know, you've been trying to build a company for now by 2008, almost three years. You know, I had a bunch of attempts, but they got shut down, shut down, shut down. And so you we you know, you you just have like all and then suddenly re you realize that the it hit me that the world's best venture capitalists have just funded us. And that is non-trivial, that has to mean something. And I think you know, I can never forget that moment of my life because you know it was like you can it gave you the ability to then you know exist.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

So this was part of this $15 million round. The first series.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

This was this this is series A, then I had one more round series B led by them itself.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Okay, and the next round was this uh series C soft bank soft bank, a similar story, would love to hear it from you because like Varun also said in his interview, that this story has multiple versions, but when I heard it from you, it was just amazing. So would would love you to share this story again.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

You know, the we uh we were raising our series C, generally speaking, and you know, we were out here talking to a lot of the investors. We had very decent interest. We in fact had somebody give us a term sheet to say, hey, we will give you 45 million dollars. 40 or 45 million? One of those two numbers. I think 40 million dollars.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

I'll just stop you here. What all happened from that series A to Series C? Like in terms of numbers, revenue, what all you built?

SPEAKER_00 43:32

Series A to Series C, you have to realize at the end of that series A, we all got together and said, guys, we are destined for something. You know the whole point I talked about uh you know, you the your you change the definition of no limits.

unknown 43:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

So we changed it to say here is what we have to go for. So we were just on a Hyper growth trajectory, series A to series B. I know our series A was, I think, some 20, 22 million dollars of uh market of valuation. Series B was 120 million dollars. It was just like it was a rocket ship. It was crazy. We were launching country after country after country. We were just like like we were doing things that had never been done before. We were doing things like launching, building a product from India to the world, building product in India, hiring the best engineers possible. We were going country after country. Like the like we would land in countries that we had only seen on maps. We would land there, we would like open our office, we would like hire people, people will come together and we would say, okay, let's go for it. We would just, and we would make mistakes, but we were just moving so fast that any mistake was fine. You know, you would the pace would correct it. And so now we were reaching this pace that we had appetite for growing much more. And so we went out and said, Hey, we need like you know, $40, $50 million round. So we had a term sheet for $40 million by a very uh you know reputed uh private equity fund. Um and then somebody met me and said, you should go meet Masa. I'm like, who is Masa?

SPEAKER_01 45:33

This was 2010 or 1111.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

2011. So who's Masa? I don't know, I never heard of him. I said, Well, he runs softbank. I said, What's soft bank? Well, it's the biggest carrier in Japan, and you should you must go see him. He's like, you know, I don't know. He's like, no, no, no, you must go see him. So I said, okay. Uh but I, you know, I cannot go because visa for Japan in those days used to take four weeks. So I was like, by that time, hope I think my deal will get done. Yeah. So they said, huh? They were part of his team, by the way, his office. So they're like, okay, can we suggest one thing? I said, okay, what?

SPEAKER_01 46:13

So this guy was part of South Bank's team. His team, his team.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

And he met me in India.

SPEAKER_01 46:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Okay, and he loved our story, and he's like, okay, you must meet Masa. And I said, okay, I I will, but it's gonna take me four weeks, but you know, etc. etc. Right. So he says, okay, do one thing. Can we do all the due due diligence that we need to do ahead of time? And I was like, wait a minute, you want to do due diligence, but you're not like you don't even know whether you're gonna invest into us. So yeah, not a worry. Let us let us do this, and it's our cost. So, okay. I anyway had everything ready by the way, because I was you know trying to raise. So they they kind of jumped in and they started to look at everything. They I think they had like some 30-40 people put on job for the next 30 days. Okay. So now I reach Tokyo. Mohit, my co-founder, and I kind of both go to Tokyo and I okay.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Mohit is the one who left job.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Who left his left his job, right? So now we were we are in Tokyo, we like, you know, we have a weekend to kind of hang around, so we you know, roam around Japan a little bit. Um, we go to his office. Now I'm go, I'm not, now I'm not on my way to his office. I'm just by the way, in all of this, I'm just excited about being in Tokyo. Like, because I know I have a term sheet, like I think it'll be okay. So now I'm in in Tokyo, I'm going to his office and I now I'm reading about Masa on my phone. Okay. And I kind of see a very different thing that he's constantly doing, which is he's not, he just like I kind of realize it's not, it didn't hit me, but I kind of see the kind of investments he had done, whether it was Dyahoo or like it was like or Alibaba, right? It was like major investment. So what I do is I go to his office, the like you know, reach. It's like a football field-sized like very big boardroom, okay? Some like 50 seats on both sides, and in a typical Japanese style, you know, you sit on one side, the other team sits on the other side, you know, Masa sits at the head of the table, and you know, I start to to speak and share our story. And, you know, Masa is listening, listening, listening, listening, kind of zones out a little bit in between, then comes back in, and you know, and then he's like, What are you really building, Naveen? What is this? What is this? And I'm like, I want to build one of the largest advertising platforms. I think globally it's required. He then goes quiet. I'm like, maybe I answered it completely wrong. It's like I should have been more practical, real, like something. Oh, I want to do this and that. And then he's like, I want to invest money. How much are you how much do you want? Now I had come prepared with everything to say $50 million. Completely prepared. I'll say $50 because I had a $40 million term sheet, $50 looks good. I said $250. And then he goes quiet again. And he's like, Why do you need $250? And I'm like, Masa, if I have to try and build something at global scale, I need to do these four things. They were not planned four things, but they were the four things that I always thought to myself at that moment that I want to do. It was completely goes bazar. He's like, what is like like his facial expressions kind of go hey wire and and you know, Masa negotiates a little bit and says I'll put in 200. And that was it. We negotiate the valuation for a little bit, and that was it. What did what I realized is I don't think this was about like in now when I look at it, it's not about I was very lucky to be there and to do this, but you have to find people who believe in your vision, and you have to be able to have the ability to ask what it re what would it take? Why do you want to work with them? Since then, that has been our approach. It has more failures with it, also, because you know, if I go to ask somebody else to say, hey, I need 200, they may just throw me out of the room in that in that time period. But I think we need to be able to find people who believe in the bigness of a vision. And of course, we now know him, what he has done in the world. I had not known this at that point of time, right? Today it's a well-documented story on what a phenomenal investor he is, how visionary he is, and how he thinks about the world very differently from anybody else. And so, yeah, I felt very lucky.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

What do you admire about him the most?

SPEAKER_00 51:36

Think about it like ability for him to push the envelope and to think big beyond anyone else can imagine, that people can call him crazy for. That is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

I saw the same thing known to push his founders to think bigger.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

It was exactly the same. Like I would, I would, yeah, I would see him every uh, you know, three or six months in Tokyo, and after the first 10 minutes of looking at the you know, the business and its the numbers and whatever, he would just be harping on one thing. It's like, what would it take to change the scale 3x? What would it take to change the scale 5x, 10x? He was not trying to give me the answer, he was trying to figure out together with you what it would take. And I would not have the answer till I would come back maybe three months or six months later, because I would have to do a lot of figuring it out. But I realized that in those moments, when you have to take a risk, what is the point in taking a small risk versus going for it? And that's what I learned from him. Like there is the the effort required for doing something decently big to doing something magnanimously big is not that different.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

And meanwhile, what all changed in Indian VC ecosystem?

SPEAKER_00 53:14

You know, uh how was it in 2007, then 2011, and then by 2011, you had the early stage venture capital starting to come into India, right? So that was there for sure. You had a lot of companies now getting funded at series A, series B level. You did not actually have anybody look at you know large-scale $200 million, $100 million investments coming in at that point of time for sure.

SPEAKER_01 53:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:39

Uh I feel very happy that we kind of kicked it off. And then, of course, you know, in 2015, 16, 17, 18, you had like billion-dollar rounds that started to happen in consumer businesses. Correct, incorrect doesn't matter, but at least the scale of investments were of that nature that started to happen. So I think the large-scale investment thesis kicked off probably after a round. Uh, and that was a great thing. Uh, so I think the VC venture venture business growth stage capital business started to change uh in new age economy.

SPEAKER_01 54:10

11.

SPEAKER_00 54:10

Yeah, 11-12, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

11-12. Okay, and going back to your um you said somewhere in the middle of the conversation that people questioned you, that you were a B2B founder, you have no idea about B2C, how to operate a B2C company. You did both, right? Both um R unicorns, most celebrated unicorns. Like what did you learn running a B2C company that you didn't know uh when you were just operating in Movie?

SPEAKER_00 54:44

Oh, great question.

SPEAKER_01 54:46

You know how different it is.

SPEAKER_00 54:48

It is different, it is different. You have to think differently about B2C and B2B. Um in B2C, when you think about when you think about what you are trying to build, you almost have to think about what whether you would use the product or not. That's the way I think of it. In B2B, the right way to build a product is go and talk to 25 customers of yours, take their input to a certain extent, and then build a product that not necessarily just fulfills what they're asking, but solves the problem in a big way. The imagination required in building a B2C product is very different than a B2B product. In a B2B product, you have to be perfect. You have to be solid in what you deliver because you're giving it to an enterprise who is very, very in B2C, people are looking for innovation and fast movement. And those are two different skill sets, different ways of approaching uh engineering. Um, and that took a little bit of time for us to capture. Uh, but I think we as a company now do both of these things and do both of them really well. Uh I actually believe large organizations, corporations, etc., will exist at the intersection of B2B and B2C. And therefore, founders should figure out how to do both of them. So if there are a lot of B2C founders, they would gain a lot by building a B2B skill off their own business so that they can actually connect the two in, you know, whatever they're trying to provide into the consumer world, they should be able to provide to the to the enterprise world or vice versa. Uh, and I think that works really well. Um, so yeah, it's been um fascinating to build both of these companies, different ways to approach them, but it they're not that uh complex. They're not it's not that complex.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

I think can you list down like two, three count two or three points that can be challenges or relatively easy to build this versus for this company?

SPEAKER_00 56:57

In in enterprise, when you build, if you have done your research well, you will be in the zip code of what the customer is looking for. So, therefore, in an enterprise world, you have to do a lot of upfront research, talk to customers, you know, really think about what problem they have, and and therefore build for them, and then you can co-build with them. And that's a that that allows you to essentially have a higher chance of success. In B2C, that's not the you cannot talk to anybody, generally speaking. What you would do is you would build something, launch it, and realize it's bombing. It's totally crashed. You have to have the ability to come back and fix it very quickly and launch version two. That may again bomb. So you you have to have a uh an organizational capability where research is does not matter, innovation matters, and pace matters. Here, predictability matters. What matters is your research and the solid, the definitiveness and the depth of what you've built. When you try and transpose this to each other's world, then you are basically doing bad for both of them. And I think keeping them separate, recognizing these two things will allow you to build uh you know something in that world. You have to put the product out. It's very, very scary to put a product out in front of a consumer because you get public lashes.

SPEAKER_01 58:29

Yeah. And both in Mobi and Glance are super successful now. But uh in that journey, can you share some anecdote where you felt that you know in Mobi or Glance is no more an ambitious startup, uh it's it's becoming a truly global product from India and you're you know successful in what you have been trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 59:00

I am not there yet.

SPEAKER_01 59:02

Not there yet.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

No, I think look, you have to realize you have to change the no limits.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

Is there any number? There's no number. There's no number.

SPEAKER_00 59:15

I'll tell you, we we believe we are building one of the finest advertising platforms that'll scale to bring AI in the hands of the everybody in the world. We will support that AI's distribution, AI's scale out, we will support it. How do you think AI, who is going to pay for AI? Consumers do not pay for stuff. We think we will play a very big role in uh in you know, as building software that will subsidize access to AI for the world. We want to be one of the top platforms to do this in the world. That's the mission that we would sit with on the Inmobi side. On the glance side, our mission is to bring intelligence in the way the world shops. We want to change the way the world shops. We fundamentally think that if the world, if if as you bring intelligence into the way you and I shop, it will change, bring about ripple effects across the supply chain, value chain. Manufacturing will get impacted. Individual brands will have a place in front of the consumer without having to do unnatural things. They should focus on their craft because the intelligence of the machine will be able to identify these individual brands from, I don't know, Kolapur, Mehrat, wherever, so that they can be discovered by people across the world because realize the machine is now trying to find the right product for you. It'll change the way the supply chain of the world will function. We will be one of the top players in the world in making that happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:06

But for now, the infrared cost is too high.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:09

And we have advertising as a mechanism that we understand how you can smartly use to subsidize that access to consumers. In the world of AI, as we launch GLANS, what is our biggest cost? Our biggest cost is inference cost. Every interaction that you do with glance and try to find use the intelligence of GLANS to search for products or to look for products, there is an inference cost. In order for it to be at a population scale, I must be able to figure out how to cover for it. Because we have such a beautiful uh monetization machinery in the form of Immobi, we are able to bring these two things together and make it happen so that the consumers have access to intelligence for shopping without having to pay for it. And that is a business model that we have cracked. There are not that many consumer scale companies that have their inference cost covered through some business model that is at a population scale. So we feel very kicked about being able to do this, being able to reach not billion dollars, but billion users this time with our product. A billion, we want to make sure a billion people in the world use our product to find intelligence, to use that intelligence and change the way they shop.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:26

Thank you so much for your time. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Have a few more questions. No Nancy, I truly enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

So thank you so much for inviting me and uh enjoy this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

Thank you so much for your time. And you came from Belindur, uh really means how much.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:41

Anything, anybody travels for anybody in Bangalore is always a great thing. That means I was looking forward to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:47

Thank you so much, really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:48

Thank you.