Journey through an Indian startup’s roadmap to build itself a global business across five continents, 578 million mobile customers in 165 countries, and a reported valuation of $1 billion

With annual revenues of more than $100 million, InMobi reaches nearly 578 million mobile consumers in 165 countries through 93.4 billion impressions (number of times internet ads are displayed on website pages readers log on to using their mobiles) every month. Basically, InMobi does on the mobile what Google Ads do on the internet. The company claims it is already the largest mobile ad network in Asia, and is second only to Google’s AdMod globally. Recently, it left behind Millennial Media, an NYSE listed company, and a leading mobile ad network in the US. Largest or not, Naveen Tewari, InMobi’s 35-year-old founder and CEO, has undoubtedly journeyed through an almost-unreal entrepreneurial itinerary, considering he founded InMobi (called mKhoj then) as a mobile search business (an idea which was soon abandoned because it didn’t find traction) out of a small Mumbai flat in July 2006. Since Tewari’s Plan-B approach to build a mobile ad network, and his start-up’s re-branding to InMobi in July 2009, growth and change have both been frenetic. Three and a half years isn’t a long journey, but in Tewari’s case, it’s been one packed to the very brim with milestones, and an enviable ability to grow—across locations—rapidly. Soon after InMobi changed tracks to becoming a mobile ad network, Tewari realised that the scale and ambitions he had for his company, could never be met by merely being an India player. As it is, his Bengaluru office had began to notice that several advertisers from South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East would land up on InMobi’s technology platform— to see if the company could help them reach out to mobile consumers in these regions. “We might have a global technology platform but we could only penetrate these markets upto a certain level from Bengaluru,” says Tewari, who is an IIT Kanpur, Harvard Business School alumni. “We knew to scale up, we needed to go deeper, to understand each of these regions. That meant establishing a local presence in each of these geographies.” Mobile advertising was still at a nascent stage in India then. Gartner, in fact, estimated the global mobile ad market to be $3.3 billion in December 2011. India has just a `0.1 billion contribution to that pie, found a recent CII-PwC report. Clearly, Tewari spotted that the opportunities were elsewhere. Going global was a need for him. Fortunately, Tewari had managed to rope in $8 million from marquee investors such as Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (early investors in Amazon, Google and Netscape) in January 2008. In July 2009, InMobi went international with its office in Jakarta, Indonesia. That set the pace for its global expansion. Within a year, the company successfully expanded to five other countries. And, by the end of 2011, they had offices in these countries. This situation posed a unique management challenge because most companies usually have the advantage of their home markets doubling up as their core markets. It is easier to play in a familiar battleground when trying to establish a stronghold. As unusual the situation was, Tewari found an unusual solution to the problem, instead of being lured to the most advanced mobile markets, InMobi decided to tap emerging markets like Asia and Africa, where they had already witnessed interest from advertisers. Setting shop in emerging markets had the benefits a young start-up needed; limited competition, low customer expectation, and a market size that might be small in context to bigger giants, but was big enough to build a strong base. Also, attacking these regions first gave the company enough time to get its business processes and systems into place before it ventured into more advanced western geographies with confidence. “If we’d started or ventured into the US right at the beginning, we would have 17-18 networks to compete with. Our probability of being successful there would have been very low and we would have fizzled out like most of the networks at the time there did,” says Tewari. Today, having savoured the wins of his approach, Tewari recommends totting up the miles for entrepreneurs. Indian start-ups that don’t find India a big enough market for their products or services should try out South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa as “companies based in the US don’t necessarily look at these, companies based in China are very happy being within China since it’s a very large market itself and companies based in India can relate to these regions culturally on some level”. For their first few international offices, Tewari, or other senior leaders from the Bengaluru office would go visit the new geography, whether it was Indonesia, Singapore or South Africa, do a recce of the place, explore the market and set up the local office. It would take at least two to three trips to the locales to understand the needs of the market. But soon Tewari realised that despite their best efforts, these “study” tours could only result in a superficial knowledge of the market. The best way to set up offices in unknown markets and scale up fast was to hire a local leader and let her/him lead the charge, he says. “However hard you might try, you can never understand a market like a local person would.” InMobi’s young and international culture was the perfect hook to bring the right people on board. Sample this: the average age of InMobi’s senior leadership team across the globe is around 36 years. The average age of its total workforce is lower still at around 28. Other cultural requisites to be a global, product start-up destined for a bright future, are embedded in the young company. “Everything is based on merit here,” says Tewari. “We have people in their late 20s leading the same initiatives as those in their 40s in different locations.” All of this helped InMobi’s core need to hire exceptionally talented people locally as it went global. And, to be able to do so without needing to tap head hunters. In every geography it entered, InMobi relied on referrals from industry contacts and networks of classmates from the founding teams. Today, the company is proud to have demonstrated an impressive ability to hire the best people. “We have people who are real leaders in what they do. Rob Jonas, the guy who heads our Europe division used to run a very large component of the business for Google. When you hire people like that, you don’t need to teach them how it’s done,” says Tewari. Not just Jonas, the team has been able to bring Crid Yu and Atul Satija, two other ex- Googlers to head its North America and Asia-Pacific operations respectively. The on-boarding process has been well thought out as well. Each new local leader spends the first four to six weeks with the leadership team in Bangalore, sometimes through long, extended Skype conversations, or by flying in to the headquarters to get to know the InMobi culture. They spend the next weeks laying down the foundations of setting up an office, and strategising on how to enter the new geography. Over these past couple of years, InMobi has evolved a scalable approach to get the business up and running in a new geography. Instead of approaching local partners in a new market, the company gains access to local users in new markets through international partners who are already operating in those regions. This ensures they get access to more than 1,000 publishers in the local market even before they set up shop. With a number of publishers on board, the company begins pitching advertisers for ads. It’s only when they are well-entrenched in a new market that they start to think about targetting local suppliers. “You can’t do it the other way round because local players have specific needs in terms of language or the kind of content, which you can’t scale up. You can provide customised services and satisfy the local market only once you have a standard framework,” says Tewari. Of course, things weren’t silky smooth everywhere. Setting up business in Africa, he says, is easier than one would imagine, mainly because African countries are determinedly trying to promote business. But, in markets as underdeveloped as these, finding the right people, especially in a new industry like digital marketing, was a challenge much bigger. China took the cake on that, he says. Scaling up and starting offices in multiple locations is challenging but being able to maintain a unified culture across each of these is harder still. Tewari says there isn’t a single silver bullet that helps him manage that but a host of little practices that ensure people feel a part of a cohesive workforce. “Our offices across the globe may not very similar in terms of the way they look, but they are very similar culturally,” says Tewari.