The InMobi Group is a curious giant. Not only is it comprised of India’s very first tech unicorn, the mobile advertising platform InMobi, it also houses another unicorn within which is one of India’s youngest and fastest. That’s the lock screen service Glance that’s on hundreds of millions of smartphones globally. There’s also live video app Roposo, which is pressing down the accelerator on its live commerce offerings.

All of these are linked together by Naveen Tewari, the co-founder and CEO of InMobi., His entrepreneurial journey has seen numerous pivots, innovations and failures. And an abiding survival instinct honed through first-hand learnings around business and creativity.

We begin all the way from mKhoj, Naveen’s first tech start up, and trace his journey down to the current day behemoth that InMobi is. Through this journey, there are stories, anecdotes, notes on culture, and in each of them, some first principles. These are the principles that help Naveen look at the world a little differently than the rest of us.

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Full Episode Transcript:

Naveen Tewari

If you have 15 years of journey in a startup, the first few years is hard because we all know that you tend to fail, so you have to survive through that. 

But when you have a 15-year journey, then you have more such near-death moments. And we’ve had those. About 7-8 years back, we’ve had those moments when we were not doing that well.

We probably weren’t as close to death as people announced it to be, but it is what it is, right? 

You feel that you’re going to be close, because if somebody else tells you that you might be close to death, you think you’re close to death.

Yeah, so we think we are pretty solid survivors.

Rohin Dharmakumar

Hi there. I am Rohin Dharmakumar, the host of First Principles and The Ken’s co-founder and CEO.

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