With InMobi and now Glance, Naveen Tewari (MBA 2005) is at the forefront of a growing trend of global consumer technology companies created in Asia from the ground up.

Growing up in a family of esteemed academics, Naveen Tewari thought it might be a career path he could follow, too—but his father, knowing him well, suggested he work in a field where the results were more immediate. That guidance set Tewari on an entrepreneurial journey with no guarantees and plenty of ups and downs. With one failed startup under his belt, he cofounded InMobi, a mobile-first advertising platform that achieved unicorn status in 2011—the first consumer technology company fully conceived and executed in India to do so. In this episode of Skydeck, Associate Editor Julia Hanna talks to Tewari about following InMobi’s success with Glance, which he launched in 2019—and a development he sees as part of the larger trend of homegrown, Asia-founded technology companies expanding into Western markets.

Photo by Manush John

READ MORE

Julia Hanna: Why was it important to you to do this in India, and what changes have you witnessed in the startup scene there since you started InMobi?

Naveen Tewari: I always felt that the country has had the ability, the technological prowess, the entrepreneurial spirit to be able to build something. And we have had scenarios of, you know, a few companies getting built in the late ’90s. And I felt that, you know, with the internet kind of scaling itself up and mobile internet coming to the foray, developing countries will actually kind of rise because you know, now every consumer would have a computing device in their hands.

And if that were to be true, then markets with large populations would create substantial, size, you know, businesses. And therefore, after HBS, after tinkering around with, you know, a few startups, [00:01:00] myself—all of them of course failed miserably—going back to India seemed like a calling of sorts.

It was not easy for sure, I would argue. Nobody believed that an Indian company could actually create a startup. But it always felt good because you were always in the unchartered territories, things that have never been done.

What has changed since then? I think a lot right now, you have almost a unicorn coming out every week, if not faster. I kind of look at this very similar to where China was about 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, from a technology perspective, from a startup perspective—where the domestic market actually was sufficient enough to essentially allow for creation of these companies. And therefore what you see here today is, you know, the best talent going towards startups, the most innovative people of the country actually going to become entrepreneurs, and the capital actually moving [00:02:00] towards a lot more riskier kind of ventures, which is effectively going to change the face of the country in a way that’s never happened before. 

JH: Yeah. You referenced some of the difficulty you had, because of that perception initially, because you started InMobi back in 2008, and was a lot of that around the idea that companies aren’t built in India, that it’s more of a services  situation?

NT: Look, I think the idea that a technology startup can be conceived and imagined out of India hadn’t happened before. It was assumed that, you know, we are, as a set of engineers, very good at replicating things in a fairly efficient manner—producing code in a very efficient manner—and scaling the computation behind that. The idea that, you know, you create something that didn’t really exist and so therefore it took time.

JH: Right, right. And I think I've read that you've talked a little bit about how this could almost be seen as a larger trend, a sort of eastward-moving trend in technology development and startups. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

NT: When we first launched InMobi, it became the first company in the product space to essentially kind of, you know, go from east into the west. There’ve been numerous companies in the enterprise product space which are now growing from the east to the west. I think given the deep understanding on the enterprise product side, I absolutely see that trend happening and it’s already starting to happen to a great extent.

But I don't think the trend just stays in the enterprise product side. I think if you move to the consumer product perspective, I think there's a big change that has just taken place in the world.

And the change is that the [00:04:00] consumption of content, whether you are growing up in India, whether you’re growing up in the United States, the millennials today are consuming the same content. So when my children come to the US, they actually find no difference in the conversation that they have with fellow children out here, because they’re all growing up watching the same content, probably in a different time zone.

And so a new wave in my view is getting created in the last, I would say decade, or half a decade or so, where amazing consumer internet products are being developed out of Asia and are actually making their way in the US. TikTok’s a great example of that, which basically kind of  became very large in China before it came out of China and then actually has made headway into the US.

Large consumer products don’t come very often. We see the same thing with Glance, which we are creating right now. We made it large in India first, and then we took it [00:05:00] out into Asia and we see that as a movement of a consumer product making it in the US market.

So we actually see, you know, an east to west movement of not just enterprise products, but also consumer products. And by the way, last point on this: I think the cost of creation of a product that reaches 100 million consumers is one 10th or maybe one 50th, the cost that it would take to do so in the United States.

It’s a natural direction of force that actually is getting created. 

JH: That’s interesting. You mentioned Glance. Can you describe for us what it is? 

NT: Yeah, absolutely. Look what, you know, one of the things InMobi created is Glance, which is a revolution in the way consumers use their mobile phones. It’s a platform that brings the internet onto the lock screens. Our thesis is very simple: Every one of us picks up the phone every few [00:06:00] minutes in anticipation of that next new message, or tap onto that app to essentially find out, hey, did I miss something? And in reality, you know, you don’t really know that you missed anything. You’re just anxious about not missing anything.

And so what Glance does is by bringing the internet to the lock screen, is it takes away that anxiety for you to keep opening the phone and clicking on the app and actually says, hey, you can actually consume content right on the right on the lock screen, because through AI, we can actually try and tell you what you may really want to see, whether it’s entertainment, whether it is, you know, news or sports or shopping.

So yeah, it’s a new consumer application absolutely revolutionizing the way consumers use their phones. And we are very, very kicked about bringing that into the US in the next year or so.

JH: That’s great. I’m just curious, to give us a sense of it as a product, what do you have on your lock screen that’s courtesy of Glance? 

NT: If I pick it up, given it’s the morning,[00:07:00] I’m pretty sure I’m going to get a dose of my news right now. And it probably would then show me something around sports because I am a sports fanatic. I love a lot of the content coming from the creators. So I would see a lot of that. 

JH: Yeah. So I’m wondering how do you make money on something like that? Is it an ad model or how does that work? 

NT: The beauty of bringing all the internet on the lock screen is that you have all options of monetization open for you, right? So clearly advertising is a big option and that’s where, you know, our own InMobi ads platform becomes really powerful and important because, you know, we have one of the largest advertising platforms on the planet. So we kind of use that for our own purposes, for sure. There is a transaction model because we have creators bringing their entertainment and their art on the lock screen. And they’re also selling on the lock [00:08:00] screen, you know, it’s a life commerce phenomena. So one of the things we realized was, all of our commerce to date, the reason the way it is today is because it’s an intent-driven commerce.

But when you think about, you know, you’re walking into a mall, you’re walking out on the street, you don’t think about, oh, I just need to buy this black t-shirt. You actually just roam around the street and say, oh, I like this, I like that. And I like this pair of shoes, I’m going to buy something. What you’re doing is you’re discovering, and that’s the true shopping experience that the world’s really used to, which unfortunately, in today’s world and especially in the COVID era, has gone away.

JH: I wondered, doing what you’ve done since launching InMobi in 2008 and now Glance, I think it was 2017, what keeps you going, because it’s such a demanding schedule. And also, how do you keep the people around you motivated?

NT: If you enjoy something that you’re doing, then it doesn't take any toll on you. I absolutely love what I do. If you look at the best technology companies today, they’ve been there for, you know, 25 years to probably 45 years. I think what’s happened in the world for the last few years is the model of venture capital is an institution in itself, but it actually forces you to think about building companies not in an institutionalized manner. It asks you to essentially create an outcome in a matter of five to ten years and kind of go away to the next outcome for them. It’s a great model for the venture capitalists to make money on, but it’s not a great model for creating institutionalized [00:10:00] companies for a long period of time.

I kind of think of it differently to say, look, if you are going to create an institution, then you’ve got to think differently about it, you don’t work on it for months or quarters, but you actually think about years and half a decade or more. What excites me is the fact that we are building an institution and a culture of innovation in an environment of a technology company and doing that from a country where it’s not been done before.

If you are truly asking me, my goal and the motivation for me is to create a large, fundamental institution on a global stage out of India. And I think we can do that. 

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Post a Comment