Black, white and blue silhouettes of skyscrapers reminiscent of the Manhattan skyline, adorn the reception wall at the Bangalore office of InMobi, the five-year-old tech start-up that claims to be the largest independent mobile advertising network in the world. The sky-reaching buildings are a good metaphor of InMobi’s ambitions to win the mobile advertising race where it counts global giants such as Google as its biggest competitor.

With annual revenues thought to have crossed the $100 million-mark, InMobi says it reaches 578 million mobile consumers in over 165 countries through 93.4 billion impressions (the number of times internet ads are displayed on mobile websites or apps) every month. Basically, InMobi acts as an intermediary between advertisers and content publishers for mobile phones. Its technology platform enables the com­pany to connect publishers such as Pandora, NBC, CBS Interactive and Zynga with leading advertisers such as Ford, Disney, Microsoft and Reebok; and for both parties involved to target mobile internet users through ads on mobile websites and apps. InMobi says its platform, come as it does with real-time analytics, delivers two benefits—for pub­lishers, higher fill rates of their ad inven­tory; for advertisers, superior ROI from their ads. While independent rankings of global mobile ad networks are hard to get, it does seem that InMobi is managing to deliver that value. The company claims it is already the largest mobile ad network in Asia, and is second only to Google’s AdMob globally. Recently, it claims to have left behind Millennial Media, an NYSE listed company, and a leading mobile ad network in the US. 

Largest or not, Naveen Tewari, InMo­bi's 34-year-old founder and CEO, has 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 instead, and subsequent rebranding 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 and users—rapidly. MYB retraces InMobi’s tracks (and its 30 offices in five continents) to find out how Tewari equipped himself, and his com­pany, for this global expedition.

A GLOBAL VISION 
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 Bangalore office had begun 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 Bangalore,” says Tewari, who is an IIT Kanpur, Harvard Business School alumnus. “We knew to scale up, we needed to go deeper, to under­stand these regions. That meant establishing a local presence in each of these geographies.” 

Moreover, mobile advertising was still at a nascent stage in India then, and continues to be so. Gartner recently estimated the global mobile ad market to be $3.3 billion in December 2011. India has just a $1.8 million contribution to that pie, found a recent CII-PwC report. Clearly, Tewari spotted the opportuni­ties were elsewhere. Going global was a need for him. 

Fortunately, Tewari had roped in $7.1 million from marquee investors such as Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (early investors in Amazon, Google and Netscape) in January 2008. Much of that was used to fund his global plans. In July 2009, InMobi went international with an office in Jakarta, Indonesia. That set the pace for further expansion. By the end of 2010, the company had suc­cessfully grown to five other geographies. 

This situation posed a unique management chal­lenge—most companies have the advantage of their home markets doubling up as their core markets. Quite logically, it's easier to play in a familiar battle­ground when trying to establish a stronghold. As unusual as his situation was, Tewari found a smart way around the problem. It was an approach that ditched the more-likely course of travel. 

Instead of being tempted by the "hottest" and most advanced mobile markets of the US and Europe, InMobi decided to tap emerging markets like Asia and Africa where they had already witnessed interest from advertisers. This approach worked perfectly. 

Setting shop in emerging markets had just the advantages 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 enthusiastically recommends an "emerging market" strategy to other entrepre­neurs. Indian companies 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 because US companies don’t necessarily look at these markets, and companies based in China are very happy being at home since it’s a huge market. Plus, Indian com­panies often find it easier to culturally relate to some of these regions. 

PITCHING TENTS
 For their first few international offices, Tewari and other senior leaders from the Bangalore 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. Despite their frequent travelling, and spend­ing considerable time in each new geography, Tewari soon 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 lead the charge, he says. “However hard you might try, you can never understand a market like a local person would.” 

So the team concentrated their efforts on finding somebody who was plugged into the domestic market, had the ability to quickly grasp the InMobi culture, and could bring an entrepreneurial zeal to set up new offices. 

Of course, scoping out the perfect local office head wasn't easy for an unknown start-up. But, Tewari says he was always confident that InMobi's fun, 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 years. Even in its Bangalore headquarters at the Embassy Golf Business Park—where it has neighbours such as Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo—InMobi has the Silicon Valley stamp all over it (Tewari spent a year working for vQube, a mobile VoIP start-up before founding InMobi), courtesy the bean bags, funky bar-stool chairs, bowls of bananas for people to snack on, and meeting rooms named after popular games (Angry Birds and Talking Tom) and blockbuster movies (Madagascar and Toy Story). To further extend the globalised feel, and stay true to its mobile universe, InMobi offices only have two landline connections, usually for the reception area. Everything else—includ­ing communication across geographies— gets done using Skype, or other instant messaging tools. 

Other cultural requisites to be a global, product start-up destined for a bright future, are embedded in the young com­pany’s way-of-life as well. For one, there’s a healthy disregard for hierarchy and a com­mitment to merit. It’s common to see someone much younger than the rest of the team in charge. “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.” 

Tewari says he was confident that InMobi's young and international culture was the perfect hook to bring bright local talent on board.

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 team's—Amit Gupta, Abhay Singhal and Mohit Saxena—business school days. 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, as well as Peter Bassett, former SVP sales at Millenial Media, one of its strong competitors in the US, to run InMobi’s North American sales division. 

The on-boarding process has been well thought out. 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 few 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 even before they have set up shop. 

Says Tewari on his frequent travel to InMobi's international offices,"Culture flows from the top. And, when we are growing so rapidly, it's important for people to hear from me where we are, and where we are headed.

"Imagine entering the market for the first time when you don't even know the local guys," says Tewari. With a significant 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 targeting 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,” he says. 

Of course, things weren’t an easy trek many times. While some seemingly difficult-to-navigate places, such as Africa, were a breeze to set up an office in because the governments there are determinedly trying to promote business, others posed serious bureaucratic obstacles. China took the cake on that. In 2011, when InMobi decided to open offices in Beijing and Shanghai, the language barrier coupled with the vast number of regulations and the many licenses required to get started proved to be a hugely complex exercise. Russia sprung up similar issues when they entered the Russian market in April earlier this year. Even Africa, where it was easier to deal with the government, staffing espe­cially in an industry as new as digital marketing proved to be a herculean task. Even here, Tewari managed to staff his office with much star power. Isis Nyong'o, their vice president and managing director for Africa, was nominated as one of Africa's most suc­cessful women by Forbes magazine. A former MTV and Google employee, Nyong'o was also nominated by the World Economic Forum for its Young Global Leaders award.

“I’m proud that we've been able to solve for challenges within the local context of each market,” says Tewari. “A lot of coordi­nated approaches are required to make a global operation work. I think we’ve been able to crack that code. " 

Nickhil Jakatdar, founder and CEO of VuClip, a California-based mobile video service, and InMobi’s first customer in the US, isn’t surprised at the way the story has unfolded. He recalls his early breakfast meetings with Tewari. “Naveen had a very good sense of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Even then, he had the ability to attract good talent around him,” he says. 

30 COUNTRIES: ONE CULTURE
Scaling up and starting offices in multiple locations is a tough enough trek. Creation and nurturing a unified culture across each location is harder still. Tewari says there isn't a single silver bullet that does the trick; a host of little practices ensure people feel part of a single, cohesive workforce. “Our offices across the globe may not be very similar in terms of the way they look, but they are very similar culturally,” says Tewari. 

To instill this shared culture, the company holds a three to four day programme called the Catalyst at the beginning of each year. At the Catalyst, the top 20 per cent of the company's man­agement from all geographies (in terms of performance and lead­ership positions) get together in Bangalore to put their heads together for the year ahead. Roughly, 100-150 people interact with one another across departments, geographies and functions. The agenda is packed, and peppered with product demos, workshops and presentations during the day, and live musical events, kara­oke and cocktail dinners in the evenings. 

It's an event eagerly awaited by InMobi employees as it helps form personal bonds with people you have been working with closely, but who are halfway across the world. Or as Gaurav Gupta, an InMobi employee who is a part of the organising com­mittee of the event puts it, “It’s great to attach a face to the e-mail address one has been working with for so long.”

Tewari concedes that sometimes teams in smaller centres have voiced concerns about feeling disconnected and disadvantaged compared to their colleagues in Bangalore, or buzzing centres like San Francisco and London. To make sure every employee in every office feels like an equal player, InMobi decided to invest in an intranet where employees from across the globe could be plugged in. Uptil now, the company has be been using Podio, an online work collaboration platform, for real-time internal commu­nication and networking across geographies. But, the rapid scaling up of the company has warranted a much larger, more customised company intranet which the company is currently working on. 

Your chances of success are going to be very low if you are not confident about hiring exceptional local talent." - Naveen Tewari 

Of course, Tewari recognises that even in an era where business communication has been revolutionised, there is no trumping the benefits of a face-to-face interaction. More and more, InMobi employees are given the chance to work closely with their col­leagues in other offices. Teams from Bangalore are sent to their offices abroad, and teams from other offices come to Bangalore for short tenures of three weeks, or longer stays of up to six months to thrash out problems in a product, or work on a new strategy. An employee-rotation scheme is also being institutionalised where top performers of a certain geography will be given the opportunity to work for a quarter in another geography. “You get to learn so much while working in another country,” says Tewari. 

Personally, Tewari ensures he spends enough time communicating with his teams. Clocking up flyer miles is a given when you have 834 people working for you across 30 locations round the globe, he says. He travels roughly half the year— crisscrossing the globe to visit InMobi’s major markets namely, the US, Western Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Korea and Indonesia, a few times every year. When he's not travelling, he meets senior leaders from all locations virtually once a week, and physically every quarter in Bangalore. "Culture flows from the top. And, when we are growing so rapidly, it's important for people to hear from me where we are, and where we are headed." 

Beyond his employees, Tewari's story is an important one to hear. InMobi is, without a doubt, a rare story of an Indian start-up that has built itself into a global brand in a short span of time. Hav­ing established a leadership position in the Asian Pacific market, its future plans include going deeper into the American market. So can it create the same magic on the Manhattan skyline? 

If its recent travels are anything to go by, it definitely promises to be a journey of a lifetime for both Tewari and InMobi.