Not enough questions on startup culture being asked in boardrooms: InMobi’s Naveen Tewari 

After a $200 million investment from Jio Platforms last week, InMobi-owned lock-screen content platform Glance has set its sights on the global markets. Riding on its partnership with Reliance, the company will expand to countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Russia, with a huge focus on the US.

The plan comes as live commerce and short-video platforms take off in India, triggering consolidation and intensifying competition. Founded in 2019, Glance’s lock-screen platform is present on more than 400 million devices across Asia.

Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of the InMobi Group, which owns ad platform InMobi, Glance and Roposo, likened the launch in the US to playing cricket at Lord’s, considered the home of the game. But that’s not all. The company expects revenue and the overseas user base for its consumer apps Glance and Roposo to be much larger than in the Indian market.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Tewari spoke about what the Jio investment entails, why going global is the only way to build a solid business model, and issues around startup culture.

Edited excerpts:

This deal was a long time in the making since it was reported many months ago. Can you take us through what went into the discussions/negotiations? 
The deal took a little longer because of the paperwork, etc. But the conceptual synergies like the areas of partnership, all of that got very quickly understood. It was a very straightforward deal.

If you just step back and look at the larger picture, at InMobi we have built interesting platforms. Two of them are consumer platforms, Glance and Roposo. We also have the InMobi ad platform. All of those can be very useful for Jio. If you look at Glance, it is changing the way consumers experience their phone because we are bringing everything on the surface. We believe that with the advent of 5G, surfaces will play a very different role. The role of app stores will diminish and the role of surfaces will emerge. This partnership with Jio, given that it is the most advanced carrier in the world, makes absolute sense. Then, we have Roposo, which is an influencer-led live entertainment and live commerce platform. In China, live commerce has already become 20-25 percent of the total e-commerce market in a three-year period. We expect live commerce to actually do the same for India and the rest of the globe.

InMobi is a fairly advanced ad platform globally and Reliance is building a lot of digital assets. Can we help them monetise them better? Jio investing money in us becomes strategic so that we can then dedicate more resources and work with them. Also, we can use the capital to grow globally.

That’s our objective as a company: to grow far more globally, especially in the US and Latin America. Also grow Roposo, which is only in India, into Asia.
You have multiple integration segments. One is the device where you will get more access to customers through JioPhone Next. You also talk about live commerce and gaming. Can you take us through how this integration will work?

For Glance, we now need to get into integration and so the execution would take about 3-6 months. For Roposo, similarly, integrating with Reliance Retail is a possibility. We will do the same thing for gaming.

Apart from the obvious partnership with JioPhone, which would give more access to smartphones for Glance, how are you looking at Roposo?
If you look at what Roposo is bringing to the table, it is a platform for live commerce, where high-quality creators come in, talk about products and then sell. If you want to integrate that product supply chain with that of Reliance Retail, then suddenly we have access to much higher quality and a much bigger portfolio of products than what we would be able to do just by ourselves. Because we are not big on the supply chain.

For Reliance Retail, they have a supply chain of physical commerce, digital commerce, and now they will have live commerce. So it is a win-win for both because they probably were not going for live commerce by themselves and we are not going for the backend e-commerce investment ourselves. So that is (the way) the Walmart-TikTok partnership (worked).

Are you in talks with Reliance Retail for Roposo and can you share what timeline you are looking at?

Those are conversations that are happening right now. But as a part of this whole investment, we will have conversations on various divisions of Reliance on ways in different areas where we could partner. Everything could not be locked down at the time of investment.

What are your immediate targets?

We are looking at getting to a billion devices in the next two years for Glance and we are looking to get to 100 million monthly active users for Roposo.
What kind of positioning are you looking at for Roposo, especially in mature markets like the US, which have multiple players?

I don’t think there are that many live commerce players out there. We are in somewhat of a rare category when it comes to live commerce. In terms of short videos, you are right – that space is very well-suited to a single player, frankly speaking, or maybe two players, Instagram and TikTok.

There are many e-commerce players that will launch live commerce. But live commerce has to be built first – it cannot be a feature. For example, how do you build an entertainment platform? You cannot say because I have sports content, let me also add entertainment on it. That doesn’t work. But the thing is if you have two or three players in the world that are good at live commerce, and we are one of those two or three players, well, no complaints.

At the end of the day, the market dynamics keep changing. What drives your optimism and are there challenges emerging from there?

We are going to take the consumer platforms global. I don’t know how many of them have actually done that. So we actually think of ourselves as Tencent coming out of India, building consumer and enterprise platforms and taking them globally. That is a very hard thing to do.
If you look at consumerisation across the globe, that’s going to happen from the east. Why would it happen from the east and all the way to the west? Given China’s real lockdown these days, it is going to happen from India. Why would that happen? Because the new generation today are growing up on the same content, whether it is in India, Southeast Asia, or the US. When my children come to the US, it does not take them a second to connect to the children here because they are all growing up on the same content.

For the first time in history, content consumption is the same across the globe. When content consumption is the same across the globe, your ability to build large-scale consumer products – because consumer access is actually lower in the Asia market – is better. So therefore, if you see the best consumer products that are getting created in the last five years, they are all coming out of Asia and becoming large there (the US). The last big product that was built in America was Snapchat, and that was many years back. So therefore, you have this wave and we are going to be riding that wave right now with Glance and Roposo and we will ride that way with a few other products, as you will see over the next year or so.

That’s one big part. Second, if you really want to build a consumer platform in India, you have to increase the size of the potential ARPU (average revenue per user) you are going after. India in itself does not give you enough ARPU to create large companies. So therefore, for consumer product companies in India, they have to think about how to be global. That is what we are doing from day zero. Almost a third of Glance is already outside of India.

In two years, almost 60 percent of Glance and 50-60 percent of Roposo will be outside of it. That is how we think of it because you can never beat the consumer access number of India because we are just a large country. So we can use that to our advantage.

So how do you use a country of India’s size to your advantage? Perfect your product in the market. Then go outside. Create a global platform. That’s what we’re doing.So are you looking at driving revenue from overseas for consumer apps, Glance and Roposo?

Yes. There is no comparison on GDP per capita between developed markets and high developing markets. India is a developing market. It is a reality. Therefore, if you want to build a high-quality product, you can build out of India, which we have done. If you want a solid business model, you have to essentially expand.

So the market you are going after, would that be the US?
Yes, of course. They say that when you play cricket, you have to play at Lord’s – there is nothing else.

While your focus is on live commerce through Roposo, we see consolidation in the short-video space. ShareChat buying out MX TakaTak and Reels is doing well in India. Where do you see Roposo in this mix? Is there scope for further consolidation?

From Roposo’s perspective, we are looking at live commerce and live entertainment and at premium creators and celebrities. It’s a very different model. We are clearly not going into a short-video model and don’t believe that short video is the right way to do it.

Of course, there are other players in this space and there is consolidation. If you want me to answer what my viewpoint on the consolidation in the short-video space is, it is an out-of-syllabus question for me because it’s not a space that I'm really into.

We understand that Glance already launched ad monetisation and live commerce was launched in October 2021. Where are you at both in terms of monetisation?

We may not be able to share the exact figures here. But what I could tell you is that we tested out ad monetisation last year for the first time and we had almost every major brand in the country come up and participate on the platform. They have seen great success. So that’s one part. On the live commerce front, it is still early days because we only launched that in October.

With Android, do you see concerns around privacy and also are many people turning notifications off a concern?

Privacy is independent of running the product. Privacy is about following the law, irrespective of whether somebody likes the product, doesn’t like it and turns it off, keeps it on. It doesn’t matter. In terms of, can people turn it off? Yeah, of course, and that happens with all the products. We are constantly striving to improve the product like how we can make them better.

Glance isn’t an app so you cannot uninstall it. You only have the option to turn it on or off. Hence, there have been concerns raised by people and reports that there are privacy concerns around Glance.
I think privacy is a concern that has to be managed because there is no other answer to that. So you have to manage it and you have to get it right. What everybody can be assured of is that we follow the highest quality of privacy laws that are there to be followed.

Given that Glance comes through scrutiny of the device manufacturer, everybody should be assured of the highest privacy parameters. Like when we integrate that into JioPhones, it will have the highest level of security and that’s the least of peoples worries.

There is a lot of scrutiny on the startup culture in India in light of what's happened with Ashneer Grover, Shark Tank, etc. As one of India's earliest internet entrepreneurs, the first unicorn rather, what is your take? Has too much funding, perhaps, spoiled things too soon? How does one really build and scale culture in such an environment?

I don’t think the funding that’s coming into the country has anything to do with culture. It’s like saying a lot of funding is forcing you to create bad products – that’s not the case. If you treat culture as a product, which you may not be selling but you have to create internally, you can’t create bad culture. That is one part. Building a culture is paramount.

Are questions around culture being asked in boardrooms? The answer is no, that’s probably not really happening to the extent it should happen. Are there founders who have built an amazing culture? Yes.

There are so many startups that you don’t hear anything about – those are the right ones. The challenge is the ones that you hear about are causing you to hear about things that have gone wrong. Well, you should actually flip that and say, ‘Okay, I didn’t actually hear about this for 95 or 98 percent of the other startups that have gotten money. That means they are doing a good job.’

So, I would not take one or two examples where culture may have gone wrong as a sign of the culture being an issue in the country. In the same breath, I will also say that as an experienced founder or an entrepreneur, because I've done this for over a decade, what is the most important thing to work on, as a founder, as a CEO, is building out the right culture. Because that is the only thing that will help you sustain the tough times, which are going to come for sure. That is the only thing that will help you navigate strategy and help you build a better product.

Why do you think the boardrooms haven’t done it yet?
I think the boardroom in India does not have members who have built companies the way you have members who are investors. And so therefore, for them to actually appreciate the point around culture is not the primary nature. Therefore, founders need to surround themselves with other people who have built companies so that they can be guided in those directions quite well. It’s pretty straightforward.