New-age tech giants such as Urban Company, Zepto, Swiggy, and others are thriving not by replicating global models but by reimagining them to suit India's needs, driven by innovation rooted in local realities.
Early on in InMobi’s journey, its founder and CEO Naveen Tewari discovered that his people were finding few takers in the arranged marriage market.
Tewari had grappled with other, bigger problems before. In 2007, when he founded InMobi to change the way mobile advertising was done, there was no concept of a startup or a founder, leave alone funding. People thought he was crazy for giving up a career as a business analyst in the US to move to India and start his own company.
He managed to manoeuvre around the mindset and the misgivings, but the marriage market conundrum stumped him. “They could not get married,” recalls Tewari. “When they said they worked at a startup, no one wanted to marry them.”
That came in the way of hiring and retaining good people. So, Tewari did what well-meaning people do when they are not quite sure what to do. He called a press conference—InMobi’s first. Indeed, the intention was to find coverage in the media, but the end goal was to make the company credible and, in turn, present its employees as bankable marriage prospects.
Something must have worked. In 2011, InMobi became India’s first unicorn—a privately owned startup valued at more than $1 billion—at a time the term unicorn had yet to enter popular parlance in India.
Continue reading: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/startups/from-zepto-to-razorpay-and-more-do-indian-startups-have-what-it-takes-to-become-global-tech-giants/96243/1
