Why We're Glad Our Startup Has Four Founders

I think it was the passion to build a mobile-first global business based out of India that brought the four of us together. Abhay and Amit had already tried their hands at entrepreneurship and Mohit was a technology genius. It was like getting a dream team to start your own venture. Although, getting them together was another story altogether. We all knew each other since our IIT days. It must be one of our after party conversations where we shared our respective aspirations of entrepreneurship that stayed with us unconsciously. Well, who knew then, that we will start a company together in near future!

For me personally, it started when I was successful in bringing a bunch of 100 students to India and founded a U.S. based nonprofit (India School Fund) to fund and set-up schools in rural India during my MBA from Harvard. Somehow this success rekindled the spirit of entrepreneurship in me. In fact instead of joining a tier one corporate with a heavy pay package, I started designing plans of something of my own and I ached to start it in India.

So, it all started in the summer of 2007. I called Abhay to meet me and by the end of the night we decided to work together. We spent the next several months convincing Amit and Mohit to join us. All convinced, we moved to Mumbai for our new beginning and cracked our first idea at a small roadside restaurant that served as our cafeteria and conference room. mKhoj – our SMS based deal search engine was born. Sadly it did not fly well and by the end of the year we decided to pivot our business. It was a start of something far-far bigger – InMobi – our mobile advertising business. All four of us never looked back since.

Sounds like an entrepreneur’s fairy-tale right? Now, let me share the backstage details with you. When we failed and pivoted our business from mKhoj to InMobi or when we did not get any trained people to be hired with the required skill-sets as we were the first in the industry, and on many such instances in our journey – everyday we wanted to give up. But it was the power of four that kept us going. Whenever one of us was on a downward spiral, the other three used to make him believe in the then seemingly impossible goal and set him get going. Challenges like these acted as a litmus test for each one of us where we fared with flying colors each time and that sealed our fates together, as we had each other’s back no matter what. 

We all bring different facets to the table. Abhay is the co-founder and chief revenue officer who not only runs global HR but also helped in building InMobi’s Europe business for 2 years. Amit on the other hand is the co-founder and president North America who helped InMobi in expanding its footprint to multiple markets across 5 continents. And Mohit is the co-founder and chief technology officer who is the very backbone of our business. It is his wise decision of right investment at the right time and right places that helped us gain strong technological and operational infrastructure. We are always ready to get into the grind and get our hands dirty – in the end it is all about making things work. I think it is this flexibility and diversity of skills that has helped us bring out the best in each other while balancing each other’s shortcomings. 

But that does not mean that we agree on everything. We are college buddies who know very well about each other’s mettle as well as each other’s quirks. So when time calls for it and sometimes just for fun we fight like crazy. Come on! What’s a relation without a heated discussion be it as friends or as business partners and lucky for us, we are both.

By the way, we have a lot of fun together too. We have access to each other 24x7. We live next to each other, like practically 5 minutes’ walk away except for Amit based in San Francisco who is connected throughout his day and ours virtually. We literally knock on each other’s door at any point of the day or night. It could be for anything - from a discussion on a burning topic to just a chat about some anecdote from our travel or just a joke that we wanted to share in person. Our wives and kids have given up all hopes and have joined our madness too.

All in all, I could only say that it’s been seven years since we started together, failed miserably, started afresh, and today we live our dream of entrepreneurship, hoping to build a massive company that we can put on the world map. We might not know too much, but we have infinite grit and perseverance to make it happen. These two pillars mean so much to us that whenever someone wishes to join our InMobi family, we look for these in them; as to us, these are what start-ups are all about. Our journey have always been supported by these two pillars and it could not have been possible without each of the four of us. Each four of us are different yet similar and I could not have been more blessed than to have my college friends turned into my business partners who have grown to be a family today.

This article was first published in Economic Times