India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaving every morning for a desk job and making sure the monthly bills get paid is anathema to traditional thinking. Yet for the first years of their marriage, that’s exactly what happened. Mrs Tewari kept him afloat.
    The weight of expectations did not stop at the family hearth. The fresh-faced entrepreneur had his own inner demons to confront. Money talks. Finishing his MBA aged twenty-six, the Harvard graduate had every prospect of making stacks of it. He spent a week in California attending job interviews, which resulted in employment offers from a variety of select private-equity firms. All his peers told him to put off going it alone. ‘“Wait a couple of years,” they told me. “Get some more work experience.”’ The idea, he admits, sorely tempted him. It would mean more cash in the bank, a more comfortable lifestyle, a fancier car, a juicier bonus. But the prospect unnerved him too. The longer he waited, he realised, the harder it would be to jump ship. So he picked up the phone to his would-be employers, thanked each of them in turn for their generous offers, and said, regretfully, that he had to decline.
    That takes guts. Throwing everything after a dream. Putting heart before head. If Simply Fly has any guiding themes, it’s qualities like these. My thoughts turn back to the aviation entrepreneur by the pool. The two men come from different stock and different generations. Gopi, at least to begin with, had less to lose than the McKinsey man. As Tewari talks, however, I hear unmistakable echoes of the older man’s voice. It’s there in both men’s inner compulsion, in their embrace of the seemingly irrational. ‘I’d always kick myself if I didn’t give it a go,’ the InMobi founder says at one point. It’s the Graduate stealing the Captain’s lines.
    I probe further into the InMobi story in search of other similarities. Two practical factors hampered the company’s creation. First, Tewari had no working capital. Second, he had no InMobi. As with Gopi, the colt entrepreneur began with the second problem. The money, he figured, would come later. What he needed was his ‘big idea’. To find it, he headed for San Francisco. His plan was to work with ‘very, very small companies’, help build them up and then flog them on. A year later, nothing. The ventures had either bombed or stalled.
    Feeling low, he headed back to India for a month-long break. Sitting on the couch at his mother’s house, bored, he sketched out a business plan. His idea centred on ‘mobile search’. The intention was to design a service enabling phone users to send an SMS requesting information – say, for the location of a restaurant or the number of a plumber – and receive an SMS back with the answer. That was the breakthrough idea. It looked good on paper, he says in retrospect. It ‘got trashed’ in practice. Yet it opened the door to what he is doing now. By early 2008, a prototype version of his InMobi product offering hit the market. And the rest, as they say, is history.
    Tewari was right about the money too. It came. First in dribs and drabs, then in ever-increasing volumes. He remembers his meeting with Ram Shriram, of Shertalo Ventures and Google fame. The Technology Midas was joined by a representative of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Together, they represented two of the biggest venture-capital firms in the world. Twenty minutesinto Mr Tewari’s presentation, Shriram raised his hand for him to stop. ‘Right, we’re investing,’ he said. The InMobi owner stood there stunned. He looked down at the remains of his slide presentation. ‘What about the revenue model, the pre-money valuation?’ The details can wait, the investment guru responded. ‘For now, let’s roll up our sleeves and discuss what you’re going to do after this.’
    An hour later, the boy from Kanpur found himself sitting in a cheap rental car in a Silicon Valley parking lot. When he had woken up that morning, InMobi had