Jackpot after four failures

The Founder Of Two Unicorns Says It Was All About Not Giving Up

- S SHANTHI

FOR NAVEEN TEWARI, CEO and founder of adtech unicorn InMobi, a degree from an Indian Institute of Technology was a given. Reason: everybody in his family was a professor at IIT, starting from his grandmother who joined IIT Kanpur in the 1960s to teach Mathematics. She was also the first female professor across all IIT branches.

Tewari was in fact born and raised in, in his words, 'an academic bubble'—inside the campus of IIT Kanpur. His father and he went to the school inside the campus. "I didn't realise till I came out of it that I grew up in an academic cauldron of excellence," Tewari says. "My grandmother travelled to the US to do her PhD. Everybody around me was highly qualified, but unassuming, so doing a bachelor's degree was just a beginning," Tewari says.

He graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2000. This was when the software boom was at its peak. But he didn't want to work for a software company. "During my internship at one of these companies, I realised that the work was mediocre, whereas I was brimming with creativity," he says. Luckily, that was the year when McKinsey started campus placements at IIT. "None of us knew about McKinsey. We were only told that it was the most preferred job for IIMs," he says.