Piyush Shah Co-Founder InMobi and President & COO, Glance chats with Amit Somani, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

06:00 - Inmobi’s Story of Survival and Scale

20:00 - How to Evaluate Persistence & Grit

27:30 - 100 People Who Operate Like Co-Founders

30:45 - Building a Pro Sports Team & a Family

36:00 - Why Intent > Capability

Read the complete transcript below

Amit Somani 00:40

Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast. This is your host, Amit Somani, and I’m delighted to have with me a friend, a former product practitioner, and now co-founder of InMobi, Piyush Shah. He’s also the president of Glance, one of the hottest companies in the mobile space in recent years. Welcome to the show, Piyush.

Piyush Shah 01:00

Hey, thanks, Amit. Pretty happy to be here.

Amit Somani 01:05

Great, Piyush. So maybe you can start by telling our listeners a little bit about both Glance and InMobi in terms of what they do, and then we’ll drive into the journeys of both the companies and your own journey to this point.

Piyush Shah 01:15

Yeah, sure. I hope that InMobi is known by many people, but I will still talk about it. InMobi was India’s first unicorn. A bunch of people came together and said, how do we build a world-class product and tech company out of India? There’s a lot that had happened before, in terms of services and whatnot, but I would say the real mission was to build a world-class product and tech company that could beat the giants in the world of mobile advertising. And that’s how it started almost 15 years ago.

And really, I would say survived, scaled in different ways, but few things that we are proud about in InMobi, of course, we became global very quickly. Most of our revenues come from parts globally, and the most important thing is, it’s something that started competing against the big giants of Google, Facebook and Tencent and Alibaba.

And that of course, became very interesting. The other thing about InMobi that’s worth knowing, I mean, the thing that at least was very, very a matter of pride for all of us is, it’s not just about the first unicorn. What is more interesting is, we became India’s first profitable unicorn back in 2016, and ever since have been really profitable and very, very interesting in the way we have gone about rapid innovation and scaling our different businesses within InMobi, and done that across the world.

So that’s what InMobi is in a nutshell, we work very, very closely with advertisers, publishers, and there’s a whole shebang on what we do. But I would say, the real thing that I would like to describe ourselves as, is a bunch of very passionate people who feel strongly about tech and product and people, and then how we can create a world class company that can be in the likes of Google and Facebook out of India. And that’s what really mattered for all of us.

Glance is a subsidiary within InMobi. It was our B2C play five years ago, when we believed that there’s something unique about what we could do, how we could completely change and create a whole new different form of consumption on phones. And that’s when we saw six years ago that there’s something about the lock screen which we could completely reimagine altogether. And when most of the lock screen was all about the clock or the weather, depending on the country, we felt, let’s do something different about the lock screen. Let’s reimagine how consumers could consume a slice of the internet and just glance on the lock screen.

And suddenly, Glance became a verb like Google or Xerox for many people, for almost half a billion users across India, Southeast Asia, and now Latin America, they glance on their phones a 100 times a day and they consume a whole lot of very interesting consumer internet experiences that developers work with us on. So that’s what Glance is.

Again, very proud I would say, because it is something which we built out of India and we believe it’s one of the fastest growing consumer internet giants out of India. So that’s what Glance is and happy to, of course, share more.

Amit Somani 04:50

Absolutely, and fascinating. Let’s start with the InMobi journey. I also have a question about the founding and validation for the Glance idea, but let’s go to InMobi for a moment. Like you said, not only India’s first unicorn, one of the earliest ones, but also one of India’s first profitable unicorns. But I also know an interesting story, and Naveen Tewari, I would be remiss in stating that he was on our podcast many years ago, said that you guys had this big funding round from SoftBank in, I’m tempted to say 2010, ’11 timeframe, early certainly 10, 12, maybe 14, 13 years ago.

And then it went into this timeline or time warp where it didn’t raise any money, and then in the advertising market, public and private markets have had a love and hate relationship with Adtech, either in the news or not in the news. And so, fundraising was difficult, and maybe that also helped you with your journey of both survival and profitability.

So maybe, let’s work through a little bit of the InMobi story of survival and what was happening during all those years, those seven, eight years before you got to net profitability, and how you guys were transforming and innovating during that time frame, before we get to the Glance story.

Piyush Shah 06:05

Oh, absolutely. I think you got it right. I always say that InMobi, maybe there’s a price for a quiet unicorn, we should get for that. We’ve been at it for a few years because it’s more B2B, and a company out of India that has got clients across the globe, a lot of what we have gone through is pretty interesting, I feel. I think the first thing worth sharing is, there is a huge ambition that has always remained there. I mean that’s a big value, big pillar of what we do.

And we’ve always been clear here, let’s just do something, it has to be big, it has to be large, let’s not think small in any fashion. And seeing that today is, I guess, not sexy enough when there are a lot of other startups, India has got almost a 100 unicorns.

But saying it back then in 2007 and ’08 when we actually started and startups were still not the in thing, and funding and unicorn and terms are not even there may be at that level, at least in India, was definitely formidable. One of the big reasons why I joined Naveen and Abhay and the gang was because I saw a very different level of audacity in what they were trying to do.

And because I had my own startup way back when I was 19 years of age during college, I had tasted blood, I had tasted blood and I knew that this is what it’s meant to be. But when I met these folks back in 2007, ’08, it just felt that it doesn’t matter what business we are in, it didn’t matter whether we are doing mobile search or something else. What mattered was the vision, the audacity on doing something really big out of India.

And I feel that that principle has really helped us throughout, because that’s what attracted talent. That’s what attracted a whole lot of people to say, “These guys are actually thinking really big, I want to be part of this rocket ship and let’s just join them.” So I think that right from the, this did not come in late, it was there right from the beginning. Even when the Softbank thing happened in 2011, we raised the first $200 million that India had ever seen, and what Masa invested directly.

And we felt, hey, let’s not use this in India or Asia, let’s just go and conquer the West. Let’s launch in the US and Europe. Let’s launch in CJK, I mean China, Japan, Korea. And I know that that’s just one of the decisions we made without getting daunted by what it will mean to execute in these markets.

So I think the ambition piece is something that I always feel has stayed the test of time, regardless of good times or bad times, I mean, especially bad times. And I think that’s something I do want to, of course, reinforce. The second thing which links to your point on surviving and scaling, I think in most of these cases it is not about whether our strategy is right or our execution is not right or access to capital. I think a lot of those things are in place in the world.

To me, I think one of the big things that start making real sense, start separating through character is, what is the belief that people are sitting with? Are people at the top, are your top 100 engineers, product guys and business folks, do they have their core belief, the core sense of confidence that we can do it. Yes, we can actually fight against the biggies out there.

There’s no difference between us and them. And I’ll be honest, if you look at four, five, six years, while we would stand up on the stage and say, this is who we are up against. People did have fears, we had fears, we had insecurities, we are claiming but how will we execute it, in the world of mobile and advertising, I mean these guys are stalwarts out there.

But I think what helped is, somewhere, the realization that ultimately it is the same set of people. I mean, who are doing it? I mean, it is our batch mates. It is our batch mates sitting in Twitter or Google or Facebook or Microsoft running their ad-tech divisions, for God’s sake. And a lot of that conversation, it is more the mindset. I mean, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Silicon Valley or Bellandur in Bangalore. For us, Bellandur was a headquarters, it was our Menlo Park, our Mountain View, and ability for our folks to feel that more at the deepest level of, I would say belief, was very important.

I mean all the hard work, all the intelligence, all the ups and downs, all the resilience comes to me, it’s downstream. What’s upstream, is that core belief that we are in no way different in any way. We got to learn, no doubt, but let’s just go out and do it. So that’s I think somewhat a second theme and a second principle, I feel that has stood the test of time, because this test happens every two, three years.

Something happens in the world and there’s some lack of belief that creeps in. And I think that’s really been helpful. And the last one, and this is by the way, my rendition, I’m sure the other founders have similar words, but it’s the same rendition. The last principle that has stayed is, sheer absolute perseverance and grit in making stuff work.

If you’ve always said, this is not about hardcore talent and hardcore passion alone. I mean, talent and passion are present in large quantities, even across the board. Every other company believes passionately about the things that’s still more lower up in the Maslow’s hierarchy of what it really takes. I mean, every founder feels passionately about their thing and is willing to work hard and has got a whole lot of talent.

I think we felt, and we have been more than ever got redemption in this, that somewhat talent and passion are a bit overrated. If you stay at something for long, if there is absolute perseverance and hunger and resilience on solving a problem for long, and struggle is there, it will result into greatness, it will result into what really matters.

None of us know the right answer. In any case, we are focusing on the unknown, unknown realm. So we will figure it out together, and I think that has really helped us throughout. So I would say that ambition, that belief and the absolute sense of grit has been just the foundation of our survival, our scaling, our transformation year after year.

Amit Somani 13:05

Absolutely fascinating. And I have heard this from folklore, I don’t know if this is true and whether you can either confirm or deny it. I’m sure, and we are in the venture business ourselves, there would’ve been innumerable acquisition offers along the way, from including some of these big giants.

And I remember every single time this happened and there was an informal poll in the company, the folklore story I’ve heard is, Naveen would ask people to clap. He did not take the offer without necessarily mentioning what the offer was. And apparently, it would break into a rapturous standing ovation with clapping.

So this pure sense of, like you said, belief, ambition and independence, to say yes, we can do it and we can do it alone. And that’s the kind of thing that we look for when we are backing companies. I don’t know if you want to comment on that little anecdote, but I do want to double click on some of these attributes you mentioned.

Piyush Shah 14:00

Yeah. And we’ve had many, I mean, twice or thrice a similar thing has happened to us you know that Amit.. So I think a lot of that oxygen comes from the people who are, we know what we are doing and together we will figure it out, because most people joined us at that time, it was not sexy enough, that time the salaries and the stuff was not crazy like in the last four, five years.

So I think it’s not just the folks in India who joined us because of that, I know that our folks in China joined us, because they figured that we are the underdogs trying to compete against Alibaba and Tencent and Baidu. And the same for our US team, so it’s not just the India thing. I think if you want to join, felt that there’s something audacious about this, and let’s just be part of the rocket ship.

Amit Somani 14:55

Absolutely. I want to go back to one of the early bets that you guys made, in particular going into China and even the US. There’s lots of SaaS companies now 10 years later, 12 years later, we’re dabbling into US or Europe, et cetera. But even now people are scared to go into a market like China, metaphorically. It could be Korea, it could be Japan, it could be something more of that area. So what gave that confidence beyond, of course, the bravado and the ambition that we can do this, and how did you guys get that PMF into a new market? It’s like a company now thinking of launching in Latam or in Japan or in some other market.

Piyush Shah 15:35

Yeah, the honest answer is, it was sheer bravado. I mean the intellectual, the logical answer is, mobile was a universal problem. We knew this opportunity is going to be large, there’s going to be seven billion people on the planet with a phone. Advertising is a universal thing. If you use tech and product to solve a problem for a market, why can’t we solve it for 10 other markets? That’s the logical, and of course, we did that part also, the right, logical, analytical answer.

But in the heart of it, I think we were very clear that we got to go and hit the biggest markets in the world. Everyone is early. Google was also early. Google also did not have this thing in place. They bought a company called Admob at that time. Facebook was still figuring it out. Amazon was nowhere there in the picture in advertising, we all know this.

So a big part of that was, we know we are early, we know we have hit upon a certain wave, a macro that’s going to last another 20 years.

And how do we make sure that we invest aggressively behind it on the top three, four spending markets in the world? What is needed to solve for that? Yeah, let’s talk it out. So at our highest level, I think it was that simplicity. This is what is needed.? I will say that I don’t think we were super daunted about how we will do it in the sense, none of us had built something like this before, let’s be honest.

So there was nothing, no experience, no exposure of any kind whatsoever. SoftBank did give that push definitely, because capital was interesting and useful. That came in. But more than that, I think we were very clear, it is not going to happen in one jiffy. We had three bad starts or false starts before we cracked North America. So whoever out there feels that this is easy and there is a formula and there is a method, basis a blog out there either in B2B and completely in B2C.

We are shitting bricks right now, because B2C is much more high alpha. But B2B also, which seems like a science, which seems like it has enough material out there on cracking a market like the US. I think there’s always more lows than highs. It takes two to three high frequency false starts before you crack it.

And I think we just stayed at it. We’ve stayed at the belief that we can crack the market, we have to crack the market. We of course, got a whole lot of local leadership and we somewhere combined and merged strong local leadership, hired from the best companies, with very core passionate folks who have been with us for a long time, and created that combination for the right culture. The time zones suck. So a lot of that got done, and I think we managed to build this into a very global IP.

I mean, the US is two thirds of our revenue. China’s a pretty strong lot. In Asia, we are good at it. So B2B, we actually went about doing it in this fashion and, I mean, it is painful. It has been painful, but trust me, it just created a very different level of confidence within us, once we did this.

And for any B2C company, like in this case now, Glance, when Glance felt we have something exciting, let’s say this outside India and become a global B2C giant. In any other place, I would say it would take balls of steel to say let’s launch a consumer platform in the US or in Latin America. I feel, because of our InMobi experience, because of that journey we went through, none of us even flinched in imagining we could do so. And I think it’s just taken that years of failures and cycle of time zones and bad hires and survival, before we got it.

Amit Somani 19:25

Yeah. No, that takes me to point number three, which was your point about persistence and underrated, and perhaps the only thing that matters no matter how much talent and IQ and so forth you have. And I know you say that a little bit in jest, you’re obviously not hiring people who are not smart, but hiring more for persistence and grit.

This is a little tangential and I know we’ll talk a little bit about people and culture. How do you evaluate persistence and grit when you’re interviewing people at a very tactical level, because everybody wants to find people who are going to last the fight?

Piyush Shah 20:00

Yeah, a good question, Amit. I haven’t found a formula for that or a best practice for that. What we have found out is, how aware are people of their failures in a very deep manner, and in what way have they reflected and how much have they struggled? When you’re in the deepest stage of struggle and when you have almost tears in your eyes, because your thing is going to get shot or the product’s going to get killed, or your team is going to get laid off, what has been the character or behavior and action that the candidate took.

And in those moments, I think that’s the only conversation you can have, and then maybe feel what a guy has gone through to understand whether this person can stand this or not. I mean, in another way if I say it, I think we’ve seen people, the biggest test is, how have people behaved in tough times, not in good times.

And then, when the chips are down in that company, in the previous company, wherever they worked, when the chips are down, then true character comes out. And what is the awareness of this person when the chips are down, and how many cycles have they stayed when the chips are down? Most people don’t stay in such cycles. They give up and they run away to a better posture, a better company which is paying a lot more. So how many cycles have people seen in a company, because they believed in that company?

At the end of the day belief makes the world go round. And we are also trying to believe in something before someone else believes in it. Everyone believes, everyone knows now that EVs are an in thing, but someone had to believe in this 15 years ago, or 10 years ago. I mean similarly, we believed in the lock screen six years ago, far before Apple believed in this, frankly.

And I think, just staying on in these tough times when no one else will believe you, and there are enough skeptics inside the organization, leaving aside the outside skeptics. I think, if you ask me my simple mechanism in interviews and conversations, maybe that’s the only way I can figure it out.

Amit Somani 22:10

No, that’s actually very insightful, and I do think that this notion of both persisting and being secure enough to deal with failure and come through it stronger, I think that, that could be a pretty good marker and a good point to evaluate. Since you mentioned belief a lot, can you double-click a little bit on that?

What does that mean? Is this belief about just the fact that we are going to persist and build a large company, or that we’re going to do something in mobile ad-tech, or we are going to do a lock screen, or is it little more aspirational than that? So just maybe a little bit on what belief really means to you.

Piyush Shah 22:50

I think that I would say it is at two, three levels, and it’s good that you are double-clicking on it. It is very important for your teams and leaders to have absolute belief in the vision and what we are trying to do. And hence, they need to see, they need to sense that bet that you are making. In any case, if the founders and the company is not making a huge bet on a macro, in any case, it’s not going to be a large thing. So how does a team internalize that bet? Because most people, it is great if others don’t realize that bet, it is in our interest that people say this will not work or it sounds too simple.

So I think it is belief in the thesis itself, in the idea itself that we’ve got to stay at it for too long before someone else sees this, because we see it, we saw something, we saw mobile being large back in 2007.

We saw mobile linked, in-app linked, advertising being large in a few years from then. We saw that there’s something about the lock screen and how the world could consume a slice of the internet on the lock screen very early. But most people, it’s very hard to maintain that belief, to build that belief across investors and partners and internally.

So I think this is the first level of belief. That is very important, because you got to stay at it long enough, and a lot of us as founders need to shield those teams first. Those are the zero to one units within the machine that you have. I mean the machine is the one that’s generating revenue, but there are zero to ones within the company, and we have had many, many zero to ones that failed.

But the ability for us to shield those zero to ones, give them that patience capital within the company. It’s not the external guys who screw up, it’s the internal folks who might just give up on things. It’s not the board also, or the investor who says don’t do this. I think that sense of belief is very important.

I think the second, and I’ll just pause at that, is the core sense of self-belief. It all boils down to the fears and biases and insecurities that each leader has, and that’s the other very important type of inner confidence, inner belief that, no, we are good enough, that we are actually equipped enough to crack this. You have got to work hard around it.

And I think that’s what I say, is there fear that a person is not good enough? Then in any case, our vision will not get fulfilled. So those are the two levels of things I’m talking about that really matter if you want to do something large. And I think, the ability for us to unlock that fear, make people aware of their inner fears, be able to understand where it comes from and then act on it or tackle it, has come a long, long way. To me, I think between these two things, that’s what I mean when I say belief.

Amit Somani 25:55

Very helpful. Switching gears, Piyush, let’s talk about the overall people and the culture part of the story. I know that you and Naveen and the team are really proud of it and understandably so, and you think of that as one of your core IP. Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the best practices that you guys have built in, beyond obviously instilling belief and persistence and backing people all the way through zero to one and more journeys?

Piyush Shah 26:25

Yeah. This is an extremely philosophically deep topic and something all of us truly care for, so let’s talk about. I think, we realized very early that the people IP is going to be the most defensible moat for us ever, and you can build as much great tech or create the right moats around the business, but if there’s one thing, if there’s one area which I can thump on the table and say that has helped us survive and transform and scale year after year, it is the way we have thought about our people.

And let me just talk about two, three aspects there. I think the first thing is, I mean that we believe strongly, collectively as founders, and then a bunch of other leaders, this company would not be successful if we say it is meant to be run by three, four, five co-founders.

It is only going to be really successful if we have almost 100, 200 people who operate like co-founders, even if they’re not called as one.

And of course, I was one of those people who was not an original co-founder, honestly. I was one of the first few early people in the ecosystem who got anointed as a co-founder later in the company. And I know there are 100 other people in the company who believe in the company who operate like one. There’s a passion for what you’re doing, and they’re operating like one without necessarily being called one, without the title.

And that, for people to feel that this company is theirs and the company cares for them, not just in a transactional sense, not just so that they can be better employees or more productive employees, not just so that they can achieve the results better. If they can achieve the results more productively, that is a very transactional relationship.

Instead, if the company believes that, hey, I think you have much more in you than you ever thought about, you think you are 60, 70% ready for something, for a role or a canvas or a charter, but I think you are there, and go for it. I think it is when people believe and see there’s someone out there who’s betting on me more than I can bet on myself, that you can do a lot more than you’ve ever imagined, I think that environment has really, really been very, very transformative.

When people feel, hey, this place actually cares about unlocking my truest potential, and it’s giving me opportunities beyond what I ever imagined for myself. So that’s the first one. The second one is when we say, hey, it is not just good enough to have an environment which is just about winning and cracking and getting great results, but it’s also somewhere about balancing that with trust and care and some joy.

Let me explain that. I think somewhere in the world out there it seems like an or function, not an and function. There are companies who have said, we are all about kick-ass, cut-throat, competitive, we got to crack it and make it happen. And there are companies who are very, very people conscious, very, very savvy and careful about people and culture. We said we will not go down the Google way or the Amazon way or the Netflix way, very early.

We said there is something about us that we believe in. It may be rooted into Asian philosophy or whatever. I don’t know where it came from, but there’s something about saying, hey, this is the InMobi way. Very early we said, this is our way, good, bad, ugly, this is what we prefer.

And it’s not about a book or someone else. Infosys has a great culture, Netflix has a great culture, but this is our way, we learn from other people.

But what organically grew was our way of doing things, our way of building this whole thing. And our way was all about an environment that was a kick-ass winning team that delivered great results, and yet we treat them like a family. That, and, is very, very important and very, very hard. Why is it either/or? An ability for us to say, yeah, we will achieve our goals and we will dream big and get large business results, but we will actually be patient with our people. There’s trust and care, genuine care about backing people.

It is not a hire and fire approach. And I think, being able to somewhere bet on people, stay with them in their journey of unlocking, because they also need to go through a couple of cycles. If a company can go through one or two pivots and cycles of learning and figuring it out, why don’t we allow people to go through that journey?

Why are we imagining that people should do that one thing right and crack it? That’s not how it works. So I think, the ability for us to stay in that environment which combines both a pro sports results team, and being treated as family, that I feel is another big, big thing that we have tried to create. We are always WIP, I would feel, it is not something that we have cracked completely, but that’s very important for us, more importantly, it’s very important for us.

So that’s the second big, big thing I would love to say on the people piece. And finally, and something which I think we have realized, all of us as founders, more lately, last two, three, four years, it is very important for us to enable our folks to go through this very important journey of self-awareness and self-confidence. It is not about another LinkedIn course or a Coursera skill module, I mean L&D for us, learning and development is not about these functional transactional skills anymore.

It’s about going deep into who you are, what are the deepest fears and biases we carry, maybe ever since childhood, and where is it ending up limiting our own growth, our own thinking and the whole mindset. And that unlock, I use the term unlock for that journey, starting from us as founders, on how do we first go to the next level and reimagine ourselves with all the blind spots we carry, even today.

That I think, is one of the biggest efforts we made in the last three, four years, more so. Let’s unlock folks from the deepest areas of where they are. So it is all somewhere grounded in the belief that people are good. Let’s stay with them, and of course, there’ll be some people who will take advantage of the system, but let’s not penalize the 98% of the population, for the 2-3% who are the bad apples.

Let’s be patient, let’s back them, let’s bet on them, let’s engage with them deeply and let’s arm them with a very different sense of confidence, so that they can unlock themselves. That’s what I feel.

Amit Somani 33:40

Lots of follow-up questions, but let me go back to your point number two, and figure out how do you separate giving people one cycle, two cycle, letting them iterate, just as the company’s iterating to get to PMF, and distinguish that from performance, to use your term, a high performance sports team, to say maybe you just don’t have the skills to be a Nadal or Federer as opposed to, okay, you are 11 years old or nine years old and we just have to grind it before you get to 15 and play a U16 tournament.

So how do you figure out real performance versus skill, or do you unilaterally, beyond the hiring process, of course, back everyone until it naturally separates the wheat from the shaft?

Piyush Shah 34:25

I mean, clearly the starting point is backing. Once you have hired them, whatever filters and philosophy and values we carry, the natural thing is to trust them and back them and ensure they have the right canvases. Having the right canvas, did we make sure that they had the right big canvases, is very important. After that I mean, it’s a natural evolution of performance.

The question is not whether the output or outcome came or not. The question is, is there impatience with actions, versus patience with results? So I think there’s a lot of impatience about actions, and high frequency speed-based, is there rapid learning, rapid actions where people are actually doing a lot and stepping back, of course, strategically at all a lot.

And frankly, once you go down this cycle a few times, our entire leadership also is now geared to figure out the wheat from the shaft, and realize that, yeah, here is a class of people who are just completely in it and are figuring stuff out and are able to constantly innovate themselves and learn and iterate altogether, versus a bunch of folks who are not able to do so. And I think, somewhere there’s a whole distinction, by the way, on intent versus capability. I think that intent is very important, we can work on capability.

So I think that also becomes very clear, is there intent? . Once the intent is there, the hunger is there. Then we are willing to back people and stay with them and enable them and coach them and give them the environment.

By the way, this is not perfect, but in general, I feel if you really want to operate, we are not operating in this known, known, I keep using this terminology, there’s not a known, known world, because if you keep solving known, known problems, we’ll get capped on the value we create for ourselves. If we are operating in the unknown, unknown world and solve problems that others have not solved, then you need people who are able to ride these waves of entropy.

And the more and more people are accustomed to riding these waves and figuring out this muscle and doing it for themselves and their teams and moving from these lows and highs, I think we are seeing more and more people building these layers. The cycle is important. So out of the top 100 people we have, almost 70-80% people have seen these cycles. I mean the metric is that almost 70% of people are for more than 7 years in the company of the top leaders. So if you have stayed and you have done well one or two times, and you’ve failed a second time, and the company has backed you and allowed you to succeed the third time, imagine the amount… That is true depth and that’s true layers that gets built in our organization. And that’s those, to me, are the other real co-founders actually, beyond just the original ones.

Amit Somani 37:30

That’s fantastic. And as we bring this to a wrap, I can’t forget mentioning, you talked about the InMobi way and taking on the global giants, like the Googles and Meta’s and Facebook’s and Amazon’s of the world. In fact, for us building Prime Venture Partners as a homegrown VC firm, we often talk about the Prime way. Of course, we get inspired and learn from various people, but the Prime way is not the same way as firm X, Y, or Z.

And so, that really resonated with me at a very personal level. We are far away from being an InMobi, but maybe we’re on the right path as well.

Piyush Shah 38:10

No, I mean, I’ve been watching and tracking you guys a bit closely. I think it’s very, very indigenous and natural in the way you guys are doing it, so really impressed.

Amit Somani 38:20

Well, thank you so much, Piyush, for taking the time. I thought there were two product guys who are going to talk about product and PMF and the first million ARR and the new ways to test your idea. And we went off on a tangent, but perhaps we’ll get you back maybe sooner this time than two, three or four years later, and really talk about the product part of your journey and that of Glance and InMobi. But this was a most fascinating conversation, with lots of interesting insights. So thank you for taking the time for being on the podcast.

Piyush Shah 38:50

Hey, thanks Amit, this was great. Really enjoyed myself and I hope folks liked it too.

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