Breaking the rules
Over mini idlis, chutney podi and masala dosa in their office cafeteria, Abhay Singhal and Naveen Tewari tell Rahul Jacob what it takes to target advertising better and to bind people to an organisation
About an hour before I actually meet Naveen Tewari, chief executive officer of InMobi, I am at his desk trying not to look at what seem like notes for a strategy meeting scribbled on top of it. Bengaluru’s rush-hour traffic is so erratic that I have arrived an hour before our 9 am breakfast. The head of marketing for India and Southeast Asia is giving me a tour of the office, which is festooned with balloons that morning — the balloons signal it is an employee’s birthday. In addition, there are placards hoisted above the desks of Mukhtar Ahmad and Shashank Sharma that read, “5 Awesome Years” and “7 Awesome Years” respectively. InMobi, the mobile ad platform company that competes with the likes of Google, was founded in 2007. And, then I find myself at Tewari’s desk in this very open-plan office.
It’s a metaphor for a company so democratic that it seems an Athenian ideal where everyone has their say, even anarchically so sometimes. Employees do not have to apply for leave and the travel expenses policy was dispensed with in favour of an honours system. Office décor consists of walls covered with graffiti. Employees designed the meeting rooms, painted the walls and used waste materials to decorate, says Supriya Goswami, the marketing executive I have just met, as she leads me to a room where one wall looks like a giant colour palette. The result is one of the strangest looking offices in India, a rival in weird aesthetics to Infosys’ bizarre agglomeration of buildings across town that mimic the Louvre and the Titanic.
By now, it is time for breakfast. I am introduced to Abhay Singhal, chief revenue officer and one of the company’s four co-founders (on the left in the illustration). We help ourselves at a diverse breakfast buffet that stretches for 50 metres or so, ranging from mini idlis showered with chutney podi to masala dosas. I want to eat most of it but restrict myself to fruit and mini idlis, which are light and tasty. Singhal is off and running, selling the virtues of the company’s newly introduced product Miip, which will target users of shopping apps by sending them personalised information about products or experiences they might like. “What comes to your mind when you think of Flipkart? Discounts. Amazon? Discounts. You end up dumbing down the message for the masses,” he says. “The answer to a lack of interest in advertising is not more advertising, but better advertising.”
InMobi, notably with Miip, seeks to target advertising better, allowing a smartphone user to “discover”, say, where the stylish casual shirt stores in the city are. An IIM-Indore professor recently declared Miip more significant in the long run than the ascendancy of Sundar Pichai at Google. “We do 8-10 billion ads a day,” says Singhal, adding that we typically spend three hours a day on our smartphones. I have barely taken this in when he is telling me the story of a 14-year-old who used InMobi’s mobile technology to make ~1.2 lakh selling ads to people in his building society. Singhal says he recently discovered six teenagers in his apartment complex had “created their own apps”. This is Bengaluru after all, I muse, trying to keep up with his rapid-fire delivery.
Tewari arrives, having just gotten off a conference call with the US. Singhal says they were partying last night till 12.30 am to celebrate Haseem and Shashank’s seven years with the company. “We hired them extremely raw. They were fresh out of college,” says Tewari, eating a Mysore masala dosa with such relish that I unwisely decide to have one as well. “We were raw,” says the bespectacled Singhal, segueing into a mad caper about hiring someone from Google years ago and unwisely putting him up in a flat with four other men in Mumbai. The employee, used to Google’s luxuries, balked. “At 2.00 am, I brought him to my house,” he says with a laugh. “The guy was with us five years.” After a nanosecond of a pause — which, while you are taking notes and trying to eat a dosa, is all you get with this articulate 30-something duo — Singhal turns reflective, “These stories are important to bind people to the organisation.” Tewari, who has an infectious grin, and the boyish Singhal are high-spirited raconteurs, but there is usually a management moral to the tale.
At InMobi, if employees leave to start a business, the company doesn’t take away their access card; instead it assigns them office space and unfettered access to the cafeteria and brainstorming sessions. “We have a lot of boomerangs (employees who return),” says Tewari. “Money doesn’t keep people. Of the factors that (retain people) money is the only measurable one. Culture keeps people.”
Cue a story about reviewing InMobi’s travel policies. The document was seven to 10 pages long in eight-point type, Tewari reports, as he mocks rules such as ‘two calls per day from San Francisco’. He tore it up. “We thought, ‘We fundamentally trust people. This policy negates that.’ We said, ‘Travel as if it were your own money.’” He was warned most employees would abuse the new policy. “Do you want to guess how many did,” Tewari asks. The company has about 1,000 employees so I say 20. “Three,” he says triumphantly. In fact, employees opted to stay with friends or share an apartment booked on Airbnb. (InMobi’s business is split equally between the US, Europe and Asia and it has a presence in 20 countries.) He then recounts sharing a flat booked on Airbnb with three colleagues in San Francisco and congregating in the kitchen while one of them cooked breakfast. InMobi’s travel expenses dropped by two-thirds.
While they were at it, the company did away with its performance management systems. “We decided we would give everyone a 100 per cent bonus (except salespeople),” he says. “(Now) we can have conversations about ‘what will make you better’. We don’t have to ask people to work hard. They work incredibly hard.”
In an innovative variation on the crossfunctional teams of the 1990s, InMobi encourages employees to take bridge assignments, essentially opting to work for months at a time in a different department. One woman in HR has opted to do so seven times. “People come away saying, ‘That section has people like me,’” says Singhal.
I used to write about management and am a fundamentalist about delegating responsibility, but wonder if policies such as allowing employees to change their laptops at will or paying bonuses to new hires who quit end up creating chaos. “The underlying assumption is that you can’t trust people,” Tewari says with feeling. “The world wants something you can control and measure. You are in far greater control if you let go. We lose people to entrepreneurship, not to other companies.” The InMobi co-founders, who also include Amit Gupta and Mohit Saxena, believe in their management gospel so passionately that they have codified it into something called YaWio (a wacky amalgam of Turkish, Sanskrit and Latin) and open-sourced it to allow other companies to benefit.
My delicious dosa is still mostly uneaten, but my time is up. Singhal is speculating that drones might one day be used to transport people and we laugh about that being the only solution to Bengaluru’s traffic snarls. I ask about persistent talk that Google has sought to buy them. InMobi is valued at $2.5 billion to $3 billion, a fraction of nextdoor neighbour Flipkart. “The rumours about Google are rumours. They are nice rumours,” says Tewari emphatically, pointing to estimates that mobile advertising will be a $200-billion business by 2018. “We’re definitely not going to sell.” Quips Singhal, “What would we do after that?” Indeed, they seem to be having such fun breaking the rules as they go along that it’s hard to imagine them doing anything else.