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Why Inmobi May
be India's
Most Innovative
Company
The mobile ad platform that has Google and Facebook in its sights
is
pushing the envelope by focusing on its most precious resource
— people
"That has been one of the keys to our growth making sure we
get the
right people in from the beginning. If you get that right, you hire
amazing people, they'll be fine, and they'll do amazing things"
Laszlo Bock, HR head, Google, at a Forbes Reinventing America
conference
Till
2012, it wasn't as if Naveen Tewari and the three other cofounders
weren't signing
on the right people for the eight-year-young InMobi.
It's just that leading them
was now becoming cumbersome, as the numbers
got larger. The quartet were wrapped
up in scaling what they claim is today
the world's largest and most powerful
independent mobile advertising
platform. In four months -between April
and July, 2012 -the company's
employee base surged from 200 to 900.
“We
hired people to be on a massive growth trajectory,“ recalls 37-year-old
Tewari.
That
growth, however, was proving elusive. What prevailed instead was
chaos:
people
had overlapping responsibilities, the 700 new hires had little clue
about InMobi
-why they were brought in, and what they had to do.
Result: unrest and
inefficiency. In despera tion, the company attempted to
throw in some systems
and structures, but that only further slowed down
the lumbering tech startup.
“We
realised we had made a big mistake around managing our people,“
says Tewari.
Corrective measures duly followed. For the past three years,
InMobi has experimented with some very refreshing, counter-intuitive and
even bizarre people policies to recruit, retain, engage and
reward its
employees. Just like Google and Facebook,
which InMobi wants to go
head-tohead with. To do that, their talent management
has to be as disruptive
and far-reaching -and perhaps even more than
the tech giants it is keen to
emulate.
No
Attendance Issues
Facebook
is known not to track employee absences; John Sullivan, a
professor of
management and consultant at San Francisco State University,
in a recent presentation titled `People Management Practices from Google,
Facebook andApple',
said the key lesson to learn from that is
“if you focus on measure and reward
performance, you won't have
attendance issues“.
InMobi
isn't there yet, but it has got its own variant of this Facebook policy:
employees
don't need their supervisor's approval for up to six days of leave.
And
there's more -everybody gets a 100% bonus (except the sales team,
which could
get more or less depending on performance), and performance
appraisal systems
have gone out the window. There is no international travel
expense policy; InMobi employees travel and spend as they
please.
If a new InMobi recruit quits within
a month, he gets a quitting bonus -three
months' salary to go! Everybody at InMobi
gets $800 annually as a
'learning wallet' which they can utilise to do anything -cooking classes,
scuba-diving
lessons, learning a new language or simply
mastering new
technologies. Also, everybody gets $200 every year to change
their handsets.
When
any InMobians -as the staff is called -want to quit and start a new
venture, the
company does everything they possibly can to support them.
So instead of taking
their access card away when they quit, InMobi is happy
offering them free
office space, allowing them to intermingle, brainstorm
with their
ex-colleagues and
even eat the free food that a well equipped
cafeteria serves round the clock.
“We
have made some radical, disruptive changes around people management.
And
the results are visible,“ says Tewari. Earlier this month, InMobi made
a big announcement
in Silicon Valley with the rollout of a discovery feature
called Miip
on its platform. Miip, the company claims, is a “revolutionary
discovery platform“
that delivers “a consistent, personalised and content-rich
experience that
users will fall in love with“ by presenting a curated collection
of product
feeds, apps
and content with “stunning“ visuals.
“It is so advanced and cutting edge that it
is ahead of its time. And all that
work was done in In dia,“ beams Tewari.
InMobi
is targeting a revenue of $1 billion by 2017 through Miip alone. It is also
partnering
with handset makers like Samsung to target 650 million smartphone
users
by em bedding technology in the hardware so that ads are displayed while
users
are on their home screens.
Tewari
gets a pat on his back from Nandan Nilekani, cofounder of Infosys
who is an
advisor to the InMobi board.
“InMobi
is truly an Indian company that has achieved global status and we
all should
be proud of it. They were `mobiles only' and `mobile first' long
before the
terms were invented. They are one of the few companies in the
world that have over a billion users. As they transition o from a B2B
[business-to-business] company to a consumer brand, and from advertising
to commerce on the smartphone,
they will continue to break new ground.“
People:
Biggest Disruptive Force
The
rules have changed. In the 21st century knowledge-led world, it is
possible for an 11-year-old Facebook to overtake
220-year-old GE in market
capitalisation.
Apple, Microsoft And
Google -technology-led giants that are relative
newbies on the corporate landscape.
And if there is one weapon these giants
are using effectively and efficiently
to give them the competitive edge, it is
their smart talent base.
“We
are going to be a massive global internet company,“ says Tewari.
Harbouring sky-high
ambitions, Tewari knows where to look for cues.
Pitted
against giants like Facebook and Google, in an industry that is
changing and
growing at frenetic pace, the relatively small home-grown Indian company
(media
reports put its valuation at around $2.5-3 billion; still insignificant
compared
to Facebook's $270 billion and Google's $440 billion) is making
some
smart innovations around people policies to get ahead in the game.
“We
are in the business of innovation. People -and not products and
profits
-are our biggest asset,“ says Abhay Singhal, cofounder of InMobi
in
charge of the people function.
There
are many reasons why InMobi thinks that way. It is the only way it
can flourish
-or even survive. Operating across over 20 countries, pitted
against giants, it
knows well that it cannot win the game operationally.
It has to be on the
back of
disruptive technology. “We have to create
disruption in technology and innovate
not once or twice but constantly and
consistently. It demands disruptive people policies to
achieve that,“ says
Tewari.
Born
in 2007 and focused on mobile as the platform, InMobi operated in a
niche
space when it started. As smartphones and handheld devices get
ubiquitous, the head start is proving useful. According
to a March 2015
eMarketer report mobile
ad spend is expected to grow from $19.2 billion
(16% of digital ad spend and
3.7% of total media ad spend) in 2013 to
$101.4 billion by 2016 (51% of digital
ad spend and 16.5% of total media
ad spend).
While
Google is king in capturing both digital ad spend (31.45% in 2014)
and mobile
ad spend (50.2% in 2014), it is increasingly seeing tough
competition in the
mobile space. Facebook is playing catch-up rapidly,
with mobile ads count ing
for almost $3 billion of its 2015 sec ond quarter
revenues of $4 billon, an
all-time high.That's
because Facebook users are
spending more and more time on their smartphones.
Facebook's mobile ad
spend surged from 5.4% in 2012 to 22.3% in 2014,
according to eMarketer.
To
be sure, in the past two years, there has been significant consolidation in
the adtech
industry. In 2013, Twitter acquired MoPub, a startup that helps
mobile publishers
manage their ad inventory, for $350 million.A year later,
Facebook acquired
LiveRail, a video ad startup, for $500 million, Yahoo
another video ad firm, for $640 million and
Google ac quired Adometry,
a
marketing attribu tion company, for an undisclosed amount.
Unsurprisingly,
in March this year, the grapevine crackled that Google
would acquire InMobi at a valuation upwards of $2
billion. InMobi
dismissed the rumour,
and now seems keen to instead go head-on with the
global giants.
And
its people are visibly the centrepiece of its innovation gambit. “We have
to
create a people culture that is not just about incremental improvement but
10x
[10 times earnings multiple ] and truly disruptive,“ says Tewari. That
of course isn't easy. “The features and
analytics on the InMobi ad platform
are
not as rich and robust as some of its competitors like Facebook and
Google,“ says
Jayanth Kolla, partner, Convergence Catalyst,
a tech research & advisory
firm.
YaWiO Culture
InMobi
says it is now fashioning its own people culture that's curiously
called YaWiO
-imagination (haYa in Turkish), Oneness (aWirodhin in
Sanskrit) and Action
(Opus in Latin). “All people initiatives that we
undertake at InMobi are a
reflection of the YaWiO culture that we live,“
says Anson Ben, director,
learning
& development, InMobi. Their cultural fest is called YaWiO-x;
the first
one was held early this year. The festival, like the name, is
off-the-wall
For
a reason. “Often it happens that you go really deep into a problem, and
then
take a break. Giving your mind that rest is a critical step in the idea
generation
process. Think Archimedes -his Eureka moment was in a bathtub.
The
incubator was created when an obstetrician visited a zoo.
Throughout
history, we find stories like these,“ explains Ben.
The
three-day YaWiO-x invited three not-for-profits institutions XPRIZE
(focused
on technology) and Magic Bus (focused on education), and
aerospace Startup
Team Indus -to solve some of the big problems. XPRIZE,
with impressive advisory
board members like Elon Musk, James Cameron
and Ratan Tata, threw a
challenge to help solve women's safety issues using
technology. Magic Bus, which
works with 4,00,000 children in slums and
villages, threw a challenge to
transmit educational content through extremely low bandwidth. And Team
Indus,
which is looking to land an unmanned rover on the moon, wanted help
in
setting up a communication system between the rover and the lander
amidst harsh
conditions on the moon.
“At
InMobi, we have some of the best problem solvers.While taking a break,
if
they could help solve some of humanity's biggest challenges, nothing like
it,“
says
Ben. InMobians in 20 teams came together to find solutions to the
problems.
“It
is an interesting initiative. At a humanistic level, all of us want to get
involved with
something bigger than the self. We are on our way to solving
the problem,“ says
Matthew Spacie, founder, Magic Bus.
The
only way Indian companies can move to the next level, becoming global
players
with world-class products in this knowledge-led world, is by finding
new ways
to hire and manage smart talent. They need to do what Silicon
Valley companies
like Google and Facebook have managed to do around
talent management which has helped them disrupt
markets and bring about
innovations “They
need to have their own version of YaWiO,to unleash
their talent,“ says
Tewari.There are two broad themes that are shaping
InMobi's people policies
and its YaWiO culture. The first is the realisation
that the world has changed. “About 25 years ago, GE set the
benchmarks and the GE Way was
the
Bible for the corporate world in managing its people. That is no longer
true,“ says
Tewari. The complex performance management system that
these companies set
up was geared to test how people behaved in predictable
circumstances.
In
traditional industries, where the job was repetitive, the thrust on process
excellence
worked.
The
world today is far more unpredictable with many disruptive forces at
work.
How
to remain nimble and flexible despite scaling up is a constant worry.
Companies
today need people with very different skills to survive and
flourish.
“They
should be comfortable taking risks and think of disruptive ideas.
should
work to remove the fear of failure,“ says Tewari.;
New
Rules for 21st Century
With
100% bonus policy for everyone (except sales team), the focus clearly
is to
push employ ees to give their best -not for a short-term financial
incentive, but to
create some thing truly disruptive. Similarly, conventional
HR policies pertaining
to travel and leave were dustbinned as often they are
drafted keeping in
mind that violations happen in 1% of the cases.
For example, the company had
a 10-page elaborate foreign travel policy
document listing out expense limits in
each country. One day they decided
to get rid of the policy and asked people to
travel and spend as if they were
spending their own money.
The
fear of massive overspending was belied with only two out of a
thousand-odd
em ployees doing so. Even that 0.2% quick ly fell in line.
Similarly,
the HR team analysed past leave approval data, which revealed
that
90% of leave requests were for under six days and almost 99% of them
got
approved by the supervisor. So the company decided that for leave
requests for
up to six days, no supervisor approval is required.“We took
away that power
from the managers. Nobody misses it anymore,“ says
Kevin Freitas, director,
human resources, InMobi.
InMobi
aspires to give lot of learning and growth opportunities. One such
is called
a bridge assignment where employees can volunteer to take up
short-term
(threemonth) projects alongside their day job. So a finance
professional
can take up a bridge assignment in marketing.
This
helps the company break down the silo culture.
As
InMobi experiments with these employee policies, it is clear that some
policies
will work and some will not.“We will revisit them if we find they
are
not working,“ says Singhal almost casually. As they go about attempting
to
become as big as the Facebooks of the world, the InMobi cofounders are
also,
either consciously or otherwise, going by the lessons of their iconic
founders.
After all, it was Mark Zuckerberg who said: “You're better off
trying
something and having it not work and learning from that than not
doing
anything at all.
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ETM2AUG15
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