The most important lesson to remember is that failure is inevitable, but so is success, so rebound.
One of the challenges of having exceptionally high quality talent is that they're constantly restless, and they're constantly on the lookout for opportunities.
I come from a middle-class family, where you grow up thinking about government service. But when I went to Harvard, I saw that entrepreneurs and business leaders were just like me. It gave me a feeling that I could also do such things.
We were told that building a product company in India is impossible, as there wasn't enough talent available. But we survived, thrived, and grew despite a whole lot of frowns and thumbs down.
The world has many very smart people who are doing interesting and different things, and there is no better way to learn than to interact with them.
I realized that the journey of entrepreneurship can often be a lonely one. Not everyone wants to believe in or support your vision, and every entrepreneur faces this moment of truth. It's hard to walk away but harder to persevere.
When we failed and pivoted our business from mKhoj to InMobi or when we did not get any trained people with the required skillsets, as we were the first in the industry, and on many such instances in our journey, we would think of giving up every other day.
I don't consider my competition to be companies but entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the freedom to take your own decisions, and that's what we offer.
InMobi is passionate about pushing the limits of business and mobile technology.
Advertising has to be contextual, as the potential in 'push' marketing is fairly limited and is largely viewed as spam. Thus there is a need to get into 'permission' marketing and 'pull' marketing to deliver value to marketers.
In 2007, I was living in San Francisco. I came out of business school, and I was very keen on doing something with a small company. I felt that the market, in general, in mobile phones was just going to explode.