Mentoring structure can help boost learning exponentially: Mohit Saxena, Cofounder & CTO InMobi

Mohit Saxena, Cofounder & CTO InMobi: My first job was at a Tata Steel plant and for the first three months, we were all put into a training session. But when we reached day 90 of training, the realisation dawned upon us that we were still right where we had started on day 1.

No amount of classroom lessons can train you for your job. Once the real on-job training started, I finally realised that you basically start doing your job and learning things as you go.

The best friend I made on the job: Your first workplace becomes your home away from home, where you always find a partner in crime. I was blessed with two strong groups of friends. One was my college group and the other was made of friends from my first job. I am still in touch with almost all of them and we always make time to catch up.

The worst mistake I made: When I LOOK back today, it feels like I had wasted the first six months of my career, as the learning process was extremely slow. The first two or three years into work are crucial to one’s career. What you do in these initial years is what defines your future.

The best leadership lessons I learnt: In those days, there was no structure around leadership in terms of mentoring, grooming or training. Ironically, this forced me into learning my first leadership lesson – realising that I was on my own but the responsibility of doing a great job remained. This made the learning curve very steep, because I had to figure things out quickly on my own. Later in life, I realised that a mentoring structure would have boosted my overall learning exponentially.

My biggest innovation: In my first project, we had to make extremely heavy machines work in tandem with each other. For this, the software that I had to work with relied on a lot of sensors, aligning and coordination, which I found difficult.

To simplify my problem, I named the three big machines that I was supposed to make work in tandem as Tom, Dick and Harry. I wrote a very simple code stating that if Tom did A, Dick did B. When Dick did B, then Harry did C and it came back to Tom. While all my managers thought I was using the original code to the T to manage the sensors and take readings, I was inventing my own code.

How I had fun at work: The company had a phenomenal training programme for inexperienced joinees for their first year at work. They have a state-of-the-art facility especially for this. College never ended for us. We still had hostels, training classes, exams, mess. The upgrade was that alcohol was allowed in mess and we had our own money to spend.

How I managed my work-life balance: In those times, work-life balance for me was to somehow increase my free hours during the day to have fun. The only way to achieve this was to work through the night. So we willingly wanted to work in the night shift, and even drew lots to finalise who would get it. In those days, simple pleasures defined the value of life.

(As told to Brinda Dasgupta)