Start-up accelerator Morpheus has a mantra for turning a great idea into a business

Chandigarh-based The Morpheus was one of India’s earliest, if not the first, private start-up accelerators, opening its doors to the nation’s budding entrepreneurs six years ago. After successfully helping the likes of Yourbus and Online Prasad become viable enough to attract multi-crore investments and even bigger acquisitions, The Morpheus recently announced that it would bring down the shutters on its wildly successful accelerator programme. But worry not, the team is coming back bigger and better, as Nandini Hirianniah, co-founder, The Morpheus, told Firstbiz inan email interview_._

Edited excerpts:

What are some of the problems that the new avatar of The Morpheus is looking to tackle?

Here are some things we think need more attention:

-Focus on happiness: Just by themselves scale and valuation are the wrong metrics of success of startups. Personal happiness of founders and teams should be the first metric and everything else will follow.

-Growth of founders: When companies grow fast in first one to two years, it is very challenging for founders to grow at the same pace in terms of maturity and leadership skills and they become overwhelmed.

-Helping founders in their personal growth so that they can effectively handle bigger scale/bigger teams and new challenges is one of the biggest focus points for Morpheus right now and going forward.

-Hiring for start-ups: Although start-ups are finding creative solutions for this issue, there needs to be a concentrated effort on this front. An online plus offline platform where really passionate / creative / willing candidates can find a start-up which matches their temperament.

-Leveraging technology to unlock portfolio / community value: There is a need for a tech platform to solve these problems, which are common across all portfolios / all communities. We believe using technology to help a community stay connected and benefit from each other can be a very powerful tool for any start-up ecosystem to move forward.

What lessons from the past will you bring to the new functioning of The Morpheus?

The biggest joy/learning for us has been the joy of being part of the Morpheus gang, which is a community of start-up founders who are playing roles of givers to others in the community, while they continue to build their own venture. When most people in a community are involved in sharing and giving, it creates an environment of abundance of knowledge. When new people come into such an environment and culture, they are very likely to adopt a similar attitude of sharing and giving.

This is the aspect of Morpheus we want to focus on - a community where everyone shares and gives, a community where entrepreneurs are happy, they are growing personally along with all the hard work and challenges.

How are you looking to involve alumni of The Morpheus program while working with new entrepreneurs?

Current members of the Morpheus gang are the reason for its existence and they are the nucleus of our next phase. Going forward, the identity is the “Morpheus gang” and not “The Morpheus”, it’ll now be all of us as part of the community and things will be driven by members of the group; and not individualistic.

We are building a strong product at the backend, which will be the backbone of all interactions in times to come. Here, senior gang members can open up their calendars for interactions based on the time they have, skillsets and expertise, which we can use to pair a newcomer with a senior for help either on a need-based format or as a mentor-mentee format.

How did the concept of making ‘happiness’ the yardstick of success come about? How do you think it will play out practically?

Intuitively, at The Morpheus, we’ve done things that we’ve derived happiness from. Now, when it came to observing the entrepreneurs we were working with and trying to find out what was the reason some entrepreneurs were doing better than others - when I say better, not just statistically but by way of how they functioned - we observed these were people who were in a “flow” or who functioned “intuitively”. Then the question was, how does one stay in the flow or intuitive state all the time? That’s when we realised that true happiness is the key.

When we talk of happiness, we refer to it at a level of understanding beyond measurability.

Along those lines, how has the idea of giving without expecting and getting back worked out so far? Any examples?

All of how the existing Morpheus community works is based on this philosophy. Once an entrepreneur became a part of the Morpheus, as part of a batch (how we worked earlier), he/she became a part of the Morpheus community too. This community has from its inception been a “give more to get more” space. And that has worked really well for all of us. For the community, there is a feeling of brotherhood, of sorts. To give you a simple example: If an entrepreneur was travelling from say Bangalore to Mumbai for the first time, all that he’d do is to write a note to the gang and he would be assured stay/support from a Mumbai entrepreneur in the gang.

Will The Morpheus shut down the incubator/accelerator program? What changes can we expect?

Yes, we will no longer run the four-month Business Acceleration Program, like we used to. Through these five years of running the program, it has evolved based on need and learning. And towards the end, the programme was never actually all that I had listed. For one, we were never about a four-month only interaction. Our approach has always been long-term relationship based, where the most important criterion was the founders.

We will start engagement with a start-up at a time when the start-up and the Morpheus are mutually ready, any time of the year, and for as long as our support is relevant for them.

We will be opening the Morpheus gang to companies in the next stages, two to five years/five to 10 years and across other categories.

Will you have a similar ‘happiness’ measurement mindset?

We believe that like-attracts-like. Five odd years, 180+ members later, we have all the more reason to believe it. The Morpheus team has always worked on that principle, but realised it only recently. Like us, there are many driven, focused, passionate founders who are working on the same parlance, but maybe have not realised it in an obvious manner. One of our tasks is to introduce to the concept to as many and walk along with those who resonate with this measure of happiness.

Will The Morpheus be looking at entrepreneurs focusing in any particular sectors in the short term? Any sectors you think will be an exciting space to enter?

Our primary focus has been the founders. So, we will continue to engage with them.

Specifically, we have been sector agnostic. But, however, it is important that founders solve problems they can resonate with, areas where there is a need to get a fresh perspective or solution to make things better - could be something that’s as basic as sustainable clothing or even artificial intelligence-driven solutions. The key is, does the founder resonate with it for the right reasons, and what the purpose of solving the problem is.