Tete-a-Tete

Morpheus Venture Partners are making headlines after they announced the 7 new Indian start-ups that would join their bandwagon. We speak with Nandini Hirianniah from Morpheus Venture Partners to get a lowdown on all the buzz.

Tell us the reason for choosing the 7 Indian start-ups? Was there any criteria?

We received around 100 applications from all over India, from which we created an Initial shortlist of 15. All these 15 are excellent teams and promising ventures on which we would like to have worked on. But, considering various factors we had to choose some and let go of a few

The next step was to bring the 15 down to 6-7 who will be a part of MVP-Batch2-2008. This decision involved various factors: people in the team are the most important aspect, stage of the venture, working relationship between MVP team and the founding team, quantum of value that the MVP team could add to the venture and make an significant impact, etc.

But the three main factors for choosing the 7 are:

• Each startup has a rockstar team, with the right set of skills, a great vision and a lot of passion.
• Each startup is targeting a large market opportunity which is growing at a rapid pace
• Most importantly, there is a lot of comfort level between the MVP team and the founders

What is the average investment size that would interest you?

MVP does not invest currently. However, we do have some investing partners who we connect the companies with, for seed/angel investing options. We plan to close a fund of about 5 Million $ by the second quarter of 2009, so that we can directly invest in the companies.

How would MVP add value to the start-ups?

MVP team will work closely with these startups for the next 6 months on areas like product development/launch, customer traction, B2b deals, team building, revenue models, etc. (every startup has unique needs!).

The main goal for the startup founders & MVP is to build something impressive enough to raise the next round of capital. Once the team feels that point is reached, we will introduce the startups to early stage investors—and in some cases even acquirers.

Why did you choose the Y-Combinator model?

While working on morpheus we studied similar companies in others parts of the world and came across Y Combinator. They are doing a very good job and offer many good practices, which can be studied and adapted to the Indian environment

Where does MVP see itself in the next 5 years?

MVP’s goal is to be the preferred choice for investment, business advisory and mentorship for promising early stage startups in India.

MVPs vision is to facilitate a startup revolution in India, by way of building strong businesses out of early stage companies. To have a closely knit startup community that learns from each other and helps each other grow and in turn grow the economy of the country. India is due to seeing a startup revolution and now is the genesis. 6-8 years from now, we will see a series of today’s startups make it big in the world economy either via M&A or IPOs

Message to young/budding entrepreneurs

• Look for problems around you, and think about solutions that are much better than the existing ones
• Remember that the power lies with you, the entrepreneur.
• Think big, dream large.
• Listen to your customer, as he’s the one that matters and make every penny work for your customer. Rest will follow!
• (Our favorite advice): Be fair to every one, people who you work with, people who you meet at conferences, on the blogs and otherwise. Startups need a lot of help (and all kind of help) from people around to build their dream product/service and if you are fair to people, they will come forward and help you.