StartupCentral

Last month, Indus Khaitan stepped down from startup accelerator Morpheus Venture Partners to go back to his entrepreneurial roots. He’s signed up as part of the founding team of Sunnyvale-based enterprise mobility startup Bitzer Mobile. The company provides interactive, multi-platform, secure, manageable and native mobile applications for accessing enterprise data. Khaitan, a self-confessed techie, founded Silicon Valley-based Tejit, a discovery engine for user-generated content, in 2007. The startup was acquired by SezWho (acquired by Echo) in 2008. He returned to India that year and set up base in Bangalore with Morpheus to work with young Indian technology startups. In an interview with Startupcentral, Khaitan talks about what prompted the decision to quit Morpheus and his plans ahead. Edited excerpts:

How long have you been thinking of moving on? Why?

About three months, since December. I was getting a little bored with what I was doing. As an investor you have to have a lot of strength not to get involved on the technology side. Entrepreneurs here run very slow overall. The ecosystem is not mature. If you have a new idea, the competition does not exist. Or you don’t have money or vision. That has been nagging me for some time. If I give advice to an entrepreneur, he take his own time. Then I want to jump in and write code. Being a techie I was getting bored not doing things myself. That was the key reason.

How did Bitzer Mobile happen?

I had been brewing the idea of starting a project on my own. Then I found a couple of friends who had started this company in the enterprise mobility area. I knew them from my earlier startup. The vision is to become the RIM (Research in Motion) of the applications economy.

Tell us a bit about the founders of Bitzer Mobile.

Ali Ahmed, who is the CTO of the company, conceptualized the idea about eight months ago and built a virtualization platform for the device. Naeem Zafar, who is the CEO, has led several high-tech startup in Silicon Valley and teaches entrepreneurship at the Haas Business School at the University of California Berkeley. I joined them two weeks ago as vice president of India operations.

Will you move back to the US?

Not immediately. Maybe in a year. We’re setting up an India development center and just did out first hire yesterday. We need to set up a sales organization as well. The development team should have 10-15 people by the end of the year and at least five within a month.

What’s your key takeaway working with entrepreneurs here?

Barring a few most lack the big vision to build multi-crore businesses. It may be because they have not been exposed to a lot a big success stories here.

How can that be fixed?

Well entrepreneurs need to think big. It’s okay to start small but the vision must be big. Second of course is the availability of capital. Kosmix which got acquired by Walmart this month had raised over $55 million from venture capitalists. The point is that money was available. I know smart people at places like Yahoo! India and professors at IITs who have good ideas. But who is willing to take a wild bet on them? If you look at Silicon Valley, most of the brave new world investing is done by investors who have been former entrepreneurs.

Given this environment, what are the survival chances of outfits like Morpheus?

Morpheus is just one part of the game. You need multiple vehicles for sustainable impact. There are about 15-odd venture capital firms investing at the later stages. We need 3-4 times that number at the early stages and another 3-4 times that at the angel and seed stage.

Image Courtesy: Indus Khaitan