I first heard of “Morpheus Gang” in February 2014 when I wrote this story for TechCrunch about how and why it was shutting down.

Sameer Guglani, one of Morpheus founders, wrote this emotional and somewhat philosophical blog titled “Morpheus is going nowhere.”

Since then, I have met dozens of the Morpheus gang members from Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune: they include Ashish Tulsian of POSist and Sumit Jain of Commonfloor. The gang is now around 340 members strong, and what binds them together is this selfless, passionate sense of mission (I know it’s hard to believe this at a time when “the mercenary culture” is going mainstream).

For this podcast, I meet Guglani in his Chandigarh den, in a small, well laid-out pocket of the modern city.

I ask him what it would take for Ola and Flipkart to beat Uber and Amazon?

While answering the question, Guglani candidly admits that he mostly prefers using the services of the multinational rivals. He points at the challenges faced by the Indian startups and their founders, in terms of not being excellent at doing several things. “Most of them are great at one, may be two things, and that’s about it.”

“At some point in time, entrepreneurs start stagnating because there’s so much struggle they have gone through to move every inch,” he tells me. “Somewhere the feeling of having arrived comes in, somewhere the growth of consciousness stops — it’s like my car has run out of fuel.”

What he stresses is for entrepreneurs to expand their consciousness to deal with challenges that they cannot even predict. He cites example of Tesla’s Elon Musk to illustrate how evolved entrepreneurs like him have expanded their consciousness.

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Podcast produced by Anand Murali.

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