Circles.Life founders had 100+ investor meetings before nabbing a big one

This is 14 Questions, where we ask founders in the Asian tech scene to share their memorable moments, lessons learned, and advice for other founders.

Name: Abhishek Gupta

Current position: Co-founder at Circles.Life, which just launched an AI-powered personalized events feature called Discover.

Describe what you do in one sentence: Bringing an exponential change to personalization in digital services.

Photo credit: Circles.Life

What was the most memorable moment when building your company?

I remember the time when we were running low on cash and had to convince investors. The concept of a digital telco at the time was unproven and most traditional investors considered telco a sunset industry.

We went to more than 100 investor meetings before the first big investor came on board. Guess what? That investor took less than 30 minutes to make his decision! That was unexpected, especially after the many months of struggle.

What was your lowest point when building your company? How did you move past it?

To me, there’s no such thing as lowest or highest point. Some days are great, some days are not so good, and there are the usual ups and downs.

As a founder, one has to become immune to such thoughts or the daily swings will destroy you (and your team!). One has to take a bigger picture view and remember “why are we doing this” and keep chugging along.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

Business is always personal.

While we hear of this “lesson” often, the true meaning of it has come alive for me only in recent years. Unless you hit the heartstrings of people around you—be it family, friends, investors, employees, potential partners, etc.—you are always going to have a suboptimal outcome. While I always thought so about family/friends, I’m surprised by how much even the most hard-nosed negotiations—which you’d think are all about logic and numbers—are driven by emotions.