Conquering the World from Southeast Asia w/ Abhishek Gupta, Co-Founder Circles.Life [S4.E7]

Abhishek Gupta is the co-Founder of Circles Life, Asia’s first fully digital telco. Everything a Circles customer experiences is completely online, bringing the same level of sophistication to the telco world that consumers enjoy in many other walks of life, such as their food delivery or ride sharing. 

Circles is currently kicking off its second act. Having penetrated Asia initially with it direct to consumer telco offering, they soon realised that their in house technology stack could be rolled out for other telcos to use, and have now started to offer a B2B SaaS platform to enable this. This is an interesting vertical playbook to be running, and we dig into Abhi’s vision of where this may lead. 

This is a wonderful deep dive into the challenges and advantages of scaling a company in Southeast Asia, as well as giving insight into the technology eco system more generally. 

Raised in India, Abhi is a true high performer, a wonderful leader and someone who is trying to disrupt one of the largest markets in the world. You would not want to bet against his success. 

You can follow TDM (linktr.ee/tdmgrowth) and host Ed Cowan (linktr.ee/eddiecowan) across social channels.

Show notes;

Growing up in India (00:03:11) 

Skills Abhishek learned from his years in consulting (00:05:01) 

Circles Life founding story (00:07:14) 

The tailwinds of the telecommunications sector in South-East Asia (00:09:49) 

The insights that had developed as to how Circles Life was going to disrupt the legacy telcos and why the customer-centricity was so important (00:10:48) 

What led Circles Life to make the transition to  B2B from B2C (00:15:52) 

What the telco industry could look like in 10 years (00:17:58) 

Insight into the technology scene in South-East Asia (00:21:56) 

Circles Life culture and how it has evolved (28:09) 

Circles Life’s culture as a competitive advantage (31:13) 

The value of an employee ownership plan (33:12) 

How Abhishek’s job has evolved over time (34:45) 

Having a personal board of directors (36:59) 

The power of story-telling (39:59) 

How Abhishek thinks about adversity (42:32)