Friends Founder, Kunal Gupta
According to Kunal, Friends is the answer to a major issue plaguing American cities. Art venues are disappearing rapidly and with no ability for the people who love them, to directly help them stay open. Working to bridge that gap, Kunal and his co-founder, are going to create a more just world, full of beauty and art.
What problem is Friends addressing?
In every city in this country, passionate people are relentlessly putting their time, freedom, and livelihoods on the line to bring you culture and to support the artists and musicians you love. They build music venues and galleries, bring in boutique retail and services, run food and drinks establishments, all the while fighting really tough odds to keep the lights on and make your city a beautiful place.
They’re enormously undervalued.
It’s difficult for them to meet rent — which rises 10% every year, as well as overcome an increase in regulatory barriers on small venues. The federal government has ended support programs like the National Endowment for the Arts. This moment in history is a threat to what it means to be America.
I’ve spent lot of time on both sides, both as a venue owner and as a venue patron. Behind the scenes, I can tell you — the most renowned and legendary art spaces seriously consider throwing in the towel almost every day, because they just don’t know how to pay for operations.
But as a customer — I can also say I’m frustrated that I can visit a new art space, fall in love with it, and have absolutely no way to protect it as it gets assaulted by these new forces and invariably shuts down.
So what we do at Friends is make it extremely easy for people that love cultural businesses to step in and become part of their financing, and in a simple way that they can afford to engage in. I’m confident that if we nail the infrastructure to make that relationship easy and exciting on both sides, we can turn things around 180 degrees and redesign our cities together, making them better and more vibrant places than they’ve ever been.
From watching our beta testers take off so successfully, I’m optimistic we have a real shot at this change.
What in your background drew you to entrepreneurship and what continues to drive you?
I had my first major business responsibility as an artist. Three Columbia College friends and I had a band, Loud Objects (https://loudobjects.com). We sold merchandise that people loved a million times more than our music — we were always sold out of merchandise. This was ten years ago, but even today, Pitchfork magazine features our band merchandise as a top Christmas gift for music lovers, it’s still a hot item. Meeting worldwide demand like that ran us through a crash course in product design, material sourcing, production, fulfillment, partnerships, customer service, marketing, bookkeeping, delivery, and I found every step of the process pretty exciting. Incidentally, one of my first projects with Joe, my co-founder at Friends, is that we partnered with him to manage our merchandise business.
Since that tiny venture, we’ve learned a lot about business (especially culture! that is tough!) as we’ve moved on to venues with much larger teams. But I’ve always carried an honest enthusiasm for the work. It’s just a thrill to be in touch with so many kinds of people.
I also grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My father founded DataEase, the first database app for regular people, before Microsoft Access. Everyone from schools to international banks ran DataEase, some still do! He later built an e-commerce company called Neuvis and put every resource into it — my high school friends and I, for example, engineered the software. We sold the company to IBM — but just a day before the acquisition, our family was in crushing debt and the house was barely standing from neglect. So the whitewater-rapids of entrepreneurship is a familiar space for me, and I feel a responsibility to put that understanding to good use.
How did you initially start blending your passion for art, with your background in Computer Science?
The computer music department at Columbia and the video games courses within Computer Science at Columbia led the way here. The Computer Music department (and WBAR) gave us face-time with legends in the music industry, and Bernie Yee who led video games at Columbia gave us face time with legends in the video game industry. It’s always inspiring to meet great people.
Did you always know that you would want to branch out of purely being an artist and in to blending the two?
Not at all! I started out wanting to be an artist, probably to rebel against my childhood upbringing in startup culture — and entrepreneurship emerged out of a sense of service. After being an artist for some time, I began truly appreciating the worldwide community of art spaces that make art possible. So I quit my day job as a software programmer and started an art space in Providence — which eventually led to Babycastles, a popular gallery for video games.
When we started with Babycastles, we relied on a larger art space to host us. By receiving that support, I ended up feeling a responsibility to support larger art infrastructure, and co-founded Silent Barn. And then in working on Silent Barn, I started understanding that better tools can make an enormous impact on Silent Barn and all kinds of places like Silent Barn in the world — and that visceral appreciation for the true value of cultural infrastructure brought me back full circle back to creating a fundraising startup to try and unlock it.
What has been your favorite experience as a Founder thus far?
Finding incredible people to work with and having the blessing to see them make the choice to join you in a vision that you believe in together is the most fulfilling thing in the world, and I imagine it always will be the best part. I can’t believe how many unique, creative, powerful people I’ve shared history with in life so far, and I’m totally looking forward to more.
What has been your biggest challenge and how did you address it?
In my earlier entrepreneurial work, we could slip, but then get back up. If we did “good enough”, we could reasonably expect we would succeed.
For the first time, this company, Friends, isn’t like that — technology entrepreneurism is an absolutely unforgiving, “no holds barred” environment. We’ve woken up to the point that there is no “good enough”. We’re sprinting as fast as possible with a finite set of resources, which is just us — the founding team. Every personal weakness scales up, every operational weakness scales up, and that cost can absolutely make the difference on whether or not this whole project fails, even if our ideas have merit. So Joe, my co-founder, and I started using tools like Toggl and spreadsheets to take exquisite stock of every way we succeed or fall short of our goals, as well as improving the way we present topics and make decisions, and spend serious time evaluating this on a regular basis. It’s a deep and exciting process of personal growth which forms the basis for really fluid teamwork, and something I’m looking forward to developing further and sharing with more people that we get to partner with over time.
How did your experiences at Columbia College influence where you’re at today?
I owe my career to WBAR radio, a college radio station in a basement of Barnard, as well as to the station managers that helped us get involved in DJing, throwing, and attending events in the WBAR community. WBAR introduced me my own meaning in life, which is to participate in culture with an inclination to address justice.
The Computer Music department at Prentiss Hall, under Brad Garton, extended that guidance with the thrill of being in a tight-knit community sitting on the technological cutting edge of cultural creation.
A sense of service pervaded all the instruction I received at Columbia, down to my piano teacher, who inverted my ideas of art-as-expression into art-as-a-service, which better fit my values.
And the strong current of social justice that pervades the Columbia student body helped me better understand issues in feminism, race, and economic justice at a deeper level than I would have at other schools. That understanding helps me work with and listen attentively to people from so many diverse backgrounds with a level of comfort — which is absolutely a blessing in the work I do.
What has been the best piece of advice you’ve been given along the way?
A combination of things actually — I had a meeting years ago, with an investor I admire, in which he wanted to know how we would be “cool.” This was his single point of focus, which made me think.
My co-founder, Joe, taught me early in our collaboration history that everything starts with friends. That’s actually the basis of our company’s name. On day 1, you invite your friends. On Day 2, they invite their friends. On day three, their friends invite their friends, and it begins to feel like a powerful movement of countless strangers — but it’s really friends.
I once asked Molly Crabapple how she motivates creative people to pursue justice. She said to communicate from an emotional space foremost.
I can combine all this advice to say that your story, who you are, the emotional place from which you engage with people you work for and with — these are essential elements of your company.
We built that insight directly into our product, which is what makes it work.
Is there anything else you would like us to know about?
Visit our website to see a demo, request a pilot, or just learn more!
You can watch a video of how the platform works, or check out the featured list of accounts to see the platform in action.
We recommend becoming a member of Silent Barn, Babycastles, or Blank Forms if you can — you can even buy tickets to an upcoming Columbia Venture Community incubation night with Friends!
Live stats show off our progress so far on the main page of the Friends website, with over 1700+ attendees pledging over $15,000 in support. (That’s almost $10+ additional revenue per ticket!) Wild. And stay in touch on Medium at Do More With Friends !!
Enormous thanks to you for sharing your experiences with the community and best of luck as you continue to make the world a more creative place!
