Richa

When I was a founder, no one replied to my emails or returned calls. Now I'm an investor and everyone wants to meet me. This is a side of entrepreneurship no one talks about. I've been meaning to share these thoughts for a while now. As a founder, I would reach out to investors, potential hires, partners and all kind of people. Mostly sending cold emails and begging for warm intros. Some days I’d open my inbox ten times an hour. Nothing. Not even a polite No. And every meeting I did get felt like charity. People would check their phones while I was passionately talking about what i'm building. It wasn’t just isolation, it felt being invisible & lonely. People say “build in public,” but the truth is, unless you’ve raised a lot of money or built a network around the big entrepreneur circle, you’re just noise in the feed. No one roots for you unless the world already has. No one talks about this version of entrepreneurship where your startup is still ugly and half working. People don’t really meet founders. They meet press releases. Funding headlines. Vanity metrics. You don’t exist until TechCrunch or Yourstory says you do. I didn’t have time for personal branding. I was too busy building, selling and surviving. And most days i'll wake up wondering , am I building something real and useful? Then I became an investor. Suddenly, I was interesting. Now my inbox is overflowing. Everyone wants to meet me. Founders, operators, influencers, even the ones who never replied before. I get a lot of engagement on my posts & people tag me on social media. People ask for advice & feedback. They send decks, DMs & invite me as a guest to their events. Same events where i couldn't get entry earlier as a founder. Irony is, I used to be ignored for building. Now I’m celebrated for betting. This is the part that messes with your head. Not the rejection but how conditional the world’s attention really is. So now, I try to reply to every cold email. I take the calls that don’t scale. Because I know what it’s like to be building something real and feel completely invisible. If you’re a founder in the trenches, just remember this. This world doesn’t reward quiet builders. It rewards loud signals. And when you're not seen, it eats away at your mental health. Not because you're weak. But because being human means wanting to be heard. And if you’re on the other side, pause before you ignore the next unknown builder. Because today's nobody might be tomorrow's someone. And they’ll remember who replied. Keep going. The world may not meet you yet. But one day, it will pretend it always did.