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‘Kya kar rhe ho?’: CEO of ₹2,500 crore company surprised by driver opening car door for him
The CEO of Astrotalk, Puneet Gupta, revealed how his new driver’s behaviour changed after overhearing a phone call.
The CEO of Astrotalk has shared a lighthearted reflection on how money shapes perception, revealing how his new driver’s behaviour changed after overhearing a phone call. Puneet Gupta, the Noida-based founder and CEO of Astrotalk, said in an X post that he hired a driver for the first time.
The first two days went well. However, on the third day, the driver rushed to open the car door for Gupta in an unexpected gesture of deference.
The CEO of Astrotalk — a company with a valuation of ₹2,560 crore, according to Tracxn — was surprised by this act.
Astrotalk CEO surprised
“Bhai ye kya kar rhe ho? (What are you doing, brother?),” he asked the driver. Gupta further told the driver that he could have opened the car door himself — “ye main kar lunga, aapne 2 min waste kar diye car start karne mein,” he said.
The driver replied saying that opening car doors is part of his job description.
Gupta was puzzled by the sudden change in his behaviour, until he realised what could have prompted it. The CEO of the astrology platform recalled that a day earlier, he had been having a phone conversation where he mentioned a deal worth between ₹100 to 500 crore.
He surmised that his driver had overheard the conversation and decided that he was an important person, and therefore taken it upon himself to open the car door for him.
“Later I realised, on the second day I was discussing something on call where I was talking about 100-500 crores. And suddenly he realised ki bada banda hai ye toh darwaja bhi kholna padega,” he wrote on X.
More about Puneet Gupta
Puneet Gupta is the founder and CEO of Astrotalk. In his own words, he comes from a “lower-middle-class family”.
In a Quora post three years ago, Gupta said that money has not changed his lifestyle and that he still drives a Hyundai Grand i10 which he bought in 2015.
In his post, he also revealed that he dated a woman from an upper-middle class family who constantly pushed him to earn more. After an argument with her, he quit his job without a plan and moved back to his hometown of Bathinda, Punjab. He and his girlfriend also broke up around that time.
After a few months of struggle, where he ate cheap food and slept on the floor of his friend’s apartment while juggling low-paying jobs, Gupta launched “an IT service company named CodeYeti in April 2015 and ran it for 2.5 years, before pivoting the entire business to a product named AstroTalk in October 2017.”
