In a world where finding guidance can often feel like searching for a distant star, Aanchal Gupta’s journey shines as a beacon of resilience and purpose. Faced with challenges unique to being the youngest leader in her field and navigating spaces where mentorship wasn’t the norm, she turned every obstacle into an opportunity. Her story is one of quietly becoming a mentor herself helping others weather their toughest battles while relentlessly pursuing solutions with her team. This unyielding drive culminated in the creation of Agents Stack, a visionary platform born from Aanchal’s deep understanding of the power of collaboration, impact, and leadership that knows no boundaries.
Here is a founder whose value is never defined by circumstance but by the strength to lead and uplift others along the way.
Driving Digital Transformation and Diversity in Male-Dominated Industries
Aanchal has always been a curious individual with a passion for solving tough problems, a deep love for nature, and a spirit of adventure that has guided much of her career trajectory. With an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, she gravitated towards Networking and Cybersecurity, fields she found most engaging at the time. Beginning her professional journey at McKinsey, she consistently tackled business challenges by leveraging technology to drive digital transformations aimed at either topline growth or bottom-line efficiency. Recognizing the unique intersection of business and technology as her strength, she now sees the advent of AI as the perfect opportunity to address the toughest problems with meaningful global impact.
Throughout her career, she has often been the youngest and sole female in many roles, particularly since her start at McKinsey, where her involvement was driven purely by business strategy. She has repeatedly taken initiatives from zero to one across various functions and businesses, rapidly growing them in traditionally male-dominated industries such as Technology (during the early 2000s), Energy, Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Cybersecurity, and Manufacturing. While she never specifically set out to become a woman leader, she has always been committed to fostering diversity within her teams.
Calling for Systemic Change
Aanchal has always focused on hiring individuals who take true ownership of their work, people who hold themselves accountable, fail fast, learn fast, and grow from the experience. She believes in giving “tough love” when necessary to aid learning but largely empowers her team to work independently, stepping in only when they reach out for guidance. This hands-off yet supportive approach is the same philosophy she applies to customers stepping in decisively when a real problem arises and something is on the verge of breaking.
She does not believe she has necessarily faced direct biases as a woman leader but acknowledges that being the youngest person in leadership has often posed a bigger challenge. In several instances, managers hired above her in Sales roles were unfamiliar with working alongside high-performing young leaders especially women creating a cultural disconnect. She observes that many men struggle to network with women, partly because such interactions have not been normalized or encouraged since childhood.
Where Aanchal does see the most significant bias against women is in the investor community. From her perspective, many VCs and PEs have had limited exposure to young, ambitious women building large-scale businesses and taking bold risks for big visions. While data clearly shows that women-led businesses consistently deliver higher performance, she believes the funding gap feels more like a staged systemic barrier than purely unconscious bias. For her, closing this gap requires systematic change and, critically, increasing the number of women in investing roles.
Thriving in Fast-Paced Leadership
Aanchal has consistently prioritized building diverse teams throughout her career, actively hiring and promoting talent that spans genders, nationalities, and varied backgrounds. She believes diversity fuels innovation and growth, and as a manager, she has fostered inclusive environments by championing young and diverse professionals across all roles.
Balancing a demanding career and family life is deeply important to her. Aanchal cherishes time spent learning with her children and values her family as a top priority, regularly dedicating quarters of the year to be with her parents and drawing on experiences from traveling to over 40 countries. However, she acknowledges that founding Agents Stack required immense effort, with work-life balance being a gradual achievement during the startup phase.
Throughout her journey, Aanchal has been assertive and data-driven, blending solid business intuition with numbers to back her decisions. At 28, she took on a leadership role in a Fortune 100 industrial company abroad, working in a male-dominated environment with colleagues significantly older and predominantly men. Her directness and readiness to address political and slow-moving issues were sometimes at odds with the company culture, leading her to eventually move on. This experience reinforced her desire to be in fast-paced organizations with communities where collaboration is fluid, titles do not hinder alignment, and agility is embraced.
Journey of Mentorship and Representation
Aanchal has never officially had a mentor but recognizes the significant need for one. Throughout her career, most of her managers quickly became mentors, providing valuable guidance whenever she sought it. However, finding the right mentor remains a challenge, especially given that mentorship is not a widely established concept in her background. She acknowledges that individuals who have experienced a fast-paced life balancing demanding roles in male-dominated industries alongside family and children are rare to find. Drawing from her own professional challenges, Aanchal naturally mentors those she can relate to, striving to help them avoid similar mistakes and hopes to dedicate more time to this in the future.
For Aanchal, having the right community has been vital her parents have always been her strongest support, alongside a few mentors and friends who truly understand her. She believes building a strong community is crucial, especially since many women lose such support over time due to the pressures of balancing family, work, and childcare. This situation calls for change, which she sees slowly emerging through a more equal distribution of responsibilities both at home and in the workplace.
Aanchal also observes that inherent biases against men in leadership roles persist, particularly in industries like cybersecurity and manufacturing. She believes the quickest way to overcome these biases is by increasing the representation of women in leadership and investing communities, as women leaders are more likely to recognize and address these biases swiftly.
Balancing Leadership, Parenthood, and Inclusion with Purpose
Aanchal believes that with limited time split between raising two young children and building a company, the most effective way to foster inclusion is by hiring the best talent. At Agents Stack, over 50% of the leadership team comprises women, and the organization boasts more than 70% overall diversity. The team is made up of immensely talented and ambitious individuals working across marketing, consulting, accounting, and ML/AI, bringing with them varied backgrounds in industries, functions, and countries, enriching learning for everyone every day.
Balancing the growth of a fast-paced organization as an early member in the Asia-Pacific region while raising two young kids has brought several high-pressure situations for Aanchal. Each time she had a child, her manager changed, requiring her to quickly adapt to new leadership styles while ensuring customers, teams, and the business continued to run smoothly, a challenge that brought considerable stress. Her approach to managing such situations has been to remain calm and, at times, silent, allowing most issues to resolve themselves naturally.
Aanchal firmly believes in leveraging one’s strengths, finding a mentor as early as possible, and seeking out multiple role models to learn from, whether directly or through reading about their lives. She emphasizes the importance of choosing the right manager, as they can make or break a career, and advises against chasing titles. For her, long-term success lies in excelling in areas of genuine passion and proven capability.
Leading Across Borders, Industries, and Cultures
Aanchal’s career story is that of a wanderer, much like her love for the mountains and jungles where she finds her happiest moments. Driven by a passion to restore the harmony between humans and wildlife, she has traveled to more than 40 countries and lived and worked in six different nations. Her professional journey spans diverse industries including BFSI, Energy, Utilities, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, and Cybersecurity. In every organization, she has often been the youngest and the only woman in leadership, thriving in multicultural environments with colleagues from varied nationalities.
What fuels her excitement daily is solving increasingly complex problems, always with measurable impact and clear outcomes in sight. She finds joy in collaborating with a great team that shares a common vision and goal, knowing that true progress comes from collective effort. To stay ahead of trends and challenges, she continuously reads widely across media and journals, deeply listens to customer issues, and remains actively involved in her life with her children a balance that sharpens her perspective and keeps her grounded in her mission.
