Strangers to Friends: Meet Ariela, Co-Founder of Happy to Gather
Making friends as an adult might be the hardest thing nobody warns you about. We sat down with Ariela, originally from Ecuador and a former Circles House member, to hear how a genuinely lonely chapter of her life led to Happy to Gather, the events company she co-founded to turn strangers into real friends. Below, she shares her story firsthand.
Tell us about Happy to Gather and how it began.
I'm Ariela, I'm from Ecuador, and I'm the co-founder of Happy to Gather, a business in the area of human connection. We started this project a year ago, and we've hosted twenty events so far. The idea is to bring human connection back to people. In a world where social media and AI are everywhere, we wanted to bring people together again, face to face, human to human.
It started from something personal, honestly. I was feeling lonely in a moment of my life, and I needed people. I arrived at Circles House and I was surrounded every day by people, and that changed my whole perspective on how important community is. In that moment, I understood that people need to find their own people, and their life will be so much better.
What makes Happy to Gather different from a typical meetup?
There are so many other events out there, a lot of meetups where it's just, okay, people connect, and that's it. We wanted to do something completely different, where people can actually get to know each other on a deeper level, because it's genuinely hard to get to that point as an adult. If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it properly: a good name, good branding, a new way of doing it that nobody else was doing.
I think making friends as an adult is so hard. When you're young, by default, you're meeting the same people every day: your classmates, the same twenty people, and you're spending a lot of time with them, getting to know them deeply. As an adult, especially with everybody working remote now, that default disappears. It's super hard to meet new people if you're not meeting them regularly. And the spaces where people do meet aren't really the right spaces, you go to a sports class, you do the class, and then it's over and you didn't actually connect with anyone. I think we're just lacking spaces to meet people on a deeper level. A lot of people want real connection, and a lot of people are open to new friendships, they just don't know where to find it.
How did you find your co-founder?
That's actually the same story. Being at Circles completely shaped my whole life, because that's also where I met my partner, who I went on to co-found Happy to Gather with. Being around people who were building things, everybody talking about their businesses, their projects, that inspired me too. I always wanted to create something of my own, and seeing people actually doing it made me think, why not me? I can't be happier with how that Circles experience turned out, honestly.
What actually happens at one of your events?
Our technique is to get people coming in as strangers and leaving as friends, or at least as people who got to know each other on a genuinely deep level. We've built our activities through a lot of trial and error, and now they work really well. Yesterday we had an event, and people kept telling us they couldn't believe how time flew, it felt like half an hour and it had actually been two hours. I don't feel like those people are strangers anymore. I feel like I've known them for months, and that's kind of crazy. It comes down to the dynamics, everybody introduces each other, so everyone gets a real chance to know everyone else who's there, and through the activities, people find what they actually have in common.
What's the moment you realized this was actually working?
Our very first event group is still the one connecting the most, people are still hanging out, still making plans, still friends with each other. More than the event itself being a success, it's seeing what happens after: people doing their birthdays with people they actually met at Happy to Gather. My heart goes like crazy over that, honestly, because it means so much to me that people actually find real connections and friendships, that they have people to live life with, to have fun with, and not be lonely. That's genuinely my reason for doing this. And it hasn't just changed one life, we've changed a lot of lives, including our own. I've met a lot of my own friends through Happy to Gather too.
What's the part of building a company that nobody talks about?
I think one of the hardest things about starting something from scratch is that you're not going to make money straight away. You really need to be living your project and keep going, I think that's the most important thing. So you have an idea: let's try it, let's keep going. And if something goes wrong, if one event didn't go as planned, maybe the vibe wasn't right, maybe not enough people bought tickets, keep going. The next one is going to be better, and you learn fast from your mistakes. Every moment is for learning, and for doing it again.
What's the vision for where this goes from here?
We don't know exactly where this is taking us. We have an idea of where it's going, but we're staying open-minded to whatever it has to become. Our main focus is just that we want human connection to be everywhere in the world, however that ends up changing along the way, that's the purpose we're heading toward.
