<div> <p>What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?<br>Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. </p><p>By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.</p><p>In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:</p><p>Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating? </p><p>1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you? </p><p>2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs? </p><p>3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?</p><p>A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.</p><p>Chapters</p><p>0:00 Introduction<br>0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family<br>1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940<br>2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing<br>4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11<br>6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale<br>11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet<br>13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck<br>14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant<br>23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet<br>27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra<br>28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway<br>31:40 3 metrics every founder should track<br>41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)<br>43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea<br>46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence<br>49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)</p></div>