Part 1: Captain Fresh's Utham Gowda on seafood as the world's last unorganised trillion-dollar industry, why undervaluation is a founder's superpower and his “reverse career path”
About this episode
Utham Gowda shares his journey of building a billion-dollar seafood company from India and discusses the industry's challenges and his personal insights.
Welcome to First Principles! This is part 1 of episode 52, the full conversation. Rohin met Utham Gowda at Spacebot Studio in Indiranagar on a Tuesday afternoon. Utham was compact, measured, and precise in the way he spoke, like someone who has spent years learning when to talk and when to listen. What's striking was how quickly he opened up. Within the first half hour of the conversation, you got the sense that this is someone who has thought very deeply about his own life, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a conversation and then, almost without noticing, going places you didn't expect. The story itself is hard to believe. A kid from landlocked Mysore, with no connection to the sea, no family background in business, builds a billion-dollar global seafood company. He took salary cuts at every job change, even after getting married. He has never owned a car and the highest tax he paid was in 2015. And his eight-year-old son, unable to get his father's attention any other way, started a fake company called Blackfish and would set up a little boardroom at home, just to have something to talk to his dad…
People in this episode
Host: Rohin
Guest: Utham Gowda
Topics covered
- seafood industry
- entrepreneurship
- founder stories
- business valuation
- global companies
- personal growth
Keywords
- seafood
- entrepreneur
- business
- global company
- founder
- valuation
- Mysore
- Blackfish
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Captain Fresh, Blackfish
Places: Mysore, Indiranagar
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- Part 2: Captain Fresh's Utham Gowda on seafood as the world's last unorganised trillion-dollar industry, why undervaluation is a founder's superpower and his “reverse career path”
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