The Story Under the Numbers

In 1942, a man named Mr Gupta started a small electrical trading company in India. Eighty years later, that company is the Jakson Group. Eight thousand crore in revenue. Generators, solar, hydrogen, ethanol. One of the country’s largest private renewable energy businesses, built across four generations of the same family.

Bharat Gupta is the fourth generation. He is a director at Jakson Solar and leads international expansion. His father is the vice chairman, his uncle the chairman, and his brothers run the rest. By every external measure, his path was already drawn.

Except in the board meetings about solar capacity, Bharat was sitting there with his phone in his lap, scrolling through Gymshark, Lululemon and YoungLA. One day, he stopped scrolling and started building.

He stopped scrolling and started building

The first person Bharat told was not his father. It was his gym trainer.

He had been in the gym for more than fifteen years, buying a lot of clothes from the global fitness brands he admired, and one day, it clicked that he could build his own. He told the trainer. Then he told his wife, who fully backed him. Then the two of them started writing down names. Skull Theory. Skull Crusher. A long list of fifteen, most of them random. The one that stuck was Musclemind, a blend of muscle and mind, from the gym idea that your muscles grow faster when your mind is focused on them.

He took the trademark. He registered the company. He did all of it across three or four quiet months. Only after the papers were signed did he walk into his father’s cabin and say the words out loud.

[EMBED: YouTube Short or Instagram Reel. "The first person who knew was my gym trainer"]

Telling his father

His father, in Bharat’s words, was not very happy.

The logic was sound, and it came from love. The family already had a base worth thousands of crores. Bharat could take the solar business from two thousand crore toward ten, toward fifteen. Or he could start something from scratch and spend years just to reach a fraction of that. His father wanted him to choose the first. Bharat calls that fatherly warmth, the advice of a man who has walked the harder road and does not want his son to walk it too.

But Bharat chose the harder road anyway. When I asked him why it mattered so much, he was frank. He wanted to prove to himself that he could build something big through his own hard work and will. And he wanted to prove to his father and his family that he had made the right call and had not wasted years of his life.

The early months were not clean. He had to let go of the first two people he hired within two months because their vision did not match what he was trying to build. He started again with a new team. The first drop launched in September 2024. At first, the only buyers were family. It felt good, and it also felt hollow, because a brand is not for your family; it is for the community out there. The day orders started coming from strangers is the day he believed it could work.

[EMBED: Instagram Reel or LinkedIn native video. "I wanted to prove it to my father also"]

The story under the numbers

Here is the honest part, and it is as much about me as it is about Bharat.

Throughout a lot of our conversation, Bharat reached for numbers. Two thousand crore to six thousand. Six to eight. A hundred crore when his grandfather left the company, eight thousand today. The figures are real and impressive. But numbers are noise. Story is a signal. And I kept trying to move us from one to the other.

I do not read that pull toward data as a flaw. I read it as gravity. When you are the fourth generation of a business measured in thousands of crores, the number is the language you were handed. It is how worth gets counted at the dinner table. So when a son steps out to build something small and entirely his own, the instinct to reach back for the family’s yardstick makes complete sense. He is proving himself in the only currency the room has ever used.

My job in that chair is to find the person underneath the yardstick. To get past what the business is worth and into what it costs him. We got there in flashes. The scrolling in the board meeting. The secret months. The quiet admission that he wanted his father to be proud. I wanted more of those, and reaching for them is the part of this craft I am still learning. The story was always there. My work is to make room for it.

The part that doesn’t fit on a pitch deck

Near the end, I asked Bharat what he does at eleven at night when something goes wrong at Musclemind. When you are building in a category your family cannot help you with, and the people you would normally call are running an eight-thousand-crore business in a completely different world.

He did not say he calls a mentor. He did not say he called a co-founder. He said he wears a Rudraksh and that it calms him down.

That is the founder story we rarely get. The part that does not fit on a pitch deck or a LinkedIn post. Just a person sitting alone at night with a business he chose to build, a family he is trying to make proud, and a self he is still figuring out how to lead. It shows up in small ways too, like the thirty or forty customers he calls himself every weekend, just to ask about delivery, quality and comfort, because he wants to hear it directly.

Bharat is early in something that might become very large, or might stay quiet. Either way, he chose it without permission, without a playbook, and without the easier path his last name was offering him.

If you are building something your family does not understand, this episode is for you. If you are inheriting something your family built, it is for you too.

I'm Ravneet Oberoi. This is The Story Behind.

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