Utkarsh Soni Interview
Q. What is one piece of career advice that sounds good on social media but is actually terrible advice in real life?
"Just follow your passion and the money will follow." It sounds beautiful on a reel with the right background music, and I understand why it spreads, it's the advice everyone wishes were true. But it's incomplete to the point of being dangerous. I followed my passion for content straight out of college with zero financial cushion, and it nearly broke me.
What actually got me to a place where I could build a career out of content was the boring, unglamorous part nobody posts about, taking a stable job at KPMG first, understanding how income and stability actually work, and using that safety net to fund my content experiments on the side. Passion without a survival plan isn't courage, it's just risk with a nicer caption. I tell students this constantly: chase the passion, but build the floor under it first. The floor is what lets you take the passion seriously for long enough to actually get good at it.
Q. What is a failure or rejection from your early career that still influences how you work today?
In my early days of blogging and content creation in college, I made every kind of content I could think of, comedy, lifestyle, trends, information, and most of it went nowhere. Views stayed in double and triple digits, across months of consistent posting with almost nothing to show for it, and more than a few moments of genuinely wondering if I was wasting my time while people around me had "real" jobs lined up.
That period of putting in real effort and getting close to zero response taught me something I still lean on today: consistency without a clear niche is just noise, both to the algorithm and to yourself. It's why, when I finally moved into tech and AI content, I went all in on one lane instead of spreading thin across ten. And it's why, when BrandBazaar takes on a client or a piece of content underperforms, I don't panic or take it personally, I've already survived a much longer stretch of "nothing is working" than most people ever see from the outside.
Q. What do you think is the biggest disadvantage students from non-privileged or non-target backgrounds face, and how much of it can actually be overcome through skill and persistence?
The biggest disadvantage isn't talent or even access to information anymore, most of that is genuinely available for free online now. It's the absence of a safety net and a network at the same time. If you come from a privileged or "target" background, you can afford to fail a few times, you usually know someone who's already done what you're trying to do, and you have people around you who understand the path you're choosing. Without that, every setback feels like it might be the one that ends the attempt, and you're often the first person in your circle even trying this, so there's no one to call when you're stuck. I'd say skill and persistence can overcome a genuinely large part of this, maybe 60 to 70 percent of it, because content, outcomes, and results speak for themselves online in a way they didn't a generation ago.
But the remaining part, the network, the margin for error, the people who can open a door in one conversation that would've taken you two years to open on your own, that part isn't fully erased by hard work alone. It gets narrowed, not eliminated. Anyone telling you effort alone closes 100 percent of that gap either hasn't lived it or is selling you something.
Q. If you could eliminate one misconception Indian students have about AI, careers, or entrepreneurship, what would it be?
That entrepreneurship and content success happen fast once you "figure out the trick." Students see the highlight reel, a creator crossing a follower milestone, a founder announcing funding, and assume there's a shortcut they're missing, some secret hack or AI tool that will compress years into weeks. What they don't see is the two or three years of unremarkable, low-response effort behind almost every "overnight" story, mine included.
On the AI side specifically, I see the same impatience, students expecting AI tools to replace the need for building real skill, instead of treating AI as leverage on top of skill you actually have. The misconception isn't that AI or entrepreneurship are hyped too much, it's that people underestimate the unglamorous timeline underneath both.
Q. What was the biggest risk you took while moving from a stable corporate career to entrepreneurship, and what were you most afraid of losing?
The biggest risk was walking away from a steady KPMG paycheck and a clear, predictable career ladder to bet on something with no guaranteed income, an agency and a startup, both of which could easily have gone nowhere. What I was most afraid of losing wasn't the money itself, though that fear was real too. It was the certainty. In a corporate job, you know what next month looks like. As a founder, you genuinely don't, and that unpredictability is a different kind of pressure than anything a 9-to-6 prepares you for.
I was also afraid of what it would mean if it didn't work, going from someone building an audience and a company to someone explaining to family and peers why it fell apart. That fear didn't go away before I made the jump; I just decided the regret of not trying would outlast the fear of failing.
Q. With AI changing careers so rapidly, do you think young professionals should be worried about becoming replaceable or focused on becoming adaptable?
Adaptable, without question, but I'd push back gently on the framing that it's purely a mindset choice. Worry, in small doses, is useful; it's what pushes people to actually go learn the new tools instead of assuming their current skill set is safe forever. The mistake is stopping at worry instead of converting it into action.
The professionals I see getting replaced aren't losing to AI directly, they're losing to other people who learned to use AI as a multiplier on their existing skill. So my honest answer is: let the worry be the alarm clock, not the whole day. Use it to build the habit of learning continuously, treat every new AI tool as something to get fluent in rather than something to fear, and stay adaptable by default. The people who'll be fine aren't the ones who aren't worried, they're the ones who took the worry seriously early and did something with it.
Bio
Utkarsh Soni is an entrepreneur, content creator, and storyteller, best known as the Founder of BrandBazaar, a creative production and storytelling agency, and the CMO of Docrud, an early-stage startup where he is building the marketing engine. His journey began in Bengaluru as a student with a passion for content creation but no clear roadmap for turning it into a career. Financial realities led him into the corporate world, where he worked as a Software Engineer and Data Engineer at KPMG while continuing to create content alongside his professional career. After experimenting with comedy, entertainment, and informational content, Utkarsh eventually found his niche in technology and AI, which helped his digital presence grow rapidly.
Today, Utkarsh has built a community of approximately 2.5 lakh followers on Instagram, with a wider audience of around 3–4 lakh people across platforms. Beyond creating content, he has spoken at colleges, judged more than ten college fests and hackathons, and interacted with thousands of students through his work. His evolution from a corporate professional and aspiring creator to an entrepreneur reflects his willingness to experiment, adapt, and build consistently. Through BrandBazaar and his work with Docrud, he now combines his experience in content, storytelling, technology, and marketing to help build brands and businesses while continuing to explore the evolving intersection of content, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Interviewed By Anushka Agarwal
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