The Black Sheep Who Bet on Himself

The Black Sheep Who Bet on Himself

From pre-dawn soccer practices to challenging the status quo in his family’s seafood business, and now working to transform the global food supply chain, Burnt Co-Founder Joseph Jacob’s story is about compounding effort and the audacious belief that he was meant to do great things.

Stacking Wins The Kobe Way

In Joseph (“JJ”) Jacob’s childhood bedroom, a poster of basketball great Kobe Bryant reigned king.  As a child of Indian immigrants, he was raised to do what was expected, not to dream too big, or veer too far from the expectations of his family. Kobe preached something different: work harder, get one percent better each day, and you could accomplish something extraordinary. The poster was the first glimpse into JJ’s desire to chart his own path. His beloved poster of Kobe was confirmation that what he felt was substantive, and promised a certain inevitability. He just needed to figure out what he was stacking his wins toward.

Compliance & Competition

JJ’s life was shaped by two vastly different worlds. In Atlanta, his father was a U.S. Postal Service employee who embodied an immigrant’s pragmatism: do what is expected. To him, dreaming of something bigger was an unthinkable luxury and a waste of time. The norm was obedient compliance. JJ was expected to be a good student, and follow the path laid before him by his family, and contribute his part for the next generation.

In contrast, he spent his summers with his maternal great-grandmother. She was the mastermind behind his great grandfather's billion dollar seafood empire—one of the first to export shrimp to the United States. The family business was impressive, but badly fractured. As generations rose up to jockey for leadership, their competitiveness drove them apart, each seeking out the control they felt they solely earned. Family members built rival companies, and competed fiercely year after year. Yet every Christmas, they would check their cut-throat ways at the door to celebrate as a family. To JJ, it was proof of ambition, but also rife with complications he didn’t want to inherit.

In Atlanta, the message was modest survival. In India, it was audacious, dysfunctional ambition. JJ didn’t fit neatly in either world. He felt like the black sheep—restless and unwilling to accept the guardrails binding him to either view.

Doubling Down 

At twelve, he asked to go to boarding school in India as a means to occupy his restlessness. He craved an environment void of the conflicting voices in his family and the quiet to listen to his own. A multi-sport athlete, JJ had dreams of playing professionally and worked tirelessly to excel in basketball and soccer. Witnessing the intensity JJ dedicated to each sport, his soccer coach pulled him aside with advice that echoed what Kobe inspired: double down. If JJ wanted to win, he needed to put all his eggs in one basket; he needed to commit and pursue greatness unapologetically.

JJ listened. Each morning, he would wake before dawn to arrive at the soccer pitch at 4 AM. Each practice he would try to arrive earlier with the hope of actually beating his coach to the field – he never did, but JJ also never stopped trying. Guided by his dedicated coach, and feeding the insatiable drive within, his progress was profound. With his speed and deft left foot as a left back, he commanded order on defense, and was the catalyst for offensive attacks.

At the start of the new year, as captain, he and his coach committed to getting the team in the record books. JJ believed success would come only if everyone was committed to eat, sleep, and train as a team on campus, even though many students commuted. An ultimatum was set—stay on campus or walk. Overnight, forty players—including some of the most talented—walked away. What remained was a smaller but far hungrier group. 

That year, they won the school’s first championship, and JJ earned a spot on the 19-and-under Indian national team. It wasn’t raw talent alone that carried him. It was the result of compounding effort, and the grit to relentlessly pursue something greater.

From Factory Floors to Delusional Certainty

After pausing school to play for the national team and professionally in India, JJ returned, earning his diploma and then collegiate degree. As he stepped away from athletics, the questions he had carried from his family’s empire—why things were done the way they were, and whether they could be different—grew louder.

Working at his uncle’s factory under the agreement that no one would know he was family, JJ rotated through every role imaginable. He helped farmers lay eggs and feed, waited for trucks unloading 20 tons of shrimp in the early hours, and sat alongside hundreds of workers at long tables, peeling and deveining shrimp as brine and shells slicked the floor.

What astonished him wasn’t just the scale of the operation, but the antiquated tools propping it up. Multi-hundred-million-dollar operations ran on pen, paper, and flickering green-screen terminals. When he asked why, his uncle just shrugged: that’s the way it is, kid.

JJ found a kindred spirit in his childhood friend Rhea, whom he met at a young age during a family celebration. Rhea’s uncle was in business with one of JJ’s uncles, building a sprawling set of pizza restaurants in Dubai. The two conspired year after year—if our uncles could build enduring companies, why can’t we—and more over, why can’t we do it even better.

That shared conviction became a spark. While family expectations tugged at JJ to join the seafood empire, he chose his own path. JJ and Rhea quietly built their future together, first as friends, then as husband and wife, and ultimately as business partners.

JJ and Rhea were determined to fulfill their childhood promise to each other of building something greater – and there was no question it would be in food supply. They knew firsthand exactly which problems were keeping people up at night and why the outsider solution to rip-and-replace old ERP systems was a non-starter.  With Burnt, they are building an AI “watchtower”—a solution that sits above and works with existing workflows to accelerate them, not replace them.

JJ often describes founders as needing to be “delusionally certain.” Not reckless, but certain in the inevitability of their mission. The black sheep of his family has carried that certainty from the soccer field to the factory floor and now to Burnt, where he’s helping food supply chain companies run faster, leaner, and smarter. His conviction remains the same: double down, and the world will move with you.