At 17, Paveethat “Gutt Gutt” Surattiantra understands that a strong performance begins long before anyone is watching.
For more than a decade, singing has been the place where he learned that lesson. What began as a childhood hobby became one of the defining disciplines of his life, leading him to the highest marks in Thailand for the Trinity Grade 8 Pop & Rock Vocals examination and First Prize at the Vienna Grand Prize Virtuoso international music competition.
Yet the more interesting part of Gutt Gutt’s story is not simply that he performs. It is what performance taught him about building.
In preparing for Trinity Grade 8, a normal practice cycle involved going through each song with his coach, identifying the smallest imperfect sections, then repeating the process until the performance felt complete. The final submission was especially demanding because it required a full recording in one take. Small mistakes meant starting again.
That patience now follows him into a very different setting: a plant biology entrepreneurship project focused on catnip aromatherapy for cats. Working with a team that includes undergraduate students, master’s students and professors, Gutt Gutt is helping develop a product that sits at the intersection of scientific experimentation and commercial strategy. The project, developed in collaboration with Mahidol University’s departments of Biotechnology and Plant Biology, involves extracting essential oils, testing mixtures on cats and refining the product so the extract is colorless and largely odorless.
For Gutt Gutt, the connection between singing and entrepreneurship is not forced. “What translates is challenging myself to do bigger and bigger things,” he says, “and putting in work, dedication and effort.”
On one testing day, the team laid out extracts from different parts of the catnip plant: stems, leaves and flowers. The cats first smelled the stems and leaves, but when the flowers were introduced, they moved immediately toward them. For the team, that small behavioral shift became useful product intelligence. The flowers appeared to produce the strongest attraction, helping clarify where further extraction and testing should focus.
The project’s challenge is not only whether cats respond to the product. It is whether the idea can become a repeatable, commercially viable business. Catnip plants were not being specifically grown by farmers across Thailand for the team’s intended use, creating a sourcing and standardization problem. Instead of treating that as a dead end, the team began testing how to grow catnip in-house and formulating a process that could eventually be replicated through an external supply chain.
That is where Gutt Gutt’s business instincts have become more visible. He sees his role less as inventing a product from nothing and more as positioning it intelligently. He describes himself as drawn to strategy and investment, with a focus on commerce, sales, marketing, and supply chain. In his words, the task is not just finding the right supplier, but understanding the plant biology behind the materials and combining that with business thinking to create an efficient and profitable system.
His SCB Investment Banking internship sharpened that lens. There, he researched companies, evaluated growth potential, and presented findings clearly. The experience gave him exposure to finance and to the discipline of making informed commercial judgments. In his own startup work, he says investor appeal depends on demonstrating profitability, sales potential, and evidence that people actually want the product.
That is a strikingly mature way to think about a project that is still in its early stages. The team has entered the Bangkok Business Challenge at Sasin and passed the first elimination round. For Gutt Gutt, that milestone signaled that the project had real potential. Winning grant funding, he says, could help expand the supply chain and begin the commercialization process. Still, he does not see the competition as the final destination. Success, in his view, means launching the product and testing whether it can scale.
He also does not see the venture as a temporary high school project. “This is not just for college,” he says. “I’m not just going to stop once I get into university.”
That long view is rooted in the same temperament that carried him through years of music. During the pandemic, when performance opportunities disappeared, Gutt Gutt considered quitting singing. The stage had always been the part he loved most, and without it, the activity briefly lost its sense of purpose. But he continued, encouraged by his parents and teachers, and later found himself performing in Vienna, looking back at the moment when he nearly stopped.
The lesson stayed with him. Dedication, he says, once meant doing something consistently for a long time. Now, it means something more exacting: not just time, but skill, expertise, and effort applied efficiently.
That definition may be the clearest link between the singer and the emerging business strategist. Whether he is perfecting a song or helping shape a catnip aromatherapy venture, Gutt Gutt is learning to move from talent to structure, from instinct to process, from performance to execution.
And in business, as on stage, he seems to understand that the final delivery only works when the invisible work behind it has already been done.