Essays
Long-form thinking on operations, building in India, AI in practice, trade, and living.
-
Fika B’lore: setting up and running a foreign-owned company in India
Fika B’lore is a Scandinavian bakery in North Bangalore that Niklas and I co-founded and run as equal partners. It operates as a foreign-owned Indian private limited company. This page is the structured version of how we stood it up and what the machinery underneath it has taught us. The narrative version, with the actual
-
What setting up a company in India actually is
The FSSAI license sat in the queue for months. Not rejected, which I could have understood and done something about. Just not moving. Every time I checked, it had somehow settled back to the bottom of the pile, behind whatever had come in after it. There was no reason given because there was no decision
-
Built, Not Bought
I am not a programmer, and I run three businesses on software I built myself. A supply chain operator’s make-or-buy decision, turned on the question of what actually transfers when the builder leaves.
-
The Man With Fourteen Cars
We thought we had hired a driver. He turned out to be salaried by a man with fourteen cars, and the 2x rate I had been so pleased with was a vendor margin I had not priced. On the labour-contractor layer that has been holding Indian urban work together for 140 years.
-
The license that didn’t expire
Eight months into running a small bakery in Bangalore, the regulatory regime around us has been rewritten three times. A note on pace, predictability, and what Malmö doesn’t see.
-
The Operating System Is Not the Moat
You can build a perfectly systemized AI-run business and still be unsellable. PE buyers treat channel concentration identically to customer concentration. One WhatsApp pipeline is one customer to a diligence team.
-
Vibe Coding Is the Wrong Frame. What You’re Actually Doing Is Specification.
Karpathy coined vibe coding. Willison countered with vibe engineering. Both miss the real shift: the scarce skill is knowing your own operations clearly enough to describe them to a machine.
-
Parking Garages, Service Elevators, and the Last Meter
The supply chain for a ₹195 cinnamon bun across a Bangalore apartment complex is, per unit of distance, significantly more complex than anything I managed at Tetra Pak.
-
The Complexity Trap
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. The pattern is always the same, and I have watched it play out for fifteen years.
-
Beautiful Sandcastles and the Case for Running Lean
Taiichi Ohno described boom-time organizations as beautiful sandcastles. The tide always comes in. The question is whether your foundation is rock or sand.