Last Saturday I sat in Obsidian and created seven notes. One each for Tarento, Trelleborg, Wibe Group, Autoliv, Elof Hansson, EMPE Diagnostics, Bluefish Pharmaceuticals. Swedish companies with offices in Bangalore. Each note had a status field, a priority field, a source field, a contact name I did not yet have. I typed them out manually. None of my twenty skills could help me. The AI operating system I had spent six months building was useless here, because this was not a process to be executed. This was a second channel to be constructed.
I had been avoiding this work for many weeks.
The reason is quietly embarrassing for a supply chain guy who spent twenty years advising companies on single-supplier risk. Fika B’lore has one distribution channel. Ten WhatsApp communities, three hundred and thirteen customers, one hundred and eighty orders a week, zero physical retail, no Swiggy, no Zomato, no wholesale contracts worth the name. The WhatsApp pipeline is beautiful. It is also, viewed through the lens of the thing I am supposedly building toward, a liability.
The goal is to be acquisition-ready by August 2027. That is fifteen months from today. And somewhere around the fifth Obsidian note, it became clear that the single biggest threat to that goal is not a skill I haven’t written yet. It is the fact that I have been pointing my attention at the operating system and not at the thing the operating system is supposed to defend.
The diligence room
Here is the scene I keep running in my head.
A private equity associate, two years out of an MBA, is doing the first read on Fika B’lore. She has a template. The template is more or less the one ChrysCapital used when they acquired 90 percent of Theobroma Foods in July 2025 for 2,410 crore rupees, about 275 million dollars. She is looking at the revenue breakdown. Channel split, she notes. And then she sees what I see every Monday: one hundred percent through WhatsApp community groups managed by two co-founders.
The template has a number for this. John Warrillow, who spent fifteen years studying what makes small and mid-sized businesses actually sellable, calls it the Switzerland Structure. “Try to work your customer concentration down to a point where your largest customer represents no more than 15 percent of your revenue,” his Built to Sell system recommends. Above 20 percent, the deal softens. Above 30 percent, according to FOCUS Investment Bankers, “transaction valuations can be substantially reduced, perhaps 20 to 35 percent.” Above roughly that line, many PE firms decline entirely.
Here is the thing the associate’s template does not do. It does not distinguish between a customer that is 100 percent of your revenue and a channel that is 100 percent of your revenue. It treats them as the same category of risk, because they are. The question she is asked to answer is not “who pays you.” It is “how quickly and how catastrophically could this revenue disappear.” A single channel answers both questions identically to a single customer.
I have been building, with real pleasure and real skill, the wrong asset.
I have been building, with real pleasure and real skill, the wrong asset.
The thing I keep missing
The uncomfortable part is that I know better.
I have written single-sourcing risk assessments for Tier-1 suppliers. I have built dual-sourcing strategies for Swedish multinationals. The Swedish word for this kind of dependency, rävsax, captures it better than English: a trap you willingly step into, where the jaws snap shut, leaving you entirely at the mercy of your environment
I have been running my own bakery stuck in a rävsax and calling it a strategy.
The operating system is not nothing. Building it was not a mistake. A 2025 FTI Consulting survey cited by EisnerAmper found that 59 percent of PE funds now rank AI as a top driver of value creation, and they give examples of businesses whose EBITDA multiples moved from 7x to 9x after AI implementations in forecasting and operations. The EisnerAmper report says it plainly: “Strong metrics get companies into the conversation; technology and positioning determine whether buyers lean in.” The operating system is a multiplier on the right underlying assets. It is not the asset itself.
The honest concession
There are counter-examples I cannot wave away, and it would be dishonest to write this essay without taking them seriously.
In 2012, Starbucks paid $100 million for La Boulange, a 19-outlet San Francisco bakery chain founded by a French baker named Pascal Rigo. Within three years Starbucks had closed every retail location. What they wanted was not the channel. They wanted the recipes and the brand signal. The entire acquisition value, once the reporting chrome was scraped off, was the intellectual property. A single-channel artisan bakery delivered a nine-figure exit by being the thing worth stealing, not the thing worth buying.
In August 2020, General Atlantic valued Gymshark at over a billion dollars. At that point Gymshark was a decade-old DTC fitness brand that had grown primarily through Instagram, influencer seeding, and a community of athlete ambassadors. The diligence team knew exactly what they were paying for. Not distribution breadth. The community itself, unit economics that held under pressure, and what Jason Cohen calls the “mutually reinforcing” operating logic no competitor could replicate cheaply.
Both cases say: the channel is not always the point.
What unites the cases that worked is that something other than the operating system was also durable. La Boulange had recipes people would pay to steal. Gymshark had a community that belonged to the brand rather than to the platform. In both, the buyer could answer a question the diligence template does not name but always quietly asks: if we took away the current channel tomorrow, would the demand still be there?
That is the real test. Not channel count. Channel independence.
The chicken farmer
There is a metaphor that has been sitting on my desk for a week and I cannot stop coming back to it.
In 1950, ninety-five percent of chicken farms in the United States were independent. Farmers owned the birds, sold into open markets, negotiated with multiple buyers. Five years later, the number was ten percent. Today, over ninety percent of American chicken production runs through contract grower relationships with vertical integrators. A 2011 USDA survey found that 21.7 percent of contract growers had exactly one integrator in their area with whom they could sign.
The farmer builds a poultry house, a purpose-built structure designed around a specific integrator’s birds, feed system, biosecurity protocols. The shed is operationally excellent, modern, efficient, profitable for as long as the contract runs. The problem is the asset. A poultry house has no alternative use. If the integrator terminates the contract, the farmer does not lose a buyer. The farmer loses the ability to use the asset at all.
I am not a chicken farmer. I am also not as different from one as I would like to be. Meta owns the pipe, and that would be true of any platform a business rests on. Terms change, policies tighten, reach gets throttled, algorithms shift. The specifics matter less than the structural fact: the asset I have built, elegant as it is, has one narrow mouth to feed through, and I do not own the mouth. Resilience is not about distrusting the platform. It is about not being one policy change from silence.
What Theobroma actually sold
The deal most often cited as evidence that Indian bakeries are now acquirable is Theobroma. The number is real. The path is worth sitting with.
Theobroma opened its first store in 2004, on Colaba Causeway in Mumbai. For six years, that was the entire business. One outlet. No second location until 2010. ICICI Venture invested in 2017, taking a 42 percent stake for 120 crore rupees, presumably because by then the multi-city footprint had started to compound. By the time ChrysCapital bought them out in 2025, Theobroma had 225 stores across more than 30 cities. Roughly 60 percent of revenue came from online and delivery orders. Roughly 40 percent from physical footfall.
What the acquirer paid 2,410 crore rupees for was not a single beautifully-run channel. It was a multi-channel physical distribution asset that had taken 21 years to compound into a number that mattered. The operating system, the recipes, the brand, the delivery infrastructure, all of these multiplied the asset. None of them substituted for it. You cannot compress 225 retail outlets into a skill library.
There is a Scandinavian version of the same logic. Lagkagehuset, the Danish bakery chain that Nordic Capital acquired in 2017, sold on “flexibility of concept”: multiple store formats, urban food-to-go outlets, international expansion under the Ole & Steen brand. The operating model was good. The thing the acquirer actually paid for was that the operating model could be pointed at more than one kind of channel.
The metric that moved
Somewhere in the last two weeks my internal scorecard for this business has begun to shift.
The number I used to track on Monday morning was how many new skills I had added, how many automations had shipped, how many steps of the workflow had been pulled from manual to systematized. The number I am starting to track instead is what percentage of reoccurring weekly revenue comes from outside the WhatsApp communities. Today that number is very low. If the business is going to be sellable in August 2027, that number cannot be close to zero. It needs to sit somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.
Which is why Saturday’s seven B2B leads mattered more than the twentieth skill I could have written this week. Tarento is the Bangalore arm of a Swedish tech consultancy. Trelleborg has a local engineering unit. Autoliv’s Indian subsidiary has Swedish leadership. Most of the pipeline is Swedish-linked, because that is the version of me that can walk into these offices and sound like something familiar. The angle is defensible. The work is unglamorous. It is also the work the operating system cannot do for me, because the operating system lives downstream of demand. It cannot create demand where none exists.
The skill library and the B2B pipeline are doing different things. One is a multiplier. The other is the asset being multiplied. I had been spending Saturday mornings on the wrong one.
The question I am still sitting with
If the operating system is a multiplier, and the distribution is the asset, and the asset has to be diversified enough to survive a diligence room, what does a second channel look like for a pre-order bakery in Bangalore that does not want to live on Swiggy?
Theobroma’s answer was physical retail density. We do not have 21 years. Gymshark’s answer was an owned community on someone else’s platform, with exceptional product economics underneath. We might be able to approximate that. La Boulange’s answer was that the recipes were the asset and the channel did not matter; Starbucks closed the stores and kept the book. That is a possible end-state, and I have noticed lately that our recipe document is starting to look like the sort of thing an acquirer might quietly want.
I keep coming back to the B2B move. Corporate gifting, office fika deliveries, Swedish-linked companies that want a credible fika offering without the friction of running it themselves. Seven notes on a Saturday is not a channel. It is the beginning of one. By December I will know whether it is a real second leg or a founder’s hobby that the calendar ignored. Nordic Capital’s “flexibility of concept” phrase keeps coming to mind. You do not need four channels. You need one channel plus a credible capacity to build a second one.
Maybe the real skill the operating system has been training me in was never the automation itself. Maybe it has been the reflex of asking, every time, what exactly I am multiplying. The AI is very good at running the operating system. It cannot tell me whether the asset underneath is the right asset. That part is still, for now, the boring middle-aged founder with the laptop on a Saturday morning, typing out the names of Swedish companies one at a time into an Obsidian vault.