Multi-sided marketplaces are hard to scale. What bottlenecks genuinely surprised you?

The biggest surprise is how behavioral the challenge is.

Restaurants and suppliers often operate on long-standing routines – phone calls, WhatsApp messages, standing orders. Changing those habits takes time.

But what we see consistently is that once a chef tries Saltz and experiences the convenience and price transparency, they rarely go back.

Saltz and Oberlo are quite different animals. With one exit behind you, how do you approach building this one differently?

Oberlo was fundamentally a software layer on top of an existing ecosystem.

Saltz is much more infrastructure. We're rebuilding parts of how the food supply chain works – supplier onboarding, logistics network coordination, pricing aggregation, data, ordering workflows. We’re building systems that can support thousands of restaurants ordering daily.

Upcoming 100+ hires: are you going to be heavily distributed, with sales/ops people in every market?

Our approach is a mix:

• Local field teams that build restaurant relationships
• Centralized R&D and marketing teams

We want the customer experience to feel local, but the infrastructure behind it to scale globally.
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You're deep in European supply chains now, do you see other sectors ripe for the same opportunity, or is food uniquely broken?

Food is uniquely fragmented. You have tens of thousands of small suppliers, daily purchasing, volatile pricing, and almost no modern procurement infrastructure.

Most restaurants still order via phone calls, PDFs, and WhatsApp messages. So the opportunity is enormous. 

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