Cody Berenson started his career closing up a burrito restaurant at 2 AM for drunk college kids in Boulder. He fell in love with operations — the sheer amount of time, money, and energy it takes to get a product onto a shelf — and never looked back. That path took him from managing supply chains for nationally distributed brands to his current role as SVP of Operations & Services at Siddhi Capital, a growth equity firm with a twist: a full operating team of ten embedded alongside the investment side.
It's a model that exists because Cody saw something that shocked him when he entered the investment world — how many people write checks without understanding the operational backbone of the businesses they're funding. Siddhi's team plugs into portfolio companies and beyond, rolling up their sleeves on everything from building manufacturing lines for products that have never been made at commercial scale to setting up S&OP processes for brands doing $200–300 million in revenue that still don't have the right planning infrastructure in place.
The conversation covers what changes operationally at each stage of a brand's lifecycle — and what goes wrong when teams don't recognize the shift. Pre-revenue is its own animal: no data, high aspirations, and a foundation that has to be built on assumptions. The $1–10 million range is, in Cody's view, actually harder — everything is changing, retailers are calling, innovation is flying, and you're building systems while the plane is taking off. Past $20 million, the mistakes stop being small. A hundred thousand dollars. A million dollars. The margin for error compresses and the need for real planning rigor becomes non-negotiable.
Cody's sharpest point lands on capital. S&OP isn't just sales and operations planning — it's working capital planning. In today's funding environment, where brands actually have to be profitable or on their way to it before they get their next check, getting inventory right can extend your runway by six months to a year. Getting it wrong means burning cash you can't replace.
The episode also goes deep on how product characteristics shape operations in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. A sparkling water brand has dozens of co-manufacturers to choose from at every scale. A brand making something specialized might have two — or might need to build its own line. That constraint changes everything about how you plan, and getting founders and boards to understand the landscape they're operating within is half the job.
Also in this episode: the cottage cheese revolution and why Good Culture couldn't make enough product even if they wanted to, how AI is flipping the 80/20 rule for operators who used to spend most of their time just organizing data, and Quality Italian's chicken parm pizza — which sounds gross and is absolutely overkill, but apparently phenomenal.
Topics Covered:
- From managing a Boulder burrito restaurant to SVP at a growth equity firm: Cody's path through operations
- How Siddhi Capital embeds a full operating team alongside its investment portfolio — and why that model exists
- Brand lifecycle stages: what changes operationally from pre-revenue to $10M to $200M+
- Why the $1–10M stage is actually harder than pre-revenue for operators
- S&OP as working capital planning: why getting inventory right can change your fundraising plan entirely
- The cottage cheese problem: what happens when demand explodes and manufacturing capacity doesn't exist
- How product characteristics and co-manufacturer availability fundamentally shape your planning constraints
- AI for operators: moving from 80% data wrangling to faster, cheaper decision-making
- Why writing a good AI prompt is actually an operational discipline — you still need to know the answers to the test
- The case for formalizing processes before automating them
