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Say you want to make a jacket.
Ricky Ho reaches for that example twice in our conversation without seeming to notice he is doing it, which is how you can tell it is the shape his mind actually runs on. The jacket has to be good. It has to land in the United States for under seven dollars. And from those two constraints, an enormous number of questions unfold that a reasonable person would have no way to answer.
"Should I be going to China or should I be going to Vietnam or should I be going to Cambodia?"
And suppose you pick a country. You are still nowhere, because now you have to pick a factory, and this is the part Ricky says people badly underestimate.
"Many of these suppliers, you won't find publicly available information on them. Like these factories barely have websites online. It's very hard to even like verify if they're legit."
Which is why, for decades, the answer to this problem was an airplane. You flew to a trade show. You stood in a hall and met people, because meeting them was the only available proxy for knowing anything about them. Ricky calls this "obviously a very expensive and time-consuming process," which is the understatement of a man who has built the alternative.
The alternative starts with an unglamorous act of accumulation. SourceReady buys customs data, and it buys it the hard way.
"We basically get customs data from over 85 different countries. So we go government by government getting shipment data."
Government by government. And there is no API for that sentence. But it is 85 separate procurement relationships, and the reason it is worth doing is that shipment records are one of the few places where companies tell the truth involuntarily. A supplier controls its website. But it does not control the manifest.
And assemble enough of those manifests and you can run the question backwards. Instead of asking a factory who it is, you ask the record who ships to whom, and the answer arrives as a map.
"If I wanna make this jacket and I wanna find out who are the suppliers making this jacket for Calvin Klein, we can literally build you a list of all of the vendors that match this description."
But a list of vendors is not yet an answer, and here Ricky arrives at the problem that actually interests him, which is not discovery at all.
It is judgment.
"As a brand or retailer, if you're sourcing a product, how do you actually know which suppliers have good quality? Because quality is very subjective. There is no universal metric for quality."
And then he does the thing that separates a person who has thought about this from a person who has merely encountered it. He points out that the obvious source of information is worthless.
High quality, he says, is not something you would just take at face value, and then he breaks off mid-sentence to put it as a question instead. "Like if a supplier on their website says, 'We make high quality,' do you believe that? I mean, every supplier on their website will say high quality."
The claim is not false. But the claim is empty. When every participant in a market makes the identical assertion, the assertion stops transmitting anything, and you are back to the airplane.
So Ricky went looking for a signal the supplier cannot author. And he found the analogy in a place that has nothing to do with manufacturing.
"Similar to how Google ranks websites based on the quality of backlinks, we will rank suppliers based on the quality of the customers they work with."
And Google's original insight was that a page cannot credibly vouch for itself, but other pages can vouch for it, and the pattern of who vouches is harder to fake than the page's own copy. But Ricky's version swaps the noun. A factory cannot credibly vouch for itself. Its customers can, not by saying anything, but by continuing to place orders that appear in the manifests.
And he makes it concrete immediately.
"If I know that this factory, if seventy percent of their customers are on the higher premium segment, then more likely than not, this factory is gonna be more kind of quality driven than a factory that does ninety percent Target and Walmart."
Meet a factory that tells you its main customer is Walmart and something happens in your head whether you approve of it or not. Meet one whose main customer is Lululemon and something else happens. Ricky's argument is not that the bias is correct. It is that the bias is already operating, on a sample of one anecdote, and he would rather run it across every shipment record in 85 countries.
And the same trick shows up again on a different question, and once you have seen it twice you start seeing the method rather than the feature. Minimum order quantity is a number suppliers rarely publish, and it determines whether a small brand can work with them at all. So do not ask. But look at what they ship.
"On average, this supplier, most of their shipments are around five hundred to a thousand pieces, so most likely their minimum order quantity is around five hundred."
Infer the thing they won't tell you from the thing they can't hide. That is the whole company, applied twice.
Now, who is this actually for. Ricky's answer surprised me, because I expected procurement departments and got something closer to a cultural observation.
"So the most common entrepreneurship that exists today is basically building a brand."
And his reasoning runs like this. Platforms lowered the barrier to commerce. Anyone with an audience now faces the question of how to monetize it, and sponsorship income is not a business because you do not control it. So the creator builds something to sell. He reaches for the obvious example.
"Even, like, MrBeast, he builds Feastables, and the reason for that is once you have a product that you can actually sell yourself using your traffic, that becomes a recurring revenue."
"This whole physical supply chain is traditionally so out of reach to regular people, but it's also, ironically, the most common startup in the world."
The most common startup in the world sits behind the least accessible knowledge in the world. And most people are not going to build software, because they do not know how and could not sell it if they did. But a clothing line, a water bottle, chocolate — those are legible. People can picture themselves doing it. And the moment they try, they hit a wall made of things nobody told them existed.
Ricky's example is chocolate, and it is a good one because it sounds so harmless.
"Because it's food, you need FDA approval. So when you find a supplier, you can't just, like, find some random factory to make this. You need to find an FDA-certified factory."
Then the question that actually lands.
"For a random creator, do they know where to find FDA-certified factories, and do they even know to look for the certifications that they might need to sell?"
Not whether they can find one. But whether they know to look. That is a different and much crueler kind of ignorance, because it does not announce itself. And supplements are the same, and he is blunt about why. "You're putting stuff in people's mouths."
This is where the conversation stops being about technology, and where Ricky is at his least promotional.
"They get burned by the wrong supplier. They'll work with some random supplier in China that doesn't ship the goods and then they get scammed. There's all types of problems that you would not foresee, and then you're like 20K down the drain."
And twenty thousand dollars, from someone who had to save it. And when he describes the moment the mistake finally surfaces, he stops sounding like a founder describing a market and starts sounding like someone who has watched it happen to people he liked.
"The impact of that decision does not come until later, and they're like, 'Oh, shit, I fucked up.'"
He is right that it compounds, and he is precise about the arithmetic in both directions. Save twenty or thirty cents on a unit and order fifty thousand units and you have made thousands of dollars from a single decision, in a category where gross margins run 40 or 50 percent before marketing. Get the same decision wrong and a 40 percent tariff you never saw coming arrives with the container and a twenty-thousand-dollar bill.
Which is why the last few years have made his job harder and his product more necessary at the same time. For twenty years the answer to where to manufacture was China, and he says so without any of the geopolitical throat-clearing the topic usually attracts. "Whatever you wanna make, just go to China." Tariffs and tension broke the default, and what replaced it is not another default but a genuine optimization problem with too many variables for an amateur.
And Pakistan and India for denim. Vietnam for athleisure, because Pakistan and India do not have the infrastructure for it. Forty-five percent tariffs on some goods out of China that make the old answer economically dead. And a small brand founder who has no idea any of this is true.
"If you're not in the supply chain every day, how would you know if tariffs increased in Vietnam two months ago because of some new law that passed?"
His framing of what the software is for follows from that, and it is the most careful sentence he says all hour.
"Supply chain is an optimization problem. It's like you have all these different knobs and things that you can tune, but to a regular person, they don't know what are the impacts of tuning these different things."
Not that the machine decides. That the machine holds the variables, and you supply the objective — and he is emphatic that the objective is not always cost. Maybe you want premium and will pay for it. The tool cannot know that. You have to say it.
Ricky sold his last supply-chain company at 23, so his optimism about small teams is not free-floating. And he thinks three or four people can build a ten-million-dollar brand now, and given what he has already done I am not inclined to argue with the arithmetic.
But I am not sure the hardest part is the part he has solved.
Because everything SourceReady does is downstream of a decision it cannot make for you. It will tell you which factories serve premium brands, what a fair price looks like, which certifications the category demands, which country's infrastructure fits the product. All of that used to be a moat and now it is a query. What it will not tell you is whether the thing is worth making, and the creator with an audience and no idea what to sell is not actually blocked on sourcing intelligence. They are blocked on taste.
Ricky's bet is that the sourcing wall was the real one, and that the people stopped by it were stopped by information rather than by judgment. And he may well be right. The manifests are real, the arithmetic on twenty cents times fifty thousand units is real, and the twenty thousand dollars people lose to a factory that never ships is extremely real.
Honestly, I don't know which wall was load-bearing. I know the jacket is easier to source than it has ever been, and that nobody has yet built the thing that tells you whether to make the jacket.
Guest Bio: Ricky Ho
Ricky Ho is the Co-Founder and CEO at SourceReady, an AI-powered global sourcing platform that helps retailers, brands, and independent creators identify and vet manufacturers using customs shipment data pulled from more than 85 countries. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Ho became known for applying data-driven supplier ranking — using the quality of a factory’s existing customer base as a proxy for its own production quality — to a sourcing industry historically built on opaque, relationship-gated information. SourceReady launched in December 2024, positioning itself against pay-to-play incumbents like Alibaba by offering unbiased, data-backed supplier matching.
Previously, Ho founded Treelab, a supply-chain ERP startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Tencent. He raised $22 million for the company and sold it at age 23, giving him a rare second run at the global sourcing and supply-chain problem before turning 30.
Hey,
Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.
I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at caden@hey.com with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
