Making Markets · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

Sid Malladi: The Future of B2B Trade - [Making Markets, EP.62]

·51 min·3 clips

Nuvo packages business identity, cashflow history, credit bureaus, and trade history into one approval screen.

Eric Golden introduces Making Markets and frames the show around the psychology and structure that shape markets. He welcomes Sid Malati, founder of Nuvo, to talk through the machinery behind B2B trade and the friction between a product and the people buying and selling it. Nuvo is presented as a digital network built to speed onboarding, visibility, and trust. Sid argues that B2B relationships have become too complex to run on the old under-the-table handshake model, because modern firms now source from more places and sell to more places than before. Globalization changed the map. He uses the example of a flower wholesaler in Kansas City to show how a business that once dealt with a handful of farms and a few local retailers may now manage 100 vendors and a much larger customer base. E-commerce makes the network denser. That density changes what trust has to do, because the same business now needs a repeatable way to evaluate counterparties, confirm legitimacy, and move quickly across a much larger set of relationships. COVID pushed more of that work online. Sid says fewer people are tied to office rituals like sitting next to a fax machine, and more of them now expect to form partnerships from wherever they are. Speed matters more now. The conversation then turns to technology maturity, with Sid arguing that the tools have finally reached a point where they can handle situations like a liquor wholesaler receiving a large request from an Idaho-based bar and needing to decide how to trust it. Fraud and verification sit underneath that problem. Eric keeps the discussion anchored in market mechanics, pressing on why the category was not solved earlier and what has changed in the economics of trade. The answer is partly scale. As more businesses enter the system and more trade routes open, the cost of manual relationship-building rises, and infrastructure that cuts friction starts to matter as much as the product itself. Sid does not treat this as apocalyptic. He suggests the industry is still large, still has alternatives, and is more likely to shift strategy than collapse, with the real question being which businesses adapt fastest to the new shape of trade. Optimism returns slowly. The interview closes on that note, with the possibility that the next decade will favor companies that build trust and distribution mechanisms for a more interconnected market.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how B2B trade changes when trust, visibility, and onboarding have to work at larger scale.

Sid Malati and Eric Golden frame a familiar B2B problem: as vendor and customer networks expand, the old trust model gets slower and messier. Nuvo is presented as a way to speed onboarding, improve visibility, and make those relationships easier to manage.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want B2B trade stripped down to trust and friction, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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