Five businesses, one calendar

How I actually work across dairy, rice, spirits, media and software without any of it collapsing.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-07-31 · Life

In every room I work in, someone knows the subject better than I do. The dairy vet knows cows. The miller knows grain. The distiller knows spirit.

My work is to ask the question they have stopped asking because it is too obvious, to write down the answer, and to connect it to a market that does not yet know any of this exists. That takes being confident enough to ask naive questions in front of experts and unbothered enough not to need to be the smartest person present. I did not start with that. It came from being wrong in public enough times that it stopped being frightening.

The question I get most often is how the ventures connect. Dairy, rice, spirits, talent, software. People look for a thesis in the sectors and there is none. What all five share is the shape of the problem: a real thing exists, and almost nobody has done the unglamorous work of making it legible to the outside world.

Almost nothing about dairy helps with rice, and almost nothing about rice helps with spirits. The domain knowledge does not transfer, and pretending otherwise is how people end up shallow in five directions. A small set of habits does transfer.

Count the thing before forming an opinion about it. Every one of these businesses had a number everybody quoted and nobody had verified.

The back of the package is more important than the front. True of a rice bag, a bottle and a business plan.

Whoever does the work should be able to see their own work. Adoption of any system, in any sector, tracks almost perfectly with whether the person entering data ever benefits from having entered it.

Write it down or it did not happen. Memory is a liar with excellent intentions.

Time does not transfer. There is no leverage trick. Five things take five times as long as one thing, and anyone who says they have found a way around that is selling something.

So each venture gets concentrated blocks. A week about rice, then a week about the farm. Switching context within a day is where the quality dies, because the second subject gets the tired version of me every time.

The cost of working this way is latency. Everything takes longer to reach anyone, and some things wait longer than they should.

This arrangement would not function in a mature market, where every one of these sectors already has professionals doing the work properly and a generalist adds nothing. In Cambodia the gap is real. There is excellent product and very little infrastructure of the boring kind: systems, records, labels, compliance, story. Being useful here takes being present and finishing things. That is a low bar and almost nobody clears it.

What makes it survivable is that I build the tools. It is an additional workload. Every hour spent making a business legible to itself buys back many hours of asking, waiting and reconciling. It is the highest-return activity available and it never looks urgent, which is why almost nobody does it. If I have to ask someone for a number, I am dependent on their week. If I can query it, I am not.