A show from Distribution Capital · January 2027
Software is free now. Distribution is king. We sit down with the people who control America's distribution and ask what wins next, and whether they are putting money into it.
The premise
A quarter of the last YC batch shipped codebases that were 95 percent written by AI. Anyone can build the product now. Nobody can build the shelf, the route, the venue, the chip or the cloud it has to live on.
So the question for every founder and every fund has changed. It is no longer who has the best software. It is who owns the way it reaches the customer, and what do they want.
This show goes and asks them. The owners, the chairmen, the families with billion dollar businesses nobody has heard of. On camera, at the place they built.
moves through America's wholesale distributors every year. About 30,000 companies, most of them private.
NAWa year is what Google pays Apple to be the default search on an iPhone. The best product on earth still pays for the slot.
DOJ v. Google, court recordcompanies move more than 90 percent of America's prescription drugs. Every pill goes through one of them.
McKesson, Cencora, Cardinalof the YC winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95 percent AI generated.
Y Combinator, March 2025Kingmade
Live Nation took equity and made a canned water the only water on sale at 120 venues and festivals. Revenue went from $45 million to $263 million in two years. Valued at $1.4 billion. Eight of its ten biggest distributors are now investors.
The venue owner wanted equity to grant the shelf. That is the trade.
Same can, same formula. PepsiCo paid $550 million for 8.5 percent and put Celsius on its trucks. US market share doubled in twelve months. Revenue went from $314 million to $1.3 billion in two years.
Nothing about the product changed. The route did.
Coke paid $2.15 billion for 16.7 percent and handed Monster its bottling network. The stock rose 30 percent in a day and has run four times since. The founders became billionaires that afternoon.
A sixth of the company for the distributor's trucks. Cheap.
Amazon put in $8 billion and made AWS the shelf. Claude sold to tens of thousands of AWS customers through Bedrock, trained on half a million Amazon chips in Indiana. Amazon booked a $9.5 billion paper gain on the stake in a single quarter.
In AI the distributor is the cloud. The cloud took equity.
Two sodas with no trucks of their own. The shelf did the work. Poppi sold to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion. Olipop is valued at $1.85 billion and sits in 50,000 grocery doors.
A buyer at Walmart made two billion dollar companies.
Brad Jacobs paid $11 billion for 600 roofing branches, then kept buying. He calls building products an $800 billion industry and wants $50 billion of it. He is not building the software. He is buying the counters it gets sold across.
The smartest money in America is buying distribution, not apps.
"The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."Alex Rampell, Andreessen Horowitz
The question we ask everyone
Every company on this show spends billions a year and has a list of things it cannot buy. We get the list on the record.
Trucks that drive themselves. Shelves that reorder themselves. Chips in buildings that did not exist a year ago. They are already deciding.
Most of them have never invested in a startup. Some are about to. We ask which one they would put on their shelves tomorrow.
Season one · Invitations going out now · Names announced at launch
The CEO of the largest live entertainment company on earth, with a stake in more than 300 venues.
The former forklift driver who now decides what goes into 939 warehouses and 84 million members' carts.
The brothers who run the largest beer distributor in America and the trucks that supply McDonald's.
The man who sold $75 billion of data center chips in one quarter. Most of the world's AI runs on them.
The CEO of the cloud that holds more than a quarter of the world's computing.
The co-founder of the landlord whose buildings handle trillions of dollars of goods a year.
The CEO of the company that moves one in three medicines in North America.
The president who runs the business behind the most subscribed science creator on YouTube. Eighty million strong.
The CEO whose family firm administers nearly $20 trillion of savings.
The private Florida company that controls one in every five Toyotas sold in America.
The Wisconsin family that bakes 249 million bakery items a year for its own 900 gas stations.
The chair who built America's largest roofing distributor in Beloit, Wisconsin, and still owns it.
The fifth generation family behind Windex, Ziploc, Raid and Glade. $12 billion a year. Never sold a share.
The New Zealander who ran Walmart US and now runs America's largest supermarket chain.
The man who bought $11 billion of roofing branches and says he is only getting started.
The man who ran the biggest company on earth by sales for twelve years and handed it over in January.
Owners, chairmen and the families behind America's billion dollar private companies. Plus the founders they made and the funds that bet on them. Guests appear in a personal capacity. Nothing publishes without their sign off.
Who it is for
You have the product. Every round is full of money and short on customers. Hear the biggest customers in America say, on the record, what they want to buy.
What they will buy, before you build itYour portfolio can build anything in a weekend. So can everyone else's. The winners are the ones that get onto the shelf. Hear the people who own the shelf say what they want.
Where the acquirers are lookingYou run a company most of America depends on and nobody has asked you about it. Not a trade magazine. Not a puff piece. One hour, at your place, and nothing goes out without your sign off.
One hour. Your place.Hosts
Host · Founder, Distribution Capital
Built TURN, backed by Live Nation, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price. Two exits. He has sat on the founder's side of the Live Nation trade and knows what the venue asks for.
LinkedIn
Host · Founder, Distribution Capital
Private equity banker. Built and sold her own investment bank. Founder of Capwave AI. She asks the numbers question the owner was hoping to skip.
LinkedInJanuary 2027
Distribution. is produced by Distribution Capital. Guests appear in a personal capacity; appearing is not an endorsement of Distribution Capital or any fund. Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Figures on this page are taken from public announcements, filings and court records as of October 2026 and are not verified by us; company names are references to publicly reported events, not endorsements or affiliations.