"I would rather get into a competitive space where I can differentiate than into a new market where I have to create demand from scratch."
After years of mapping startup sectors for corporates, Ivan's rule is simple: educating customers about a brand-new problem costs far more than standing out where demand already exists. Coffee in Singapore is crowded, and that crowd is the proof people want it.
"That classical musician has a concert ticketed at $200, $300 at night. In the afternoon he played his violin in the MRT station and no one stopped. Same product, different storytelling."
Paco flips the specialty-coffee playbook. Ask and they'll tell you the farm, the fermentation and the roast. The story on the counter is Madame Parodox and a cast of illustrated characters. Once the characters arrived, people started bringing friends who weren't coffee fans.
"We literally launched with four menu items. Black, white, hot, cold. Simplest menu ever."
Each season adds a few experiments. What works stays. Ripple, a coffee that tastes intensely of strawberry, had people asking for it by name before they'd tried it. What doesn't work goes. Seasons alternate between expanding and consolidating, so the menu never sprawls.
"It allows us to track every single shot we've made. When we have hundreds, thousands of stores, it's going to be immensely easier to figure out which stores are having issues."
The espresso machine logs every extraction, the milk is foamed with air instead of steam so nothing gets diluted, and different stores may carry different beans. Ivan's model is Uniqlo: "a tech company that happens to make clothes."
"AI has been amazing in letting one software developer, one software architect, work like a team of software developers."
Paco runs on its own in-house software, Paco OS. Ivan's view is that SaaS is becoming a wrapper for databases, and building your own wrapper is now often cheaper than buying tools and stitching them together.
Ivan Chandra Suriady spent years building startups for other people: corporate ventures, market maps covering millions of startups, concepts that had to make sense to a board decades out. Then he picked a market everyone warns you away from.
He co-founded Paco Coffee and opened one coffee bar at The Sail @ Marina Bay at the end of January 2026. Within five months its Madame Parodox blend won Gold in the Flat White Dairy Experimental category at the Global Coffee Awards Asia, judged double-blind. The idea behind it: specialty-grade coffee, with the farming, fermentation and roasting done properly, served with the ease and consistency of a chain. "Coffee is 50% storytelling and 50% product," he says, so Paco tells its story through illustrated characters instead of tasting notes.
We get into why chain coffee and specialty coffee are converging across Asia, and why the same office worker wants a comforting latte on Tuesday and something bright and strange on Saturday. Ivan explains why Paco releases new coffees in seasons that double as experiments, why a single store logs every espresso shot as if it were already a hundred, how he designed the counter from human-reach studies, and how AI let one developer build Paco OS instead of buying SaaS. We also cover the difference between corporate venture building and founding in the wild, and the 1am visitor who took exactly one piece of Biscoff and became Waldo the Disruptor, a coffee that sold out in three days.
This one is for anyone who has been told a market is too crowded to enter.
Paco Coffee & Ivan — Highlights:
→ Specialty coffee bar at The Sail @ Marina Bay, Singapore, opened at the end of January 2026
→ Gold, Flat White Dairy Experimental, Global Coffee Awards Asia 2026, for the Madame Parodox blend, judged double-blind
→ New coffees released in seasons, each fronted by an illustrated character. Waldo the Disruptor sold out in three days
→ Every espresso shot logged, and milk foamed with air instead of steam
→ Runs on Paco OS, in-house software built with AI, and designed to scale through venture funding and franchising