Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Maldonado: The most crucial PE diligence step is meeting operating partners

Pete Maldonado · How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale · Oct 3, 2025 · at 26:11

Pete Maldonado, co-founder of Chomps, explains his diligence criteria when selecting private equity partner Stride Consumer Partners.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.4s
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“The biggest thing you could do with a private equity partner is meeting the operating partners that are going to be the ones that are supposed to be helping drive value.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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Insight
Maldonado: Building a DTC community first drives downstream retail velocity
“That's also why we're so successful in retail is all of that foundation that we laid in the DTC world, building that community, building a loyal following, and it was just, you know, it's brick by brick, right? It's one person at a time.”
Pete Maldonado Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 10:02 How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Maldonado: Chomps launched at Trader Joe's selling 360 units weekly per store
“So like a good retailer would do, you know, like now, like you know, like a health food store, like a whole foods or whoever might do like 15, 20, 30 units per store per week. We came out of the gates doing 360 units per store per week of this product. That's …”
Pete Maldonado Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 18:02 How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale
Disclosure
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“A total of less than 700,000. And over the course of like the two year period that we were, Working with them. ... So we, you know, even to this day, we've only, that's all the primary, primary capital's ever taken. Even aside from, we did a private equity rai…”
Pete Maldonado Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 22:50 How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale
Assertion Partly supported
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“And then we've stumbled on Kevin Western from Western Smokehouse, which is you know, one of, is our first co-packer, but now we've, we have, was it four plants now with them? And we're doing the big JV in Mexico, Missouri on a pretty massive plant, a 300,000 s…”
Pete Maldonado Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 6:03 How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Maldonado: Trader Joe's placed an initial order of 1.1 million Chomps sticks
“It was a 1.1 million sticks, I believe.”
Pete Maldonado Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 12:30 How a side hustle became an industry leader (with Chomps co-founders) | Masters of Scale
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