The case for building in a country that nobody expects

When I told people I was building a winery in Armenia, the responses fell into two categories.

The first was the diaspora response: pride, warmth, a sense that this was the right and meaningful thing to do. This response was generous and, in some ways, beside the point. Pride in heritage is not a business case.

The second was the polite skepticism dressed as practical concern. Armenia? Why not somewhere with established wine infrastructure? Why not somewhere with more predictable logistics? Why not somewhere that the market already understands?

Both responses were missing the same thing.

The point was not despite Armenia. The point was partly because of it.

What non-obvious geographies offer

A particular kind of competitive advantage is available in places sophisticated actors have chosen to ignore. It is not available everywhere, and it requires specific conditions to be real rather than just optimistic. But when those conditions are present, the advantage is meaningful and durable in ways that advantages in crowded markets rarely are.

The first condition is genuine underlying quality — something real that the market has mispriced because it hasn't looked carefully enough. In Armenia's case: volcanic terroir at altitude that produces wines with genuine character, a 6,100-year winemaking tradition that includes indigenous varieties found nowhere else, and a generation of winemakers and agricultural scientists with serious training and no international platform yet. The quality was there. The audience wasn't.

The second condition is the absence of entrenched competition. When I planted Pinot Noir at Proshyan, nobody was competing with me for that specific combination of variety, site, and market positioning because nobody believed it was worth competing for. That absence meant I could take time to get it right without being outrun by a better-funded competitor making the same bet. In Sonoma, that time doesn't exist.

The third condition is first-mover narrative value. The story of being first — the first commercial Pinot Noir in Armenia, the first harvest, the gold medal — is a story the market doesn't have yet and therefore values when it arrives. In established regions, every producer has a story. The stories compete with each other, and most of them disappear into the noise. In a place nobody expected, the story stands alone.

What it actually costs

I want to be honest about this because the non-obvious geography argument can sound like an invitation to romanticize difficulty, and that's not what I'm doing.

Building in Armenia was harder than it would have been in California. The infrastructure gaps were real. The logistics were unpredictable, requiring constant improvisation. The regulatory environment required patience and local expertise that took time to develop. The supply chain for specific inputs - certain barrels, certain equipment, certain materials required sourcing creativity that wouldn't have been necessary elsewhere.

None of those difficulties went away even though the strategic logic was sound. They had to be solved one by one over the years. Some of them are still being solved.

The cost of non-obvious geography is operational complexity that doesn't stop. It requires building local relationships deeply enough that the informal systems work for you rather than against you. It requires patience for problems that have no clean solution, only workarounds that gradually become processes. It requires a tolerance for uncertainty that founders in more established environments don't have to develop in the same way.

That tolerance, it turns out, is not only a cost. It is also a transferable capability.

What building there taught me that building elsewhere didn't

The Silicon Valley tech ecosystem is extraordinarily good at many things. It is good at moving fast. It is good at accessing capital. It is good at pattern-matching to successful models and executing against them at scale.

It is less good at operating without those advantages. And the founders who have only ever built inside that ecosystem sometimes discover, when they encounter a context where the advantages aren't available, that they don't know how to function without them.

Building in Armenia, where capital is scarcer, infrastructure is less reliable, and no existing pattern tells you what the next step should be, develops a different kind of problem-solving. One that starts from what's actually available rather than from what should be available. One that builds informal solutions before formal ones are in place. One that treats constraints as design parameters rather than obstacles to be removed.

I have found that capability genuinely useful in contexts far beyond Armenia. The resourcefulness that difficult geographies require turns out to be transferable in ways that the ease of well-resourced environments is not.

Who this argument is for

I'm not suggesting that every founder should build in a difficult or non-obvious geography. Most founders shouldn't. The additional operational complexity is a real cost that can sink a company without the specific advantages that justify it.

But I am suggesting that the reflexive preference for obvious geographies - established markets, known infrastructure, understood regulatory environments - leaves real opportunities unexplored. The sophistication of an investment ecosystem is not the same thing as the quality of an investment opportunity. Sometimes the best opportunities are in places where sophisticated capital hasn't arrived yet, precisely because it hasn't.

Armenia was that place for wine. It remains that place for certain categories of technology. People who recognize it before the recognition becomes consensus will gain advantages that compound for years.

The rest will wonder, later, why they didn't see it.