How smuggling seven beans broke an empire. And what it teaches us about modern talent wars.
Welcome to Plain Sight by Wyzr, where we bring hidden patterns into plain sight. Every week, we explore stories and ideas that help us understand why we are the way we are.
From Coffee to Code: The Art of Breaking Monopolies
In 1670, a Sufi mystic named Baba Budan completed what might be history’s most consequential act of industrial espionage. Returning from his pilgrimage to Mecca, he stopped at the port of Mocha in Yemen, where he was offered a refreshing drink of qahwa to ease his long journey. He found the taste so intoxicating that he vowed to bring the wondrous beverage back to his homeland.
But there was a problem: the Ottoman Empire had made the export of raw coffee beans punishable by death. Only roasted beans could be traded, ensuring Yemen’s monopoly over coffee cultivation.
Undeterred, Baba Budan concealed seven green coffee beans (seven being a sacred number in Islam) in his beard and smuggled them across 6,500 kilometers back to India. He planted them in the hills of Chikkamagalur, Karnataka, breaking a monopoly that had lasted for centuries.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher. The Ottomans took coffee control so seriously that Sultan Murad IV (1623–1640) made public coffee drinking punishable by death. He reportedly patrolled Istanbul’s streets in disguise, broadsword in hand, executing coffee drinkers on the spot. His successors continued harsh penalties: first offense meant beatings; second, being sewn into a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus River.
Only roasted beans could leave Yemen - this wasn’t just protectionism; it was economic warfare through biological control.
What happened next shows the power of a single act of strategic knowledge transfer. From Baba Budan’s seven seeds, the Dutch took coffee to their Indonesian colonies. A coffee tree was gifted to the King of France. French planters carried it to Martinique. From there, coffee spread across the Caribbean and Latin America. Some estimates suggest that ~90% of Latin America’s Arabica coffee can trace its lineage to those original smuggled seeds.
Today, Brazil and Vietnam produce over half of the world’s coffee. Yemen? It doesn’t even rank among the top producers. And coffee? A $250+ billion global market - all seeded by a mystic’s act of defiance.
What Baba Budan did with coffee, modern companies do with talent. Both strategies break monopolies by transferring what’s most valuable: knowledge at its source.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg, who’s turned this into an art form. In 2010 he said: “We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people.” The numbers back him:
- Instagram (2012): $1 billion for a 13-person team
- WhatsApp (2014): $19 billion
- Oculus VR (2014): $2.3 billion
Fast forward to June 2025, and Zuckerberg has made his biggest bet yet on this strategy: a $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI, aimed at bringing CEO Alexandr Wang to Meta to lead a new superintelligence unit. With rivals like OpenAI pulling ahead on AI models and consumer apps, the time to act is now.
The scale of the Scale AI deal reveals just how high the stakes have become in the knowledge economy. Already, it’s sending ripples through the AI industry - with reports suggesting that companies like OpenAI and Google may reconsider collaborations with Scale, wary of sharing their most guarded secrets. In this race, the key asset isn’t code, it’s people. And the budgets reflect it: AI leaders are now spending billions annually on talent, data, and training infrastructure, and that spend is only growing.
Today’s version of knowledge smuggling moves at unprecedented speed. In the early 2010s, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn were among the most prolific “acqui-hirers” - buying startups not for products, but for people. It’s estimated that up to 50% of tech acquisitions in that period were talent-driven. And the pattern continues: Anthropic (the company that has created Claude) has successfully lured top engineers and researchers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, reshaping the competitive landscape just as Baba Budan’s seven seeds reshaped coffee cultivation.
The mathematics of talent are the same today as they were in Budan’s time. Up to 85% of industrial espionage cases involve insiders - proving that human networks often matter more than any technological defense. Just as seven smuggled seeds fueled a $250 billion industry, the right talent acquisition today can alter the course of entire sectors.
So here’s the question every leader should be asking:
What monopoly in your industry exists today simply because no one has been brave enough to “smuggle the seeds”? What seven pieces of knowledge, if liberated, could transform entire markets? In a world where information moves at light speed, maybe it’s time to find your own version of Baba Budan’s beard.
What we’re reading at Wyzr
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. This classic explores how successful companies can do everything right and still lose market leadership to newcomers. Christensen’s insights about disruptive innovation help explain why established monopolies - whether Ottoman coffee control or modern tech dominance - eventually crumble when outsiders change the rules of the game.
Hope you enjoyed this edition of Plain Sight. If you did, do share with your friends. Until next week.
Best,
Utkarsh
