VG Siddhartha: Private man who built a massive consumer brand
In an irony of cinematic proportions, Siddhartha, an intensely private man who abhorred publicity and was painfully shy, has perhaps met the most public of ends. He rarely gave interviews or attended any of the public functions associated with his father-in-law SM Krishna, be it when the latter was sworn in as Karnataka chief minister or as India's external affairs minister.
Siddhartha was a rich man's son who went on to become a billionaire and in the process built a very visible consumer brand in Café Coffee Day whose 2100 stores today dot India. While he was a passive, long-term investor in his tech startups, he was passionate about his first love, coffee. Siddhartha was a maverick who wanted to turn the tea-drinking Indian nation into a promising market for coffee. His bet paid off and how. It helped that he comes from the coffee heartland in Chikkmagaluru, where his family's been growing coffee at its estates since 1870 and where they have a 550-year-old ancestral house. When the property was divided between his uncle and father, he bought 479 acres for about Rs 90,000. He later increased his holdings to 3,500 acres by 1992. Today, he and his family own 18,000 acres of coffee estates.
The coffee connoisseur sniffed a business opportunity in the '90s. In 1993, when the Coffee Board allowed free trade in coffee, the producers could export and get a fair price. By 1995, he started selling coffee powder in Bengaluru and Chennai. Café Coffee Day made its debut with a cyber cafe on Brigade Road in Bengaluru in 1996. "The idea of starting a brand name came when I met a member of the family which owns Germany's best-known coffee brand Tchibo, which was our second-largest buyer. Tchibo started with just a 10sft outlet selling coffee powder in 1948 in Hamburg and went on to become the second-largest coffee roaster in Europe. If Tchibo made it in 40 years, why couldn't we?" he said in an earlier interview to TOI.
"He put India and India's coffee on the global map," said former Coffee Board chairman GV Krishna Rau.
Siddhartha started his career as an analyst and equity trader in Mumbai soon after graduating from St Aloysius College in Mangaluru. He started out with with JM Morgan Stanley (now called JM Financial) where he worked with Nimesh Kampani. The chairman of JM Financial, Kampani on Tuesday couldn't believe the turn of events. He said, "I'm surprised and shocked to know about the incident. I don't know why he took such a decision. He was a jovial and hospitable person."
Naresh Malhotra, a serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Café Coffee Day said: "I knew Siddhartha from 1988 when he was a stock broker and before he started out as an entrepreneur. He is a strong personality and this is totally out of his character."
Many friends recount Siddhartha as a humble human being who didn't mind chartering a flight to attend weddings and funerals of loves ones. From his office at Café Coffee Day Square, he would escort friends personally to the lift and the lobby, which is unheard of from billionaires.
He was too humble, many thought. "During discussions on MindTree's stake sale, an investor told him to be the billionaire he is during investor roadshows after seeing his gentle side and no halo around him," a source said.
Sunalini Menon, Asia's first woman coffee taster, recalls: "Siddhartha has a humane and humble side to him. Humility and Siddhartha go hand-in-hand."
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References
- ^ Café Coffee Day (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
- ^ VG Siddhartha (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
- ^ SM Krishna (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
- ^ MindTree (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
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