VG Siddhartha: How a lot can change over coffee

BENGALURU: For the longest time, very few people outside business circles knew how the founder of Café Coffee Day looked. Camera-shy and aloof, VG Siddhartharemained low-profile — inaccessible almost — even as his chain’s tagline ‘A Lot Can Happen Over Coffee’ came true. That continued even during his father-in-law SM Krishna’s tenure as CM of Karnataka between 1999 and 2004.

Born and brought up among the lush hills and valleys of Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka, Siddhartha, the only son of a well-to-do coffee planter Gangaiah Hegde, chose not to continue his family’s century-old coffee-growing tradition. The student of economics started off with JM Financial, an investment banking firm in Mumbai in the early 1980s. He had made his ambition known to his family — that he will be super rich someday.