On July 29, 2019, India’s home-grown coffee king, VG Siddhartha, founder of the Café Coffee Day chain, asked his driver to stop near a bridge over the monsoon-swollen Netravati River, saying he wanted to go for a walk. Two days later, his body was pulled from the water following a huge search operation.

News that the widely admired Karnataka entrepreneur had taken his life stunned India’s financial community. Only in the days and months that followed did the full extent of Siddhartha’s troubles become public: he was up to his eyeballs in debt, both personal and corporate.

In The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V. G. Siddhartha, seasoned financial journalists Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta present a meticulously researched and authoritative account of the perfect financial storm Siddhartha was facing.

The book traces his journey from being the son of a coffee plantation owner in the quiet green hill district of Chikmagalur to the visionary creator, in the late 1990s, of India’s largest café chain. Café Coffee Day was not merely a place to drink coffee; it became a social space where young Indians could linger, talk, relax and even do business.

The problem, however, was that Siddhartha, whom the authors describe as a “modest man who eschewed flamboyance”, didn’t confine his investments only to coffee. He aggressively diversified into real estate, hospitality, tech parks, venture capital and logistics, relying increasingly on borrowed funds and convinced that the sheer scale of his assets could cover his liabilities.

As the authors note, Siddhartha developed “a mania for picking up any company that was for sale”. This strategy gave him a sprawling portfolio of businesses but ultimately contributed to his downfall.

Short-term borrowing became integral to his financing model, while extensive personal guarantees tied Siddhartha’s fate directly to that of his companies. The problem was not only excessive debt but also debt that was constantly out of sync, with misaligned timelines, rising interest payments and constant refinancing pressures.

He took new loans to repay old ones. Most of his businesses generated little profit. And despite the size of the empire he built, the authors say it was strictly a one-man show.

Eventually, Siddhartha ran out of wriggle room. Trapped by mounting debt and the intense personal responsibility he felt towards employees, investors and his family’s reputation, the pressure became overwhelming.

“I have failed as an entrepreneur,” Siddhartha wrote in a final letter to the company’s board, investors and his family. “Despite my best efforts, I could not create a profitable business model,” he said, adding that there was “tremendous pressure from lenders”.

Focus on finances

The book is a deep dive into the finances of Coffee Day Enterprises, the listed holding company at the centre of Siddhartha’s web of businesses. Rao and Datta have assembled a remarkable body of material on the company’s operations and the challenges Siddhartha faced.

The book’s achievement is all the more impressive given the scant co-operation the authors received from friends, close associates, family members and the company itself. “There was simply no one who could add anything beyond the fact that he was a very nice man and a sincere, hard-working entrepreneur,” they write.

Siddhartha began his career as a stockbroker in the 1980s, when India’s stock exchanges were considered the Wild West. His most important realisation, the authors suggest, was the power of borrowed money, or leverage, and how it could be used to build vast fortunes. His time on Dalal Street may also, they note, have given him “the idea of cutting corners to save money”.

By the 1990s, Siddhartha found himself in an India brimming with opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs. In 1998, drawing on his family’s coffee-growing background, he launched Café Coffee Day, pioneering what would become India’s now ubiquitous café culture.

He built a vertically integrated business, from plantations to cafés, aimed at creating easygoing spaces where young people could sit for hours, talking and unwinding. At the time, cafés were largely confined to five-star hotels or roadside stalls. Café Coffee Day, with its memorable slogan “A lot can happen over coffee”, became a template for future café chains, bookstores and co-working spaces.

But this success, too, was largely fuelled by borrowed funds.

As rents rose and competitors such as Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Blue Tokai entered the market, margins thinned. The core business stopped generating enough surplus to service the debt. Over time, the brand hollowed out: lenders stepped in, premises grew shabby, outlets shut and staff went unpaid.

One of the central lessons from Siddhartha’s life, the authors argue, is the extent to which regulatory loopholes can be exploited by entrepreneurs. Because SEBI scrutinises only listed companies, promoters with large unlisted businesses can keep much of their activity out of public view. The authors also point to compliant auditors willing to endorse management’s rosy assumptions, or simply out of their depth.

Fragmented regulation compounds the problem, with different institutions overseeing different aspects of a business and rarely able to follow a case to its logical conclusion. The media, too, come in for criticism, often lionising fast-growing entrepreneurs without probing deeply into the mechanics of their financial operations.

There is no doubt, the authors conclude, that Siddhartha was a charismatic and well-regarded man. His efforts to support small coffee planters and the young people of Chikmagalur “left a lasting legacy”. But these qualities proved to be no shield against the relentless pursuit of banks and financial institutions, both before and after his death.

The reviewer is a former Reuters correspondent based in New Delhi

Title: Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Cafe Coffee Day Founder VG Siddhartha

Authors. Prosenjit Datta and Rukmini Rao

Publisher: Key Lime Publishing

Price: ₹699

Meet the authors

Rukmini Rao is a financial journalist who has reported extensively on Karnataka-based businesses for over a decade for both print and television media.

Prosenjit Datta is a veteran business journalist with over three-and-a-half decades of experience.

Published on January 18, 2026