Tanvi Raut Dessai

It's been exactly a year since we started This Is Business! When we decided to get into video, we knew we wanted to go beyond studio conversations and visit businesses to see how things worked. Our first shoot was with @tnpanil at SuperK. We barely had a team, a plan or a script, but he gave us a chance anyway. That video crossed 50,000 views in its first week. Since then, we've done over 25+ shoots, visited some incredible factories and labs, and met people working on things we probably wouldn't have had the chance to see otherwise. We're still learning as we go, but I'm so proud of the team and grateful to everyone who's opened their doors to us. And we're always looking for interesting people and businesses to meet. If you know someone building something fascinating, please send them our way! Btw, the SuperK episode crossed 500K views this week!

Trent has signed a deal with British coffee chain Caffè Nero to open cafés inside Westside and Zudio stores. Westside and Zudio offer quite different shopping experiences and attract different crowds too. Also, a lot of clothing stores don't even allow you to bring food or drinks inside because of the risk of spilling something on the clothes. Curious to see what this will look like.

.Dictionary.com has named “maxxing” its Word of the Year for 2026. It started as gaming slang and has now made its way into pretty much everything. There's sleepmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, looksmaxxing and even tokenmaxxing. The word appeared in digital media nearly 19 times more often this August than the monthly average last year. We had some fun with this one and made a little video about it at @FilterCoffeeHQ too.

Was ordering groceries on Blinkit today and spotted Borécha, a kombucha brand from Goa I've been following and writing about for quite some time. Back in 2019, brothers Ishan and Anish Varshnei started making kombucha in Goa. Ishan had gotten used to drinking it while living in the US, and when he returned, he couldn't find anything quite like it here. So they decided to make their own. They called it Borécha, which means “good tea” in Konkani. This was years before all these good-for-you drinks started getting so much attention in India. They've since built their own manufacturing setup in Goa, expanded into other beverages, and even got Borécha onto airlines like Akasa. The same company also makes Maka Di, a craft beer brand. And they're now aiming for ₹500 crore in annual revenue over the next 4–5 years, with even an IPO on the cards. With so many newer brands entering this category, it's quite nice to see how early these guys were, and that they were doing all of this out of Goa. Also, the mango one slaps!

Went to Fort in Mumbai recently and noticed just how many fashion labels have stores there. One boutique after another, some with really pretty spaces. And I’m guessing the rents aren’t cheap either. Who actually shops at these places? Do people travel all the way to Fort for a particular label, or do they just walk in and discover them? And what makes these brands so different? Genuinely curious because there seem to be so many of them, and I know very little about this side of Mumbai’s fashion scene.

Data centres are now trying to win over schoolchildren in the US. I came across an interesting WIRED story about how companies are organising school trips to data centres, handing out colouring books, storybooks and science projects about how they work. One industry group even sponsored flag-making kits for 3,100 first-graders, along with cards explaining the economic benefits of data centres. Data centres are facing growing opposition from local communities over their electricity use and impact on neighbourhoods. So the industry is now trying to build some goodwill among younger people too. Apparently, industries like oil, gas and fast food have been using this PR strategy for years. Covered this and a lot more in today’s @FilterCoffeeHQ newsletter ☕

Goa was the first state in India to officially allow motorcycle taxis, back in 1981. We called the drivers pilots. I was booking a cab the other day and saw Rapido's bike taxi option, and it immediately reminded me of the pilots back home in Goa. If you've been to Goa, you've probably seen them. Those yellow-and-black motorcycles parked near markets and bus stands. Growing up, this was such a normal way to get around. You'd just find a pilot, tell him where you wanted to go, agree on a fare and hop on. And now companies like Rapido have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and turned bike taxis into a billion-dollar business. I also came across a short documentary by BBC Marathi about these pilots recently. Many of them are now struggling to make a living, with more people owning their own vehicles and services like GoaMiles changing how people get around. And while reading more about this, I found out that the Goa government recently launched an app called Mhaje Driver (My Driver) to help these pilots get more bookings, without charging them any commission. Pretty cool! I love finding these little parallels between Goa and the places I travel to. Growing up, I never really thought of bike taxis as a business idea. They were just something we'd always had back home.

Been going to the gym without my phone, headphones or watch for a week now. No music, no tracking anything. Just an hour to work out and think. Absolute game changer.

We cover a fair bit of strange business, tech and internet news at @FilterCoffeeHQ too. A few stories that made it into the newsletter recently: - Hackers broke into the refrigeration systems of hundreds of French supermarkets and turned their freezers into heaters. Some reportedly hit 50°C overnight. - Maharashtra's food safety commissioner Tukaram Mundhe made it to The New York Times, which called him a "rock star" for his crackdown on food safety violations. His team has carried out over 12,000 inspections since May. - Anthropic's Claude accidentally submitted a fake murder tip to Philadelphia police during an internal test. Thankfully, the police website's spam filter caught it. - Over 200GB of Cartoon Network's behind-the-scenes files reportedly leaked online, including sketches, storyboards and animation files from shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Gumball. - Nintendo says it has no plans to stop selling physical game cartridges, even as Sony moves towards digital-only games. Physical copies still accounted for 38.5% of Nintendo's software revenue in a recent quarter. - This year's Physics Nobel went to a scientist who helped build a giant detector buried under Antarctic ice to catch neutrinos, tiny particles that pass through our bodies without us noticing. More at filtercoffee.substack.com ☕

Singapore has launched a dating service for its unmarried government employees aged 21 to 35. It's called FirstDate, and instead of endlessly swiping, you sign in with your national digital ID, answer a few questions about yourself, and get matched with one person at a time using the Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm. Singapore is dealing with a record-low birth rate, with fewer than 30,000 babies born last year. But what I found even more interesting is that this isn't the government's first attempt at matchmaking. Back in 1984, it actually set up a unit to organise social events for single graduates. The Singapore government has been trying to set people up since 1984.

Inside the startup training dogs to sniff out cancer. Huge thanks to @akadogluk and @Itamar_Bitan for taking us through the process! Video out now on This Is Business 🇮🇳🚀 youtu.be/e806BwLqmiU?si=KKcv…

.@FilterCoffeeHQ merch spotted in the wild .

What billionaires have been up to this week 🚀 - Elon Musk unveiled a Tesla Roadster that drove upside down and performed a mid-air flip. - Vinod Khosla backed a biotech startup that's offering to freeze people's immune cells for possible future use. He's signed up himself. - Mukesh Ambani's Jio Platforms preps for India's biggest IPO, aiming to raise up to ₹30,213 crore. Reliance also launched ₹20 flavoured milk under a new brand called Joyland. Quite the range of activities.

If "fuck it, we ball" was a person.

Quite the list we’ve got here! So many interesting names I hadn't come across before.

We’re about 20 episodes into This Is Business, and I just realised we haven’t featured a single woman founder yet. Not intentional, but something I’d like to change. We’ve spent the last few months visiting factories, labs and businesses across India to understand how things actually work. Would love to meet more women building interesting companies. Any interesting women builders I should speak to?

Goa is seeing a lot more community-driven fitness activity lately. Just this week, hundreds of people showed up for a run-and-rave. I grew up in Goa, and I don’t remember fitness being this much of a social thing here. Of course, people have always played football, gone cycling or taken their morning walks. But now there are running clubs, padel courts, calisthenics groups, open-air gyms and entire communities forming around fitness. A lot of this seems to have picked up after Covid, when more people started moving to Goa or spending longer periods working from here. Around the same time, fitness studios and communities started popping up, with locals getting into it too. The funny thing is, Goa always had the outdoors and the space for all of this. It's quite nice to see people using it differently now, and Goa getting attention for something beyond its beaches and nightlife.

HackerFab @iitbombay is a first-of-its-kind student-run semiconductor fab in India, built by a group of students trying to make chip fabrication more accessible and hands-on. We went to IIT Bombay to see how they’re doing it with low-cost tools, and what semiconductor fabrication actually looks like up close. Huge thanks to @aryamman_bhatia and @Abhineet_Avhad for taking us through the process! Video out now on This Is Business 🇮🇳 youtu.be/qx0pNiMLfg4?si=63VR…