Day: October 18, 2025

• Jash Mehta was a consultant before cofounding the organic coffee and tea brand Pop & Bottle.
• She told Business Insider that running a startup has been the “best MBA you can ever do.”
• Since becoming a mom, Mehta says she’s become a better leader for the company.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jash Mehta, the cofounder of Pop & Bottle, an organic, dairy-free coffee and tea brand. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been building Pop & Bottle, a better-for-you coffee and tea company, for about 10 years now. I didn’t come from a food-and-beverage background — I was in consulting before this — but I always had an entrepreneurial itch.

I grew up in a family of business owners, and from a young age, I was dipping into projects for them, learning the basics of running something of my own.

It wasn’t until I started creating something of my own that I realized how much more there was to learn.

My cofounder and I love coffee and tea, and we are passionate about wellness. We wanted to create something made of clean ingredients that still tasted great. That’s how Pop & Bottle was born.

At the time, we didn’t know how to scale a beverage company — we were complete newcomers to the industry. We literally started in my San Francisco kitchen, experimenting with recipes and ingredients.

Our first commercial production was in a tiny rented kitchen in Berkeley, California, where we’d make about 100 bottles a day on weekends. Then, we graduated to a slightly larger space, and eventually to a full-scale factory. Each shift has brought its own set of lessons about how to manage these types of relationships and ensure the quality of our product remains true to who we are.

Now, we partner with several production facilities across the country, depending on the product line, and each has offered us great expertise that helps us scale. We’re now available in Whole Foods, Costco, Target, Walmart, and other major retailers, as well as online for our nonperishable products.

We use plant-based, organic ingredients — things like almonds, oats, dates, and coconut for sweetness — and no refined sugars. Our packaging reflects that same ethos: clean, minimalist, and joyful.

In the early days, we didn’t have a big marketing budget, so we learned to rely on design to do the heavy lifting. A beautiful pastel bottle can act as a mini billboard on a crowded grocery shelf.

As a company, we’ve grown chapter by chapter. The first chapter was all physical grit: making the product, delivering it ourselves, taking orders, hustling sales — nothing was too big or too small. It was exhausting but exhilarating.

The second chapter was about building a team — learning how to hire, manage, and motivate people, and shifting from being a doer to being a leader. That was a whole new skill set.

And then I became a mom. That added another dimension entirely.

How parenting taught me to be a better executive

Balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood comes with a lot of mixed emotions — many positives and some challenges. As any working parent knows, there’s always that question: Could I be doing more here? Could I be doing more there?

But becoming a parent has made me a better executive in two major ways.

First, time management.

Before kids, I could pour 80 hours a week into the business — staying up late, working weekends, and constantly glued to my laptop. As a parent, that’s just not possible. Your time suddenly has an opportunity cost that’s very real. It forced me to get ruthlessly clear on priorities and learn what to leave on the cutting room floor.

Second, empathy.

Parenting has given me more patience, compassion, and listening skills — all of which are invaluable when managing people. Understanding and supporting your team isn’t so different from guiding your kids: you have to listen, adapt, and communicate clearly.

I often say that running a business is the best MBA you can ever do. You’re constantly learning, constantly growing, and the “curriculum” changes every day. There’s no textbook for the challenges you face — you just evolve to meet them.

Financially, building a company like this is a long game. There are sacrifices, especially in the early years, when you’re reinvesting every dollar back into the business. But for me, the motivation has never been purely financial. It’s about creating something meaningful — a product and brand that make people’s lives a little better.

We’ve expanded nationally, and our ambitions continue to grow. For now, our focus remains domestic — there’s still plenty of room to grow here — but someday, who knows? Maybe international expansion will be on the table.

Ten years in, I feel like we’re just getting started. Pop & Bottle has evolved so much, and so have I. It’s been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life — right up there with motherhood.

Running this company has pushed me to grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and becoming a parent has given me the perspective and balance I needed to sustain it. Together, they’ve taught me lessons no MBA program ever could.

• A professor warned that AI is making students dependent on Big Tech’s algorithms for knowledge.
• Anthropic data shows students already use AI to write, edit, and even solve assignments directly.
• Kimberley Hardcastle of Northumbria University says education risks losing to algorithmic authority.

Generative AI isn’t just changing how students learn — it’s changing who controls knowledge itself.

That’s the warning from Kimberley Hardcastle, a business and marketing professor at the UK’s Northumbria University.

She told Business Insider that the rise of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in classrooms is shifting education’s foundations in ways few institutions are prepared to confront.

While schools and universities focus on plagiarism, grading, and AI literacy, Harcastle said the real risk lies deeper: in students and educators outsourcing judgment to algorithms built by Big Tech.

Students are outsourcing the thinking process

Data from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, shows just how deeply AI has entered the classroom.

After analyzing about one million student conversations in April, the company found that 39.3% involved creating or polishing educational content, while 33.5% asked the chatbot to solve assignments directly.

However, Hardcastle said this isn’t just a case of students “not doing the work.” She said it’s also about how knowledge itself is constructed.

“When we bypass the cognitive journey of synthesis and critical evaluation, we’re not just losing skills,” she said. “We’re changing our epistemological relationship with knowledge itself.”

In other words, students are beginning to rely on AI not just to find answers but also to decide what counts as a good answer.

“This affects job prospects not through reduced ability, but through a shifted cognitive framework where validation and creation of knowledge increasingly depend on AI mediation rather than human judgment,” she said.

The ‘atrophy of epistemic vigilance’

Hardcastle said her biggest concern is what she called the “atrophy of epistemic vigilance” — the ability to independently verify, challenge, and construct knowledge without the help of algorithms.

As AI becomes more embedded in learning, she said, students risk losing the instinct to question sources, test assumptions, or think critically.

“We’re witnessing the first experimental cohort encountering AI mid-stream in their cognitive development, making them AI-displaced rather than AI-native learners,” she said.

“We’re witnessing a transformation in cognitive practices,” she added.

That loss could ripple beyond classrooms. If people stop practicing independent evaluation, society risks becoming dependent on algorithms as the arbiters of truth.

Big Tech’s growing control over knowledge

Hardcastle warned that the deeper danger isn’t just cognitive but structural.

If AI systems become the primary mediators of knowledge, Big Tech companies effectively control what counts as valid knowledge.

“The issue isn’t dramatic control but subtle epistemic drift: when we consistently defer to AI-generated summaries and analyses, we inadvertently allow commercial training data and optimization metrics to shape what questions get asked and which methodologies appear valid,” she said.

That drift, she said, risks entrenching corporate influence over how knowledge is created and validated — and quietly shifting authority from human judgment to algorithmic logic.

The stakes for education

Hardcastle said the question isn’t whether education will “fight back” against AI, but whether it will consciously shape AI integration to preserve human epistemic agency — the capacity to think, reason, and judge independently.

That requires educators to move beyond compliance and operational fixes, and to start asking fundamental questions about knowledge authority in an AI-mediated world, she said.

“I’m less concerned about cohorts being ‘worse off’ than about education missing this critical inflection point,” she said.

Unless universities act deliberately, she said, AI could erode independent thought — while Big Tech profits from controlling how knowledge itself is created.

• US consumers are feeling the pinch of tariffs on small orders shipping into the US.
• The tariffs are also complicating international shipping, customers are finding.
• Problems at UPS have compounded the issue, they say.

Rich DeThomas never thought ordering wine from Italy would be this complicated.

In late August, he ordered a dozen bottles of red wine to be sent to his home in Huntsville, Alabama. It never showed up. Citing recent tariff changes, UPS requested more details about the shipment before saying it couldn’t deliver the wine to DeThomas at all.

After receiving a replacement shipment from the vineyard, he also got a $13 bill from UPS for “abandoning” the first case.

“It’s the headache of dealing with it all,” DeThomas said. “What the hell? What’s going on?”

DeThomas is one of the Americans finally experiencing the ramifications of President Donald Trump‘s April announcement of sweeping tariffs on most countries. Many customers’ latest headaches are coming after the Trump Administration ended the de minimis loophole in August, which exempted shipments worth under $800 — and many consumers’ most common purchases — from tariffs.

Now, customers are realizing that, in addition to paying the cost of tariffs, some are having to become amateur customs brokers to make sure their online order arrives.

The chaos has become especially apparent for UPS customers like DeThomas. The service has left customers’ US-bound packages sitting at its warehouses for days or weeks, and, in some cases, said that it would dispose of their shipments because of customs issues since the demise of a loophole for small shipments under $800, Business Insider has reported.

Tariff tedium frustrates consumers

After Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, business leaders and economists predicted a spike in inflation and shipping chaos. Walmart and Amazon were among the companies that said they’d be raising prices. Importers increased ordering to build up inventory before tariffs took effect.

Then, we waited. Over the summer, inflation ticked up slightly, and stories of surprise bills for online orders began trickling out.

Now, consumers say they’re having to learn about wonky aspects of tariffs — what’s the product’s country of origin? How do I verify that I’m being charged the right fee?

In early September, after DeThomas’ 12 bottles of red wine were held up for several days at UPS’s Louisville facility, a customs broker for UPS told him via email that they would either be abandoned or returned to the sender at their cost. “Personal wine imports ORDERED ONLINE are NOT permitted,” the broker wrote.

UPS did not respond to questions from Business Insider about DeThomas’ experience, including which policy its broker was referencing when they said that online orders of wine aren’t allowed.

“If this is going to happen, I’m not ordering it,” DeThomas said.

Katie Golden, who resells clothes on Depop, said that she expected to pay some tariffs when she ordered $179 worth of used apparel from the UK. Still, she said, she was surprised when UPS sent her a bill for $769 when her shipment reached the US, including a $54 brokerage fee.

Golden said that she’s trying to dispute the tariff and have her bill reduced. She said that she suspects that UPS didn’t understand what was in her shipment and applied the wrong tariff rate.

“It shouldn’t be this hard to order a package,” she said.

Some UPS customers have told Business Insider that they are trying to contest their tariff bills after their shipments were hit with the 200% tariff rate for Russian aluminum — among the highest rates that the US charges on imports — though their shipments didn’t contain metal from the country.

Tom Strohl, president of consulting firm Oliver Wight Americas, said that customers could look for alternatives to buying stuff abroad if they keep running into problems with tariffs. Companies that ship into the US should either factor tariffs into their purchase prices or allow customers to pay the tariffs when they place their order, he said.

“If customers are confused, it’s going to affect their brand,” he said. “That, to me, is the worst possible outcome for a supplier.”

That’s a concern for businesses that, like many in the US, are gearing up for another busy holiday shipping season. Kunal Sharma, who owns two Ontario, Canada-based businesses that sell parts for luxury cars, said that he’s already watched UPS lose or return some of his US-bound shipments since the end of the de minimis loophole.

“I can’t even imagine how bad it’ll get on Black Friday,” he said.

Economists expect tariffs to affect US consumers in other ways, such as raising prices and making it harder to get a job. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said that tariffs have prevented the central bank from cutting interest rates sooner.

But the duties’ effects on shipping and ordering stuff abroad may continue to be one of the clearest examples of the duties hitting home for Americans.

George Hayes is considering cutting back on ordering from outside the US.

The North Carolina resident imports figurines, pillows, and other goods popular in the Otaku community from Japan. The products are often cheaper there than equivalents for sale in the US. With the new tariffs on small shipments and backups at services like UPS, though, Hayes said that he’s planning to hold off on ordering more until there’s clearer guidance on what he can and can’t import and which tariffs will apply.

Hayes paid about $700 in tariffs on his last shipment. But it’s not just the cost: For many items, he now has to report the country they were manufactured in to determine the correct tariff — a challenge, he says, since he buys many secondhand items.

Before the end of the de minimis loophole, he said, that was something he never had to think about.

“I wish we could have that again,” Hayes said of the system before this year’s tariffs. “We didn’t know how good we had it.”

Do you have a story to share about UPS or tariffs? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.