Howard Schultz
speaker
633 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Howard Schultz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And is that when you did the lowercase, when titles all became lowercase?
No, everyone was lowercase from the beginning.
Oh. Out of respect. Everyone's lowercase. Listeners, when you look up a Starbucks employee on LinkedIn, it always looks like, is that a typo? And then you realize there's a pattern. All employees always put lowercase titles. So another interesting thing about the, I was reading the S1 last night, the management team inclusive of you owned 18%, but only 9% to 10% of that was you personally.
So the rest of the management team owned just as much as you did as the founder. That does feel unusually high. Do you think that that played a role in sort of getting people's buy-in and getting them to bleed Starbucks as much as you did? Not intentionally, no. Okay, not a strategy. No, that was not a strategy. Interesting. So then from there, you open in Washington, D.C. on the East Coast.
I think that the reason you picked D.C. was because your mail order business was strong there. So you sort of had proprietary data to know that that was going to be a good coffee city. I don't know how you found that out, but that's accurate. In 1995, you crossed 500 stores. You had just bought the Coffee Connection, as we talked about, in Boston.
And they had one asset that was perhaps much more valuable than any of the real estate or any of the sales that you would generate from there. They owned the trademark on the word Frappuccino.
And I'm so smart that I looked at that Frappuccino with disdain.
Really?
I didn't like the name. I didn't like the beverage. I didn't think it was appropriate for Starbucks. And because I just saw Starbucks as such a purity with regard to coffee. And I was wrong, dead wrong, obviously.
But yeah, it's very different than coffee. Completely different. A blended cold drink. That was the first cold drink we've ever introduced. It was not a coffee-forward beverage. When we introduced it in Southern California, it went crazy. So what changed your mind to greenlight it? I didn't have a choice.
I mean, it was, Coffee Connection had it, then we had it in Boston, people wanted it, and I just went along. And you ended up like reformulating it, right? It wasn't exactly what the- A store manager in Santa Monica reformatted it, and she was on it. I think Howard Behar loved it. People in California loved it. There's a fantastic story about Frappuccino because of what we did with it.
Not in its existing form in retail, but what we ended up doing with it in terms of leveraging the brand and distribution. That's another great story.
Yeah. So I went to Atlanta and Pepsi in the same day. It wound up being Coke. I went to Coke. I went to Pepsi the same day. The Coke meeting was a meeting that lasted less than 30 minutes. I can't remember who I met with. They dismissed me. Didn't view Starbucks. Didn't understand what I was trying to do and didn't give me much time to even explain it. And then I went to Pepsi. And this is 95-ish?
Mid-90s.
See, 500 stores, your public company.
But no one... But in East Coast, Starbucks wasn't really well known. So I went to Pepsi and purchased New York, met Roger Enrico, the iconic CEO, and Craig Weatherup, the president of Pepsi. They loved the idea. And we started talking about this.
Subsequently, Craig Weatherup and I, on a napkin, I swear, shook hands and created a multi-billion dollar business for Pepsi and Starbucks and a 50-50 JV and bottle of Frappuccino. And Craig Weatherup deserves all the credit for that. And then Craig became a board member of Starbucks.
Oh.
And Roger and I were friends until his death. and served on the DreamWorks board together.
And was there an internal revolt? Because I could imagine people saying, this is a bridge too far.
Showing 261–280 of 633 · page 14 of 32
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