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
So she is the glue to everything that's happened. And I don't know if she'd ever had a conversation with her father. I'm sure she did. But the whole thing could have been over.
And that would have been a very understandable response if Sherry had said, I wasn't going to say anything, but look at our situation objectively here.
Yeah, and her father was a great guy. And I understood, but I was embarrassed and humiliated. How could I not be?
In a business that he clearly did not understand, you know, a coffee store.
The other interesting thing to point out around this time is for the people who were seeking high-risk business investments, this is the late 80s, it's time to look at tech. We're now 12 years into Microsoft, Apple's four years past the Macintosh, and you're trying to raise money for a coffeehouse chain.
With names that people couldn't pronounce and serving it in a paper cup to go.
That does not sound innovative to me. I don't know why I'm putting my risk capital into your... Yeah.
You know, I would bring investors to the two or three stores, and I would make sure there was a fair amount of people in the space. And that's when I started talking about the language of community and the third place. And that's what I saw in Italy. The unlock and the epiphany, of course, it was the romance of espresso, but it was the sense of community.
And that is what was happening very early on in the two stores in Seattle and the one in Vancouver. You could see it. What would people do after they bought the coffee? You said these are very small places. They would stand up. Because the two stores didn't have seating right away. They would stand up at the coffee bar at the window on Columbia Center. And it was at 8, 9 o'clock in the morning.
They were hanging out there. And then late morning, they were coming back. And you could just feel the relationship that people were having with one another around human connection. I know it sounds trite, but I could see it back then. And as I was talking to people about the investment opportunity, I was pointing out, look what's happening here. There's something happening.
There's some magic going on here. It's not just the coffee. The coffee was the conduit. All right, so we're at the pivotal moment. Starbucks and Pete's gets into financial trouble. And the debt to equity was north of six to one for a company that was tiny. Jerry comes to me and says,
jane and i his wife are going to move to california and we're going to keep pete's and i'm going to sell starbucks and my heart is pounding i said okay and then he finished it and he says i think you're the person to buy starbucks i said that's fantastic but i don't have any money you're gonna give it to me no money how much is it 3.8 million dollars Now we're in 86, 87.
Now we get into a story I have told, but not 100%, because I protected the guy. But I'm going to tell it. I go out to raise money. I'm having a hard time. So Jerry gave me about, I think he gave me 90 days to raise $3.8 million. Around the second month, he just came to me and said, where are you with all this? And I think I had about half of it raised.
I might have fibbed a bit and said I had a little bit more, but I had about half. And he lays a bomb on me and says, Howard, listen, we're in a tight situation here. And one of your investors has put a cash, all cash offer on the table with no due diligence and wants to close right away.
For him to take it over, not you.
Yeah, yeah, I'm out. I'd be out. And I said, who is it? And he told me, I'll save that. And I'm absolutely annihilated, crushed, because I didn't have the wherewithal. And I could just envision as soon as I heard that name, I knew it was over. I was in a basketball league at the Seattle club. I'm playing basketball that night.
My good friend, Scott Greenberg, who's an attorney at a prestige firm in Seattle, the Gates firm. I'm basically crying to him after the game and telling him the story. And he says, you've got to come to the office tomorrow and meet our senior partner and tell him the story. Bill Gates, senior. I said, well- A titan. Incredible.
There were three titans there, but here is the titan. And Bill was six foot seven? He's six foot seven. He's a mountain of a man and very imposing. So nine o'clock in the morning, I put a suit on. I must've been sweating through my shirt. I was just so anxious, so nervous. At the same time, so scared about what was gonna happen. I go in there and I must've been trembling. I was just so nervous.
I tell him exactly what I just told him. And he interrupts me and he says, Howard, I'm just gonna ask you two questions. Is everything you told me true? I said, Mr. Gates, yes. Have you left anything out? No. And he says, come back in an hour. I said, okay, to do what? He says, I'll see you in an hour. And so we walk out. I'm walking around.
I think we probably went to Columbia Center to get a coffee and come back. I go back with Scott, and Mr. Gates says, Scott, I'm going to see Howard alone. And Scott leaves. Now I'm alone in his office. I hardly sit down, and he says, we're going for a walk. And I said, where are we going? And he says, we're going to see the man who was Sam Strom.
Showing 81–100 of 633 · page 5 of 32
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