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
One of your investors.
One of the investors. We walked across the street to the Rainier Tower, the old Rainier Tower. I think Sam had one of the biggest offices. We walk in there, and I swear, even though it's so many years later, I have a perfect, vivid account for what took place. Sam is sitting behind his desk, and this is what happened, because it was five minutes. Bill Gates, remember, he's a huge guy.
leans over to the desk with his hands on Sam's desk and says, I don't know what you are planning, but whatever it is, it's not going to happen.
Wow.
And he says, Howard Schultz is going to acquire a Starbucks coffee company, and he's never going to hear from you again. That was it.
And we walk out. That's it. That's the whole thing. And so did you hear from Jerry that the bid had been dropped? We walk out, and I say to Mr. Gates— There's one little problem.
I say to Mr. Gates, what just happened? And he said, you're going to buy Starbucks Coffee Company, and my son and I are going to help you. Wow. Hmm. And we raised the money, and that's the story. I never spoke to Sam Strom again. I've never mentioned his name publicly. I never mentioned his name in his book. And I say it respectfully. I'm not trying to, but that's the story.
And Sam, I mean, for anyone who doesn't live in the Seattle area, his name is on buildings and community centers. I mean, this revered philanthropist, I actually don't know his business background. How did he become the Titan that he was? He was involved in real estate and also in those auto stores. How did you get him off the Il Giornale cap table?
Wasn't he an investor in your existing business? He and his family were investors to the end until they got out. Oh, wow. Until they got out. Wow.
No, he had a henchman who was his money guy who figured out we could just take this company. And what do we need Howard Schultz for? He's a young kid. Mm-hmm. And Sam had experience with retail with those auto stores.
I see. So he could install some professional management from some other venture.
Yeah, it would have been over. But the thing about Bill Gates is I saw him socially a hundred plus times. He never, ever said anything public about what he did.
He never took credit for it. So for listeners, Howard's told this elsewhere, but you spoke at the Microsoft CEO Summit. You recounted this story to the Fortune 500 CEOs. And Bill Gates III, Microsoft founder, comes up to you afterwards and says, yeah, who was the guy? But Bill did not know the whole story. He didn't know any of it. He didn't know what his father had done for me.
He's hearing it for the first time. And this is, you know, 2015 or something. So Starbucks, like, you would think someone would want to tell their family I played some significant role in this, but that's not the type of guy he was. Bill Gates Sr.
never told a soul what he did for me.
Again, the humility. Humility. incredible lesson about humility it's amazing yeah and so were bill gates senior and bill gates the third investors in that 3.8 million dollar round bill senior was but i don't know if it was part of bill or but yeah microsoft interesting um so i asked sherry about this when i was preparing for the episode and her recollection was it was something like
one to two weeks before the three-month exclusivity for you was going to be up. And so you're basically like, this event happens, but now you need to come up with the money. And you have this unbelievably short period of time to do so. And so she said that you were calling everybody you knew.
She was calling her clients, because she's a designer, calling her clients, trying to just find pockets of 50K here, 100K there, anywhere you could to make it happen.
But I had another angel. who helped me by the name of Jack Rogers, who became a lifelong friend who passed away a couple of years ago. He was part of an investor group, and he brought them along. So the acquisition goes through. Yeah. August of 87, we bought the six Starbucks stores. We had the three Il Giornalis, and there were two stores under construction.
So at the end of the calendar year, we had 11 stores and 100 employees in 1987.
Showing 101–120 of 633 · page 6 of 32
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