Howard Schultz

“I didn't create any of this, I didn't invent any of these parts. The I just brought the parts together, which is what a great merchant does. Like Jeff Bezos didn't write the books. He just put the books together on a platform that you could, we all could buy a…”

“Howard Schultz and I did Starbucks. In a 125 stores in 40 different markets”

“From the money that I did make from Howard Schultz and Starbucks, and again, thank you, Howard, because you, he made me legitimate. That Starbucks deal sealed the deal for me”

“And the power of getting out of your own routine was, And seeing how other people live, spend money, spend their time, has led to trillions of dollars of value creation, and more importantly, passion.”

“I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates, and all of the great ones you know, the very charismatic ones, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and, you know, I've learned from all of them, and in a way I've tried to imitate…”

“I will never forget it was the fall of 2007, and we had an investment meeting in Seattle, and he walked in and he said, we need to slow down our investments.”

“One is the espresso company, Faima. And one is the large Italian coffee company Lavazza. And I asked them both to invest in my idea. And both of them turned me down.”

“Jerry gave me about, I think he gave me 90 days to raise 3.8 million dollars. 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 mo…”

“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.”

“August of 87. We bought the six Starbucks stores. We had the three old Eldranales, and there were two stores under construction. So at the end of the calendar year, we had 11 stores And a hundred employees in 1987.”

“For the initial 1.6 million that you raised for Il Giornale, you talked to 242 investors, 217 of which said no.”

“No, it was totally my childhood. My parents were always in debt. Bill collectors were always calling. And no, there was, we never had any debt the entire time. Never.”

“The ability to source and roast coffee And put that through the supply chain of a beverage gave us probably at the time an 80% gross margin.”

“The model basically was a sales to investment ratio of two to one. And a operating profit of 20%.”

“Howard Schultz should have said to them, I want an exclusive on that lid. Because that lid became the standard for the world. If I would have just understood that.”

“There certainly was a fair amount of discussion all the time about the sensitivity of the price points, and I think in later years, maybe in the last couple years, given the consumer inflationary time, I think it's become a bit of a problem.”

“Ultimately we gave 14% of everyone's base pay in the form of stock options at the end of the year based on the strike price. And I had to do it the year before the IPO.”

“We got turned down by Goldman Sachs.”

“No, everyone was lowercase from the beginning. Out of respect. Everyone's lowercase.”

“The Coke meeting was a meeting lasted less than 30 minutes. I can't remember who I met with. They dismissed me didn't view Starbucks or, didn't understand what I was trying to do and didn't give me much time to even explain it.”

“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 fifty-fifty JV and bottle Frappuccino.”

“I did a hundred quarterly conference calls as CEO. A hundred. That's a lot of earnings prep, because each one of those has, what, two weeks before it of. The truth is, the majority of those were no script.”

“On that holiday, a friend of mine Not, I didn't know he was there, but it was Michael Dell was there. And I must've talked to him almost every day about the transformation of Starbucks. And he was going through a similar thing at Dell almost at the same time. …”

“Never had a negative comp month in my history of the company.”

“I went up there, and I laid it out. Chapter and verse. I think we have seven months left. We are going to be insolvent.”

“And then I had this economic formula of how many customers it would take per store to turn comps around. And the number was low. It's like less than 10 per day or 11 per day.”

“Because the previous administration had done things that diluted the integrity of coffee to maximize yield.”

“He was right, except for one, the general counsel. They were all gone.”

“I don't think I would have allowed the mobile app to be on demand, 24 hours a day. I would have slow rolled the availability of it, and then understood how it was being used, and whether or not it was going to disrupt the experience.”

“What is it, 70% of drinks are now iced beverages, and it was when you started, zero percent.”

“Founder leaves, I'm not talking about me, it's you, historically, and companies lose not only the extent of the entrepreneurial DNA, but they lose the ability to be on offense. And the worst thing that a company can do, like a sports team, is start playing def…”

“The worst thing that could happen to a company is believing that you are incapable of doing anything but succeeding, and you deserve the success. But if you start playing defense and don't have the offensive mind, it's not going to go well. And I think over ti…”

“The day I came back, and I knew what the market would do, is I announced that we were suspending the stock buybacks, and stock went down. I expected it, and I announced that we were going to take basically the money we were using to stock buybacks for the year…”

“The first thing I want to say is I've made it clear to the Starbucks board, Howard Schultz, and I've made it clear to Loxman, Howard Schultz has no desire or intent to return as CEO of Starbucks.”

“Starbucks and Howard Schultz was actually one of the biggest retailers of CDs. In the U.S.”

“Howard was super happy with it and had me present to his board of directors”

“Howard Schultz found out, and he called me on my mobile phone and asked me to come in and meet with him. So I went back to his office, and it was the week that my furniture was, you know, already on a truck to San Francisco. And he kept on being like, why? Why…”

“Probably four or five a day. Yeah. And no, no caffeine after five PM.”

“This was 1976, and at Xerox first I sent you to a sales training school in Leesburg, Virginia, and after that, for six months, all you do is make 50 cold calls a day. But I'm not talking about on a phone. You have to go make a physical cold call. Into an offic…”

“I started realizing that this is a third place between home and work. But the beverage was the draw.”

“No, there was no service of any cup of coffee at any Starbucks So it was just pounds of coffee for home use.”

“Overnight, we had hundreds of customers every day, and we introduced cafe latte to the city of Seattle, basically.”

“The truth of the matter is that I spoke to 242 people to try and raise 1,700,000 dollars to form Il Dernali.”

“And Starbucks put a little contract in there, which was, you have to raise 600,000 dollars to use our 200.”

“The person who should buy Starbucks is you, and so the price is one-time sales, six stores, 3.8 million dollars, which was You know, it was fantastic news. And I'll give you a 90 day exclusive to try and come back to me with 3.8 million dollars.”

“And all I remember him saying is, you should be ashamed of yourself. That you're gonna steal this kid's dream. It's not gonna happen. You and I both know this is not gonna happen. And within 10 minutes, he told them to stand down, we're walking out of this off…”

“We closed 900 stores, and 90% of them had been open less than a year.”