Today he is known for his role as chairman and CEO of Starbucks but he also co-founded the Maveron investment group, owned Seattle SuperSonics and was a member in the board of directors for the Square, Inc. financial services company.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 19th 1953 in a Jewish family as the son of a trooper in the US Army and his wife Elaine. Howard had a younger sister called Ronnie and a brother Michael who all grew up in the Canarsie Bayview Houses owned by the NYC Housing Authority.
The family was quite poor and a family of five staying in a crammed little space determined him to find ways to get out but this proved to be a great learning place for him. The cultural diversity made everyone try to get along. Once the father was released from service he started all kinds of jobs such as a truck driver, ending up with a broken leg from one of them that left him immobilized for months. The impact of seeing and living the struggles of the working class made a permanent impact on him and all his childhood he looked for a way to get out.
The natural athletic qualities of Howard made him become interested in sports like baseball, football and basketball, joining the Boys and Girls Club. He studied at Canarsie High School, graduating in 1971 and then received an athletic scholarship in high school for the Northern Michigan University, becoming the first member of his family to go to college. After the first season in the team he got injured and he lost the scholarship, leading him to find desperate measures for paying the college fee, such as even selling his blood.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree in communication in 1975 and became a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon college fraternity along with personalities like Ronald Reagan. After graduating he found work for Hammarplast, a company selling European coffee makers to the US and he was an appliance salesman.
His skill and efficiency made him quickly rise through the corporate ranks and become director of sales. During the 1980s he noticed that most of the sales went to a small company in Seattle, Washington called the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company with the numbers going up each month, so he decided to go there and check out the project.
The first day Howard Schultz walked in the original Starbucks coffee shop was in 1981 which is when the company celebrated ten years of existence. He explained that from the first moment inside he felt like home and something attracted him here: “I had never had a good cup of coffee. I met the founders of the company and really heard for the first time the story of great coffee … I just said, ‘God, this is something I’ve been looking for my whole professional life.”
In 1982 he married Sheri Kersch and they had three children. Also in 1982, Schultz was hired as director of retail operations and marketing at Starbucks and in 1983 during a visit in Milan, Italy he saw the large number of coffee bars available here, giving him the idea that the company should start selling coffee drinks and not only beans as they were doing at the moment. This would allow people to have more experiences in the spaces of the brand and popularize it but the company creators Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl weren’t convinced since during the 1970s they had a similar attempt which didn’t prove successful.
After a lot of insisting from Howard’s part the company gave way and allowed the establishment of a coffee bar at one of the new opening stores in Seattle and it was much more successful. This made the future development of the company go in a direction that the owners didn’t want, so Schultz went on to create his own coffee bar chain called Il Giornale that was a hit.
In fact, this venture allowed Howard to gain sufficient money with the help of investors to buy Starbucks and merge the two companies together after only two years. This huge expansion of the brand made him the CEO and chairman of Starbucks and he managed to improve the quality of the coffee served in the whole country.
He wrote a book together with Dori Jones Yang in 1997 called Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time and a second one with Joanne Gordon in 2011 which was entitled Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul where he explained the life inside the company in a lot of details.
He owned the NBA Seattle SuperSonics for a while but his business oriented thinking was critiqued since the team spirit wasn’t taken into consideration. In July 2006 he sold the team to Clayton Bennett and left some notoriety in Seattle.
Another thing that made the headlines was his support for the legalization of gay marriage in March 2013 and Starbucks announced its support for a referendum to legalize gay union in the state of Washington. This action led to some internal dissent since some shareholders considered that this was leading to loss of sales to which Schultz responded that not all decisions have to be economic and narrow in time.
Forbes magazine ranked Howard Schultz in 2006 on the 359 spot of the richest 400 individuals of America and by 2013 he reached the 311 spot on that list and the 931 spot for the list of billionaires around the globe with a current net worth of 2.5 billion dollars.
Schultz resigned to work as the CEO of Starbucks in 2000 but after eight years he took the reins back until November 2013 to be replaced by the executive of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar. During the last years of his leadership of the company he described the Starbucks philosophy thus: “We’re not in the business of filling bellies; we’re in the business of filling souls.”
