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Acquired

Episode 34: The Starbucks IPO with Dan Levitan

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2017

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben & David "pour over" the 1992 IPO of the legendary Seattle coffee company with the help of Dan Levitan, who served as lead investment banker on the IPO and who would later co-found the venture capital firm Maveron with Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz.

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury


Topics covered include:

  • The original Starbucks’ founding as a coffee bean roaster, started by three disciples of the legendary coffee roaster Alfred Peet
  • Howard Schultz’s introduction to Starbucks, his joining the team as director of marketing, and inspiration behind his “third place” coffee shop vision
  • Howard’s departure from the original Starbucks, founding of Il Giornale, and subsequent of acquisition the Seattle Starbucks stores
  • Starbucks’ incredible growth following the acquisition and expansion beyond Seattle
  • The state of raising private capital in the 1980’s/90’s, and the decision to go public (link to the S-1)
  • Howard’s ambitious goals for the roadshow and investor participation, and subsequent stock performance after the IPO
  • The narrative and evolution of Starbucks as a technology company, or a consumer company that leverages technology very effectively

The Carve Out:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Sorry guys there. Sirens going by my windows here.

0:05.0

Guess David's in Europe. Welcome back to episode 34 of acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs I'm Ben Gilbert

0:25.7

I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts today we'll be talking about one of the great

0:30.9

legends of a historically non-tech company in a technology city,

0:36.0

Starbucks. And I'm here with Dan Levitan in Seattle and we are both sipping our Starbucks so I've got all the milk latte here Dan what are you drinking?

0:48.0

I'm drinking a tall decaff Americano, the why bother drink.

0:52.0

Seriously, what is the point?

0:55.0

Now, it's a good evening beverage, but I'll ask you later why the no caffeine right now.

1:01.0

Just like the taste of coffee, and I don't need non natural energy.

1:05.0

Dan doesn't do drugs. So, uh, listeners before we dive into the show, um, a couple of things I want to cover. One if you're new to the show we we've got a great

1:15.8

slack community so we've got over 500 people discussing mergers acquisitions IPOs,

1:20.8

tech news really anything that people want to create rooms for.

1:24.4

So you can learn more about that at acquired.fm and join.

1:28.6

Hit us up on Twitter, at acquired fm.

1:32.1

All right, listeners, our sponsor is one of our favorite companies, Vanta, and we have something very new from them to share.

1:39.0

Of course, you know Vanta enables companies to generate more revenue by getting their compliance certifications.

1:44.4

That's SAC 2, ISO 2701.

1:47.6

But the thing that we want to share now is, Vanta has grown to become the best security compliance platform as you hit hyper growth and scale

1:56.1

into a larger enterprise.

1:58.4

It's kind of wild. When we first started working with Vanta and met Christina,

2:01.8

my gosh, they had like a couple hundred customers, maybe.

2:05.6

Now they've got 5,000, some of the largest companies out there, it's awesome.

...

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