Starbucks was founded in 1971 by Gerald Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl as a retailer of whole-bean coffee, tea and spices. Howard Schultz joined a decade later and helped turn it into a coffeehouse business inspired by Italy’s cafés. The title’s “$80 billion” figure has no date or valuation basis established here, so it should not be treated as Starbucks’ current value.
Who founded Starbucks?
Gerald Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl opened the first Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in April 1971. The company says each invested $1,350 and the three borrowed another $5,000 from a bank. Their roughly 1,000-square-foot store sold whole-bean coffee, tea and spices; it was a specialty retailer, not yet the café chain associated with Starbucks today. Starbucks’ company history describes the founders and the original store.
The founding distinction matters: Schultz did not start Starbucks. He entered an existing business and later led its change in format and expansion. Its original focus on beans remains visible in the company’s present-day coffee offerings, including Starbucks whole-bean coffee.
How Howard Schultz changed the business
Schultz encountered Starbucks in 1981 and joined in 1982 as director of operations and marketing. A 1983 trip to Milan introduced him to Italian cafés as social gathering places, not simply places to buy coffee. He wanted to bring that coffeehouse experience to the United States. Starbucks says it became a coffeehouse in 1987, after Schultz had started Il Giornale and then purchased Starbucks with local investors.
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The transformation was therefore a change in both customer experience and business model: Starbucks moved beyond selling beans for home use to serving coffee in stores where customers could linger. The three original founders established the retailer; Schultz helped build the coffeehouse identity that became central to the brand.
How the company grew—and what the figures measure
Starbucks’ published figures show expansion, but they describe different measures at different dates. Store counts track the retail footprint; stock-price appreciation describes investment performance over a specified period. Neither figure is the same as market capitalization, which is the market value of a company’s outstanding shares at a particular time.
| Date | Company-reported figure | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| June 2018 | More than 28,000 stores in 77 countries | Store footprint reported by Starbucks in its announcement about Schultz’s departure. |
| June 2018 | 21,000% stock-price appreciation since the 1992 IPO | Starbucks’ reported share-price change over that period—not company value, revenue or a store count. |
| January 2026 | More than 29,000 retail stores in 78 markets | A later store-footprint snapshot stated in Starbucks’ company profile. |
The 2018 and 2026 figures are separate company-reported snapshots, not a standardized growth series. Starbucks’ January 2026 profile prominently gives 78 markets, though another paragraph on that page says “more than 80”; the dated 78-market statement is the clearer figure to use cautiously. The company’s June 2018 announcement also attributes to Schultz the reflection: “I set out to build a company that my father, a blue-collar worker and World War II veteran, never had a chance to work for.”
What employee ownership contributed
Growth was not the only element of Schultz’s company-building story. Starbucks says it launched Bean Stock in 1991, initially enrolling 700 people across about 100 stores in the United States and Canada. The program extended stock ownership to employees—whom Starbucks calls partners—and connected part of their compensation to the company’s performance. In announcing it, Schultz said: “It is my hope that this reality of partnership deepens our sense of pride, of mutual support and of shared vision for Starbucks.” Starbucks’ Bean Stock history recounts the program’s start.
What “$80 billion” does—and does not—tell you
A company’s value depends on the measure and date. Market capitalization is share price multiplied by shares outstanding; enterprise value also accounts for debt and cash. Revenue is sales over a period, while stock-price appreciation compares share prices across dates. These quantities cannot be substituted for one another.
The “$80 billion” in the original title is not tied to a date or valuation method in the cited company history and announcements. It cannot be verified as a current market capitalization or as a particular historical valuation from those sources. The defensible account is more specific: three founders opened a coffee retailer in 1971; Schultz later helped pivot it to coffeehouses and expand its reach; Starbucks has reported dated store and stock-performance milestones separately.
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