Howard Schultz Quotes

Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world's major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

It's not about market share. If you have a successful company, you will get your market share. But to get a successful company, what do you have to have? The same metrics of success that your customer does.

Together, we created the STACKED brand and have really taken the product up two or three notches.

Starbucks is spreading like a cancer.

I don't care if Facebook's valuation goes to one gillion. It can go so high we have to make up numbers. It is still not a bubble because there is still not another Facebook in the pipeline.

Wal-Mart's success strategies and tactics are easy to understand yet hard to duplicate.

Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.

I think if you look at the commonalities between eBay, PayPal and OpenTable, all three are businesses that built a network in a vertical. Network effect businesses are very attractive businesses.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.

I truly believe that Yahoo! is one of the most compelling and dominant companies in the world.

If Vancouver did not succeed as Starbucks from '87 on, our entire international business, which is now thousands of stores and a significant amount of growth and profit, may not have existed.

You can say Pizza Hut is terrible pizza, but they also sell more pizzas than anybody else.

When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America - a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.

I never worked in a coffee shop and I don't drink coffee, so I never thought I would become a coffee pusher on TV.

I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.

Americans are making coffee a bigger part of their lives, expanding attitudes and behaviors that are driving new levels of consumption.

The United States is a huge market, and once you get rolling, you can replicate that model over and over pretty easily. Your supply lines are taken care of. You don't have technicians to deal with. You've got your customer base.

Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer.

Cable is a niche business. If you can own a niche, that can be a very strong business.

I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.

Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.