Episode 34: The Starbucks IPO with Dan Levitan

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
Sorry, guys, there are sirens going by my windows here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:05)
Guess David's in Europe. Welcome back to episode 34 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:26)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:27)
And we are your hosts. Today, we'll be talking about one of the great legends of a historically non-tech company in a technology city, Starbucks. And I'm here with Dan Levitan in Seattle.
And we're both sipping our Starbucks. So I've got almond milk latte here. Dan, what are you drinking?

**Dan Levitan** (0:48)
I'm drinking a tall decaf Americano, the Why Bother drink.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
seriously, what is the point? Now, it's a good evening beverage, but I'll ask you later why. Why the no caffeine right now?

**Dan Levitan** (1:01)
just like the taste of coffee and I don't need non-natural energy.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:05)
Dan doesn't do drugs. So, listeners, before we dive into the show, a couple of things I want to cover. One, if you're new to the show, we've got a great Slack community. So, we've got over 500 people discussing mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, tech news, really anything that people want to create rooms for. So, you can learn more about that at acquired.fm and join. Hit us up on Twitter at acquiredfm. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:37)
So, crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:02)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:08)
The other element that makes crusoe special is the environmental angle. crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:26)
Yep. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost since crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (2:42)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:58)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. David, can you introduce us to our guest today?

**David Rosenthal** (3:18)
Yeah. As Ben mentioned, we are covering the landmark Starbucks IPO today, and we are lucky to be joined by Dan Levitan, who is the managing partner and co-founder along with the soon-to-be former and original CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, of the consumer-only venture capital firm, Maveron. Dan and Howard started Maveron in 1998 Since then, Dan has invested and served on the boards of many successful companies including Zulily, Trupanion, Potbelly, and drugstore.com.
Dan and Maveron are great early stage VC investors and investors both in PSL, where Ben works, and co-investors with many of the companies I work with at Medrona, and really delightful folks to work with. But today, we're actually going to be talking about Dan's days before Maveron, when he was an investment banker in New York at a firm called Wartime Schrodering Company, and he met a crazy entrepreneur from Seattle who had a little coffee company that was named after a character in Moby Dick. And Dan would go on to serve as that coffee company's lead investment banker on their IPO. And that's the story we're here to tell today. So thank you, Dan, for joining us.

**Dan Levitan** (4:37)
Thank you for having me, guys.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:39)
Yeah, for Acquired listeners out there, we've had founders, we've had M&A professionals, we've had journalists, we've even had some executives at companies recently acquired on the show, but we've never had a chance to analyze an IPO before from the perspective of the investment banker that actually took them public and did the deal. So I'm super excited to have a first here on Acquired today. And actually, it's also also worth noting the date works out pretty well because right now happens to be the 25th anniversary of Starbucks going public.