David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, Blue Bottle has 40 locations, right? They have plenty of growth ahead of them if they want to. Starbucks has 24,000 locations. You don’t need to be a public company to be a 40-location coffee shop. I’m actually very curious too. They also have this online business selling directly to consumers I’m super curious what the revenue mix looks like. I would suspect a lot more of it is either buying coffee in the stores in liquid form or buying the beans in the stores and then the online subscription business is smaller. But interesting to think about that too because then you start to think about it, still not an internet company. I’m really sick of the fact that, like, oh, we sell it online and people subscribe to it. That’s a slight business model shift but ultimately at fixed cost, distribution cost, still not an internet business. But then you at least drift closer to something where you're like, “Okay,” this is different than all the brick and mortar stuff that exist today. We’ve posed some questions here and I think James Freeman and the Blue Bottle team were very clear what side they came down on on those questions which was that Blue Bottle can’t be a public company and maintain its ideals and also that it’s not an internet company. But I do think in terms of where I come down on this, I’m not sure that that’s the dichotomy that makes sense. Like I think about Apple. An Apple store and a Blue Bottle store are eerily similar. And Apple is maintaining -- What Apple store used to be anyway. Like I think the days of believing that an Apple store is a far simple location is far over.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.