David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Exactly. One of the things that I always use to counsel public company CEOs is don’t let yourself or your people be judged by whether or not the stock today goes up or down. It’s your building a company and in the long term they will correlate but in the short term, they can frequently widely diverge. I want to get into sort of maybe a one-off section, if you guys are willing to experiment here. We introduced on the Snap IPO a new section, narratives. But one I think that doesn’t make total sense and would be really hard to do the research given how long ago the Starbucks IPO happened, that narrative section that we’re going to do going forward is what the company’s narrative is that they’re trying to tell during the IPO process and what the narrative is in the press and the market around it. But what I think is really interesting especially for listeners of this show, that there has been a narrative that’s emerged over the last 10 to 15 years around Starbucks and that’s it’s a coffee company, it’s a retail company, it’s a real estate company but it’s also technology company. I think that especially for you Dan, being a technology venture capitalist and a consumer-only technology venture capitalist and founding Maveron with Howard, how has Howard’s thinking and the company’s thinking evolved from those days when there was no internet? You could only find out about Starbucks if you saw them on the street corner to the days today when you can request your usual mobile order on your phone or from Alexa and then pick it up in the building of your lobby or have it delivered to you. Yeah, it’s changed a lot. In 1998 when we started Maveron the whole thought was, “Holy cow. Technology is integrating into consumer’s lives in unprecedented ways. So how will it change the business models of these companies?” I think in 1998 a company like Starbucks or even in 2008, most companies that were in the retail business thought of themselves as using IT as a way to manage their business but not really as a way to attract consumers. I would say in the last 10 years with the advent of the web and the power of social media, you saw the eye-opening opportunity that social media can drive traffic into stores. And say that was the first aha that a lot of companies had. Starbucks maybe was a little more advanced because with Maveron and Howard was on the board of eBay, so I think he came from that regular retail world but he was exposed to, consciously exposed to technology perhaps before other traditional retail companies. I think now I find it kind of somewhat humorous that people refer to Starbucks as a technology company. I would say it’s an incredibly powerful consumer company that’s utilizing technology to integrate into customer’s lives.…

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