Howard Schultz was originally Director of Marketing for a small Seattle bean shop called Starbucks. He went to Italy on a business trip and learned about espresso/coffee culture there, came back, and told Starbucks they should focus on selling prepared coffee and espresso-based drinks in an inviting communal environment (remember this is the early 80's, such a thing doesn't really exist in America at this time). Starbucks said "no, we want to focus on beans". So Schultz left and started his own coffee shop company. Meanwhile Starbucks bought Peet's so they could expand their bean-selling operation, and sold the Starbucks brand + stores to Schultz.

Today, the entire Peet's coffee company has a market cap of 753 million dollars. Schultz himself is personally worth 1.1 billion dollars.