Career Path of a Senior Vice President at Starbucks

Sure. So college, I was an economics major at Berkeley. I didn't really have internship jobs; it wasn't as common as it is now. So my jobs were more just to do what I could to make some money.

I was a garbage man for a summer, which is something I decided I definitely did not want to do. During college, I didn't really have any specific career plans. After graduating, I had decided I would go to law school; I wanted to go to law school, and so that was sort of the next step.

I went to Harvard for law school. Afterward, I worked two summers in large corporate law firms in Chicago and San Francisco. This made me decide I wanted to do transactional law, not litigation. I also liked business, and I liked kind of business from my economics background. It wasn't so much accounting, but economics, and you learn a lot about business and high-level stuff like that.

I did that for nine years in a couple of different law firms. Then I moved from San Francisco to Seattle to take a job at Starbucks when it was pretty small. It had just gone public; they were maybe 800 stores and weren't even in all parts of the US.

I started doing real estate work for them, new stores and that kind of thing, in Canada and the western part of the US. I increasingly took different opportunities to do other kinds of law. I ended up going to Amsterdam for a year to open up a legal office there.

That was a pivotal career moment for me because I had liked business and was involved in a lot of it through real estate. Now I was on a business leadership team with cross-functional people from marketing, store development, operations, and the president. It really opened my eyes to the whole business. We were all expected to participate in any way that we could beyond our own specialty. I really enjoyed that and started to become more of a generalist in law and more of a business person.

A few promotions later, I came back to Seattle and was running the international legal operations. I was the general counsel for international for seven years and was on the leadership team for the international business with the president of International and the CFO for international, etc. We opened up legal offices in about nine different countries. For seven years, I was traveling the globe for Starbucks.

Each one of these opportunities leveled me up. None of them were things I had sought out or tried to angle for. I was just sort of open for new experiences. The growth of the company led me on a path.

I ended up, in the last couple of years, being the general counsel for the US and Canadian business and on that leadership team. I served with most leadership groups within the company, which meant over time my job increasingly became more about people development and managing budgets than it was actually legal work. I retired after 20 years, mostly just burnt out and having financially reached a point where I didn't have to work anymore.

After about a year, I unretired and took a job in Seattle at the Washington Attorney General's office. Bob Ferguson's office has a University of Washington division that sits at the university. I'd always been interested in universities, so I started working there seven years ago. I didn't think I'd be here this long. I'm retiring in September for good this time, but I've really enjoyed being in an academic environment doing large-scale real estate construction projects for the university.