Richard Tait, one of Seattle’s most accomplished entrepreneurs, has landed an interesting gig at the world’s largest coffee retailer.
Tait, who previously co-founded game maker Cranium and launched a series of new businesses at Microsoft, now holds a unique title at Starbucks: senior vice president and entrepreneur in residence. The position is a first at the Seattle-based coffee giant.
We stumbled upon the new role a few days ago while doing research on Tait’s last venture, the soccer-themed energy drink Golazo, which fell on tough times and filed for bankruptcy last year.
The Scotsman appears to have emerged from that harrowing entrepreneurial experience bruised but intact. He’s landed on his feet at Starbucks, a company whose chairman, Howard Schultz, was an early backer of both Cranium and Golazo. In fact, Tait worked as a consultant at Starbucks for a couple years after Hasbro purchased board game maker Cranium for $77 million in 2008.
Now, he’s back at the coffee retailer.
In his LinkedIn profile, Tait describes his role as “Chief BoomBoom at Starbucks,” and says he’s “bringing the energy and passion of a startup inside the rhythm of a large corporation.”
We contacted Tait to learn more about what he’s working on — intrigued by the title and the fact that the coffee retailer is increasingly embracing innovation. But Tait, who joined Starbucks 11 months ago, wasn’t quite ready to talk about the role.
Tait’s bio also shows up under the executive team listing on the Starbucks Newsroom website where it says he is “helping guide future product development as part of the steering committee for Starbucks Innovation Lab.” He’s reporting directly to newly-appointed Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.
It all comes across as a unique venture for the giant company and the longtime startup champion. The entrepreneur-in-residence role is relatively common at venture capital firms where accomplished entrepreneurs investigate new business concepts, often jumping on hot business ideas with cash support from the firm.
But the title of entrepreneur-in-residence — or EIR — is not typically found at large publicly-traded Fortune 500 companies. Even so, Starbucks’ Schultz is well aware of the concept since he’s the co-founder of Seattle venture capital firm Maveron, which has long embraced the idea of grooming experienced entrepreneurs for interesting business ventures.
Tait writes on LinkedIn:
I am the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Starbucks, which I LOVE!!! Bringing the energy and passion of a startup inside the rhythm of a large corporation. Working side by side with the strategic leadership team and their functional expertise, and changing the clock speed and innovation cycle to that of a startup. I work directly for the new CEO at Starbucks Kevin Johnson. I smile when I explain my role at Starbucks, I say I am Kevin’s backpack. :) Kudos to Starbucks for giving someone like me a roll like this. Changing big think by embracing small think, and ensuring innovation is embraced and applauded.
In a 2011 story, GeekWire co-founder John Cook called Tait “one of the Seattle area’s most accomplished entrepreneurs” — a line that Starbucks borrowed for its bio on him.
Tait’s career stared at Microsoft in 1988, where he spent 10 years. On LinkedIn, he called it his first job, going from paperboy to the software giant. He launched 12 startups within the company. He describes his efforts on LinkedIn:
I helped pioneer client server computing at Microsoft in the mid 80’s in the operating system division, ran the CD rom business with products like Encarta, and started a number of consumer oriented online services including Carpoint, Sidewalk and others.
From there, Tait co-founded and ran the popular board game company Cranium, which went on to become the third largest games company in the world, selling more than 40 million games worldwide. The “smartest small company in America” was sold to Hasbro in 2008.
As a consultant with internal teams at Starbucks, Tait introduced the Real Food, Simply Delicious campaign and, according to the company, shaped “the health and wellness strategy in 2009 and 2010.”
The launch of BoomBoomBrands heralded Tait’s ongoing efforts as a startup incubator in Seattle. He’s a co-founder of Moment, the 3-year-old Seattle-based lens and case maker for smartphones run by Marc Barros. That company just hit a $500,000 goal last week on its third Kickstarter campaign.
Tait also founded Golazo, a soccer-themed energy sports drink, in 2010. The product became well funded in 2011 with a $3.7 million round from investors who included Starbucks’ Schultz. And Golazo was well known thanks to a hefty social campaign and Seattle’s emerging status as a soccer capital. Tait once described the home of the Sounders as “soccer central USA.”
But despite continued growth, Golazo failed to reach profitability and secure more capital and had to shut down in December, according to a story in BevNET.
“It’s disappointing and sad, but I think we did give it our best shot at goal,” Tait told the publication in January. “I don’t think that we’d reached the revenue levels or the profitability status that some of the investors were looking for.”
But inside Starbucks, in his new role, Tait is clearly charged with leveraging his strengths, where he’ll be applying his “entrepreneurial lens … across the organization.”
Tait joins Starbucks at an interesting time, when the coffee giant is increasingly pushing the innovation envelope.
“I love being an entrepreneur and have done it since being a young boy in Scotland,” Tait writes on his LinkedIn page. “I love consumer brands, building great teams and the opportunity to establish an emotional connection with a consumer and drive differentiation in the marketplace.”
And his love of beverages is still a thing worth noting, too, as his bio ends with a description worthy of working at Starbucks:
“His favorite espresso beverage is a quad shot with a splash of water in the morning and a double short Caramel Macchiato in the afternoon.”
