Howard Schultz (born July 19, 1953) is an American businessman, and entrepreneur best known as the chairman and CEO of Starbucks and a former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. Schultz co-founded Maveron, an investment group, in 1998 with Dan Levitan.

Schultz was born in 1953 and raised in a Brooklyn, N.Y., housing project. He received a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University, and after graduating he worked a variety of jobs until becoming manager of U.S. operations for Hammarplast.

Schultz's adventure started in 1981 when he traveled from New York to Seattle to check out a popular coffee bean store called Starbucks that had been buying many of the Hammarplast Swedish drip coffeemakers he was selling.