Adam Brotman
Chief Digital Officer, Starbucks
How To Not Reinvent The Wheel And Still Merrily Roll Along
America's coffeehouse also boasts retail's largest and most popular way to pay via smartphone. The Starbucks app (free) serves as a virtual Starbucks card. Customers put cash on it, the barista scans your phone instead of handling cash or plastic, and folks get through the store faster. Coffee hounds used the app to make 42 million mobile payments through March, with usage growing "week over week, month over month, and quarter over quarter,” Adam Brotman says. Most impressively, he did this without a convoluted new technology (cough, MasterCard PayPass, cough) or unproven system (cough, using PayPal in the real world, cough). "We realized we could innovate by just combining some things that were in front of us."
Timeline
1995
Graduates from University of Washington School of Law; while there, named editor of the Law Review
1996
Raises a $10 million venture capital round to launch entertainment services company PlayNetwork
2010
Launches free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and the Starbucks Digital Network
2011
Launches Starbucks' "Create Jobs for USA" campaign
2012
Promoted to Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks
Infographic by Brian Rea
A version of this article appears in the June 2012 issue of Fast Company.