Schultz remains the heart and soul of the operation. Raised in a Brooklyn public-housing project, he found his way to Starbucks, a tiny chain of Seattle coffee shops, as a marketing executive in the early 1980s. The name came about when the original owners looked to Seattle history for inspiration and chose the moniker of an old mining camp : Strabo . Further refinement led to Starbucks ,after the first mate in Moby Dick, which they felt evoked the seafaring romance of the early coffee traders (hence the mermaid logo).Schultz got the idea for the modern Starbucks format while visiting a Milan coffee bar .He bought out his bosses in 1987 and began expanding.