Starbucks was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl, opening its first store in 1971 near the historic Pike Place Market in Seattle. The three Starbucks founders had two things in common: they were all coming from academia, and they all loved coffee and tea. They invested and borrowed some money to open the first store in Seattle and named it “Starbucks” after the first mate, Starbuck, in Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick.