How Did I Get Here?

Dave Burwick

President and chief executive officer, Peet’s Coffee & Tea
from
  • Education
  • St. John’s High School, Shrewsbury, Mass., class of 1979
  • Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt., class of 1983
  • Harvard Business School, class of 1989
  • Work Experience
  • 1983–87
    Account supervisor, Miller Communications
  • 1989–2001
    Brand manager and director for Mountain Dew, vice president for media for promotions and sports marketing, senior VP for carbonated soft drinks, Pepsi-Cola North America
  • 2002–05, 2008–09
    SVP, chief marketing officer, Pepsi-Cola North America
  • 2006–08
    President, Pepsi-QTG Canada, PepsiCo
  • 2010–12
    President of North America, Weight Watchers International
  • 2013–Present
    President and CEO, Peet’s Coffee & Tea
  • Life Lessons
  • “You get to a point in your career where you don’t like anybody you work for. People who get to that level are generally not very likable people.”
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  • “Don’t wait until you’re an old man to start helping people find their opportunities.”
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  • Dancing with his mother, Myrna, 1969
    “I was an only child of divorced parents, and my grandfather really served as a surrogate father. He was an M.D., and I wanted to be like him.”
  • “It was mostly a bunch of idiots who are still my friends.”
  • “My big client was Ashton-Tate, one of the big software companies. Then we opened some new West Coast businesses, so I raised my hand and moved to L.A. for a couple years.”
  • With his wife, Carey, in Edinburgh, 1989
  • “Britney Spears would often be photographed drinking Dr Pepper, which was embarrassing. I made cards listing every Pepsi beverage, and I said to her, ‘At home you can do whatever you want, but in public, you have to drink one of these.’ ”
  • “For me, it was proving to myself that I could take the skills I learned at Pepsi and apply them somewhere else, that I didn’t stay at Pepsi too long.”
  • “I went in pre-med and came back a history major. What I really wanted to do was some sort of international business thing.”
  • Middlebury lacrosse team photo (No. 9), 1981
  • “I decided between jobs at Pepsi and Microsoft. I have friends who went to Microsoft who would send me charts of the stock and what it did from 1989 to present-day.”
  • “My claim to fame was Mountain Dew, taking this sleepy, country brand that was not on the radar and turning it into something huge and really fun.”
  • With soccer player Abby Wambach, 2016
  • “Coffee is an incredible business: Everybody drinks coffee, and it’s growing rapidly. We’re going to open stores in Shanghai this year, and we just launched ready-to-drink cold brew in the Bay Area. Frappuccino was boomers, and millennials are drinking cold brew.”