Meet the Coffee That All the Cool Tech Kids Drink
Where do employees of West Coast tech firms get their caffeine fix?
More often than not, they turn to Equator Coffees & Teas, whose blends are stocked at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters and three of Google's Mountain View buildings. The café at LinkedIn's new 26-story headquarters in San Francisco's South of Market district will also stock Equator coffee when it opens in June -- just like all other LinkedIn Northern California office locations.
The small, tech-friendly roasting company launched 21 years ago in Mill Valley, just an hour north of its Silicon counterpart. Brooke McDonnell sold her mother's wedding ring to buy a small Petroncini roaster and start Equator with her life partner, Helen Russell. Today, their 90-employee company, which also has four standalone retail locations, projects some $15 million in revenue for 2016. And they recently became the first LGBT-certified business owners to win the Small Business Administration's highest honor, the annual Small Business Persons of the Year award.
