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 cafΓ© 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.
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