Seventy-five feet. That’s all that separates Nathan and Siera Conte’s bootstrapped, two-year-old coffee shop Groovy Goose from a three-decade-old location of Starbucks — a chain that generated a cool $37 billion in 2025.
Walk two blocks south of the pair, and you’ll pass a Peet’s Coffee and a Paris Baguette before arriving at a second Starbucks location that opened in 2006 right in the heart of San Carlos, a sleepy San Francisco Peninsula community that apparently goes through a lot of caffeine.
The location alone would be the death sentence for virtually any new coffee shop, but, against all odds, Groovy Goose is actually the one holding the smoking gun.
It’s a gorgeous, 63-degree fall Sunday morning, and Groovy Goose is slammed. Every table inside and out of the shoebox-sized coffee shop is filled, the line is five-deep and the slim corridor that runs along the coffee bar’s counter has a dozen more people hugging the wall, patiently waiting for their coffees to be ready.
“Brett” appears and grabs his cup. Then “Desiree” takes a mocha. “Olivia” grabs a cold brew. The people and names keep cycling in and out, sliding between one another like a well-choreographed ballet fit for San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.
Amid the throngs, there are kids and dogs and a feeling of community that’s harder to find nowadays, but especially 75 feet up San Carlos Avenue.
“I used to sit on the corner, on the other side of Starbucks — on my side — and people would walk by and I’d say, ‘Hey how’s it going? My name is Nathan. I’m the owner of Groovy Goose. I notice you get a latte at Starbucks. Can I make you a latte for free, and you can compare them?’” says Conte, 28. “And that’s how we got a lot of customers.”
The youngest of four boys, Conte grew up in San Carlos; his parents still live in his childhood home. He met Siera during a gap year at Hume Lake, a California reservoir in the Sierra Nevada that’s just outside Kings Canyon National Park. They got engaged, married and moved to Maui. He still remembers one of the first-ever conversations he ever had with Siera — before the marriage, before the kids. Her dream was to one day open a coffee shop.
While on Maui, Nathan learned to roast coffee at the award-winning Social Hour Coffee Roasters, which makes a premium Hawaiian coffee that you’ll find in high-end places like Maui’s Fairmont Kea Lani, the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and the Ritz-Carlton, plus Whole Foods.
After the pair moved back to San Carlos in 2021 to help Nathan’s brother Christian open Drake’s — a standout restaurant and bar located in the town’s most historic building — they decided to make good on Siera’s dream.
Groovy Goose opened in August 2023 in one of the first buildings in San Carlos — an 87-year-old relic that needed a complete gutting. They turned what was an elderly women’s clothing boutique into a bright, whimsical space with a disco ball and a roll-up garage door to take advantage of the Bay Area’s best-in-class weather.
The Contes enlisted Nathan’s dad to help with the build (and save money on labor) and his mom to help with the interior design, while also naming the shop after their eldest son Theo. “When he was an infant, his nickname was Goose,” Conte says with a smile.
The first year was brutal for Conte. He’d run the coffee shop during the day, then at night haul in massive sacks of beans to roast coffee from 8 p.m. to around 3 a.m. three to four times a week.
“I did that for a year. I hated my life,” he says. “I’m a human being, I just couldn’t handle that.”
So they invested in a warehouse space next to Belmont beer darling Alpha Acid and started roasting off-site. Then they started to chip away at every single competitive advantage that the Starbucks down the block held.
They added an app for mobile ordering, a robust food program of pastries, breakfast sandwiches and avocado toasts, a community board, wholesale options, and holiday specials. (Conte makes all of their seasonal syrups in-house.) Plus they invested in the kid market with their very own cake pops. And instead of getting cheaper, frozen mass-produced options, they opted to partner with two local Peninsula bakeries, plus a San Carlos mom who makes their cake pops.
“I know I have a better product,” Conte says. “I don’t use cheap beans, and I treat my staff better.”
Siera, who spent years working in specialty coffee shops in Hawaii and California, provided the barista know-how. She’s trained basically the entire staff on microfoam perfection and set up a training program to keep things going while she wrangles a newborn — their third child under the age of 5.
Starbucks, meanwhile, is a ghost town. The only tables occupied out front are filled with interlopers chowing down on nearby House of Bagels breakfast sandwiches, dads taking stroller breaks and 30-somethings with their dogs splayed out in the shade.
