Thelma Cross-Olden Foundation (TCO), a non-profit organization, had supported the settlement needs of migrant women in Montreal, Quebec, for over three decades. However, in 2011, the foundation's revenue declined sharply. By 2018, the foundation was running into debt and had less than CA$50,000 with which to manage its operations and outreach programs. The decline in TCO's finances raised issues concerning the instability of leadership, the mismanagement of funds, and an overreliance on government agencies as a key source of generating revenue. In an attempt to reinstate the financial position of the foundation in 2019, the newly appointed chief executive officer needed to decide whether to reconsider the merger deal proposed by a reputable large global charity or to search for new avenues to generate funds.

This case examines the technology of Ring, Inc. and how the technology is used by customers and law enforcement agencies. While Ring and its partners report that its camera-equipped smart doorbell and related technology (working in tandem with local police departments) have improved public safety, there is increasing concern from critics about breaches of privacy, infringement on civil rights, and racial biases inherent in the algorithms of facial recognition. This case provides an opportunity to identify the responsibility of companies with disruptive technology in a non-regulated industry, and also the role of companies that provide public services when a gap appears in the government's provision of those services.

In the fall of 2009, founder and CEO Gab Goncalves has turned PeopleAnswers, Inc. from a fledgling startup to a steadily growing company of nearly 50 employees and $10 million recurring revenue. PeopleAnswers provides people analytics software which its clients use to screen job candidates, matching potential hires to the characteristics of existing top performers. After seven years of growth, the firm is still being run by its founding team, and Goncalves worries whether the business can continue to scale. The case takes place at a moment when Goncalves is about to interview a seasoned sales executive from SAP (a major enterprise software company) to be VP of Sales, and explores strategic human resource management problems for a growing firm. Goncalves has to confront three questions: (i) Does he need to hire? (ii) What should he be looking for? (iii) How can he convince a good candidate to take the job? All three questions may hinge on the firm's broader strategy. A companion (B) case reveals what happened next, and revisits the questions of the case a few years later, at a new crossroads.

In the fall of 2009, founder and CEO Gab Goncalves has turned PeopleAnswers, Inc. from a fledgling startup to a steadily growing company of nearly 50 employees and $10 million recurring revenue. PeopleAnswers provides people analytics software which its clients use to screen job candidates, matching potential hires to the characteristics of existing top performers. After seven years of growth, the firm is still being run by its founding team, and Goncalves worries whether the business can continue to scale. The case takes place at a moment when Goncalves is about to interview a seasoned sales executive from SAP (a major enterprise software company) to be VP of Sales, and explores strategic human resource management problems for a growing firm. Goncalves has to confront three questions: (i) Does he need to hire? (ii) What should he be looking for? (iii) How can he convince a good candidate to take the job? All three questions may hinge on the firm's broader strategy. A companion (B) case reveals what happened next, and revisits the questions of the case a few years later, at a new crossroads.

This two-part case series follows CSL Capital's 2009 investment in the greenfield manufacturing company, Patriot Proppants. CSL, a recently established investment firm, employs a unique investment model, funding new ("green field") energy service businesses that serve Oil & Gas customers in the growing U.S. shale industry. This (A) case offers a perspective on CSL's approach to deploying capital and the intricacies of the decision process as it relates to potential investment in Patriot. This case also offers insights into fundraising issues, asset-backed lending, and co-investments. Specifically, in addition to evaluating the investment opportunity, CSL must decide which co-investment partner to take on, should it advance with the investment. Students are presented with an opportunity to closely evaluate the terms of the co-investment proposals, particularly given that they came separately from strategic and financial co-investors with divergent objectives.

This two-part case series follows CSL Capital's 2009 investment in the greenfield manufacturing company, Patriot Proppants. CSL, a recently established investment firm, employs a unique investment model, funding new ("greenfield") energy service businesses that serve Oil & Gas customers in the growing U.S. shale industry. Case (A) offers a perspective on CSL's approach to deploying capital and the intricacies of the decision process as it relates to a potential investment in Patriot. Case (B) is shorter and focuses on an unsolicited offer from a strategic buyer, roughly one year after the initial deal closed. This case offers an opportunity to reflect on investment value-add for CSL, exit strategies, and fundraising issues.

In April 2020, global financial markets were still reeling as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the world. Global equity markets had initially fallen by 30% in response to the pandemic, and high-yield credit markets had dropped by nearly 20%. In contrast, U.S. Treasury markets were up 20% year-to-date (YTD). Interestingly, the U.S. Mortgage Backed Security (MBS) market had been much less responsive to the health crisis, exhibiting very low volatility throughout this period and returning about 2% YTD. Maya Russell, head of asset allocation research at a large global institutional investor, must make a recommendation on whether her fund's board should invest in MBS, and if so, whether this is a good time for the fund to implement the allocation and whether it should do so pursuing an active or a passive investment approach. This case covers a wide range of topics in fixed-income investing, including duration and interest rate risk, prepayment risk, mortgage securitization, and the design of mortgage-backed securities. These concepts are analyzed from the perspectives of both individual and professional investors in fixed-income and mortgage markets.

The global mobile phone market is becoming saturated, especially in developed economies where phone makers are competing for market share in an increasingly 'red ocean'. In contrast, the African market for mobile phones has huge growth potential given a fast-expanding population and high proportion of young people, yet relatively low rate of mobile phone penetration. Transsion, a Shenzhen-based mobile phone manufacturer (that few Chinese have heard of), spotted a blue ocean opportunity and within a few years had become the "mobile phone king of Africa". The case describes its growth trajectory, competitors, challenges and future opportunities.

Almost three-and-a-half years after a turnaround strategy for the UK-based loss-making Guardian Media Group (GMG) was launched, it had finally managed to stem its losses. Key to the successful turnaround was a culture of openness, which was exemplified by how it allowed its partners to reuse its online content provided they carried its advertising, and its groundbreaking efforts to bring citizen journalism to the fore. The case examines how GMG built an ecosystem that flew in the face of conventional wisdom by providing content for free and working with supposed rivals, yet enabled it to boost its earnings in the process.

In March 2020, Manav Kamboj, CTO of PropertyGuru, an online property platform, wondered what it would take for his firm to become a one-stop solution-shop for property seekers in the home buying process. His company had just launched a new application - PropertyGuru Finance which could enable seekers to search for a home loan entirely online. The solution had taken Kamboj and his team one step closer to achieving the organisation's vision - enabling completely online property transactions by 2025. PropertyGuru had implemented several AI-based solutions to transform its platform from a property-search to a property-trust platform. The goal was to become the customer's trusted friend, philosopher and guide in the home buying process. The transformation had seen the implementation of several useful analytics tools and AI applications that had helped property seekers, sellers and agents make informed decisions in buying and selling properties. It had also propelled the company to become Asia's leading online property platform providing users a choice of over 2.7 million homes and the preferred destination of more than 24 million property seekers per month. To attain its vision of enabling fully digital property transactions, however, the company would need to think outside the box and rely on its old friend - technology, to design new solutions to enable online property transactions. How could PropertyGuru become an end-to-end property solution platform? What emerging trends in real estate could the company explore? Would it need to bundle all its proposed applications, or could it offer the additional offerings as standalone services? Could AI open more doors for the company?

The Eyewitness Surveillance II case tells the story of Rush Arnold and RT McCloy, friends who met while studying at Wharton, who raise a search fund under the name Channelstone Partners. In the fall of 2010, after having spent two-thirds of their search fund capital and reviewed over 200 companies, they came across Eyewitness Surveillance, a company specializing in the use of video technology to protect the assets of car dealerships. Eyewitness' cofounder, Vince Redland, was interested in selling the company to pursue other interests and Arnold and McCloy found the industry, company, and deal all compelling. Over the course of the next two months, they engaged in a due diligence process which further validated their interest in the company, but also raised several red flags. Among the issues highlighted in due diligence included widespread employee disgruntlement, particularly with Vince (who was also the top sales person), a reluctance to share detailed financial information, and an 11th hour disagreement about a contract clause stipulating that the purchase price would go down if monthly revenues declined after the close. Despite having conducted a thorough and in-depth due diligence process, Arnold and McCloy were at the end of their search capital and facing a deal that was on the brink. They were now faced with the question of whether or not they wanted to charge ahead, despite the red flags, or walk away, knowing that this could potentially be the end of the road.

Lebanese entrepreneur Hind Hobeika was just 21 years old when she launched her startup, Instabeat, which had developed the first real-time bio-feedback device for swimmers to monitor and improve their performance. It had been an extremely testing 10-year journey to bring the Instabeat product to market due to numerous manufacturing challenges that had caused Hobeika to almost shut down the business in 2016. However, with help from the co-founder of Jawbone, Hobeika raised additional capital and restarted Instabeat, moving its headquarters from Lebanon to San Francisco. Hobeika used the new funding to move quickly ¾ expanding her team, finding a new manufacturing partner, and re-starting conversations with the Michael Phelps Organization. However, her COO believed she should take the opposite approach - slow down and focus on getting a shippable product.<br/> In 2017 her manufacturing struggles resurfaced and Hobeika found herself once again seeking a new manufacturer. After an extensive search, she selected a manufacturer based in China, but found it difficult to manage the process from San Francisco. Ultimately Hobeika decided she needed to move to China to keep the manufacturing on track. What started out as a plan to be in China for one or two months, turned into nine months. Hobeika weathered many personal challenges of living in China, but was determined to bring the product across the finish line. By May 2019 Hobeika had returned to San Francisco with a finished product and was preparing for launch when a new, well-funded competitor introduced its own "smart" swimming goggles. Hobeika needed to decide how to proceed.

Set in 2019, the case traces the journey of Cloudphysician, a four-year old healthcare start-up offering comprehensive remote monitoring and advisory solutions to intensive care units (ICUs) of hospitals in India. The primary beneficiaries of the start-up's services were hospitals in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns across India, particularly smaller hospitals, which did not have emergency care in their ICUs, which resulted in high mortality rates. Cloudphysician team built a solution that significantly increased the capacity and capabilities of doctors in charge of ICUs at these hospitals. Cloudphysician developed a sophisticated technology using a combination of new age technologies such as computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics. More than a dozen paying hospitals were reaping the benefits of Cloudphysician as its customers. Having demonstrated the proof of concept, its founders hoped to rapidly scale up the number of hospitals adopting its solution. The case tells the story of the start-up and its founders, starting from the origin of the idea. The founders were facing several dilemmas about scaling the business, expanding the scope and scale of technology-enabled solutions, potential scaling issues, an uncertain regulatory landscape, and probable competitors. This case could be used in courses on strategy, entrepreneurship or technology disruption in the healthcare industry in both MBA and executive education programs. While the case has relevance in both developed and developing world contexts, what is unique about it is that the business concept of the firm arose out of a resource-constrained environment characteristic of emerging markets. The Teaching Note provides a framework for the instructor to navigate the case discussion in an effective manner in a typical 90-minute session.

This brief case describes the rise of so-called digital natives (also called born-in-digital) in the 2000s and 2010s that successfully grew without a sales force. The case highlights the emergence of business-to-business Internet and cloud-based companies and their decisions regarding sales strategy based on different customer bases. The case discusses the firms Atlassian, Basecamp, and Slack.

The case opens in 2020 as Michael Lahyani, founder and CEO of Property Finder, Dubai's leading online real estate classifieds portal, contemplates the company's five-year growth strategy. Since its founding in 2005 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Property Finder had secured multiple rounds of investments and expanded into countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The business grew following a proven business model revolving around monthly flat subscription fees paid by real estate brokers for packages of listings, while remaining free for end-customers to browse. By 2020, Property Finder had reached profitability in the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar, which it considered its core markets, and had done significant brand building in newer markets of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey. In 2020, Lahyani needed to decide on the company's growth strategy to increase profitability. Property Finder could focus on its core markets and switch to segmented pricing, lure in more developers to post first hand property directly, and create new revenue channels. Alternatively or in parallel, the company could tailor its business model to suit the dynamics of each of its newer markets. All the while, Lahyani had just onboarded a new executive team that was busy adjusting the organizational structure and institutionalizing procedures and processes. As a result, company resources were spread thin and Lahyani found himself at a crossroads; should the company focus its efforts on bolstering its position in incumbent markets and thus forego growth abroad, or should it pursue new markets and risk tarnishing its reputation in its core markets in case of a failure?

For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for urban Indian families. Over the 2010s, Gera had multiplied its area under development threefold; it had introduced its new ChildCentric vision of family housing villages (which incorporated children's academies in skills from swimming to singing into the real estate complex); and it had expanded its operations from Pune to the nearby state of Goa. Meanwhile, Rohit's brother Nikhil-a California resident-had invested company funds in several construction projects overseas in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2020, the company stood at a crossroads. With Rohit beginning to envision the end of his managerial career, Gera had several key decisions to make: Should it double down on ChildCentric, introduce new age-differentiated offerings to serve its customers throughout their lives, or return to a more commoditized style of real estate development? To what extent should Gera cast in its lot with Nikhil's U.S. projects? Should the company consider other avenues for international expansion? And to whom would Rohit pass the torch of Gera's leadership-his daughter Diya, or an outside professional manager?

The case revolves around the decisions that the board of directors of ecommerce giant Amazon would need to make in response to the controversial letter that activist shareholder CtW investment group sent to Amazon's shareholders, urging them to vote in favor of a proposal aimed at increasing Amazon's board diversity. The board had formally recommended voting against the proposal in the upcoming annual shareholder meeting. The board's stance ignited an internal debate at Amazon, with several employees questioning the diversity of Amazon's leadership relative to other high-profile technology companies. Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, two top advisory firms to public company shareholders, remained divided on the issue. The case presents the opportunity to discuss the importance of having a diverse board, in particular, along the dimensions of race and gender. The case is likely to generate spirited debate about the merits of diversity on corporate boards and the role that a powerful multinational company can play in promoting diversity in technology and business. More fundamentally, the case raises the issue of how organizations should measure diversity.

Emerging Hope Lanka was founded by Nilushika Silva Jayaweera ("Nilu"), a domestic worker-turned-entrepreneur in 2016. She had left her hometown in Sri Lanka, orphaned and penniless, to work in Singapore some 16 years earlier. Her determination and thirst for knowledge was the driving force that led her to persevere through the tough times, and she eventually returned to her birthplace to start a tea business as well as Emerging Hope Lanka, a not-for-profit organisation that educates and economically empowers poor rural women in Sri Lanka. Drawing inspiration from her own life journey, Nilu had established Emerging Hope Lanka to motivate women who are struggling with poverty to be financially independent. In March 2020, as she looks back on the four years of running Emerging Hope Lanka, Nilu feels a deep sense of fulfilment. Some 55 women had graduated from her micro-entrepreneurship programme and gone on to start their own businesses running mini-marts, spice-packing, dressmaking, etc. For these women, it was a big step towards supporting their families as they had been financially reliant on their husbands in the past. While she would like to reach out to more women, Nilu has to evaluate cautiously the loan requests of prospective participants in her programme. A case in point is a debt-laden mother of two children, who is urgently in need of financial assistance. While wanting to help, Nilu however senses that a one-time loan may not be the best solution and the woman may return to ask for more funds. How can she help the woman to tide through this difficult period, while instilling the notion of financial independence to ensure future sustainability of the family's livelihood?

The case centers around LogiNext, a logistics technology company that provided organized logistics and field service management in real time to increase the operational efficiency of its clients. Founded in 2014 by Dhruvil Sanghvi and Manisha Raisinghani, the company had operations in India, the United States and Southeast Asia. In 2018, when the events of the case are set, its founders were planning to expand its reach within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. As a part of its scaling up activities, LogiNext wanted to make Agility, one of the largest logistics companies in the Middle East, its logistics software partner in the region. Sanghvi and Raisinghani were faced with a number of questions: What should be the way forward for the firm? How could LogiNext cater to the GCC region's logistics challenges and understand the changes required to improve product fitment in the new market? What change management strategy should LogiNext apply in the region so that new markets or targeted companies adopt the new technology?