Eatigo is a restaurant reservation application (app) founded in 2013 which offered an alternative way of connecting diners to restaurants. The aim was to improve restaurants' profitability by filling up empty restaurant seats during off-peak hours, by offering time-based discounts ranging from 10 to 50 percent. The market for restaurant reservation apps showed potential but there were already entrenched players. With dogged determination to develop a unique value proposition and careful crafting of its business model, the founders managed to shape diners' behaviour and disrupt the modus operandi of the industry to become a leading restaurant reservation app with presence in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India and the Philippines. As business gained traction, the founders needed funding to sustain growth. They explored funding options available to small-medium enterprises in Singapore and Bangkok - loan from credit card and banks, government grants, and investment from venture capital companies. There were pros and cons. The size and cost of funding were important considerations. Whilst meeting investors' demands was necessary to secure funding, it may lead to excessive dilution of owner's control. There was also the question on the correct valuation of Eatigo. Which type of funding should the founders choose?
The Coco-Mat case tracks the development of the bedding brand from its initial concept in 1989 to the iconic status it had achieved by 2016. During that time, it went through a progressive refining of its customer proposition and brand values, developed a global retail network and expanded into hotels and wood bikes, among other areas. Back in 1989, Paul and Mike Efmorfidis embarked on a wild journey to develop an original, Greecebased sleeping system company. At the end of 2015, Coco-Mat was running stores in 14 countries, employed 250+ people, most of them in Greece, and this was nowhere close to the end of the story, barely an appetizer. They had started on a beach with virtually nothing, invented new concepts in an industry they knew little about and they could only be described as fairly resistant to change. They withstood one of the worst economic crises ever seen by a country, and they were now discussing further international expansion and accelerating growth. Could they continue to operate with their initial business model? Was it time to solidify the company and install more systems and structure? How could they retain their agility? What kind of culture did they want to establish for the company and leave behind as a legacy? The past had been nothing short of amazing but where should they take the company next?
This case follows two ex-McKinsey consultants, Magnus Olsson and Mudassir Sheikha, who in search of finding their true purpose decide to found Careem, a Dubai-based ride-hailing service. Following its launch in July 2012, Careem experiences rapid growth of 30 percent per month in the UAE and other countries in the MENA region, surpassing the co-founders' expectations. However, as a result of such immense growth, the startup struggles with various operational and cultural organizational tensions. These challenges are described from the perspective of the founders and through the eyes of Deepika Thakur, one of the early employees. By 2014, in order to succeed in Saudi Arabia, the largest and most complex market in the Gulf, Olsson and Sheikha recognize the importance of finding a strong leader to head the Saudi operations. They have their sights on a specific German-Saudi entrepreneur, Abdulla Elyas, but he has so far declined both of their initial proposals to join Careem. In the backdrop, Uber has developed a successful track record in the West, raising close to $2 billion dollars globally, and has a growing presence in the UAE following its launch there in August 2013. Finding themselves at a crossroads, Olsson and Sheikha must figure out how to address several critical organizational issues, decide how to bring Elyas on board, and ensure a robust strategy to maintain its leadership position in the region.
This case is about Tinder. It discusses different business models and ways of structuring the initial team. With a $6 million investment from IAC/Interactive in 2010, Dinesh Moorjani founded Hatch Labs to build mobile apps. His mission was to attract entrepreneurial talent to work on Lab projects which, after gaining traction, could be acquired by IAC or spun out as independent companies. To pitch talent to work at Hatch, Moorjani laid out a framework to compare the expected returns to founding an independent company versus joining an incubator. While Hatch provided lower levels of equity ownership in a single company, Moorjani argued that the complementary inputs provided by the Lab and the diversification from holding equity in the portfolio of Lab projects made the incubator structure attractive. After growing several projects from different teams, at the end of the case, Moorjani faces two critical choices: Should he support a B2B merchant services business or a dating app, Glow (a disguised name for Tinder). Second, should he go forward with a second Hatch Labs? Was the success of the first Hatch experiment replicable? The case can be supplemented with a startup valuation Exercise (#818-705), and a technical/background note on "Valuing Employee Equity at Early Stage Ventures" (#819-167).
Founded in 2008 in Singapore and China, ActSocial was a social marketing company that initially provided brands with word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing services. The firm then adjusted its model to focus on providing online social media and digital content marketing services. After significant success from 2013 to 2015, ActSocial was fully acquired by Linkfluence, a leading global social media monitoring and research company. As part of this larger company, the new leadership team at Linkfluence Asia now needed to decide how to proceed and wondered if they would have influence over the direction of their product, hiring decisions, team-building, and growth plans.
In this note, a chef perceives that a website reviewer is responsible for his slowing business because the reviewer allowed fake reviews about his restaurant to be posted; it follows that the chef would like this behavior to stop.
In 2016 Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com, an online price comparison website for car insurance shoppers, faced a troubling problem. Completion rates for the site's detailed online questionnaire were at an alarming low. Site visitors, increasingly accessing the site on mobile devices, were proving they did not have the time or incentive to answer the site's requisite questions and thus were dropping off the site before purchasing policies from the site's partner insurance carriers. As Rose and his management team struggled to lift the completion rates, they narrowed their options to three potential solutions. A task for Kyle Brodie, a summer intern, was to design and run an experiment that could yield valuable insights from an estimates display, including which customer groups, if any, responded best to the estimates, and where the estimates should be included in the questionnaire. In the A case of the series, readers are faced with selecting the best solution for lifting Compare.com's completion rate. In the B case, readers must design an experiment to test the selected option, and decide on the location and content of an estimate display test. In the C case, readers are presented with the design implemented by Brodie and a summary of the results of that experiment. They must then figure out the implications of those results for Compare.com. This case was originally written for an MBA marketing class examining Marketing Analytics. It would also be suitable for similar classes in undergraduate, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs.
Supplement to case UV7459. In 2016 Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com, an online price comparison website for car insurance shoppers, faced a troubling problem. Completion rates for the site's detailed online questionnaire were at an alarming low. Site visitors, increasingly accessing the site on mobile devices, were proving they did not have the time or incentive to answer the site's requisite questions and thus were dropping off the site before purchasing policies from the site's partner insurance carriers. As Rose and his management team struggled to lift the completion rates, they narrowed their options to three potential solutions. A task for Kyle Brodie, a summer intern, was to design and run an experiment that could yield valuable insights from an estimates display, including which customer groups, if any, responded best to the estimates, and where the estimates should be included in the questionnaire. In the A case of the series, readers are faced with selecting the best solution for lifting Compare.com's completion rate. In the B case, readers must design an experiment to test the selected option, and decide on the location and content of an estimate display test. In the C case, readers are presented with the design implemented by Brodie and a summary of the results of that experiment. They must then figure out the implications of those results for Compare.com. This case was originally written for an MBA marketing class examining Marketing Analytics. It would also be suitable for similar classes in undergraduate, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs.
Supplement to case UV7459. In 2016 Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com, an online price comparison website for car insurance shoppers, faced a troubling problem. Completion rates for the site's detailed online questionnaire were at an alarming low. Site visitors, increasingly accessing the site on mobile devices, were proving they did not have the time or incentive to answer the site's requisite questions and thus were dropping off the site before purchasing policies from the site's partner insurance carriers. As Rose and his management team struggled to lift the completion rates, they narrowed their options to three potential solutions. A task for Kyle Brodie, a summer intern, was to design and run an experiment that could yield valuable insights from an estimates display, including which customer groups, if any, responded best to the estimates, and where the estimates should be included in the questionnaire. In the A case of the series, readers are faced with selecting the best solution for lifting Compare.com's completion rate. In the B case, readers must design an experiment to test the selected option, and decide on the location and content of an estimate display test. In the C case, readers are presented with the design implemented by Brodie and a summary of the results of that experiment. They must then figure out the implications of those results for Compare.com. This case was originally written for an MBA marketing class examining Marketing Analytics. It would also be suitable for similar classes in undergraduate, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs.
In early 2012, the chair of the board of directors of Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) had to determine how to respond to demands made by the company's largest shareholder, Pershing Square Capital Management (Pershing), an activist hedge fund. Pershing's chief executive officer (CEO) claimed that CP was underperforming, and expressed his desire to replace two board members and appoint a new CEO. The chair of the board of directors had to determine the best means to fight the proxy battle and serve the interests of shareholders. Pershing was not likely to back down easily. With a shareholders' meeting expected to occur in the next few months, the chair had to resolve the matter quickly. Because shareholder activism was relatively new in Canada, the outcome of this conflict would send a message to other activists interested in Canadian organizations.
OrganiGram Holdings Inc. (OrganiGram), a New Brunswick-based company, was a licensed producer of medical cannabis in Canada. On April 20, 2016, the Canadian government announced that legislation to legalize recreational cannabis would be introduced in the spring of 2017 with the intention of having it become law in the spring of 2018. The announcement triggered expansion activities at all of Canada’s largest licensed producers of cannabis. However, there were many unknowns in terms of how the legalization of recreational cannabis would happen. What would the timeline be? Who would be allowed to grow cannabis? In anticipation of regulatory changes, OrganiGram needed to analyze the Canadian cannabis industry and engage in a scenario-planning exercise. How could OrganiGram move through this time of uncertainty, while both creating a strategy for the anticipated recreational cannabis market and continuing to work on its medical cannabis sales?
BY-HEALTH Co., Ltd. (BY-HEALTH), a Chinese dietary supplement company founded in 1995, had a first-mover advantage as a contemporary health supplement provider in Mainland China. It had successfully utilized this advantage to conquer a significant portion of the market. However, by early 2017, maintaining this leadership position in the market had become increasingly difficult, largely due to deteriorating public perception of consumables originating in China. BY-HEALTH had sought to differentiate itself by actively making its sourcing and production processes fully transparent to stakeholders, most notably by opening a transparent factory in Guangdong Province. While BY-HEALTH's transparent factory and corporate social responsibility activities developed consumer trust and positively contributed to the environment within which the company operated, they were also prohibitively expensive to maintain. It was also difficult to determine how they affected the company's bottom line. As he prepared for a company shareholders' meeting in January 2017, the company's chief operating officer was faced with difficult questions. What programs should the company continue to invest in for the future? Should some of these initiatives have an end date? If they were ended, what effect would this have on the community? How could he communicate the value of the transparent factory to consumers and shareholders?
In late 2016, the executive director of Free Geek Toronto faced a challenge. Free Geek Toronto was a social enterprise based in Toronto, Ontario. It focused on recycling electronics waste and aimed to use its business profits to expand its scope of operations and deliver on its social mission of both reducing electronics waste going to landfill and employing at-risk and marginalized individuals. As a result, the executive director purposely hired individuals who had severe physical or mental disabilities, or both, and who had recently received, or were currently receiving, disability benefits, had poor health, or experienced general struggles with regular employment. The executive director's challenges included juggling the financial and social goals of running a work integration social enterprise. In view of the constraints he faced, the executive director began considering whether to call on the assistance of volunteers-people who, despite their well-meaning intentions, might unwittingly disrupt the operation of the enterprise. Should he move forward with recruiting volunteers? If so, how could he ensure that doing so would not adversely affect the organization's current culture or demoralize the current employees?
This case is set on the verge of Microsoft initiating a TV white-space pilot in the Philippines in the summer of 2013; the uncertainty surrounding the new technology's performance in the region provides a view of the risks organizations face early on in the innovation process, particularly when decisions are decentralized and overseen at a local level. MS and its public partners in the Philippines were excited about the possibility of setting up the country's first TV white space-enabled broadband network in a remote area that required the connectivity for fisher registrations and government biodiversity initiatives. The technology had proven its success in a few other pilots in Singapore and the UK. In the Philippines, however, risks loomed. Unprecedented complications from an untested hardware supplier and a lack of an essential database arose as the launch date approached. A key decision MS had to make was whether to proceed with the pilot or focus on TV white space pilots elsewhere. The case introduces students to methods through which they can identify the sources and types of uncertainty associated with a project. Through this they can better evaluate the tradeoff between undertaking a project with a high risk of failure and the benefits that could be obtained through learning about unknown unknowns within such a setting despite the outcome. Moreover, students uncover the necessary conditions for projects to achieve their objectives within this setting. The public-private partnership setting allows students to analyze the type of uncertainty associated with a project; the project, product, and organizational complexity; stakeholder objectives; and discuss the role escalation of commitment could play when an organization seeks to pilot a new technology.
In late 2015, Crystal Call Maggelet, president and CEO of FJ Management, is working with her investment committee to help set the company's strategic direction. Maggelet, daughter of the company's founder, has led FJ Management since 2009 when she stepped in as CEO following an unexpected bankruptcy. At that time, FJ Management was known as Flying J. Flying J owned and operated hundreds of truck stops-which it called Travel Plazas-nationwide and was a growing multi-billion dollar business, but broader problems in the oil and credit markets in late 2008 forced it to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maggelet, who had been serving on Flying J's board, became its new CEO and was able to successfully manage competing stakeholder demands, keep the business running, and ultimately paid back every dollar it owed to its creditors by selling the company's core assets-its travel plazas-to its main competitor in 2010. Since that time, the company had returned to a healthy financial position, diversified its holdings, and made investments in diverse industries to determine how to grow the company, since renamed FJ Management. In 2015, Maggelet now wants to set a clear path forward for the company.