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Launched in September 2018, e-retail startup DealShare has created a tech-enabled model for the Indian mass market that allows customers to buy together, save money on good quality goods, and at the same time have fun. It targets customers who are still getting used to the Internet for commerce and for whom big e-commerce players are not an ideal option. As DealShare transitions from a regional to a national company, the founders are at a crossroads. Until now, they have prioritized profitability at the unit economics level over growth. Now that they are confident that the DealShare concept can be profitable, should they relax their commitment to profitability and expand rapidly to preempt competition? Will the investments required and added complexity derail the company's success?

LooksRare launched a decentralized and anonymous organization to compete against NFT marketplace leader OpenSea. By launching its own cryptocurrency, LooksRare attempted to lure users with a digital rewards program. The nature of the organization and its business model, however, brought challenges that are unique to the blockchain industry.

The case explores the rise and popularity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Nicole Blank has bootstrapped her functional beverage company, Sunomi Switchel, to contracts with leading grocery retailers. She is now faced with a series of choices for if and how to continue to grow the business.

Farmer Lee Farms was a family-owned farm 70 kilometres from Johannesburg, South Africa. The farm was founded in 2005 by Jimmy Botha, a sixty-year-old, first-generation Black commercial farmer. From 2005 to 2017, the farm had experienced steady growth and was recognized as a Black business success story in post-apartheid South Africa. During this period, the farm had a clear target market of high-end food packaging houses and food retailers and specialized in the supply of high-quality, high-value fresh produce. However, a severe hailstorm in 2017 destroyed important infrastructure on the farm that was crucial for growing the farm's temperature-sensitive products. The capital required to repair the infrastructure was not available. As a result, the farm lost key off-take agreements with high-end retail customers and Botha had to change his crops to hardier but lower-value cash crops. In November 2020, the farm urgently needed to re-evaluate its strategy to avoid bankruptcy, for which Botha was considering four options: continue growing cash crops and hope for a market turnaround, apply for a bank loan for funds to repair the damaged infrastructure, access the available government grants to carry out repairs to the infrastructure, or change his farming methods entirely and learn an alternative farming technique known as hydroponics.

Spotify Technology S.A. (Spotify) was facing significant problems with public relations due to artists' claims of poor treatment. They had accused Spotify of underpaying artists, obscuring its business practices, and being overly litigious. The objections reached a critical point with a union of creatives, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), submitting a petition to Spotify and on March 15, 2021, protesting at its global offices. Spotify management must decide how to navigate this issue.

Countless enterprise blockchains fail to live up to high expectations, often because the supporting governance structures are insufficiently established or have become stagnant. Based on interviews with 153 blockchain executives and an analysis of publicly documented use cases, this article offers a guide for blockchain scholars and practitioners. Its framework highlights the coordination and control challenges that exist in blockchain governance contexts and presents four generic governance modes to address them: chief, clan, custodian, and consortium. Managers can use these governance modes as a basis for four strategic moves (connecting, isolating, loosening, and tightening) to navigate blockchain governance challenges.

On March 17, 2018, the founder and owner of Memon Lubricants, a Shell Pakistan Limited distributor located in Sukkur, Pakistan, was trying to find the best recruitment process to hire a new sales team. Memon Lubricants had just opened a second location in Khairpur, approximately 30 kilometres south of Sukkur. Several constraints that affected the process included a tight budget, limited availability of skilled and qualified candidates, and pressure to complete the recruitment quickly, Therefore, the founder wanted to adopt a more efficient recruitment process than the one he had used to hire a sales force at his first branch in Sukkur. He first had to identify the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes of ideal sales representatives. He then had to encourage appropriate candidates to apply for the positions. Generally, he had to improve the current recruitment process.

Spreadsheet supplement to case 222057.

Honor Home Care, founded as an on-demand home care company, evolved into the leading home care technology and operations platforms for home care agencies across the U.S. In the last quarter of 2020, the Honor leadership team raised $140 million in Series D funding to accelerate the company's geographic expansion. Seth Sternberg, CEO of Honor Home Care, must decide between two options- acquiring one large home care franchise or buying several smaller home care agencies. In this case, students are encouraged to explore the advantages and disadvantages of different partnership and acquisition opportunities to scale technology companies in the home care market. The case highlights the complexity of customer acquisition and employee recruiting, management and retention in the industry, and lays out how Honor sought to tackle these challenges, as well as the strategic decisions they faced along the way. The case also chronicles the evolution of the home care industry in the United States, highlighting the market structures that impacted the company's growth.