This case asks how startup founders make scaling decisions in light of their priorities for their business and for themselves. Otto was a technology company that applied artificial intelligence technology to sales. It deployed natural language processing to find sales targets for companies, write messages for those targets, and send them over email, social media, and other means. Otto's automated sales outreach was personalized at scale and improved results for its clients. Early in 2024, its founders had to decide how to scale their business. They had three options: they could focus on business-to-business sales for individual clients, which posed the specific challenge of growing while working with large customer organizations; they could concentrate on the financial services field, in which they sourced deals for private equity companies and investment banks; or they could sell Otto to a larger sales firm.

Jessica Johnson-Cope, CEO of Johnson Security Bureau (JSB), pondered options for scaling the firm. JSB was the oldest Black-owned security firm in New York, and among the oldest Black-owned security firms in the United States. It provided mostly unarmed security guards to locations such as banks, public works, hospitals, and others. Johnson-Cope could deepen her business in New York; engage in partnerships or joint ventures with other security firms outside of New York; develop a new line of business in cybersecurity; or some combination. If she joined forces with other firms, Johnson-Cope would have to consider whether to prioritize retaining JSB's status as a woman-owned, minority-owned firm, a crucial aspect of JSB's competitive strategy.

The OneTen case study examines the nonprofit organization's origin story. Its founding team includes a roster of corporate superstars-Ken Chenault (former CEO of American Express), Ken Frazier (former CEO of Merck), Charles Phillips (chair of Infor), Ginni Rometty (former CEO of IBM), and Kevin Sharer (former CEO and chair of Amgen). In May 2020, soon after the murder of George Floyd, this group came together to form a nonprofit that would partner with companies, talent developers, and Black talent, with the goal of hiring one million Black people in the U.S. into jobs with family-sustaining wages over the next 10 years. Equally important is an emphasis on the promotion of talented Black employees within existing companies. The case is set in late 2020, just after the hire of OneTen's first CEO, Maurice Jones; it explores how the organization was established, structured, and staffed, and how it has so far built its partnerships.

Jerren Chang, CEO and co-founder of GenUnity, had to choose a strategy to scale his civic engagement-focused nonprofit. Based in Boston, Chang could grow the organization there or begin to expand to other cities. He also had to select candidates for a board of directors that would align with his chosen growth strategy. Chang also had to decide how to sequence these choices for an optimal outcome.

Walmart's LBU program, which allowed its frontline employees and managers to attend college at Walmart's expense, had expanded and changed over the course of five years. How could Walmart better develop the program for its associates and use it to meet the company's own talent needs?

Virgilio "V" Bento, CEO of Sword Health-a startup that provided virtual physical therapy to patients in self-insured firms via AI and sensor technology with supervision by a physical therapist with a doctorate-considered how to increase its U.S. market share. To do so, it could use lower-cost supervisors, such as health coaches; sell a direct-to-consumer product; or work with retailers, among other options. Sword Health's main competitor, the unicorn-valued Hinge Healthcare, had the first-mover advantage, but Sword had FDA clearance, a fuller stack of applications and higher-credentialed supervision. Sword and Hinge charged the same price to the client. How should Sword Health best optimize its business opportunities? This case is suitable both as a general business case for undergraduate and MBA students of any level with focus on strategy, entrepreneurship, digital health, artificial intelligence, muscular skeletal issues, the healthcare industry, and physical therapy.

This case follows the evolution of pricing strategy at Echosec Systems, a Canadian open source intelligence firm. The case provides information on pricing as the company grows and diversifies its product offerings.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, faced divergent views on its revenue possibilities and accounting practices. After a report emerged accusing it of fraudulent accounting and lack of innovation, its share price plunged. But some investors saw this as a buying opportunity and still believed in Ginkgo's prospects. Who was right?

As co-founders of home nursing company Buurtzorg, Jos de Blok and Gonnie Kronenberg prized both self-management and organizational learning. Buurtzorg's 10,000 nurses across 950 neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands were empowered to manage themselves, both in terms of client care and team management. In its 16 years of existence, that had made Buurtzorg highly successful and had made its model attractive both for other Dutch companies and internationally. Yet because neighborhood teams managed themselves, so much of what they learned remained in the team. While nurses would sometimes try to spread such solutions to peer nursing teams, such as through calls/texts or the compan's internal social network BuurtzorgWeb, there was no holistic, top-down process for reviewing and disseminating best practices across all nursing teams-in part because Buurtzorg had been designed to avoid such hierarchical, top-down management in favor of a more flat, nimble, and minimally bureaucratic organization. They attributed much of the company's success (in terms of high client satisfaction and low employee turnover) to that model. But as the Dutch population aged and the country faced an increasingly dire nursing shortage, nurses would need to work more efficiently than ever, and elevating local, variegated learning to company-wide best practices would be one way to do so. How could Buurtzorg break the tradeoff between prizing self-management and effective sharing of best practices for organizational learning?

In early 2022, the technology firm MicroStrategy unveiled a series of letters with the SEC that questioned its accounting practices around its holdings of Bitcoin. Since 2020, the firm had shifted its strategy to include not just selling software but buying and holding large quantities of Bitcoin. But accounting standards for cryptocurrency remained unclear, which could lead to conflicts such as this one with the SEC.

The OneTen case study examines the nonprofit organization's origin story. Its founding team includes a roster of corporate superstars-Ken Chenault (former CEO of American Express), Ken Frazier (former CEO of Merck), Charles Phillips (chair of Infor), Ginni Rometty (former CEO of IBM), and Kevin Sharer (former CEO and chair of Amgen). In May 2020, soon after the murder of George Floyd, this group came together to form a nonprofit that would partner with companies, talent developers, and Black talent, with the goal of hiring one million Black people in the U.S. into jobs with family-sustaining wages over the next 10 years. Equally important is an emphasis on the promotion of talented Black employees within existing companies. The case is set in late 2020, just after the hire of OneTen's first CEO, Maurice Jones; it explores how the organization was established, structured, and staffed, and how it has so far built its partnerships.

Pairwise discusses the strategic approach of a company aiming to "snackify" fruits and vegetables by using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to create nutritious, bite-sized foods that could compete with packaged snacks. The company is confronting a number of challenges, including distinguishing their approach from that of GMO foods, which had a mixed public reception.

Bubble was a software company in the low-code/no-code market, making tools that allowed users without traditional programming backgrounds or technical skills to build software. The case covers cofounder Joshua Haas's engineering background, as he experienced a high demand for coding expertise in the startup community, but a low supply of coders. It then outlines his founding, with cofounder Emmanuel Straschnov, of Bubble in 2012, and their subsequent bootstrapping for six years until 2018, when a well-known tech entrepreneur and angel investor offered them an attractive financing deal. The case covers Bubble's product-led growth, or a singular focus on the product (as opposed to investing in sales and marketing) as a strategy for user acquisition and retention. The case also covers the difficulties of hiring new employees, and Bubble's strategy for building a team.

On February 15, 2021, Alina Moss, an analyst who covered the technology company MicroStrategy, pondered a rise in MicroStrategy's share price. Moss had dialed into the company earnings call. When it ended, Moss had more questions than answers. MicroStrategy had recorded a meager operating income of $390,000 in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020, yet its non-GAAP operating income was $30.1 million and its share price had climbed 160% during the period. In 2020, MicroStrategy had invested heavily in Bitcoin, and its CEO Michael Saylor said that MicroStrategy would continue using Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. The accounting treatment of cryptocurrencies was murky as standard setters had not yet decided how firms should account for cryptocurrencies, leaving it up to companies to determine the appropriate accounting. MicroStrategy treated cryptocurrencies as intangible assets on its financial statements, as did many other firms. Accounting rules for intangible assets required reporting downward price shifts as impairment losses but did not require the recording of upswings in price. MicroStrategy disclosed a significant decline in net income as compared to the fourth quarter of 2019 because of impairment losses on Bitcoin. How well was MicroStrategy really doing? Did the current accounting treatment for cryptocurrencies make sense for companies holding Bitcoin? How should investors assess firms' Bitcoin investments?

Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust secondary market that bore similarities to the stock market. Inspired by these similarities, StockX's co-founders created a secondary platform that tracked sneaker resale prices over time and that emphasized authenticity, anonymity, and transparency. In 2017, StockX began to experiment with ways to expand from the secondary market into the primary market, using a new type of online auction known as an initial product offering (IPO). Based on the results of its first IPOs, was StockX on the right track with its strategy to expand into the primary market?

Via (a) captures the early days of the data analytics startup as founders Gounden and Ravanis considered which markets offer the right opportunities for their firm and what kinds of experiments will help them narrow their choice. Supplement Via (b) reveals the experiments they ran, and what they learned. Via (c) explores the strategic choices they face about product and service offerings once they determine which market(s) to target.