Mary Jones was the CEO of the Richardson County Community Association (RCCA), a nonprofit with assets of $250 million and annual grants totaling $50 million to charitable organizations in Richardson County, Colorado. As CEO of RCCA, Jones engaged personally with over 250 donors per year. She described her job as primarily one of relationship management, and at times, those relationships could prove challenging. In the RCCA Vignettes, Jones's first difficult situation deals with her board member, David Jacobs, who recently assumed the role of board chair. Jacobs had begun to assign the RCCA staff his own small projects and, after making his "rounds," he would sit down in Jones's office, expecting her to drop whatever she was doing in order to interact with him. Jones would need to find a way to diplomatically yet effectively convey her feelings about Jacobs's behavior. In the second vignette, Jones receives a $1 million stock donation from an esteemed donor, Leo Farnand, who asks her to hold the stock until the recently-announced sale of his company is complete. Jones and the board agree to make an exception to the company policy given the size of the donation and hold the stock. However, after delays in the sale, Jones decides she must sell the stock against Farnand's wishes. The vignette ends with Jones preparing for what will undoubtedly be an unpleasant conversation with one of RCCA's largest donors.

This fictional case sets up a scenario commonly experienced in the Search Fund process. Two recent GSB graduates founded a search fund and take steps to purchase a small business from the founder, then transition into running the business post-acquisition. WorkWell (A)(B)(C) examine three separate stages in the process.

This fictional case sets up a scenario commonly experienced in the Search Fund process. Two recent GSB graduates founded a search fund and take steps to purchase a small business from the founder, then transition into running the business post-acquisition. WorkWell (A)(B)(C) examine three separate stages in the process.

This fictional case sets up a scenario commonly experienced in the Search Fund process. Two recent GSB graduates founded a search fund and take steps to purchase a small business from the founder, then transition into running the business post-acquisition. WorkWell (A)(B)(C) examine three separate stages in the process.

In April 2007, Kristin Richmond laced up her sneakers and began the four mile run to Kirsten Tobey's house. It was a Saturday morning, but the two co-founders of Revolution Foods (RevFoods), a provider of healthy meals and nutrition education to schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles, felt pressure to finalize a plan for effectively managing their relationship with Maria Nunez. Nunez, a skeptical and influential food service administrator, had been undermining the RevFoods program at Green Academy, a charter school in California's Bay Area. Richmond and Tobey believed that if they did not address the issue now, their contract with the school could be revoked, an outcome that could threaten RevFoods's standing with other schools. As Richmond jogged up the last hill before reaching Tobey's residence, she wondered how best to turn their tense relationship with Nunez into a productive partnership.

For Sean Parker, a managing partner at Founders Fund (FF), a San Francisco-based venture capital (VC) firm, November 2007 was a critical moment in the process of raising the firm's second fund. As he prepared to describe FF's nontraditional strategy to a potential limited partner (LP) in San Francisco's Financial District, he decided to focus on what distinguished Founders Fund from the sea of VC firms in Silicon Valley, how it was innovating within a mature industry, and why it would be the most successful fund in history. Since its inception in 2005, Founders Fund had attracted substantial publicity. Though most had been positive, Parker nevertheless wanted to address a few of the critiques that had surfaced within the industry press. He hoped to be persuasive-FF wanted to close the $150-million round before the end of the month.

Corey Leibow eased his car back onto Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California. As president and CEO of Mercado, a company that provided the search and merchandising technology to power retail web sites, he had just met with another venture capital (VC) firm in an effort to raise a $26-million Series E round of financing. It was June 2008 and Mercado currently offered both on-premise and on-demand or "software as a service (SaaS)" versions of its applications. Despite the fact that revenue from both solutions was projected to grow in excess of 80 percent that year, Leibow found that investors generally pushed back on the company's hybrid approach to distribution. Some VCs wanted Mercado to focus solely on its traditional enterprise business based on a perpetual, on-premise licensing model. Other investors preferred to see Mercado morph into a pure play SaaS company. Leibow knew that he had to make a decision quickly in order to raise the capital the company needed, but he also wondered if it was possible to continue pursuing both angles. The choice he made would significantly affect Mercado's sales force and R&D team as well as which customers the company targeted and how it would attract and retain them.

Alejandro Ramirez, the CEO of Cinepolis, the largest film exhibitor in Latin America, sat in the back of row of the company's flagship movie theatre in Mexico City one evening in January 2005. The company was preparing to roll out an expensive new IT platform that streamlined box office, concession stand and warehouse operations. Despite resistance from some senior managers, Cinepolis was considering a thorough (and costly) training program. Ramirez knew he and his executive team had invested wisely in new technologies and now it was time to make those investments pay off.

Linda Jenkinson, Chairman and CEO of luxury personal services company, LesConcierges (LC), hung up the phone after checking her voicemail in July 2007. She had just received a message from Randy Haykin, an angel investor and board member who had participated in the Series C round that Jenkinson recently raised. After an initial "honeymoon period," she and Haykin had started disagreeing on internal matters, most recently about whether to hire an interim CFO while the company took time to source a permanent candidate. Jenkinson began to wonder whether Haykin had been the best choice for the board and if there was anything she could do to work with him more effectively. Unbeknownst to Jenkinson, Haykin was simultaneously considering whether his investment in LesConcierges would turn out to be the "home run" that he had originally anticipated. He also questioned how he could help solve the challenges facing the company's CEO without damaging their relationship in the process.

Terminating employees is one of the most unpleasant, yet necessary, responsibilities managers have to carry out. The Wall Street Journal has reported that firing someone is one of three situations that make company presidents most uneasy. Due to a number of factors including anxiety, lack of preparation and ingrained social norms, terminations are often botched, putting companies at risk for low employee morale, negative PR, and lawsuits, among other undesirable outcomes. The ideal course of action is to prevent a termination in the first place through a combination of effective hiring, communication, coaching and management. Yet, after all other reasonable options have been exhausted, retaining a "problem employee" may be the only action worse than firing him. Keeping such an individual on staff allows substandard results or harmful behavior to continue and simultaneously sends the message to the rest of the organization that the company tolerates under-performance. As a result, the best course of action in these situations is to carefully prepare for a termination and then conduct it swiftly and respectfully. After an employee has been fired, proactively informing those with a need to know and filling the vacant position as soon as possible minimizes disruption to the organization. When a termination is properly handled, companies often resume normal business operations with very little tumult.

In this fictional case, Jennifer Gaston, founder and CEO of mid-sized luxury jewelry company Aquamarine, was managing a couple of key hiring issues that had recently cropped up. In just six months, Gaston had brought in a new COO and was about to finalize a multi-month search for a CFO. Although she had nearly completed the transformation of her executive team, she still needed to thoroughly check references on the CFO candidate and extend a formal offer. A lot was riding on these positions and, despite the help of an executive search firm, hiring for them had not been easy. Students are asked to evaluate several aspects of hiring and prepare role plays for them.

Will Harvey hopped onto his road bike and began pedaling up Old La Honda Road, the famously steep and windy street in Portola Valley, California. As the climb became more arduous, Harvey, the co-founder and CEO of IMVU, a company that developed 3D avatar-based instant messaging, began thinking through the three term sheets that were lying on his desk at the office. He and co-founder Eric Ries had to make a decision within a week about who to partner with on IMVU's current round of financing. Harvey and Ries had adopted an unconventional approach to growth for their startup. While the typical early-stage technology company delayed entering the market until its product had been perfected, IMVU sold its chat service to customers right away, even when it was incomplete, bug-ridden, and carried a beta label. The IMVU development team then made continual modifications to the application based on consumer feedback captured through emails, surveys, and online chat forums. Within eight months of launching the beta product, Harvey and Ries believed that they clearly understood many of the features desired by their "earlyvangelists." IMVU's strategy produced rapid enough revenue growth (on a small scale) to attract offers from several Sand Hill Road venture capital firms, as well as a large strategic acquirer. However, each potential partner had a different perspective on how to ramp the company going forward. Harvey and Ries weighed whether they should continue adhering to the methodology that enabled them to get IMVU off the ground or to shift gears in pursuit of a more aggressive expansion. That decision was the first step in choosing the source of capital best aligned with the company's strategy and goals.

John Dean and Danny Lui began raising their first fund as StartUp Capital Ventures (SCV), a small venture capital firm, in 2005. Along with the four other "Managing Members" of the firm, they intended to focus investments on early stage software companies with capital-efficient business models. SCV looked for organizations with initial pre-money valuations of less than $5 million. The firm's philosophy was to target companies that already had a product or service generating revenue and that could show a reasonable likelihood of reaching near-term profitability with SCV's investment. During the fundraising process, Charlie Eubanks, an "anchor investor" for the fledgling firm, pressured the founders to devote 30% of SCV's capital to investments in China. The country was a compelling place to invest in many ways. China's GDP was growing at 10% per year, primarily driven by annual private sector growth of 20%. Tax burdens were light--there was no capital gains tax. In addition, seven times more engineering students graduated from colleges in China every year than in the United States. Yet, Dean and Lui (who was originally from Hong Kong) were also cognizant of significant drawbacks to investing in the region. Examines some of those challenges as they related to two questions the colleagues tried to answer: whether to enter that market at all; and whether to invest in Zero2IPO, a Beijing-based market research firm that tracked Mainland China private equity and venture capital markets.

Netflix, the online movie rental subscription service, did not contend with significant direct competition in online DVD rentals for six years until Blockbuster, the movie rental chain giant, entered the market in 2004 and began a price war. After that point, CEO Reed Hastings's company scrambled to maintain share and remain profitable. Investors balked at the impact direct competition had on margins and the unlikely sustainability of price cutting against a behemoth competitor. When Amazon began signaling an intention to enter the market in 2005, Hastings had at least two major decisions to make: whether to drop prices to match Blockbuster, and whether to stay the course with regard to his historic strategy of "business-as-usual" when a competitor emerged on the scene.