This case follows Compass Pathways, a pioneering company developing treatment for depression based on psilocybin, the compound found in 'magic mushrooms.' Psilocybin was a federally illegal substance in the U.S., and a "Schedule I" drug, defined as a drug "with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." As the case opens in 2023, CEO Kabir Nath is preparing for the release of the company's Phase 3 clinical trial results, expected to lead to FDA clearance and the "re-scheduling" of the company's product. As Nath and his team prepare for commercialization, they grapple with decisions that balance short-term success and long-term sustainability in an uncertain, stigmatized industry.

The case opens in March 2023, as Sten van der Ham and Jaap Maljers, CEO and co-founder of eBee, an electric bike (e-bike) company in Africa, are contemplating the different avenues for growth and path to profitability for the young and ambitious company. In 2023, the company had been gaining traction in Kenya under three business models and was also getting ready to raise a financing round of €8-10 million. eBee had the first mover advantage of having introduced e-bikes and van der Ham and Maljers needed to decide which levers to pull for to best grow eBee going forward. The case chronicles the founding of eBee, provides details on its bike designed for the terrain in Africa, and its unit economics. The case then lays the ground transportation Africa complete with challenges, opportunities, and the competitive outlook. The case then goes into detail about the three go-to-market channels that eBee picked to penetrate into the Kenyan market. The case goes into detail about the three different business models-vehicle as a service, fulfillment, and direct sales-that eBee is piloting in 2023 as well as providing an understanding of what each operate, their financial prospects, and growth outlooks, as eBee tries to grow its sales. While each business model presented its challenges and were yet to prove profitable at scale, van der Ham and Maljers firmly believed the in the immense opportunity to grow e-bikes in Africa and in eBee's first mover advantage. The duo was excited about geographical expansion. Others on the team and advisory board held that, obtaining proof of concept in Kenya first would be more helpful, while some suggested to eliminate some of the business models and focus more on others.

The case opens in August 2022, as Ahmed Galal Ismail, CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Properties and Fatima Zada, digital and omnichannel director at Majid Al Futtaim Shopping Malls, go over the plans to roll out the omnichannel mall offering for the Mall of the Emirates they have been piloting for the past six months. The Mall's omnichannel transformation had been propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at enabling customers to shop both online and offline, while redefining the mall's value proposition and its business model. The case takes the reader back to the founding story of the Majid Al Futtaim Group, its culture and vision. The case also provides an overview of the Group's successful digital transformation journey as well as its omnichannel transformation of its retail business. The case also provides a detailed overview of changing customer habits and shopping preferences, the different kinds of players competing for customers' share of wallet, and the evolution of the role of the physical shop from a point of sale to a point of experience. The case puts the reader in Ismail and Zada's shoes, who have been trying to physically, digitally, and commercially to better serve both the customers and the mall tenants. The pandemic had forced even the most digitally conservative tenants to reconsider the extent of their digital offering, thus creating the perfect backdrop for an omnichannel transformation. Ismail and Zada knew that they needed to transform the value proposition to update the business model for the malls to survive in the digital area. They needed the figure out a sustainable and profitable way to do it.

Supplement to case 523037 Volt Lines was a next-generation transportation service in Istanbul, Turkey. The company was trying to disrupt the traditional corporate transportation market by developing software that allowed it to offer subscription-based transportation. Under the subscription model, Volt Lines pooled employees from different clients to ride on the same bus and charged its clients using a per-seat pricing model instead of the traditional per-bus model. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and companies pivoted to working from home, the need for corporate transportation almost disappeared overnight. While this drop in demand put tremendous pressure on Volt Lines as a startup with negative cash flow, it also allowed the company to leverage its software infrastructure and offer even more flexible pricing models. Such flexible pricing models could help Volt Lines clients that now had their employees show up at the office only a few days a week cut costs. The three cases (Volt Lines A, B, and C) follow the journey of Ali Halabi, the company's founder and CEO, as he moves from trying to survive in the early days of the pandemic to seeing the pandemic as a unique opportunity to gain market share.

Supplement to case 523037 Volt Lines was a next-generation transportation service in Istanbul, Turkey. The company was trying to disrupt the traditional corporate transportation market by developing software that allowed it to offer subscription-based transportation. Under the subscription model, Volt Lines pooled employees from different clients to ride on the same bus and charged its clients using a per-seat pricing model instead of the traditional per-bus model. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and companies pivoted to working from home, the need for corporate transportation almost disappeared overnight. While this drop in demand put tremendous pressure on Volt Lines as a startup with negative cash flow, it also allowed the company to leverage its software infrastructure and offer even more flexible pricing models. Such flexible pricing models could help Volt Lines clients that now had their employees show up at the office only a few days a week cut costs. The three cases (Volt Lines A, B, and C) follow the journey of Ali Halabi, the company's founder and CEO, as he moves from trying to survive in the early days of the pandemic to seeing the pandemic as a unique opportunity to gain market share.

Volt Lines was a next-generation transportation service in Istanbul, Turkey. The company was trying to disrupt the traditional corporate transportation market by developing software that allowed it to offer subscription-based transportation. Under the subscription model, Volt Lines pooled employees from different clients to ride on the same bus and charged its clients using a per-seat pricing model instead of the traditional per-bus model. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and companies pivoted to working from home, the need for corporate transportation almost disappeared overnight. While this drop in demand put tremendous pressure on Volt Lines as a startup with negative cash flow, it also allowed the company to leverage its software infrastructure and offer even more flexible pricing models. Such flexible pricing models could help Volt Lines clients that now had their employees show up at the office only a few days a week cut costs. The three cases (Volt Lines A, B, and C) follow the journey of Ali Halabi, the company's founder and CEO, as he moves from trying to survive in the early days of the pandemic to seeing the pandemic as a unique opportunity to gain market share.

"Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. In 2021, it had been three years since Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) and Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) started working on Muneccim, the company's predictive AI tool. While the prediction accuracy of the tool was on the rise, the sales team remained resistant to incorporating it into their sales approach. Gunaydin and Durgun knew that, to get the most out of Borusan Cat's AI technology and help its customers adopt Muneccim's predictions, a shift in employee mindset was essential. Growing impatient with the speed at which middle management was integrating Muneccim into their processes, they began weighing options for effecting cultural change. Should they continue to employ soft tactics to get buy-in from sales reps or had the time for that passed? Would it perhaps be better to add Muneccim-based sales into the metrics for calculating bonus payments? Durgun and Gunaydin knew that, without proper implementation, even the best technology would not create much value and time was of the essence if they aimed to stay ahead of the competition.

The case opens in January 2022 as Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, co-founders of Bazaar technologies (Bazaar), the Pakistani high growth B2B e-commerce marketplace, are looking over the performance of the newly launched "buy now, play later" feature. The traction looks promising and seems to deliver more share of wallet per customer, so the co-founders are trying to envisage how big this business could get and whether it would overtake Bazaar's core business. The case provides a background on the launch of the delayed payment feature-it seems low risk and additive to the core business and is financed by the capital previously raised. The competitive environment is bound to heat up and the co-founders need to decide how best to sustainably grow this new business while also expanding the B2B business across 15 cities in the next six months.

The case opens in September 2021 as Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, co-founders of Bazaar technologies (Bazaar), the Pakistani high growth B2B e-commerce marketplace, are contemplating whether the year-and-a half old startup should also venture into offering financing to its customers, the thousands of mom-and-pop stores around Pakistan. Since its founding in mid 2020, the company has been growing its core business full throttle and also launched a digital ledger app to help with customer acquisition. Meanwhile, the co-founders are growing the team and geographically expanding Bazaar's operations beyond Karachi. Jawaid and Jangda need to weigh the pros and cons of branching out to financing and decide, with so much going on, whether this is the right time for such a move. The case provides a background on Pakistan, its retail and e-commerce space to then talk about Bazaar's founding story and its founders' ambitious mission to create a generational story in and for Pakistan. The case then talks about the company's pillars: technology, warehousing and logistics, and culture in detail and provides details on its day-to-day operations. Next, the case chronicles the company's growth both product -wise and geographically. Bazaar is trying to take a stake and solidify its place in the booming $170 billion retail market in the world's fifth-most populous nation which is yet to see much deployment of technology, and is in hypergrowth mode with a number of competing priorities. The co-founders need to decide if venturing into financing now is a good idea and whether it would take away from the company's sharp focus on the B2B business and its culture that the co-founders so passionately built. The decision is made more complicated, because the company has the funds to deploy and many think that financing will also fuel the growth of the core business.

The case opens in August 2021, as Habib and Shahysta Hassim, husband and wife co-founders of the data labeling company SmartOne, contemplate the strategy of the high growth company. Between 2016 and 2021, SmartOne had kept doubling its size every two years and now, with its workforce of 1,000, it was annotating data for global tech clients. The case provides a background on SmartOne's journey from call center operations to data labeling and elaborates on the company's operating and business model, providing details on processes such as: recruiting, training, managing the workforce, project management, and quality control. The case also provides a background on data labeling, data pipeline and the AI factory (a term explained in the case which represents the AI industry value chain) for larger context and gives an overview of the competitive environment. In August 2021, the co-founders needed a strategy to shape the company's future. Where in the AI factory could SmartOne position itself to remain relevant and take a piece of the evolving pie? Should the company grow upstream, to become a full data pipeline provider, or downstream into developing algorithms?

The case provides a background on the Saudi financial sector, as well as NCBC, and continues to chronicle Al Suhaimi's journey in NCBC and the transformation process she and her team put in action. When she joined NCBC as the first female CEO of a Saudi investment bank at the young age of 31, Al Suhaimi inherited an underperforming business with broken relations with all key stakeholders including the parent bank, customers, and the regulator. The case follows the turnaround process Al Suhaimi executed. After putting together a senior management team both from inside the business and external hires, Al Suhaimi worked with her team to diagnose and address pain points. Most notably, they drastically shifted NCBC's strategy from a brokerage driven, transactional revenue model to a recurring revenue, full-fledged investment banking and asset management model. They also made cultural and operational changes across NCBC, and mended fractured relations with their parent bank and the regulator. By 2019, NCBC became the market leader in revenues and profit securing landmark advisory mandates and creating innovative, successful products. At the fifth year mark of her appointment, in 2019, Al Suhaimi was now looking at a much different picture: NCBC was the market leader and internally, members of Al Suhaimi's senior management team were being poached by the competition, with no immediate candidates to replace them. Meanwhile, Al Suhaimi knew that she needed to make adjustments to the strategy to get the company on its next wave of growth. Externally, the Saudi stock exchange was opening up to foreign investors and had just joined three of the top emerging markets indices and competition in investment banking had heated up. With her trusted team at risk of departure, she needed to decide on her focus for the next five years: succession planning, setting the strategy for the next growth phase, and inspiring and motivating the team were top of her list.

Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) and Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) seem to have bet their careers on developing Muneccim, a new predictive technology that is designed to reduce downtime of heavy construction machines that Borusan Cat sells. While they have been able to manage to develop the technology to a level that beats any human expert in predicting machine failures, they still have not been able to find a way to monetize the technology. After spending a few years and millions of dollars developing the technology, they are both under pressure from Borusan Group, Borusan Cat's holding company, to show monetary results. Sales have been declining due to the economic downturn in Turkey, and the Company has been losing market share to their strong domestic competitors. Gunaydin and Durgun must decide about their monetization strategy for Muneccim and pick which segment of the market they want to target with this technology.

The case opens in February 2021 as Mohamad Ballout, co-founder and CEO of Kitopi, a Dubai-based managed cloud kitchen platform, is looking over the company's 2020 results. Propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery orders had been on the rise globally and dine-in restaurants were more than ever focused on profitability. Against this backdrop, Kitopi had seen high traction in its business and the management needed to decide on which growth opportunities to focus. The case provides an overview of the pain points of the various players in the on-demand food ecosystem -the aggregators, the restaurants and the customers- and lays the ground for the nascent cloud kitchen business worldwide complete with the competitive outlook. The case also provides a detailed overview of how Kitopi structured its kitchens, how the company developed proprietary software to track space utilization and efficiency across its operations, and how it built it supply chain capabilities. While the B2B positioning of the company enables Kitopi to help restaurants expand much faster and in a less costly way, the company is mainly invisible to customers who don't know that their food order is coming from a central kitchen. Also, the company has been witnessing the consolidation of aggregators across its markets. The case puts the reader in Ballout's shoes, who wondered if the company could feasibly continue to own the supply side of the business and retain its position as a primarily B2B company without risking being squeezed out by the aggregators, who owned the customer relationship and data. Should the company focus on building on its currently small B2C arms, consider licensing it tech stack, or be squarely focused on its core business?

The case opens in November 2020 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, eagerly await the results of the U.S. presidential elections. The case takes us through the challenging times between November 2019 and November 2020, as the confounders navigated Snapp through an increasingly challenging environment of sanctions, stricter restrictions of big tech companies, and since February 2020, through the operational difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that shook Iran to its core. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive and asks how the U.S. election results could change the environment in which Snapp operates, as the two presidential candidates have vastly different approaches to their policy to Iran.

The case opens in August 2020 as Moulay Mhamed Elalamy (Mhamed), CEO of the Saham Group (the Group), a pan-African investment company that operates a variety of businesses out of Morocco, contemplates the Group's identity, its investment strategy, and how to navigate the existing businesses through volatility. Since Mhamed's father Moulay Hafid Elalamy (Moulay Hafid) had laid the foundations of the Group in 1995, its insurance arm became the largest insurance company in Morocco and expanded into the rest of Africa, and the Group diversified to include call centers, real estate, and agriculture. In 2013, Moulay Hafid Elalmy left his executive duties to take on the role of Minister of Industry, Trade, and New Technologies. The case talks about Mhamed's entering the family business at the age of 23 and his rise through the ranks to eventually assume the CEO position. In 2018, Mhamed decided to sell the insurance businesses, the Group's crown jewel, and the Group became a private equity house. Since then, Mhamed and his sister Anissa Elalamy were focused on making sure that business continued to prosper. While the Group was settling into its new identity as a family office focused on private equity, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the difference between the father and son's risk appetite and management styles: Mhamed was focused on value preservation and risk-reward analysis, while Moulay Hafid's saw opportunities everywhere. This raised questions for the future and the family contemplated its risk tolerance and allocation, governance, and succession. The case introduces the different family members and executives and their points of view and asks: What difficult conversations did the Elalamys need to have to ensure shareholder value and continued success in the upcoming generations?

The case opens in November 2019 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, find out about Apple's and Google's decisions to remove all Iranian apps from their respective application stores. The case takes us through the founding story of Snapp in 2014 to how the company grew to reach two million daily rides in Iran servicing 30 million customers through its two million registered drivers in 100 cities in Iran. The case then goes into detail about how the removal of all Iran-based apps from application stores limited Snapp's operations and its go-to-market channels. Next, the case chronicles how the co-founders focused on finding operational and technological solutions to minimize Snapp's reliance on U.S. technology following the U.S.' withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018 and instating the secondary sanctions on Iran. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive in a market that had been out of reach for Western investors. In 2019, Snapp had become the largest Internet company in the Middle East yet it was increasingly difficult to navigate the operational hurdles. The co-founders could not help but think whether it was now time to reach out to major media outlets and launch a public relations campaign to create awareness around the unexpected decision that had put the very existence of many companies at risk, including Snapp's. Alkassar and Fouz needed to weigh it against Snapp's realities. The case then asks: Should they go public with their story, or would it be better to stay under the radar and focus on efficiency and sustainability of operations?

The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company's path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company announced two internal issues in August 2019. The case chronicles the founding and expansion of Jumia and the iterations of its business model and describes its competitive outlook. The case then provides a detailed overview of how Jumia built its three pillars-its marketplace, logistics, and payments arms-and how the co-founders decided on the company's strategic, customer, and product scopes over the seven years in which Jumia spread across 14 countries in Africa since its founding in 2012. The case also provides an overview of Jumia's vertical scope, its technology, marketing, and payments systems, and how the company's localization strategy brings complexities to its business model, as Jumia tries to adopt its approach, website, products, and services to each country to increase profitability. While there is for the most part no single competitor that serves the same geography as Jumia does, Jumia strives to educate the African market about shopping online and overcome various infrastructure problems in the continent to improve its margins and become profitable. While its second quarter 2019 financials show continued GMV and customer growth, the co-founders need to convince investors of the company's path to profitability and answer questions such as: Is Jumia's existing product-service mix and geographical coverage the best use of the company's financial and managerial resources, or does the company need to make some eliminations? Can Jumia's expansive approach be sustainable as the geography becomes more developed and the inevitable specialized players come in?

The case opens in August 2020 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey's oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are navigating Migros through COVID-19 and the unprecedented surge in demand in online groceries. Between the first official case in Turkey in March and August, customers have flocked to online shopping and Migros' teams have been busy trying to solve the picking, fulfillment, and logistics bottlenecks. In the six months, the company recruited and trained new pickers, expanded its delivery fleet, and converted less busy stores into dark stores. Quick to react, Migros was able to add new customers to its base and was proud of its accomplishments. Now, unable to forecast how much of the surge in demand for online was here to stay, how should Migros plan for the future of Sanal Market and Hemen? Was there anything the company could do to sustain the number of hybrid shoppers it acquired during the past few months?

The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey's oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and delivery model for the company's growing online arm, Sanal Market, and its under-30-minutes gorcery service arm, Hemen, are. Migros's online operations had grown over 50% year-on-year in the previous three years, and the target for 2020 was to grow 100%. With all of these considerations in mind, Bartin and Tort needed to decide which levers to pull for the last mile and fulfillment to best serve the future of Migros. The case chronicles the founding and growth of Migros as well as Sanal Market and lays the ground for food and grocery retail in Turkey complete with the competitive outlook. The case then provides a detailed overview of how Migros built online channels, Sanal Market and its recently introduced Hemen, and how Tort and Bartin have thought about fulfillment and delivery as well as omnichannel mentality. The case goes into detail about the three different fulfillment models, store pick micro-fulfillment center, and dark store, that Migros is piloting in 2019 as well as providing an understanding of what the company is thinking about logistics and last mile delivery as its online sales grow. While globally, online shopping and consumer preferences were changing fast, particularly in terms of how and with what frequency customers shopped online and how fast they wanted their groceries delivered, Migros was trying to find the optimum model for fulfillment and last mile delivery.

The case opens in February 2020 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey's oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are looking over the results of the fulfillment pilot the company had been running since June 2019. Comparing the data from dark store, micro fulfillment center, and store pick models, the duo see that contrary to the expectations outlined in their business plan in May 2019, the mini dark-store performance metrics were superior to those of the dark store format. As the online grocery market is evolving, the duo decide to refrain from going forward with one fulfillment model only and decide to mix and match the fulfillment models as needed and buttress the efforts with automation for picking to increase efficiency. On the last mile, the teams decide to focus on pooling and developing an algorithm to automate deployment while trying to combine delivery efforts for both Sanal Market and Hemen. Decisions with regards to Hemen's offering are yet to be made as its competitors manage to raise money from Silicon Valley.