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In August 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, was surrounded by controversy. The first major storm of protest followed the surprise election of Donald Trump as President of the United States on November 8, 2016; many put the blame at the door of fake news stories served up on Facebook's Trending News Feed. Zuckerberg dismissed these claims as "crazy," asserting that Facebook was a technology company, not a media company. In 2017, it was revealed that a Russian intelligence team had purchased 3,000 political ads on Facebook in an attempt to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election. Then, in March 2018, the public learned that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had used 87 million Facebook profiles obtained from scraping the site to affect the election. As a result, Zuckerberg was called to Congress to testify. In early 2019, Facebook announced the company was to merge its Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms and share data, but that this data would be more secure. The claim was greeted with much skepticism. To explain the move, Zuckerberg published a blog post, changing the company's mission from making the world more open to achieving privacy-focused communications on its platform. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to struggle with fake news while expanding its service offering. In June 2019, it announced it was to launch Libra, a new global cryptocurrency for its 2.5 billion users around the world. There was little doubt of the scale of Zuckerberg's ambitions.

In October 2017, Experian, one of the "Big Three" consumer credit reporting agencies in the United Kingdom made an offer to acquire ClearScore for a total consideration of £293 million. Founded by Justin Basini, Dan Cobley, and Nigel Morris in 2014, ClearScore was the UK's first company to offer consumers full credit reports and scores for free. ClearScore had accumulated over 5 million customers since its launch on July 15, 2015, and was growing rapidly. In the final quarter of 2017, it was set to reach break-even and deliver £27 million in revenues for the year. Was this the time to sell?

In July 2019, Allstate, the United States' number-three property and casualty (P/C) insurer, released its second-quarter earnings, which reported first-half revenues of $22.1 billion, up 11.4% year-over-year. Shareholders cheered the top-line growth, but, P/C premiums had only grown 6.2%, considerably lower than Allstate's top competitors, GEICO and Progressive. Indeed, since the beginning of the global financial crisis, Allstate had grown net premiums earned by just 2.1% per year, compared to 7.6% at Progressive and 9.9% at GEICO. As a result, Allstate had fallen from the number-two writer of private passenger auto insurance to number four, losing market share each year. There was, however, some sign that Allstate was returning to faster growth, with net premiums earned up 5.3% in 2018. During this period, CEO Thomas Wilson had taken steps to reignite growth, concerned primarily with building Allstate's direct-sales business, expanding its range of usage-based products and telematics solutions, and focusing more on insuring smaller consumer devices. Still, growth remained laggard, despite high-profile acquisitions of the direct online specialist Esurance in October 2011 and SquareTrade, a provider of extended warranty contracts for consumer devices, in November 2016. Nothing seemed to ward off challenges from GEICO and Progressive. Meanwhile, rapid advances in ridesharing and autonomous vehicle technology promised to disrupt the entire auto insurance industry. Allstate was early to recognize this shift and had begun investing heavily in new technologies and partnering with researchers and ridesharing operators to prepare for the coming disruptions. Wilson had also set up a new business unit called Arity that would oversee Allstate's efforts at usage-based telematics and to collect and process data on drivers to improve underwriting models.

Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), Acelerex was leveraging technologies, such as big data and grid analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) forecasting tools, cloud computing, real time control systems, energy storage testing software, monitoring, and blockchain smart contracts, to provide consulting expertise and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to a diverse group of stakeholders, including state and municipal policymakers, regulators, grid developers, utilities, and investors. Demand for Acelerex's services had outstripped supply, and, within a year, the company had grown to 14 professionals, with advanced degrees in multiple technical domains. Moreover, the company had made a profit in its first year, had achieved proof of concept and minimum viable products for all of its targeted services, and made sales along all business lines. But, cash flow had been a constant challenge because of slow-paying clients and rising fixed costs, while talent development had proved a "headache." Acelerex was Johnson's first start-up after 25 years of experience working with major firms and research institutions across all segments of the power sector, including generation, transmission, distribution, consumption, and storage. Having doubled in size for four quarters, he had set himself the challenge of doubling in size again, but he was going to take a year to do it. He was confident there was enough business in the USA to support this rate of expansion and that he could hire the team to deliver it, but was uncertain whether he should raise funds to resolve the cash flow pressure. He was also being asked to do more and more work in China, India, and Africa; did this make sense? And to add to his list of opportunities, he had been asked to provide similar services to transport, natural gas, and water networks.

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company's value proposition was quite simple: partner with employers to offer employees affordable loans that were repaid through automatic payroll deductions. Taking repayments directly from salary, and collecting those repayments in one transaction from the employer, dramatically reduced costs, saving employees large amounts of interest when compared to market alternatives like credit cards or payday lenders. For improving access to affordable credit, Salary Finance garnered considerable praise in the media, being named one of the UK's most socially responsible and innovative FinTech companies. Since the beginning of 2018, Salary Finance had introduced a savings product and an earned income advance product that were linked to employee salary. In September 2018, they expanded to the United States, in partnership with the United Way, opening an office in Boston, Massachusetts. Sarkar was excited by the progress but was still pondering how best to accelerate further growth and improve the business. First there was the question of geographic expansion. Did it make sense to pursue other markets like India? Or, should he focus on building Salary Finance's position in the UK and US? In these markets, should he prioritize attracting new employers to the platform or adding new products such as mortgages or investments? Should he register as a bank, tapping into low cost deposits and reducing the dependence on commercial borrowing to fund loans? Finally, he was concerned about how to best maintain Salary Finance's culture - "For People Not Numbers" - during rapid growth. These questions and more weighed heavily on Sarkar's mind as he considered the company's future.

In early 2017, Judith Judson (Harvard Business School MBA, 2000), Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), was reflecting on the results of the initiative she had led to identify the contribution advanced electricity storage could make to electricity generation and distribution in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The study was the first major output from the $10 million Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) launched by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker's administration in May 2015. The advanced simulation techniques employed in the study indicated that over a ten-year period, the optimal deployment of storage capacity would cut the cost of electricity for consumers in the Commonwealth by $230 million per year, deliver $110 million in annual revenues for storage providers, and reduce CO2 emissions by 100,000 tons a year, the equivalent of taking 22,000 cars off the road. Moreover, neighboring states would benefit from $250 million in lowered wholesale prices. To deliver these benefits, 1.77 GWh of advanced storage would be required across the grid, costing between $970 million and $1.35 billion. Incorporating the perspectives of a wide body of stakeholders (from utilities to municipalities to generators), the study wound up recommending a suite of policies that would facilitate the installation of 600 MWh of storage capacity by 2025, representing about 6 minutes of the state's daily electricity consumption and delivering $800 million in benefits to ratepayers. It would also make the Commonwealth a leader in advanced storage technology and deliver substantial greenhouse gas reductions. At the end of 2015 according to figures from the Department of Energy, Massachusetts ranked 23rd in the United States in energy storage deployment, well behind the leader Arizona, with nearly 300 MWh, and Texas, with over 150 MWh.

On January 6, 2019, HelloSelf, a London-based "BrainTech" company, founded a year earlier by Charles Wells, soft launched. The proposition was simply to help its members "Be your Best Self." The company provided its registered members with access to a clinical psychotherapist, a life coach, and an AI engine that personalized advice. The platform provided members with the ability to set goals, track progress, and discover new things about themselves. Throughout the previous nine months, over 500 people had registered interest in the proposition, price points had been tested, competitors analyzed, members and specialists interviewed, and wireframes developed, but there were several questions still crossing Wells' mind. Did the subscription LifeCoach bot model combined with pay-as-you-go therapist sessions make sense? How could he attract an early cohort of users? How would HelloSelf interact with the broken mental health solutions in the UK? How quickly would the platform scale and learn to provide meaningful AI support for both therapists and the LifeCoach bot? And most importantly, would the platform deliver on the mission "to help everyone discover, understand and experience their Best Self"?

On December 5, 2018, Waymo LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., launched the United States' first commercial driverless-car ride-hailing service (Waymo One), based in Phoenix, Arizona. As with other ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, Waymo One riders downloaded an app onto their smartphones that allowed them to request pick-up and drop-off points. At launch, Waymo One was limited to an area of roughly 100 square miles, but few doubted that the service would soon be extended to more geographies. When asked where it would be launched next, CEO John Krafcik commented, "We're going to grow and be paced by the level of safety that the technology provides in each of the environments that we serve." Just how fast that pace would be was driven by a whole host of regulatory, technological, and competitive uncertainties. There was also the question of the ultimate role Waymo might play in the autonomous vehicle world. What should Waymo be aiming for?

According to many analysts and industry observes, in 2018 Amazon became the largest retailer of apparel in the United States and the second largest in the world, behind Alibaba. Much of Amazon's apparel was made by third party retailers on its platform, but Amazon had been working to build its own fashion retail skills for more than 15 years, and had made a number of acquisitions to this end. Having failed to convince leading brands to sell on Amazon, the company had also launched several private label lines to boost its presence in fashion apparel. However, in 2017, it had finally convinced leading brand Nike to sell direct on its platform. President of Amazon Fashion since June 2017, Christine M. Beauchamp (Harvard Business School MBA, 1997) was contemplating next steps. Meanwhile, leading online and fast-fashion specialists such as ASOS in the UK and Inditex in Spain did not appear to have much to be concerned about. However, many traditional fashion retailers, struggling to build effective multi-channels strategies, were facing slow growth and pressure on margins. Would 2018 mark the beginning of the demise of traditional fashion retailing? What role would the bricks and mortar channel in fashion retailing play in the future? What might the future look like for the fashion industry? And what role might Amazon play in it?

Electric cars had long been championed by environmentalists as a superior solution to the internal combustion engine (ICE), but, despite large government incentives and strong pioneering efforts by a few automakers over the years, electric and hybrid cars and light trucks still accounted for less than 1% of total global production in 2016. However, events took a turn in 2017 and 2018, when many governments committed to banning ICE vehicles. In response, leading automakers announced plans to launch hundreds of electric vehicle models within five years. Early pioneer Tesla, which, in 2017, had built a stock market valuation exceeding that of General Motors (GM), despite only delivering 103,000 cars compared to GM's 9.0 million, looked as if it were about to be engulfed by this new competition. But not all were convinced that electric cars would soon displace conventional ICE vehicles. It was not clear that the infrastructure was in place to charge all these electric vehicles. There were also questions concerning the electrical generating capacity to meet the new demand. Would battery prices fall enough to make mass-market demand a possibility? In low gasoline cost jurisdictions, such as the United States, the economics of owning an electric vehicle didn't appear justified, unless subsidies were maintained indefinitely. In Europe, where gasoline taxes were high, the case for electric vehicles was stronger. But European governments depended on those taxes to meet their budget needs. Would a significant uptake of electric vehicles necessitate higher taxes on electricity? In 2018, electric cars were an expensive novelty for the rich subsidized by the poor. Would the sudden rush of new models change the balance?

Founded at the end of 1999 by Juliet Davenport and Martin Edwards, Good Energy was the number-two renewable-energy seller in the United Kingdom at the end of 2016, supplying over 71,000 of the country's 27 million households and small businesses with 100% renewable electricity and over 44,000 with gas. It also provided administrative support for over 133,000 mostly domestic solar generators selling surplus energy to the grid. Its wind and solar farms generated enough electricity for 20,000 homes. Revenues of £90 million had grown at an average of 33% over the previous five years, while operating profits of £6.0 million had grown at 27%. However, all was not good at Good Energy. A commitment in 2015 to grow to 900,000 customers by 2020 was revised in 2016 to a target of "sustainable profit growth and enhanced customer service." Moreover, the long-term goal of generating 50% of energy sold was abandoned in favor of sourcing more from third parties. Part of the challenge appeared to be the entry of many new renewable-energy suppliers that offered tariffs 20% to 30% below Good Energy's tariffs. But CEO Juliet Davenport faced other challenges. A hostile government was threatening to cap energy rates and reduce renewable subsidies. Meanwhile, Dale Vince, the CEO of Ecotricity, the number-one green-energy supplier in the United Kingdom and Good Energy's biggest shareholder, was trying to claim two seats on the board. How was Davenport going to navigate through these challenges and maintain Good Energy's success?

At the end of 2017 First Utility Ltd. was the largest of the middle-tier domestic energy suppliers in the United Kingdom, serving 808,000 of the country's 27 million households with electricity and gas. In Q1 2017 First Utility captured 3% market share. The company had grown rapidly from 2011 to 2014, doubling in size each year, and CEO Ian McCaig had signaled that he was considering an IPO. However, in 2015 growth slowed, and profits fell by 84%. The same year, the company began expanding into Germany and Poland and building its own billing system. Growth slowed further in early 2016, and First Utility recorded a loss of £12.7 million for the year. Plans for an IPO were shelved. Instead, the company began looking for strategic partnerships to offer new products and services to its UK customer base. Whether First Utility's new geographies and product lines would revive growth was unclear. Meanwhile, in May 2017, CEO McCaig announced that he would step down in September. In December 2017, the company announced that Royal Dutch Shell would acquire First Utility for an undisclosed sum. The deal was approved in February 2018, and First Utility was rolled into Shell's New Energies division.

This case describes the history of the United Kingdom's domestic energy industry and the country's efforts to create a more competitive, greener, and distributed power sector. On July 24, 2017, the United Kingdom government and the industry regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), published a report listing 29 actions to be taken to "remove barriers to smart technologies," "enable smart homes and businesses," and "improve access to energy markets for new technologies and business models." The report promised yet more disruption for the 60 suppliers who provided energy for the UK's 27.1 million households. How welcome the proposals would be to the players in the industry was not clear. The "Big Six" vertically-integrated generators and retailers, which accounted for more than 80% of the market, were facing declining sales and market share in the face of a huge number of new entrants: 30 in the last three years alone. The recent threat of a price cap on bills-or even a government take-over-did little to encourage further investment. Meanwhile, a group of six mid-tier challengers, accounting for 12% of the market, had grown big enough to be burdened with the many social and environmental charges faced by the Big Six and their growth had slowed. Several of them were now diversifying into other service offerings such as broadband or homeowner's insurance, or were looking for opportunities overseas. Then there were more than 50 small players, mostly recent entrants. While many were growing fast, often using their customers' deposits to fund growth, they were not profitable and had limited capacity for investment in "smarter energy." Meanwhile, the UK government was keen to encourage players such as Google and Amazon into the market to drive disruption. Just how quickly the UK energy market would get smarter remained to be seen.

On August 21, 2015, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, co-founders of Bulb Ltd. (Bulb) launched a new business to supply energy to the United Kingdom's 27 million residential homes with a promise of 100% renewable electricity at affordable prices. By the end of March 2017, Bulb had grown to supply 29,311 properties, well ahead of its Launch Plan of 23,166 and beyond the point of breakeven. It had been a slow start, and growth had been volatile, reaching a rate of over 3,000 new members per week at one point, putting severe strains on service levels. Moreover, Gudka and Wood had been forced to change many aspects of their plan and defer launching value-added services to help customers reduce energy consumption and create Bulb's vision of distributed generation. Now, the company was generating profits; enough to grow, but not at the level of the original plan, and there would be nothing left to invest in value-added services. Should the founders scale back on their growth ambitions and delay adding services until they had reached the scale to support them? Or should they seek more funding and accelerate growth?

In late August 2015, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, co-founders of Bulb, Ltd (Bulb), were ready to offer affordable renewable energy to the United Kingdom's 27 million households. They hoped to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of customers switching their energy provider each month, by promising excellent customer service, a simple, low-priced tariff, 100%-renewable electricity, and services to reduce energy consumption. At the time, there were only about 250,000 households on renewable tariffs, typically paying a high price for the privilege. Gudka and Wood were convinced that many more households would opt for renewable energy and turn it into a mainstream product if prices were more reasonable. Their goal was to sign up more than 23,000 properties by March 31, 2017 to reach breakeven, and then grow to more than 69,000 properties by March 31, 2021, by capturing 0.5% of all households who switched during the year. They aimed for £31 in operating profit per household for the year ended March 31, 2021. They had given up high-paying jobs to create Bulb and invested 18 months and £250,000 of their own money in the venture. They had also persuaded angel investors to invest £1 million to fund growth. On Friday August 21, 2015, Gudka and Wood sent out a batch of 1,400 emails to friends and family, encouraging them to switch to Bulb. How many would sign up?

After a wild and volatile year, Bulb, a new entrant in the UK residential energy market, ended March 2018 with 329,171 properties, 1.2% of the total residential energy market). This was 150% ahead of a plan for 130,000 properties and almost ten times the size the founders, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, had imagined in August 2015 when they first launched. Bulb was now one of the top 12 energy suppliers in the UK. Gudka and Wood were convinced that if they reinvested all their profits in growth, they would reach 500,000 properties by March 2019, and reach more than 1 million by March 2021. This would mean postponing the launch of a range of value-added services they had included in their original Launch Plan, but it could make Bulb number 7 in the industry and the first real challenger to the UK's "Big Six" leading energy suppliers to pass the one million-member mark. Even so, Bulb would still be less than 40% of the size of the smallest member of the Big Six and one sixth the size of the leader, British Gas. Was it time to seek more funding to really challenge the Big Six, making renewable energy mainstream? And did it make sense to delay value-added services to support energy conservation, distributed generation, and the switch to electric vehicles, or should they seek funding to support these initiatives too?

In early 2019, The Progressive Corporation (Progressive), the USA's third-largest auto insurance writer, reported earned premiums were up 20% in 2018 compared to the previous year, and net income was up 64%. Direct sales of personal auto policies rose 21%, while agent sales, which had, until recently been slowing, grew 16%. Homeowner policies were up 30% on a small base. For CEO Tricia Griffith, appointed on July 1, 2016, this was a clear indicator that her commitment to accelerating growth was bearing fruit. In the ten years from 2005 to 2015, Progressive's earned premiums had grown at 4% per year. They then grew 13% in 2016, 15% in 2017, and 20% in 2018. In 2018, Progressive captured 10% of the auto insurance business in the USA. Griffith commented that Progressive was in 10% of U.S. homes and would double that "in short order." This would make it larger than 2018 industry leader, State Farm. But the auto insurance business was plagued with hundreds of competitors and had historically been very cyclical. Would Griffith's strategy be enough to sustain double digit growth? The markets seemed convinced; in July 2019, Progressive's stock price had almost doubled in two years.

In 2018, Inditex, based in Spain, was the largest specialist fashion retailer in the world, generating sales of $31.5 billion in 2017 from a portfolio of eight retail brands selling through a total of 7,475 stores located in 96 countries and from websites in 49 countries. Its largest brand, Zara, generated sales of $20.8 billion and operated 2,118 stores. Since its IPO in 2001, Inditex had grown sales an average of 14.3% per year and net profits by 16.3% per year, adding over 6,000 stores in the process, and its stock had significantly outpaced the FTSE 100. While many fashion retailers were retreating in the face of weak demand and competition from online retailers, Inditex grew like-for-like sales for the year in all concepts and geographies. Online sales were up 41% year-on-year, reaching 10% of total sales. For several years, the company had been slowing the growth in retail space and investing in large flagship stores to support its online business. Significantly, in late 2016 Inditex closed four small Zara shops in the company's hometown of La Coruña and opened a 54,000-square-foot store in its place. Indeed, in the last quarter of 2017, the net number of store additions turned negative for the first time. Meanwhile, online fashion specialists such as U.K.-based ASOS were growing rapidly, adding thousands of styles a week to their websites and providing thousands of pick-up and drop-off points (PUDOs) at local retail locations around the world to support their online sales. And then there was the threat of Amazon, which had been pushing into online fashion for over a decade. Was Inditex chairman and CEO Pablo Isla doing enough to turn the online threat into an opportunity?

Tencent had undergone many transformations since it was founded in 1998 as a simple messaging service. In 2017, it was the largest online games provider in China with a wide range of game types, China's largest social networking service provider with several of the largest social networking applications in the world, and China's favorite Internet portal. It was challenging Alibaba's Alipay as the leader in online payments systems, and it had established strategic relationships with many service providers to help exploit new opportunities in online-to-offline (O2O) services and leverage its huge user base in e-commerce and search. However, there was no room for complacency. Competition from the other big local Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba was fierce, and there were always thousands of start-ups looking to enter the sector. Founder and CEO Ma Huateng ("Pony" Ma) remarked, "In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China-execution is."