Senaca East Africa, aka Sentry & Patrols, is a Kenya-based security guard firm founded in 2002 by John Kipkorir, a longtime member of the Kenyan police. At the time, there were only a few well-known Kenyan-owned security companies, and crime was rising. After some early stumbles, Sentry & Patrols grew rapidly and John's wife and daughters joined the business. Part A of this case details the family's early struggles to grow their operation, develop expertise and define their roles in the business. It follows the first eight years in operation, during which John's wife and eldest daughter became full-time employees. It traces their journey up to the point that Sentry & Patrols was approached by a European firm about a merger. The tie-up prospect offered risk and reward. By that time, Sentry & Patrols had become one of the best-known guard firms in East Africa, with more than 1,000 workers. But cash flow was tight, clients were slow to pay, and the company was struggling to expand. This case examines the challenges of defining roles in a family business and setting up effective governance structures. Case A ends with the family mulling the merger offer. Part B of this case details what happened after the family agreed to the merger and changed the company name to Senaca. Initially, the tie-up brought benefits. The company grew to 1,500 guards and landed contracts with universities, hotels and companies such as Nokia. The business diversified, expanded to Uganda, started a guard training school, and launched a technology arm. The company invested in equipment such as cameras, body scanners, security gates and electrical fencing for their new clients. However, this period presented the Kipkorirs with many challenges. John Kipkorir's other daughters became involved with the company, but over time, their decision-making power was eroded by their European partners, and the business nose-dived. This part of the case challenges students to think about family business struc

Senaca East Africa, aka Sentry & Patrols, is a Kenya-based security guard firm founded in 2002 by John Kipkorir, a longtime member of the Kenyan police. At the time, there were only a few well-known Kenyan-owned security companies, and crime was rising. After some early stumbles, Sentry & Patrols grew rapidly and John's wife and daughters joined the business. Part A of this case details the family's early struggles to grow their operation, develop expertise and define their roles in the business. It follows the first eight years in operation, during which John's wife and eldest daughter became full-time employees. It traces their journey up to the point that Sentry & Patrols was approached by a European firm about a merger. The tie-up prospect offered risk and reward. By that time, Sentry & Patrols had become one of the best-known guard firms in East Africa, with more than 1,000 workers. But cash flow was tight, clients were slow to pay, and the company was struggling to expand. This case examines the challenges of defining roles in a family business and setting up effective governance structures. Case A ends with the family mulling the merger offer. Part B of this case details what happened after the family agreed to the merger and changed the company name to Senaca. Initially, the tie-up brought benefits. The company grew to 1,500 guards and landed contracts with universities, hotels and companies such as Nokia. The business diversified, expanded to Uganda, started a guard training school, and launched a technology arm. The company invested in equipment such as cameras, body scanners, security gates and electrical fencing for their new clients. However, this period presented the Kipkorirs with many challenges. John Kipkorir's other daughters became involved with the company, but over time, their decision-making power was eroded by their European partners, and the business nose-dived. This part of the case challenges students to think about family business struc

Senaca East Africa, aka Sentry & Patrols, is a Kenya-based security guard firm founded in 2002 by John Kipkorir, a longtime member of the Kenyan police. At the time, there were only a few well-known Kenyan-owned security companies, and crime was rising. After some early stumbles, Sentry & Patrols grew rapidly and John's wife and daughters joined the business. Part A of this case details the family's early struggles to grow their operation, develop expertise and define their roles in the business. It follows the first eight years in operation, during which John's wife and eldest daughter became full-time employees. It traces their journey up to the point that Sentry & Patrols was approached by a European firm about a merger. The tie-up prospect offered risk and reward. By that time, Sentry & Patrols had become one of the best-known guard firms in East Africa, with more than 1,000 workers. But cash flow was tight, clients were slow to pay, and the company was struggling to expand. This case examines the challenges of defining roles in a family business and setting up effective governance structures. Case A ends with the family mulling the merger offer. Part B of this case details what happened after the family agreed to the merger and changed the company name to Senaca. Initially, the tie-up brought benefits. The company grew to 1,500 guards and landed contracts with universities, hotels and companies such as Nokia. The business diversified, expanded to Uganda, started a guard training school, and launched a technology arm. The company invested in equipment such as cameras, body scanners, security gates and electrical fencing for their new clients. However, this period presented the Kipkorirs with many challenges. John Kipkorir's other daughters became involved with the company, but over time, their decision-making power was eroded by their European partners, and the business nose-dived. This part of the case challenges students to think about family business struc

This case describes the founding and evolution of Oak Street Health, a primary care provider operating in the "value-based" health care space, focused on Medicare patients in the United States. This case introduces students to value-based health care in the United States, in which providers assume full risk for the overall cost of patient care under a system of capitated payments, and contrasts it with traditional fee-for-service health care. Oak Street Health was focused on a resource-intensive model of primary care clinics in more than 20 states, primarily serving low-income seniors. The company had grown rapidly since 2013 and had an IPO in 2020. However, the company was facing increasing competition from large players as health care groups like CVS became more vertically integrated and tech companies like Amazon expressed interest in the industry. This poses strategic questions for Oak Street on how fast to continue growing and what next steps to take, and how to deal with competition while driving toward profitability in a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Paul Markovich felt that a time bomb was ticking inside his industry. Each year, the cost of healthcare was rising steadily, while incomes were only inching upward. In 2018, the median income for a family of four in the United States was $65,000. His company's most popular health insurance product for such a family? A package that would cost them $16,000 a year -- a whopping 26 percent of their gross pre-tax income. That was almost three times the cost of such a plan in 1999. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where Blue Shield of California (BSC) was headquartered, the situation was even worse. "If you have a Silicon Valley engineer, it would cost the company more to pay for the health benefits of that engineer [in the United States] than to hire one in India for a year," said Markovich, the CEO of BSC. The problem with insurance companies, Markovich thought, was not out-of-control administrative expenses or fat profit margins. For every dollar that Blue Shield of California customers paid, 87 cents went to pay directly for health care costs, taxes and fees. And as one of the largest not-for-profit health care insurers in the United States, Blue Shield of California capped its profits at just 2 percent per year. "Just being more efficient as an insurance plan is not going to solve the affordability crisis," Markovich believed. "Even if we eliminated our profit and our administrative costs, that would only buy us three years [before costs caught up again]." Something much more fundamental needed to change, Markovich reasoned. Insurers like Blue Shield of California needed to reimagine their role. No longer could they simply define themselves as middlemen who tried to bring together tens of thousands of scattered physicians, hospitals and pharmacies into a network, and make arrangements for treatment and payments.

This case traces the journey of Juan Pablo Zorrilla and Javier Velasquez as they conceive the idea for a debt-settlement business in Mexico, develop the business, and expand it to Colombia, Argentina and Spain. Zorrilla and Velasquez modeled Resuelve (Spanish for "resolve") after Freedom Financial Network, an American debt-settlement business founded by two of their fellow Stanford University alumni. The case examines issues including early fundraising challenges, gaining traction, regulation, bringing on new investors as the business grew, and expanding into international markets. Resuelve was founded in 2009 and by 2017 had grown to more than 1,000 employees and 150,000+ clients. Annual revenues topped $37 million.

This case follows Silicon Valley software veteran Thomas Siebel as he launches a new company, C3, in 2009, and steers it through two major pivots - transforming the business from a firm focused on energy conservation to a data management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence platform for large enterprises. The case looks at the multiple business transformations and re-brandings C3 went through and examines the strategic challenges the company was facing in 2018 as it began to compete head-to-head with companies such as IBM and SAP. In 2009, three years after selling his eponymous enterprise software company Siebel Systems to Oracle for nearly $6 billion, Siebel launched a new business, C3. "C" stood for carbon, and the "3" was shorthand for three "M" words: measure, mitigate and monetize. The idea was to help large companies navigate the new world of carbon taxes and reduce their carbon footprints. But after just two years, C3 was in trouble. It had found clients for its software product, C3 Energy Management, yet oil prices had stumbled, and in wake of the financial crisis, companies pulled back on spending. Siebel was no going to give up. He saw great potential in the data flowing from sensors in smart meters, turbines, transformers and other infrastructure in power grids. In 2012, he laid off about 100 of C3's 150 employees, retaining the core engineering team. The company renamed itself C3 Energy and helped grid operators aggregate and analyze data from various sensor devices and enterprise software systems. C3 Energy's engine processed data at very high rates, then applied machine learning to do useful things, such as predictive maintenance, detecting theft, and monitoring sensor network health.

Stephen Pratt and Raj Joshi - two veterans of Infosys Consulting - decided in 2016 to launch Noodle Analytics (Noodle.ai) to provide AI capabilities to Fortune 1000 type companies under a SaaS-type business model. The case traces Noodle Analytics from conception through funding, finding product-market fit, and its Series B raise in 2018, looking at issues of strategy, recruiting, business model, developing the product, corporate culture and the larger industry context. As they launched their business in 2016, Artificial Intelligence had moved out of the realm of sci-fi movies and into the mainstream: Technologies like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa brought speech-recognition to mainstream consumers. Driverless cars were being tested on roads in California and elsewhere. Customer-service chatbots - computer programs designed to simulate conversations with human users - regularly interacted with humans on the web, and Google's AlphaGo computer had bested a human world champion in the ancient strategy game of Go. Increasingly, executives were under pressure to incorporate AI into their businesses. An article in the Harvard Business Review warned ominously: "Unlike with the internet, where latecomers often bested those who were first to market, the companies that get started immediately with machine intelligence could enjoy a lasting advantage." A shortage of AI experts and expertise, though, left many enterprises wondering how. Noodle aimed to serve them.

Long before Spotify had become a household name, and when Netflix was still mailing off DVDs to customers' homes, Tien Tzuo had foreseen a major transformation in the business world: from one-off sales to subscription business models. He realized that no one was making billing software to serve the complex needs of such companies, so he founded Zuora in 2007 to automate billing, commerce, and finance operations for companies built on a recurring revenue model. Initially, Zuora catered mostly to start-ups, but the world rapidly evolved. By 2017 its customers included companies such as Box, the Financial Times, Ford, GM, GE, Caterpillar, and Zendesk. In 2016, Zuora had crossed a major threshold: $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2017, Tzuo could see that Zuora was positioned to hit $300 million, and before then, he believed he would take Zuora public. The company was growing rapidly, and Tzuo had begun that he needed to approach this next phase of scaling more deliberately than he had with Zuora's early growth. "A company that is going from $100 million to $300 million has to be different than a company going from $30 million to $100 million," said Tzuo. "That $30 million to $100 million was a sprint; making the transition from $30 million, we were not so thoughtful. I wanted to be more thoughtful this time." In 2014, Tzuo had identified four major areas in which the company needed to transform: sales, finance, products, and people. Tzuo knew the transformation plan meant he would have to make a wave of leadership changes, managing hirings and terminations. And he would have to change his own leadership style to match the company's increasing size. Meanwhile, he had to think strategically about how Zuora could fend off challenges both from software behemoths like Salesforce.com and Oracle, and nimble upstarts. To successfully IPO, and satisfy investors over the long term, Tzuo knew that Zuora had to deliver consistency and predictability.

By 2015, MongoDB was seven years old and a so-called "unicorn," a startup valued at more than $1 billion. MongoDB's open-source software had been downloaded about 9 million times, and the company seemed to have the potential to disrupt the $45 billion database market. Dev Ittycheria had taken over as CEO in September 2014. An IPO was on the horizon, but MongoDB needed to get its business in position. He brought on Meagen Eisenberg as CMO in March 2015. After a few weeks getting under the hood of the operation, Eisenberg had a long to-do list. The website was ugly; SEO and SEM didn't exist; the social media strategy was muddled. The company didn't have a good system for predicting how many sales leads it needed, or how to score and prioritize the leads it did get. Eisenberg had inherited incomplete historical data on conversion rates. Before she could outline her strategy in any detail, she'd have to settle on a fundamental question: How many qualified sales leads did she and her staff need to bring in this year, so that the still-unprofitable company could close enough deals and hit its revenue targets?

In the #MeToo era, allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct pose difficult issues for employers, particularly when allegations surface about incidents that occurred prior to an employee's term at the company. This case, fictionalized but based on real events, centers on the challenge that the founder of a biotech company faces when he receives an email alleging that a new employee (male) raped an acquaintance prior to joining his firm. This case brings up questions of how to deal with the person lodging the allegation, the employee concerned, other employees who become aware of the allegation, police, human resources and legal players.

Supplement to case SM299A. In the #MeToo era, allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct pose difficult issues for employers, particularly when allegations surface about incidents that occurred prior to an employee's term at the company. This case, fictionalized but based on real events, centers on the challenge that the founder of a biotech company faces when he receives an email alleging that a new employee (male) raped an acquaintance prior to joining his firm. This case brings up questions of how to deal with the person lodging the allegation, the employee concerned, other employees who become aware of the allegation, police, human resources and legal players.

Supplement to case SM299A. In the #MeToo era, allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct pose difficult issues for employers, particularly when allegations surface about incidents that occurred prior to an employee's term at the company. This case, fictionalized but based on real events, centers on the challenge that the founder of a biotech company faces when he receives an email alleging that a new employee (male) raped an acquaintance prior to joining his firm. This case brings up questions of how to deal with the person lodging the allegation, the employee concerned, other employees who become aware of the allegation, police, human resources and legal players.

Supplement to case SM299A. In the #MeToo era, allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct pose difficult issues for employers, particularly when allegations surface about incidents that occurred prior to an employee's term at the company. This case, fictionalized but based on real events, centers on the challenge that the founder of a biotech company faces when he receives an email alleging that a new employee (male) raped an acquaintance prior to joining his firm. This case brings up questions of how to deal with the person lodging the allegation, the employee concerned, other employees who become aware of the allegation, police, human resources and legal players.

Clover Network's founders didn't see the curveball coming at the end of 2012. The two-year-old start-up had just nine employees. It had dumped its first business idea, pivoted from its second, and was working hard on a new product: a tablet-based cash register with built-in credit card processing. Large credit card payment processing companies had started noticing Clover and one had just agreed to pre-order $2 million of Clover hardware. It was Clover's first such deal. But around Thanksgiving, Clover learned that First Data-the card processing industry's 800-pound gorilla-also was interested in Clover's technology. If it could bring First Data on as a customer, Clover would have a pipeline to a huge number of retailers. In early December, one of Clover's founders received a 2½-page letter from First Data. He had expected a proposal to buy and distribute Clover equipment, maybe with a small equity investment. Instead, First Data said it wanted to acquire "no less than 75 percent" of Clover, and close the deal by December 31. Was it time to sell Clover? The case highlights how a start-up decides to respond to an unexpected buyout offer and how it proposes to structure the deal.

Clover Network's founders didn't see the curveball coming at the end of 2012. The two-year-old start-up had just nine employees. It had dumped its first business idea, pivoted from its second, and was working hard on a new product: a tablet-based cash register with built-in credit card processing. Large credit card payment processing companies had started noticing Clover and one had just agreed to pre-order $2 million of Clover hardware. It was Clover's first such deal. But around Thanksgiving, Clover learned that First Data-the card processing industry's 800-pound gorilla-also was interested in Clover's technology. If it could bring First Data on as a customer, Clover would have a pipeline to a huge number of retailers. In early December, one of Clover's founders received a 2½-page letter from First Data. He had expected a proposal to buy and distribute Clover equipment, maybe with a small equity investment. Instead, First Data said it wanted to acquire "no less than 75 percent" of Clover, and close the deal by December 31. Was it time to sell Clover? The case highlights how a start-up decides to respond to an unexpected buyout offer and how it proposes to structure the deal.

By almost any measure, Charles Schwab Corp. appeared to be killing it in 2017. The wealth management, banking, custody and brokerage firm's stock was trading near its all-time high. It was posting unprecedented levels of new client accounts, net new client assets, revenues and profits and had a record $3.12 trillion in client assets under management. Schwab was taking customers and assets from old-line wire houses like Morgan Stanley, while fending off challenges from young Fintech upstarts by being a fast follower. Despite its relatively large size, Schwab saw itself as a disruptor. Schwab was attracting more net new assets than any other publicly traded full-service investment firm and its operating costs were lower than competitors like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Still, there was no doubt that challenges loomed on the horizon. For example, how could Schwab maintain or improve trust in an era of intense cyber-threats and increasingly sophisticated technology that some consumers found invasive or even creepy? Were its products elegant and simple enough? In the era of Uber and Amazon, customers' expectations were rising. And what if a big tech company like Google or Amazon started to move onto Schwab's turf? Key to staying ahead, CEO Walt Bettinger felt, was maintaining a laser focus on the customer, and being willing to cannibalize Schwab itself to find new growth. Schwab, he thought, had repeatedly proved its willingness to do so over the previous four decades, most recently by introducing a robo-advising product. "Disruption occurs when someone listens more carefully to customers, or better anticipates what customers might want before they even realize it themselves. Most companies are disrupted because they lack the will and courage to disrupt themselves first," Bettinger said. Could Schwab stay vigilant and keep up that courage? Or was it already being disrupted and didn't realize it?

Since the 1990s, the distinction between the pharmaceutical industry and the biotech industry has blurred, creating what we can now call the biopharmaceutical industry. How and why did this happen, and where is the industry going now? Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies worked with plant- and chemical-based compounds, manufacturing drugs through chemical synthesis. Biotech companies, in contrast, sprung up starting in the 1970s and 1980s, when scientists began working on developing therapies manufactured in or extracted from living organisms such as bacteria, yeast, and mammalian and plant cells. These therapies, known as biologics, have been described as one of the "most sophisticated and elegant achievements of modern science," offering powerful therapeutic options for many diseases where previously no treatments, or only treatments of limited efficacy, were available. Biologics have included innovative therapies in rheumatology, cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, oncology, endocrinology, and other medical fields. In 2016, seven of the top ten best-selling drugs in the world were biologics. This note describes the biopharmaceutical industry, encompassing both older, larger "pharma" companies such as Pfizer, Merck, Roche or GSK, and younger biotech companies. It looks at the difference between traditional pharmaceuticals and biologics, the drug approval process, R&D, intellectual property issues, financial issues including fundraising, regulatory issues, and ethical issues.