In May 2012, a young employee at Google's London office, Markus Berger, was thinking whether he should quit his job and go after his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Berger's idea was to create Dinr, a company that would offer an upscale food ingredient delivery service in London. A customer would choose a recipe on Dinr's website and would receive all premeasured ingredients the same evening at their doorstep. Contrary to many existing similar companies, Dinr would not require a weekly subscription, but would provide one-off orders like other traditional food delivery services. Berger had already carried out an alpha-test of the service and completed an in-depth survey of potential customers to explore the market. Most of the feedback was positive, which confirmed Berger's intuition about this market opportunity. Berger had found a more experienced co-founder with technical expertise who was willing to join Dinr part time and gathered £40,000 of initial capital. Yet, making the decision to leave his corporate job and become an entrepreneur was not easy: was Dinr a good business opportunity? Would it be attractive to outside investors? What were the risks involved?
An in-house venture capital fund for affordable private schools at the base of the pyramid established by Pearson, the world's largest education company, PALF sought to invest in business models providing superior educational outcomes in emerging markets on a profitable and scalable basis. With Pearson's overall strategy shifting from the developed to the developing world and from a supplier of books to a host of other learning products and services, the company thought PALF's lessons might be applicable to Pearson's core businesses. By 2014, Katelyn Donnelly, the Managing Director of PALF, and her team had made seven investments in Africa and Asia and were close to fully committing the $15 million earmarked for the initiative. In the upcoming meeting of PALF's Investment Committee, Donnelly must present a recommendation: should Pearson allocate more internal money to the fund or should they open it up to third party investors?
In 2014, Chiara Ferragni, a globe-trotting founder of the world's most popular fashion blog The Blonde Salad, and Riccardo Pozzoli, her co-founder and business partner, had to decide how to best monetize her blog as well as her shoe line called the "Chiara Ferragni Collection". A year earlier, Ferragni and Pozzoli had already made a decision to transform her blog into an online lifestyle magazine and to build its positioning as a high-end brand. It meant that The Blonde Salad envisaged to only cooperate with a limited number of luxury fashion advertisers, inevitably reducing the blog's revenues. Ferragni and Pozzoli considered changing the revenue-generating model by incorporating an online market place within The Blonde Salad, but which strategy and timeline would she need to achieve her aim? Should Ferragni's shoe line, a separate company with a different ownership structure, be merged with The Blonde Salad or was it desirable to keep the two apart?