Jason Scott's superpower had always been his ability to connect people and ideas across industries, sectors, and geographies. After graduating from Stanford GSB, he pursued his professional North Star of finding the best entrepreneurs in the world and providing value to them as an investor at Highland Capital. After two years at Highland, Scott moved into a startup ecosystem developer role at Google. Using the resources and scale of one of the world's largest companies, Scott was eager to continue providing support to entrepreneurs across the globe. What shape would that take?

Kiah Williams started SIRUM as a Stanford undergraduate alongside her classmates Adam Kircher and George Wang. Nearly two decades later, the medication donation nonprofit was now operating in five states across the country and had helped facilitate medication donations to reach 150,000 uninsured and underinsured patients. SIRUM's technology enabled donors with excess medication supply to donate unexpired, sealed, non-opioid medications to those who needed it most. SIRUM had been largely funded by philanthropic sources and had secured funding through 2025. Williams was now pondering different growth paths for the nonprofit. SIRUM could attempt to grow quickly by expanding into new states or offering a wider range of medications. It could pressure test its pricing model. Or it could build new lines of business related to data, reporting, and compliance. The growth path was unclear. Williams wanted to demonstrate that SIRUM could be a model for social enterprises to succeed and achieve both deep impact and long-term financial stability. How should she build SIRUM's growth strategy?

Monifa Porter was in the process of building a product that could work her and her team out of a job. As head of 2401, a subdivision of the corporate innovation and growth company Mach49, Porter was building a technology product that would assist corporations as they designed, built, and scaled new ventures within their existing organization. In late 2022, Porter's team released a minimum viable product of 2401, and was now in the process of designing a product feedback and enhancement cycle that would hopefully turn 2401 into a major revenue stream for Mach49. To do so, Porter would need to run her team with discipline, all while weighing important questions about whether the innovation process could be automated and if so, what implications that had for her team of product managers.

Tesh Mbaabu started MarketForce to help bring technology to the thousands of Kenyan merchants who ran corner shops that were often a centerpiece of their communities. MarketForce began as an inventory ordering platform for merchants, but has quickly evolved into a comprehensive operating system that merchants can use to unlock new revenue streams and grow their businesses. The team has expanded from Kenya into four new African countries and hopes to be in 15 countries by 2025. In this case, Mbaabu and the MarketForce team are faced with a number of critical decisions: how to build a product expansion strategy through geographic expansion and mergers and acquisitions, and how to scale the company's culture across new markets and countries.

Charles Holloway, founder of Stanford's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, shares his reflections and learnings on entrepreneurship in this teaching note. Designed to be a hands-on tool for aspiring entrepreneurs, this playbook will frame key questions and provide frameworks to assist in building new ventures.

Eve Burton founded HearstLab in 2015 to support female entrepreneurs and cultivate a new entrepreneurial mindset within Hearst Corporation. Since the Lab's inception in 2015, the Lab team had reviewed over 6,000 companies and made investments in 48 of them, deploying nearly $50 million of capital. Now Burton was ready to take the Lab to the next level with "Lab 2.0" and "Lab 3.0." In each of these phases, the Lab would write bigger checks and look for ways to integrate female-founded startups into the fabric of existing Hearst businesses. In doing so, Burton hoped to solidify her legacy as a leader who relentlessly supported women entrepreneurs.

Ascend Behavior Partners provided applied behavioral analysis (ABA) services to families with children with autism. The growing autism services market presented a massive opportunity for Ascend to provide quality care to families in need. Ascend's delivery model relied on board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs), who were the backbone of providing care to families with children with autism. But the severe imbalance between supply and demand for these critical skills posed a challenge for companies like Ascend looking to hire qualified BCBAs. After struggling with its BCBA offer acceptance rate, Ascend made a counter-intuitive decision in December 2018 and altered its BCBA hiring process to make it substantially more challenging and time-consuming. The new process was designed to give applicants a chance to experience Ascend's culture in a more meaningful way throughout the hiring process. The epicenter of the revamped hiring process was an in-person, full-day interview, where applicants spoke with a range of employees across the company. Almost immediately after implementing the change, Ascend saw its offer acceptance rate spike from 50 percent to 90 percent. This case discusses how to create a hiring process that accurately conveys the culture of a company.

George Kurtz founded CrowdStrike in 2011 to bring next-generation cybersecurity products to the marketplace. CrowdStrike used artificial intelligence to train its detection agent on evolving threats. This approach was revolutionary in an industry that had previously been fighting against previously detected and catalogued threats. CrowdStrike grew quickly, with impressive financial metrics. The company went public in 2019, and continued to evolve its suite of product offerings. CrowdStrike also found itself in the middle of a few high-profile breaches, first at the Democratic National Committee, and in the Solar Winds hack. The severity of those attacks underscored CrowdStrike's thesis: cybersecurity would impact every person at every company in every industry. To be able to reach its aspirations, CrowdStrike needed to build a company that could service customers and make it turnkey to use its services. Kurtz saw the opportunity in the industry, and he was eager to continue to capture his share of it.

After graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nicholas Heinrichsen and Christopher Coleman launched Carlypso, a peer-to-peer marketplace for selling used cars. Carlypso hoped to disrupt the $400 billion used car market by making it easier and more convenient for both sellers and buyers. However, Carlypso ran into difficulty trying to scale its operations, and pivoted to a reverse auction model, where Carlypso worked with leasing and rental companies to make the inventory that was selling at non-public auctions available to its customers. The new model showed some initial promise, but once again, scaling operations was a challenge. Carlypso worked with lenders who were lenders who were unable to finance subprime borrowers, which drastically reduced the size of the addressable market. After struggling to find product-market fit on their own, the founders of Carlypso sold the company to Carvana. After three years of working at Carvana, the pair is ready to try a new entrepreneurial endeavor.

Tayo Oviosu founded Paga in 2009 to make life possible for the millions of Nigerians who operated in a cash-first environment. Paga helped users send money through peer-to-peer transactions, pay utility bills, and store money in a digital wallet. Paga launched a valuable human agent network throughout Nigeria, which enabled the company to build trust with customers and grow its user base significantly. By November 2020, Paga had over 26,000 agents in its network. Oviosu hoped to build on Paga's success by scaling to other countries with similar regulatory and cultural environments to Nigeria, beginning with Ethiopia and Mexico. To do so, Oviosu understood that he would have to be intentional about building a team that both understood Paga's culture but was also authentic to the new market the company was trying to enter. Paga's goal of reaching one billion users globally loomed in the distance, and Oviosu was keen to do his part to help end cash's reign in emerging markets.