Raksul, 2018 Forbes Japan "Startup of the Year," ran an e-commerce platform drawing upon thousands of individual suppliers. Launched as a business-to-business printing services marketplace, Raksul had recently expanded to operate both a logistics/delivery marketplace and a television advertising marketplace. Each marketplace faces its own growth challenges; at the same time, the CEO must consider whether and how each marketplace can enhance the others.

In 2012, GREE was one of the world's most profitable mobile social gaming companies. Its success in Japan was due both to its in-house games and to the development platform that it offered to third-party game developers. Its biggest challenge was to replicate the success of this two-pronged strategy in international markets, where it had to contend not just with many other game developers (e.g. Zynga), but also with the mobile platform providers themselves (e.g. Apple's iOS and Google's Android).