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?

Stride was founded in April 2016 and offered a software that gathered data from disparate sources and organized such data in one platform with a simple interface, with the goal of enabling marketing teams to more easily develop and launch personalized marketing campaigns. Elise Bergeron, the start-up's cofounder and Chief Operating Officer, had been confronted with multiple difficult decisions since the early days of the company. Some of the most pivotal of those decisions involved the sales aspect of the business. First, she and her cofounders needed to figure out what should be the company's target market. One potential approach involved evaluating the benefits and challenges presented by small, mid-sized and large. It was not uncommon for start-ups to first focus on small customers and gradually seek larger ones, as it expanded its product's feature sets, but Bergeron and her cofounders were not sure such approach would be the best for Stride. Alternatively, they could choose based on a use case standpoint: marketing teams in B2B and B2C companies had different needs for the product - should Stride focus on one or the other as its target market? Bergeron was not convinced. Second, Stride's leadership needed to define its sales model. At the product's price point, direct sales seemed to be a necessity. But how about the indirect channels? Bergeron was doubtful about the benefits of relying on third party platforms - such as Salesforce - or system integrators at such an early stage of the start-up's journey. The answer was not obvious, however. As of the second half of 2017, Stride's sales cycle had finally developed some patterns and its cofounders felt increasingly confident about their sales choices. Unexpectedly, however, an opportunity that could take the incipient business to the next level appeared.

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.