Saudi Aramco launched an internal venture capital arm in 2011, which promptly became the world's largest investor in energy related startups. In choosing to proceed, the company's New Business Development unit (NPD) wrestled with a number of challenges. How should the fund be structured, as a fully independent, venture capital partnership or as a business unit? How should it be governed, and how should the investment committee function? Could mechanisms be developed that ensured the expertise of Saudi Aramco's famously conservative engineering resources could be harnessed in the investment process and its business units enlisted to work with portfolio companies? How could the fund be structured to reflect Saudi Aramco's role in modernizing the economy of Saudi Arabia? The case provides a vehicle for discussing the basics of corporate venture capital and the challenges large corporations face in participating in the world of startups. It also describes how certain industries, like energy, are poorly suited to the investment profile of traditional venture capitalists. The product development cycle is too long and the capital required to develop and test products too great for ordinary, general partnerships to sustain. The case also introduces interesting themes in the role of parastatals in contributing to national economic competitiveness.

Branded as the "Millennial firm for Millennials," Mike Rothenberg founded Rothenberg Ventures (RV) in 2012 while earning his MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Over the following twenty-four months, Rothenberg raised $20 million and built a venture capital firm that made dozens of seed investments in technology-focused startups. Pitched as an event that could pack a year's worth of networking into a single day, Founder Field Day was perhaps the firm's largest bet to date. On a spring day in May of 2014, as some 300 invited founders descended on AT&T Park in San Francisco, one attendee, Fran Hauser, had a much larger decision to make than just selecting which sessions to attend in the day's 7th and 8th "innings." Rothenberg had recently asked Hauser to join RV as a partner and investor, and invited her out to the Bay Area to consider the offer. Hauser, who had left her role as the President of Digital for Time Inc.'s Style & Entertainment Group three months earlier, wondered if Rothenberg's inexperience would prove to be a drawback or a strength.

In 2011 Britt Harris, the Chief Investment Officer for the $107.4 billion Teachers Retirement System of Texas (TRS), was considering whether to pursue strategic partnerships with a group of large private equity firms. After spending four years aggressively moving the fifth largest pension fund in the United States into alternative asset classes, Harris felt that TRS shouldn't just participate in private equity funds as a typical limited partner. Rather, under his proposal TRS would offer carefully vetted firms multi-billion dollar investments through a customized fund structure that had fewer allocation mandates than traditional fund structures, and guarantees to reinvest 50% of any investment gains back into the investment vehicle. In exchange, Harris hoped to receive a highly customized compensation structure and gain greater access to investment professionals within the participating firms.

Okey Enelamah is the CEO of the African Capital Alliance (ACA), a private equity firm based in Nigeria. ACA has spent more than a year arranging a $500 million consortium bid to acquire and recapitalize Union Bank, Nigeria's sixth largest bank. Several weeks before the deal is scheduled to close, the unexpected exit of several international investors has put the group's ability to fund the deal in question. With time running out, Enelamah and the ACA investment committee must decide whether the Union Bank acquisition is still a wise investment, or whether the firm's time, talents, and capital would be better invested in other parts of the fast-growing Nigerian economy.

Randall Fojtasek, a partner at Dallas-based Brazos Private Equity Partners, must decide whether now is the time to sell his firm's investment in Tri-Northern Distribution. Brazos, a middle-market leveraged buyout group, created the company two years earlier through the acquisition of two electronic security distribution companies: Tri-Ed Distribution and Northern Video Systems. Twenty-four months after successfully integrating the two companies, Brazos has received two attractive offers for the combined distributor. With the company's management projecting double-digit growth for 2012, however, it is far from clear that now is the optimal time to exit from the firm's third fund.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is one of the largest and fastest-growing pools of investment capital in the world and follows an unusually active program of investment management. In October of 2012, Mark Wiseman was just 12 weeks into his role as chief executive officer, and he must decide how to lead the organization to outperform the market as it grows larger and more geographically disperse. After seven years of eschewing the use of intermediaries and successfully practicing its "do-it-yourself mega-investing" approach, CPPIB had garnered admiration from institutions on Bay Street and Wall Street alike. It had even been heralded as a "Maple Revolutionary" by The Economist. With assets under management projected to grow to C$275 billion by 2020, however, Wiseman faced the challenge of how to scale the organization's investment strategy for the future. As Wiseman settled into the chief executive's role, would he be able to lead CPPIB to meet its goals?

Considers the decision faced by state pension fund manager Rod Calhoun as he decides whether to invest $200 million in Bain Capital's eleventh global buyout fund: Bain Capital Fund XI. For the fund, Bain was offering its limited partners a choice between three different fee structures: first, a "conventional" fee structure of a 1.5% management fee with 20% carried interest and a 7% preferred rate of return; second, a 1% management fee with 30% carried interest and a 7% preferred rate of return; or third, a 0.5% management fee, 30% carried interest, and a 0% preferred rate of return. Should Calhoun invest in Bain? If he should, which fee structure should Calhoun choose?

At a time when ever-rising smartphone sales are driven as much by demand for devices that run must-have third-party apps as by the quality of traditional voice and data services, there is a myriad of challenges facing the software developer who is looking to choose which mobile development software platform to invest in. Written from the perspective of an established consumer bank that is about to commence development on its first downloadable application for mobile devices, the case surveys the state of the smartphone market in 2010 and considers the challenges of a platform landscape that includes significantly varying installed device base sizes, growth rates, application distribution models, and hardware device profiles. Focusing on Apple's market-leading iOS platform and App Store, for iPhones and other devices and on Google's developing Android OS and associated Android Market, the case considers potential benefits and pitfalls of each and touches on the reasons that other longer-standing platforms, such as RIM's BlackBerry platform, are less appealing to modern-day application developers.