In 2019, Matthew Scullion, founder and CEO of U.K. startup Matillion, faced a decision about which term sheet to accept for the lead investor in his company's $35 million Series C financing round. Would the connections and opportunities offered by Silicon Valley-based VC Battery Ventures make up for its lower valuation offer, or would Scullion be better off choosing a European investment firm to lead the round?
TimeCredit is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that is developing large language models (LLMs) to generate accounting memos. The case follows Ndonga Sagnia, a Gambian Harvard Business School MBA student with an accounting background, as she decides how much money to raise for her early-stage venture. The case also covers the challenges of finding a technical cofounder, initial equity allocation decisions, and the implications of the market context and founder identity for fundraising choices.
Just two years after launching its 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact firm that offered call center services to corporate clients. Chime had an employee-focused model where it hired call center agents from underserved communities. It then offered skill building and life services to these agents, which led to industry-leading employee retention rates and an overall more committed and expert staff. After agents were deployed to work from home, however, it struggled to maintain its current operating model, causing increased attrition rates. It also had amassed a large amount of debt from maintaining its facilities in Morrow, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; and Charlotte, North Carolina. At the same time, the company was growing at a record pace, but needed to address its talent and debt challenges before realizing its dream of uncovering hidden talent in underserved communities.
In 2017, Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus were deciding whether to leave their labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put other job opportunities aside, and dive full-time into founding a wastewater analysis start-up, Biobot. Ghaeli, an architect, and Matus, a computational biologist, had been turning sewage into information about "population health" and now had dreams of turning the data encoded in urine and stool into a viable and impactful business. In plainer terms, they planned to "tap into what you flush down the toilet every day." They'd been told not to. They'd been told their idea was too broad and their skills too narrow. They'd been told they had no defensible intellectual property and limited scalability. They'd been advised to choose other startups instead, and knew, as immigrants on temporary visas, if they failed at this venture, they might even have to leave the country. Despite the many hurdles and objections, Ghaeli and Matus felt mostly at ease about moving ahead. Were they missing something? Or was everyone else?