In 2020, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, co-founders and co-CEO's of the fintech company Brex, needed to determine how to balance their vision with the desires of their investors. They intended to expand Brex's offerings to include other products that served the financial needs of their startup, but some of their investors believed the focus should be on improving existing features to meet customer base needs. While Dubugras and Franceschi oversaw development of existing products and considered new ones, they were also trying to raise a Series D round from the same investors who voiced concerns on expansion. How should they balance their vision of a one-stop financial shop for businesses, with the investors' desire to be cautious and offer features to keep up with the competition?
In December 2021, Unilever-one of the world's largest producers of consumer goods-was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a facility in Brazil with state-of-the art sensors on factory equipment to collect real-time data. The data was then analyzed using machine learning applications on the cloud so that key capabilities of the factory could be run remotely on a laptop in a technician's kitchen. The company hoped expanding this effort would improve efficiency and performance across its network of factories, and result in cost savings and decreased energy consumption for the entire organization. The company's next step was to explore the possibility of further digitizing factory operations with the creation of a global virtual operations room, where operators working remotely could ultimately oversee production at all of its 200 manufacturing sites around the world.
Over his 40-year career, Paul Polman had led some of the world's largest consumer goods companies, making his biggest mark as CEO of Unilever-a multi-national corporation that produced everything from soap to soup. Polman was also well-regarded as a leader in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and had consistently staked his career on the message that doing better for the planet and its inhabitants ultimately made for better business. Many called him visionary; others felt he was misguided. But thanks to his sterling business credentials, when Polman spoke, people listened. And speak out he did, trying to win over corporate leaders to his vision of how business should serve society, and not the other way around. Now, having stepped down from Unilever and living in the midst of the biggest global health crisis in a century, he wondered how to rally business and civic leaders to do more to fight climate change, preserve biodiversity, and reduce global inequity.
In 2004, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba created Alipay, an app to facilitate payments on its e-commerce sites. As Alibaba grew, so did Alipay, until Alipay spawned its own ecosystem of financial technology products and services under the name of Ant Group. By 2020, Ant had one billion users on its platform, which offered investment opportunities, consumer lending, and insurance, targeted towards middle class individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses. In November 2020, Ant Group was poised for its initial public offering (IPO). But the Chinese government canceled the IPO just days before Ant was expected to raise $34 billion at a valuation of $310 billion. Regulators were concerned that Ant's partners were bearing too much risk and they fretted that the Chinese economy showed signs of rising consumer spending. What was next for Ant Group?
In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana's Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and tracked on a single, integrated platform. Jay was wondering how to increase annual recurring revenue by year-end 2020. Just three years earlier, when Jay joined Asana as its first CRO, thousands of companies were already using free and paid versions of its software. Since Asana was a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offer, all a new user needed to do was to create an account. This meant individual users and teams could onboard easily and initially for free, using an array of self-service tools, without purchasing approval from their IT departments on conversion to paid subscriptions and without initial sales support from Asana. This mix of free and paid users proved sustainable and profitable for Asana. However, reaching senior directors, vice presidents, and executives of potential client companies to drive larger, enterprise-wide adoptions was a challenge for the Asana sales team. Jay's desire to improve sales performance led him to a novel concept: to structure the sales team based on where customers were in their adoption cycles with Asana-that is, to organize sales by stages of the customer journey rather than by the time-honored approach of organizing by account size (e.g., SMB, mid-market, and enterprise). Was this radical idea the right structure for Asana to reach its revenue growth goals-or was it fraught with too much risk?
Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science. MobSquad also helped companies fill open roles by tapping into its database of pre-vetted foreign tech workers. While there was growing demand for these specialists, the talent supply in the U.S. was relatively constrained and American companies often filled positions with foreign-born workers using a temporary visa called the H-1B. However, U.S. President Donald Trump temporarily suspended immigration in June 2020, including foreign workers on an H-1B visa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rawji contemplated what kind of impact this would have on MobSquad and the tech industry in Canada. There was already evidence that a growing number of foreign tech workers were choosing Canada over the U.S. due to Trump's immigration policies. Now Rawji suspected that Trump's latest move would further accelerate this trend, and he wanted MobSquad to be ready to help companies and workers who had been counting on the H-1B.
Precision medicine company Blueprint Medicines was building a successful track record for bringing drug therapies to market 40% faster than average. The company had spent $40 million dollars and two years building a compound library that became its drug development engine. Blueprint's drug development strategy was twofold-it focused on creating a single drug compound for multiple disease indications, while at the same time developing drugs to track a disease through its progression. The company's goal was to become a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company that could move from drug discovery to development to marketing. But it was increasingly challenging to prioritize and manage programs, personnel and partnerships.
Ment.io was a software platform that used proprietary data analytics technology to help organizations make informed and transparent decisions based on team input. Ment was born out of founder Joab Rosenberg's frustration that, while organizations collected ever increasing amounts of data, the information gathering process did not capture human insights, which he viewed as critical to the use of the data. In early 2020, Rosenberg felt that the company he had started five years ago was taking off, but he wondered how to manage the team's limited engineering resources to help Ment stand out in a crowded software market. Should the company improve Ment's user interface, develop new features, or focus on its innovative algorithm?
Korea Telecom has committed $4billion in investments and R&D to build a GiGAtopia, essentially ushering in the next generation of mobile (5G) and wired infrastructure. CEO Dr. Hwang and his team are considering which areas to prioritize in terms of new products and services in development. The top five sectors identified by KT's team include Internet of Things (including connected cars and smart city/homes), media, health, energy, and security and surveillance. Which might provide some quick wins both in terms of revenues and market lead. Should KT develop solutions that could be exported to other countries? Should KT go all in across all five sectors, or select one or two to prioritize?
In 2019, TripAdvisor was one of the best known online travel brands and for nearly 20 years founder and CEO Steve Kaufer had steered TripAdvisor to growth and profitability, but recently the company's pace of growth had started to slow. Most of the company's revenue was generated by users clicking from its site to hotel booking sites. TripAdvisor relied on Google for both free and paid traffic. As Google began to build up and promote its own travel search services, the company sought to diversify by offering bookings for vacation rentals, restaurants and experiences. In addition, Kaufer created a new team called Core Experience (CoreX) to coordinate TripAdvisor's branding and create a coherent product strategy across its business units. Could Kaufer and his executive team turn TripAdvisor's overcome the Google threat and reinvigorate growth?
In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the genomic codes of all known species that could be tapped for discovery and innovation, from new medical interventions to more efficient manufacturing processes. He proposed to use blockchain technology to make the data both accessible and trackable so that its use could be monitored. Castilla-Rubio envisioned a time when a company in the U.S. could access a biological asset from the Peruvian Amazon, develop and commercialize a product based on the asset, and have a fraction of the resulting sales land directly in the bank account of various beneficiaries, including the Peruvian government and indigenous communities. Now he was facing major decisions about how to structure EBC to achieve his goals. Should he start at the top and build partnerships with national governments and inter-governmental organizations as the cornerstone of EBC? Or would it be better to forge ahead with a few stakeholders in an entrepreneurial project?
Baroo CEO Lindsay Hyde was facing unrest from the board of her pet services startup in August 2017. One board member (and lead investor) was alarmed that Baroo's growth was slowing while it's appetite for funding was accelerating. Hyde wanted to hit the gas and continue expanding to new cities, which meant she needed to raise venture capital. How could she convince the board and potential investors that the business opportunities were too good to pass up and an infusion of capital could help her steer Baroo through the speed bumps?
Baroo CEO Lindsay Hyde must secure venture capital funding if she wants to save her pet services startup. If she is unable to finance a series A, she will need to sell or shut down.
Western Governors University (WGU) was a nonprofit institution of higher education whose online learning model served more than 100,000 students in 2019 and was scaling rapidly. President Scott Pulsipher wanted to expand WGU's reach to millions more with a plan called 10x Vision. 10x Vision called for scaling enrollment, creating new ventures to expand access to higher education that complement WGU's business model, and funding these ventures. Pulsipher believed WGU had a potential target market of 40 million people in the United States, as an increasing number of jobs required post-secondary education. How could WGU help these individuals participate in the higher education system and achieve upward mobility?
In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual imagery, which has traditionally been generated not by the retail channel rather than by manufacturers. Catalog retailers, in particular, are famous for visually romancing the category. As a comprehensive offering, Wayfair hosts over seven million SKUs on its site, so it must solve for the lack of visual assets from manufacturers by generating visual assets of its own. Initially, the company embarks on a plan to produce these images using traditional photography studios and professional staffs, but costs mount and throughput is too slow. Seeking a solution, Shah and Conine assess the likelihood of using technology - specifically, high-resolution 3D modeling from low-resolution 2D images - to address the challenge. Resolving this issue is especially pressing, given that Wayfair has just launched private label lines and a host of what it calls lifestyle brands, which require support from high-end visual merchandising. As a consequence, the question of how to provision visual assets becomes a question of how fast Wayfair can grow. This case presents the factors involved in deciding what direction to take - a reliable path using traditional methods or a risky path using bleeding-edge technologies.
In December 2018, the blockchain startup Fluidity was about to participate in its first tokenization deal, which would create digital access to property rights in a 12-unit Manhattan condominium complex. The deal was proof-of-concept for Fluidity, which hoped to develop a business digitizing securities issuance for other real estate assets on the basis of its technical facility with blockchain technology, and in conjunction with its broker-dealer partner, Propellr. A successful transaction would only prompt larger and more urgent strategic questions, however. Among them was the appropriate revenue model for Fluidity-whether to grow by providing its technical services to broker-dealers, by going into tokenized securities issuance, or by harnessing its trading technology to facilitate a secondary market in tokenized securities.
Formula E's season three is nearly complete. CEO Alejandro Agag needs to examine his business model to ensure the racing series is positioned to grow sustainable in the years to come.