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Mary Tolan, CEO Accretive Health, examines whether to expand the company's operations in hospital revenue cycle management into the field of Total Cost of Care management.

In 2011, SecondMarket was an online platform that facilitated secondary transactions of illiquid assets, including private company stock. This case explores reasons for the decline in small-cap IPOs in the United States from the 1990s to the 2000s and how the emergence of SecondMarket provided liquidity to privately held companies like iContact, an email and social marketing software-as-a-service [SaaS] company.

In March 2011, CSN Stores is a collection of nearly 200 Internet retail websites, including Cookware.com, Strollers.com, and Luggage.com. Co-founders Niraj Shah and Steve Conine were considering making a major investment to build brand equity at the corporate level.

In the three years since Bishop and Button purchased Verengo in a leveraged buyout (LBO), the company had gone through dramatic changes. Initially a residential windows and insulation firm, after the economic recession of 2008 the company switched gears and began offering solar installations to local residential customers. Aided by favorable regulatory changes and a consumer financing partnership, Verengo's solar business took off and became the company's primary focus. By the end of 2010, Verengo had grown to $27 million in revenue and was the largest solar integrator in Southern California. In December 2010, Verengo raised $9.7 million in growth equity funding and was considering its options for future growth. Eager to expand to markets outside of Southern California, Bishop and Button knew that they had to carefully assess the firm's many opportunities and tightly manage its growth.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

The case focuses on an investment made by AXA Private Equity, a French manufacturer of food ingredients. The investment is made at the height of the financial markets, and financed with significant debt. Soon thereafter, the financial crisis impacted the company's financial performance, the valuation of all companies, and the balance sheet of banks. When the company breaches a covenant this set off a series of negotiations over the restructuring of the debt on the balance sheet. The case raises issues over the proper valuation and financing for a company, how capital markets can impact this, and the incentives and motivations of all the stakeholders.

The founding team at ScoreBig, an event ticketing company, is on the verge of a public launch of their product. The company has made great progress in negotiating access to tickets, designing its interface, and building a proprietary architecture. For consumers, ScoreBig offered the opportunity to buy tickets at below face value. For event managers, ScoreBig helped solve the problem of filling empty seats and recruiting new customers in a way that did not harm other forms of ticket sales. ScoreBig has raised over $20 million in three rounds of financing.

Samir Kaul, a Partner at Khosla Ventures, looked out his office window. It was late June, 2011, and like almost every day in Menlo Park, the sun was shining. Kaul was reflecting on what had been a very positive 10 months in the venture capital business. Over that span, he had helped three of his portfolio companies through IPOs, and helped Khosla Ventures raise its third fund, bringing the total outside capital raised by the group to more than $2.1B.

This note consists of three valuation/analysis exercises often found in venture capital financing deals.

In late 2010, Silicon Valley-based Chegg, the leading online college textbook rental company, is scaling rapidly. The case recounts Chegg's history from its origins as a distant competitor to Craigslist in college classified listings through a pivot into textbook rental followed by a period of explosive growth. Resulting challenges in scaling warehouse operations, customer service, and information technology are described, along with efforts to professionalize sourcing/pricing and product management functions. The case closes with questions about how Chegg should respond to the pending transition from printed textbooks to electronic textbooks.

This note describes the payoff structure of investment in individual venture capital-backed companies and in venture capital portfolios. Venture Capital investments are characterized by high failure rate (0ver 50%) and a small number of given successes (greater than 10% returns). As an asset, class, venture capital has produced high cyclical returns that mirror trends in capital markets and in markets for new technology. There is a large disparity in median and upper quantize performance. A small number of funds do well on a constant basis. Overall returns on venture capital have been low for the decade ending in 2009.      

The case explores decisions faced by Gilt Groupe co-founders in 2009 regarding how rapidly to grow, which growth strategies to pursue and how much capital to raise.

Angel investors Ram Shriram, Mike Maples, Eric Paley, James Geshweiler, and Jim Southern discuss their investment philosophies and the changing landscape of angel investing. Questions include: • How has angel investing changed in the last few years? • How do you evaluate a prospective investment's attractiveness? • How do you think about risk and reward in angel investing? • Is it possible for Angel funds to be too big?

Eric Giler, WiTricity CEO, must decide how to grow a company based around an untested but potentially ground-breaking technology for wireless electricity transmission.

Spreadsheet supplement for case number 281054.

Venture capitalist William Doyle must raise $35 million for a portfolio company with a promising, novel cancer therapy, just as global capital markets are imploding in the fall of 2008. NovoCure, Ltd., has developed an electrical-field-based therapy, called Tumor Treating fields, for the treatment of cancerous tumors. The therapy has shown significant efficacy with no side effects after five years of testing in human patients. Doyle believes NovoCure has the potential to become an important company with a major new cancer therapy platform, but must complete pivotal (Phase III) clinical trials and receive FDA approval. Doyle's venture capital firm, WFD Ventures, has invested $25 million in three rounds to fund pilot clinical trials for glioblastoma and other non-small cell lung cancer, and the first pivotal clinical trial for glioblastoma. Additional financing is needed to proceed with the strategically important second pivotal trial. In the fall of 2008 Doyle was negotiating the final terms of an investment by two prominent hedge funds when the liquidity crisis caused the hedge funds to withdraw from the transaction. Doyle must now reevaluate his options for securing the needed financing for this promising young company.

This case describes a critical inflection point in the growth of an international development "mentor capitalist" nonprofit, Endeavor. As Endeavor aims to scale its high-impact entrepreneurship model globally, founder Linda Rottenberg must determine what success looks like for the organization and which growth option will most effectively take Endeavor in that direction. The case begins with a panel of business leaders selecting a new class of Jordanian entrepreneurs to join the ranks of Endeavor's prestigious portfolio. Their decision forces them to wrestle with the questions: "What is high impact entrepreneurship, and how will it contribute to the economic development of a country like Jordan?"

"ZINK Imaging" describes the issues confronting CEO Wendy Caswell as she uses a partnership model to commercialize ZINK's disruptive printing technology platform, ZINK Paper. The case focuses on the frameworks ZINK has used to decide which markets to target and which business partners to choose. Caswell contemplates changes to the partnership model in an effort to speed product introduction to manage the company's burn rate and reach profitability. The context for the case is the company's imminent need to raise an additional $25 million.