The case follows Scott Painter and his executive team as they deal with a crisis that threatens the survival of TrueCar, a company founded by Painter to improve consumers' car buying experiences. TrueCar's automotive dealer network, from which the company earns its revenue, is rapidly declining in size as dealers leave to protest TrueCar's practices. The case also describes Painter's career and his personality as context for the situation. Painter and his team must persuade dealers to rejoin its network in order to survive, which will require the company to rethink its identity.
This case focuses on the investment strategy employed by 500 Startups, an early-stage investment firm founded by Dave McClure. McClure, an outspoken personality in Silicon Valley, believes that the venture capital industry is not innovating quickly enough to adapt to large-scale changes. The cost of starting a company has plummeted over time, enabling investors to write smaller and smaller checks. The exit options for companies have expanded, allowing investors to realize returns earlier than in the past, though typically at lower valuations. Major customer acquisition platforms are enabling startups to disrupt traditional businesses. Finally, opportunities for investment abound overseas in rapidly growing emerging markets, in McClure's opinion. Though not everyone in Silicon Valley agrees with all of McClure ideas, he seeks to scale 500 Startups into the first "guild-based" international venture capital firm.
The case follows Brad Griffith, the founder of Gametime, a mobile application for purchasing and redeeming event tickets. The case examines how Griffith assesses whether he has found an attractive business opportunity initially, and later whether he has found product/market fit. It also describes Griffith's decision to be a solo founder and how he leverages contractors and advisors in building the product.
The case follows AngelList, an online platform connecting entrepreneurs with investors, as it searches for product/market fit and business models. Founded in 2010 by entrepreneurs Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, AngelList begins as a project to give back to the start-up community. Ravikant and Nivi write a blog that provides founders with advice and then build AngelList to give them access to investors. However, investors often have incentives to interact with entrepreneurs using traditional modes of communication in order to protect their access to top startups, limiting trackable activities and outcomes on AngelList.
This case follows Yaron Samid, founder of BillGuard, a personal finance web application that monitors users' credit card transactions for fraudulent and unrecognizable charges. The case centers on Samid's struggles to gain broad distribution. After trying several strategies including entering start-up competitions and selling directly to large American credit card issuers, Samid considers whether he should pivot and completely change BillGuard's distribution strategy and product design.
The case follows Jim and Debbie Aung-Din Taylor, an American couple with backgrounds in international development, as they found and build Proximity Designs, a social enterprise in Myanmar. Initially, the Taylors are focused on redesigning the treadle pump for Myanmarese farmers, using design thinking and processes to formulate a pump that is affordable to their extremely impoverished target customers. However, the Taylors soon realize that they also need to build a distribution network in order to sell their products. Along the way, a natural disaster (Cyclone Nargis) and political reforms in the country create both new challenges and new opportunities for Proximity.
This case follows CEO Andy Dunn as he struggles to build a technical team that will enable Bonobos, an ecommerce and menswear company, to scale. The case also outlines the path that leads Dunn to the CEO post. Three vignettes compose the main body of the case. The first vignette deals with Dunn's struggles in getting Bonobos' engineering team to put forth greater effort. With the company falling behind its technical milestones, Dunn finds that he and vice president of technology Greene disagree on how to proceed. The second vignette presents a difficult situation where Dunn has decided to shut down Bonobos' Silicon Valley technology office in order to focus on its New York-based core menswear business. However, board members urge Dunn to give the Silicon Valley office a longer runway and they also warn that closing the West Coast office could result in a breakdown on the online platform. The third vignette begins as Dunn has extended an offer to Anil Kapur to join Bonobos as vice president of technology. Dunn learns that lead architect Jonathan Long, who initially disagreed with Dunn on Kapur's qualifications, has declared to the company's other engineers that he does not support the hiring of Kapur.
VisionSpring follows social entrepreneur Jordan Kassalow from his early career in public health through the founding of VisionSpring, an organization that sells eyeglasses to the rural poor in developing countries. The case describes how Kassalow becomes inspired and motivated by some of his early experiences as an optometry student and in public health. As Kassalow builds VisionSpring, the immense scaling challenges of distributing to "bottom of the pyramid" (BoP) customers are revealed. Initially, VisionSpring has dual goals of selling glasses and employing local workers. After testing for several years in India and El Salvador, VisionSpring makes a decision in 2008 to focus only on selling glasses and makes substantial changes in its business model and organization. The company also decides to conduct a quasi-experimental study to measure its impact on customers. Over the next several years, VisionSpring tests several different distribution models, and finds two that are promising. The case ends with the executive team pondering how best to scale these models to reach the 700 million BoP customers that could benefit from glasses in the world.
Entrepreneurs seeking to start companies in developing economies face significant human resource challenges. Before embarking on their ventures, entrepreneurs should articulate a talent management strategy that describes how they will source, identify, screen, and manage employees, including rank and file workers, mid-level managers, and senior executives as the company scales. In developing such a strategy, the most important considerations will include how much and what kinds of human capital are present, the availability of tools to effectively identify and screen candidates, local culture, and the flexibility of the labor market. Drawing from interviews with entrepreneurs and investors across a number of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, this note explores several major human resource challenges found in developing economies and the strategies entrepreneurs have employed to meet these challenges.
This case follows Julio Vasconcellos (MBA 2007) as he launches Peixe Urbano, a daily deals company in Brazil. Daily deals are coupons that offer savings at local merchants and are sold en masse to consumers by companies such as Peixe Urbano, Groupon, and Living Social. Vasconcellos and his team experience tremendous success with the model in Brazil, but are soon pressured to expand to neighboring countries as a result of the arrival of competitors, which creates a land grab mentality. Case A concludes with Vasconcellos' assessment of liquidity options given Peixe's present levels of success, market risk, and scaling risk. Case B opens with Vasconcellos having a made a decision to build Peixe into an independent company, with aspirations to IPO in the U.S. public markets. However, the market soon plateaus, partly due to negative consumer sentiment about daily deals. Meanwhile, Peixe is struggling to scale its sales force and its technology, and the company must use its remaining resources wisely. Vasconcellos finds himself having to quickly transition from entrepreneur to turnaround CEO.