個案總覽

Walker & Company follows Tristan Walker, the GSB alumnus and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as he searches for an idea around which to start a business. After a period of sifting through ideas and performing diligence on opportunities ranging from hair weaves for African American women to starting a bank, Walker found his calling-starting a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company for people of color. But this is where his journey only begins. From here, the case follows Walker as he leads the company through a series of growth stages, including setting up his board of directors and making key executive hires.

By August 2015, two-year-old mobile imaging software startup Lightricks had developed and released two best-selling paid mobile apps, grown to a team of 30, earned a revenue run rate of nearly $10 million, and achieved modest profitability. The bootstrapped company had explored raising funds, met with venture capital firms, and was presented with a term sheet. The co-founders believed the financing would allow them to scale up quicker, but they also worried about losing control of their company.

Supercell is a young Finnish smartphone game company with an unusual team structure and company philosophy. It is already one of Finland's most valuable companies, and despite being only 6 years old, it has put up some impressive numbers: as of 2016, it has released only four games for global audiences, but each one has made it to the top (or almost to the top) of the most-downloaded and most-revenue-generated app charts; it has recorded multi-million daily revenues and around a hundred million daily users; it has nearly 200 employees in its Helsinki headquarters and support offices around the world; and now, thanks to an acquisition by Chinese internet/entertainment company Tencent, Supercell has a valuation of $10.2 billion, making it Europe's first "decacorn" (a start-up with a $10 billion or greater value). Supercell's success is due in part to its unconventional company structure and attitudes towards game development and management in general. The development unit at Supercell revolves around the concept of a "cell," a small team consisting of anywhere from two to a dozen (or more) people who work together to make a game. Cells are highly independent and control all the decision-making for their game, including when/whether a game should be cancelled. The case allows discussion of important concepts like what conditions aid an effective team dynamic, how an entrepreneurial company can scale in size while retaining the "power of small," how companies can create value through focus and being willing to terminate underperforming projects, and the implications of global markets and extreme valuations for what a company must achieve.

In 2015, Hanuman Singh, a portfolio investor, was looking for investment opportunities in India. His friend Ram Naik suggested Singh invest in Tata Consultancy Services Limited, an information technology company based in Mumbai. Singh’s normal practice was to look at the company balance sheets, understand the company’s strategy, and then decide whether to invest. But he recently had a bitter investing experience when the company he invested in went bankrupt. Singh now understood that a deeper analysis was required before investing. He was looking for an accounting analysis that would give him insight into any possible manipulations so that his investment decision would yield his expected results.

In 2005, three international information technology professionals formed an international joint venture to design and construct information technology systems for shopping centres and office buildings. Despite being relative newcomers to working in the Chinese marketplace, in 2012, the company won a contract for a large job in China. However, when the company's three directors travelled to China to meet with their Chinese business partners, they encountered several unexpected, questionable situations. Their Chinese business partners were not there to meet them; rather, they had travelled to another country. The three directors met instead with representatives from the Chinese government consortium overseeing the construction project, and these officials pressed the three company directors regarding what they had brought for them. Their limited preparation and lack of contingency plans challenged their ability to maintain respect and move forward. How could they recover the situation and still achieve their goals of a signed contract?

Supplement to case E528. 500 Startups continued its expansion of accelerators and venture capital to cover a global footprint for underserved entrepreneurial markets between 2014 and 2016. As investment returns began to occur, the organization looked to grow and expand beyond Silicon Valley and increase its presence in locations that were underserved by traditional venture capital. The case tells of the activities of McClure and the leadership team as they spread their activities across Asia and the Middle East, and became increasingly active in the venture and accelerator landscape.

In February 2014, Amsterdam became the first city to issue new regulations specifically to allow home-sharing. Airbnb's Molly Turner, Global Head of Civic Partnerships; her colleagues at the San Francisco based home-sharing platform; and her counterparts in Amsterdam's city leadership now had to make the new rules function well. By the summer of 2014, the question of how exactly to do that remained unsettled. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Airbnb was negotiating with Amsterdam officials to supplement the new home-sharing rules was not materializing. Turner was hearing that the company's proposed commitments that spanned education on regulations, enforcement-assistance, and tax collection might not be enough to secure what would be Airbnb's broadest partnership with any city anywhere. Nanette Schippers was Amsterdam's Advisor on the Sharing Economy in its Innovation Office, and its lead at the negotiating table that summer. She was worried by the stand-still, too. A primary reason for the impasse in the negotiations was that Amsterdam wanted access to Airbnb's data in order to enforce the new laws more easily, while Airbnb sought to protect user privacy. For Airbnb, privacy, precedents and platform principles were at stake. For Amsterdam, it was a matter of making sure that the historic city did not become "Venice, or Florence, or 'Disneyland'"; that it wasn't overrun by visitors and that locals weren't crowded out. Could the two parties now find dry land?

In December 2014, the City of Amsterdam and Airbnb announced an MOU to promote responsible home-sharing and to simplify the payment of tourist tax for hosts in the City. It was the most comprehensive agreement that Airbnb had with any city in the world. It's final provision read, "The parties trust that theirs will be a fruitful cooperation." However, both sides were uncertain about how the agreement would be received. Molly Turner, Airbnb's Global Head of Civic Partnership and Tanja de Coster, an Airbnb lawyer in Europe, were unsure how Airbnb's hosts would react. As were their Airbnb colleagues. Laila Frank, who had been an advisor to the Deputy Mayor in Amsterdam, heralded the reputational gains from the agreement for the city, "We were worldwide news. In that way it worked out really well." But she acknowledged that there were also skeptical points of view. "The only immediate result was the tax agreement, which we were really happy about. But the rest had to be proven."

In mid-2016, the Broad Institute and the University of California, Berkeley were in the middle of a contentious patent dispute over which entity controlled a breakthrough gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9. With CRISPR-Cas9, scientists might soon be able to cure previously incurable genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis, among many others. The dispute had escalated to the point where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) declared a patent interference and began a process to determine the intellectual property's (IP) rightful owner. The USPTO's decision would not only have serious commercial implications-the technology would be immensely important to biotechnology firms looking to develop gene therapy products, and was therefore sure to generate strong revenues for whichever entity owned the IP-but would also essentially award scientific credit for this technology and thus impact the reputations of the scientists on both sides who had worked so hard to discover the tool. This case touches upon a number of other key issues too: the ethical implications of gene editing; the state of IP and licensing in the biotechnology industry; the impact of lawsuits on developing new technologies and companies; and who should own platform technologies built, at least in part, by the research of multiple parties and government funding.

The Ochsner Health System has developed a proprietary software tool designed to treat hypertension. Built into the system's electronic medical records, the Hypertension Digital Medicine program allows patients to record their blood pressure at home and share readings with their medical providers in real-time. A year and a half after launching the program, the health system's internal startup, innovationOchsner, has gathered promising clinical results and validation from the medical community. The case explores the challenges Ochsner faces in scaling and disseminating the program to other healthcare providers.

This case follows Jenica Fletcher as she rebuilds her company's guitar strings division from the ground up. Convinced that she could turn the division around if given complete independence from corporate headquarters, Fletcher relocated the group, rebranded it as Malenti Strings, repositioned the guitar strings as high-performance products, and transformed Malenti into a fast-growing, profitable business. The case traces Fletcher's key steps in rebuilding the organization, including the development of a team of committed, interdependent employees. Students learn about Fletcher's values and unique management philosophy, as well as her managerial practices and daily activities. The case also discusses the role and development of the partnerships that helped solidify and grow the business. Coming off its high-end success, Malenti must now decide whether to move into the mid-priced market with a new line of electric guitar strings called True.

The owner and chocolatier of a small, chocolate manufacturing and retailing company in London, Ontario, was considering an expansion opportunity within Southwestern Ontario. The company's current production facility was sufficient for handling immediate demand; however, there was limited space for expansion in the same building, and the building’s administration had plans to prohibit manufacturing activities within the next five to 10 years. The owner wondered whether the time was right to purchase a new storefront and production facility in a small nearby city. Alternatively, should he continue operations in the present location while looking for other opportunities to expand? He planned to create projected financial statements and conduct internal and external analyses to inform his decision-making process.

This case describes a situation in which Vivek Vyas and Vimal Popat conceive an idea to start an online obituary advertising platform. Vyas and Popat then discuss the possible ways to start an online obituary advertisement platform. The purpose of this case is to provide an opportunity to step into the shoes of Vyas and Popat and explore the best possible option to offer an alternate solution to print obituary advertisement. The case provides the context for students to examine alternate options for the print obituary advertisement amidst lack of entrepreneurial experience of Vyas and Popat.

Lending Loop, a Canadian marketplace (peer-to-peer) lending start-up, was founded in 2014 and launched to the public in 2015. It competed with other peer-to-peer lenders to challenge the Canadian chartered banks and other financial companies for part of the Canadian small-business lending market. Without an established regulatory regime in place, it operated according to its lawyers’ interpretation of securities law. The founders needed to scale their business quickly and strategically to gain a first-mover advantage in the industry and to position their company as a major stakeholder for future regulatory decisions.

The Balanced Snacking case follows the entrepreneurial journeys of Gautam Gupta and Ken Chen. Gupta and Chen met as Babson undergraduates. The goal of the Balanced Snacking project is to deliver healthy (balanced) snacks to consumers on a subscription basis through an online marketplace. At the time of the case, Gupta and Chen had developed the idea to the point of conducting marketplace experiments to determine demand. They had come from very different backgrounds, but their combined skills complemented each other as they progressed through this trial and error stage. The case focuses on what types of experiments and testing they might pursue to prove their business idea.

Crowdfunding is considered an alternative to traditional angel and venture capital funding that has helped get many business ventures off the ground. The basic idea of crowdfunding centers on pitching a business idea to a large group of people and seeking financial support. Although crowdfunding has existed for hundreds of years, it has recently gone to online platforms. The most successful platforms to date have been Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which have helped many ventures raise initial funding. This case is concerned with two different startups, one started by a twin sister duo (Marla and Annie) and the other by a Babson College student (Hanson). Enerchi Bites is a startup featuring a new food product that was developed out of a passion for fitness and yoga. Identical twin sisters (Marla and Annie Feldman) started experimenting with different combinations of foods with a chia-seed base. Once they had developed three different flavors, they began distributing their products at various yoga conventions. They quickly built some buzz about their new products and were faced with the problem of scaling their new venture. They decided to try a Kickstarter campaign where they would attempt to raise $10,000. They figured this was the amount they needed to help scale up their operations. After the completion of the Kickstarter campaign, the sisters found the final results disappointing as they netted only about $5,000 after expenses from advertising and the rewards that were due to the campaign backers. Think Board is the creation of a Babson student, Hanson Grant. This business venture was born out of one of Hanson's earlier ideas. He had created white board t-shirts. He found that the t-shirt idea was not going to work and was thinking through how to use this to his advantage until his friends connected the dots for him. If he put pieces of the material together, he ended up with an oversized dry-erase board that could be printed to feature any pattern.

Partners Group ("PG"), a Swiss based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number of large US based private equity firms followed to create a new category of firms; public private equity firms (PPEs). PG's results were superlative (565% since inception total return and 22% annual compounded growth) versus the US based PPEs performance over the same time of (76%) to 18%. PG's multiple was 22x versus their PPE peer group of 8x. PG had the lowest value of AUM yet had the second largest market capitalization behind Blackstone. Why? PG had differing management practices: (i) compensation practices; (ii) corporate governance structure; (iii) accounting policies; and (iv) source of revenues. PG historically had a low percentage of its revenues derived from carried interest payments (less than 10%) while the US PPEs had a significantly higher percentage (on average 50%). Should PG do more direct investments and have more of its revenues come from carried interests? This could conceivably jeopardize their trading multiple and their stock price. Should PG risk changing their business model or proceed with confidence?

In February 2016, a young intern was waiting to speak with the founder and chief executive officer of Surbhi Gramodyog Vikas Sansthan (SGVS), a producer and supplier of hand-made herbal cosmetic products. The founder was speaking on the phone with a potential reseller and turning down a new order due to the company being at full capacity. It was the third such request that he had declined in the past week. The young intern was puzzled. SGVS was located in Kashipur, a small town in the state of Uttarakhand in India. With a minimal Internet presence and marketing efforts, it had gained loyal customers in India and across the world, from the United States to Australia. However, SGVS was not willing to increase production capacity and expand the business, thereby forgoing a potential increase in profits. Was the company’s reluctance to scale up the business sustainable over the long run?