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In April 2010, Salil Deshpande has recently resigned from Palo Alto, California-based Bay Partners (Bay) where he had been a general partner. Although Deshpande had built a successful track record at the venture firm, he resigned with two other Bay general partners as disagreement about internal economics and governance continued among the Bay's six-member management team. This triggered the "key man" clause in the limited partnership agreement of Bay's most recent fund, Bay XI. The case considers the options that Deshpande and the Bay XI limited partners face as the firm and fund's futures are thrown into doubt.

Describes Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental consulting and strategic planning firm, and its approach for creating integrative, systematic solutions to green-building conundrums through consulting, research, and policy-related activities. Emphasis is placed on the role of integrated design and the intensive team-based "charrette" process in Terrapin's consulting work as well as on the design trends of biophilia and biomimicry. The case focuses on the sustainable redesign of 111 8th Avenue, New York, New York, to explore the challenge of managing strategic, intangible services in the context of Terrapin's more concrete focus historically. A serendipitous discovery leads the founders to consider how the firm could systematize its process while maintaining the flexibility that made it successful.

A non-governmental organization dedicated to improving underprivileged rural children’s access to quality education in southern India has grown considerably in the seven years since its inception. In considering a growth strategy, the organization’s two founders and managing trustees consider the roles of social value creation, funds sustainability, organizational visibility, resources constraints and how the relationships among these factors affect the organization’s future plans.

In 2012, a young entrepreneur is preparing the marketing portion of a business plan to launch a board games café, and he needs to complete the plan within a week so that he can review it with his business partner. The marketing plan must include a recommendation for a target market and detail plans for promotion, pricing and product offering. The partners have budgeted $6,000 for promotion to gain exposure and bring customers into the café.

The chief financial officer (CFO) and major shareholder of a small charter sport fishing company must prepare the company books for the fiscal year according to international financial reporting standards (IFRS) rules. The CFO must deal with both finance and operating leases.

James Baker is general manager of a large lumber mill in rural Virginia, Johnson Lumber. While on a business trip with the owner (the founder's grandson) and the owner's son, he receives the news that the company's planing mill has caught fire and is burning down. Baker, the owner, and the owner's son must decide what to do in the wake of losing the planing mill. Choices include rebuilding, seeking partnerships with other mills to use their facilities to fulfill existing business, or possibly closing shop and simply taking current profits. If they rebuild, Johnson Lumber will have to shut down for a year, risking the loss of customers and putting several people from the struggling community around the mill out of a job. If Johnson Lumber closes entirely, it will put its workers in an even worse position. But would it be feasible to use other mills' facilities? What if the other mills turned them down? On top of everything, the owner and his son have differences in their attitudes about and goals for the business. Baker must consider the options carefully and balance the pressure to please both the current and future owners of Johnson Lumber with what would be best for the business and the local community whose families it helped support.

Bent Mikkelsen is executive director of economic development for Denmark's second largest region, MidJutland (Central Denmark Region).. As the case opens, he is contemplating comments he has read suggesting that one of the main programs within his entrepreneurship responsibilities, the Growth House program, may not be working as well as he and others had hoped. This is the core program in his entrepreneurship development responsibilities, and a flagship program developed for the regions by the federal Danish Business Authority. The case describes Denmark's entrepreneurship and innovation policies, as well as its accomplishments, at least in terms of achieving top rankings in entrepreneurship policies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Union. Whereas more high-growth venture activity has evolved in Copenhagen, no one in Denmark claims that this is sufficient, and serious doubt that this success can be replicated in the other four regions, including MidJutland. Should every region be a locus of high-growth entrepreneurship, when talented entrepreneurs are moving to Copenhagen for its concentration of resources? Despite the fact that historically, numerous global ventures have emerged from the Central Denmark region, it appears that these older-generation entrepreneurs are not very involved in stimulating entrepreneurship among the current generation. Mikkelsen must decide if and how to tap into the expertise of the successful global Danish firms in entrepreneurial development in the region, increase the rate and effectiveness of angel investing in new ventures, and position the Growth House program better so as to accelerate private sector investment. He also wonders if the existing social and economic development programs are actually deterring risk-taking, and whether it might be time for regional authorities to stop playing such an active role.

Case A describes the creation and growth of Nuru Energy. Starting from nothing, the founder 'bootstraps' a social venture with the goal of providing affordable and effective lighting solutions for 800 million people without access to the electricity grid in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The case narrates the challenges involved in developing a social enterprise with a dual aim of turning a profit and making a social impact. It focuses in particular on the finanical challenge and provides a context to discuss difference financing options and their implications. It looks at the different business model alternatives - market-based and donor-based. The central theme is to assess the merits and drawbacks of the different funding alternatives. Case B is an update that explains what financing option the founder chose and its implications. It sets the stage for a discussion about trade-offs in the geographical expansion of social ventures.

Case A describes the creation and growth of Nuru Energy. Starting from nothing, the founder 'bootstraps' a social venture with the goal of providing affordable and effective lighting solutions for 800 million people without access to the electricity grid in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The case narrates the challenges involved in developing a social enterprise with a dual aim of turning a profit and making a social impact. It focuses in particular on the finanical challenge and provides a context to discuss difference financing options and their implications. It looks at the different business model alternatives - market-based and donor-based. The central theme is to assess the merits and drawbacks of the different funding alternatives. Case B is an update that explains what financing option the founder chose and its implications. It sets the stage for a discussion about trade-offs in the geographical expansion of social ventures.

This case highlights the journey of an organization that was set up in Hyderabad, in southern India, to provide affordable maternal care services to women from low-income urban families. LifeSpring Hospitals grew from a single hospital into a chain of nine hospitals, all in Hyderabad, in only five years. The chief executive officer has spent this initial period trying out new methods, continuously fine-tuning the model and learning from this process of experimentation. As the company seeks to scale the business to 200 hospitals, the chief executive officer must decide whether or not the business model is defined clearly enough to warrant the start of a rapid scaling process.<br><br><br><br>The case is unique because it juxtaposes a commitment to high-quality health care service delivery through processes and protocols with a commitment to making maternal care affordable to low-income urban women. LifeSpring Hospitals tries to achieve these seemingly disparate objectives by attempting to create a financially sustainable business model.

The chief executive officer of eRAD Inc., a company that develops picture archiving and communications systems for the diagnostic imagery industry, is preparing for an upcoming board meeting, where he will face several challenges related to the potential sale of the company. The founder’s recent death in a plane crash has left the company struggling to meet its financial obligations. On one hand, the sale of eRAD to a larger health care technology company will provide enough money to end the ongoing struggle to keep solvent. On the other hand, the business is on the threshold of profitability, and some board members consider the sale premature. All that remains is to reach agreement on the factoring of debt and a few other financial details to satisfy the many shareholders whose votes are needed to accept the offer.

In 1984, Trung Dung fled political persecution in Vietnam, the country of his birth, to arrive in the United States as a refugee with only $2 in his pocket. Over the next two decades, he proved his mettle as one of the most astute and successful Vietnamese-American entrepreneurs. Although Dung had never thought that he would return to Vietnam, the instinctive entrepreneur inside him recognized the opportunities presented by country's rapidly developing and modernizing economy. Dung returned in 2007 to found MobiVi, an Electronic Financial Transactions (EFT) firm. This case explores the intersection of mobile network operators, the ETF industry, and social entrepreneurs to pursue an innovative approach to providing financial services to the approximately 2 billion people worldwide who lacked access. The focus is on three of MobiVi's areas: the Nationwide Distribution System (NDS) unit, MobiVi's innovative offerings around financial services (MFS), and MobiVi Foundation. In 2012, Dung was looking at how to address market inefficiencies, help MobiVi's investors and business partners create and capture more value, and make credit more accessible to the middle and lower income classes in Vietnam. Dung was optimistic given the positive state of the Vietnamese economy, the patented MobiVi payments processing technology, and the most recent developments in telecommunication technologies.

Julia and Nate Burstein were living their dream running their own business and balancing the demands between their work and family obligations while creating a company that was responsive to their employees' and their customers' needs. The Bursteins had joined a large multinational manufacturing company after receiving their MBAs from HBS, but soon left to join Julia's family plastics business. After the business was sold, they struck out on their own to search for a similar business. They purchased Elasto Therm, with $8 million in revenue from manufactured rubber and urethane components, with their own cash, bank financing, and the seller, partly in the form of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Initially, Nate ran the business and after a few years changed roles with Julia to stay at home with their young children for three years. The two were in charge as co-CEOs before Julia relinquished her responsibilities to be at home again. The couple significantly strengthened the organization's talent, focused on innovation, growth, and provided a learning environment for their employees. Through cost efficiencies and pricing strategies, Elasto Therm was able to achieve higher margins than their competitors and focused on low-volume, short-run orders as they continued to expand the business. The 2008 recession forced them to reexamine all aspects of the business, and it retained profitability after painful cutbacks in the organization. To continue their growth into the next decade, they are faced with the choice of acquiring other businesses or growing more organically by adding to their sales organization to achieve geographic expansion.

This is an update to GS-61, describing developments at the company through 2011, including a major acquisition, distribution in China, and an initiative to cultivate start-ups that might grow into future clients.

The sole proprietor of a small cake-baking and cake-decorating business needs to make some decisions regarding the company's future. The company's growth has brought new challenges including possible space constraints. The desire to improve profitability and to take the business to the next level leads the owner to consider increasing prices and the development of a new advertising strategy.

The founders of Zaggora reflected back on a tumultuous year-and-a-half in which they had generated, from just $40,000 in personal savings, a multi-million dollar sportswear enterprise selling Hotpants to women. These were hotpants not of the 1960s hipster variety, but instead the first sportswear product of the new brand Zaggora that was made with a specially developed multi-ply fabric technology that heated up during a workout. While the founders had faced several challenges including averting bankruptcy, now they faced an equally difficult time ahead. Should they grow the enterprise by continuing with their current bootstrapped online approach, or attempt to get their product into retail stores? Should they continue to self-finance and keep control, or cede some control by taking on venture capital funding?

NEA was established in 1977 and it subsequently morphed into one of the largest venture capital firms in the world. Despite its size and significance, some other firms established during the same era such as Kleiner-Perkins and Sequoia (both were established in 1972), are arguably better-known. No venture firm, however, can parallel NEA in terms of its scale and its commitment to organizational and operational innovation. From early on the founders predicted that NEA would grow in size and significance, but the challenges associated with achieving these goals were formidable. How could NEA scale and generate favorable returns from a large capital base for its Limited Partners (LPs)? How could General Partners (GPs) be integrated and incentivized? How could the bi-coastal structure be sustained over the long run?

Wayne Ferrari has bridged the gap between being an independent entrepreneur and a "professional manager." After selling his business to a Private Equity (PE) firm, Ferrari takes on the role of CEO and with their support implements a roll-up strategy to attain growth through acquisition in the mechanical controls distribution industry. Ferrari received support from the PE firm in negotiating and financing acquisitions but faced the challenging task of integrating them into the core business. Getting all the operations on a common IT platform proves more challenging than he expected. Developing an organization that supports a new strategy of application support for their customer base requires a change in culture and an evolving leadership challenge for the business. The most immediate challenge is to implement a "pricing" model to be used with all customers that takes into consideration a variety of customer specific characteristics to set optimal pricing for quotations. On "go live" day, the sales force "is up in arms" requesting that their "special customer deals" be sheltered from this new system. The case outlines a brief history of the business, the changes over the last six years and details on the challenges Ferrari faces as iAutomation continues to expand.

A social enterprise organization, whose mission is to battle poverty and gender discrimination through providing access to technology, is faced with the prospect of losing some or all of its government funding in a time of global recession. Under the legal structure of a non-governmental organization, Digital Opportunity Trust has partnered with large corporations and other organizations and established a local presence in disadvantaged areas. It has worked in a partnership setting to mobilize the information technology knowledge of young people and train them to become leaders of change in their local communities, which in turn will give them the relevant skills and experience to support their own career paths. The organization’s striking success has been driven by its innovativeness and, more particularly, its noticeable efforts to reconcile the corporate and non-profit aspects of doing business, along with the challenges that come with it, without compromising the quality of the social enterprise brand that it is bringing forward.

On October 1, 1891, as Senator Leland Stanford cut the ribbon at the ceremony gifting 8,000-acres of his Palo Alto, California, stock farm to a new, 559-student university bearing his name and seeking to produce "useful" in addition to "cultured" graduates, the majority of onlookers were orange groves and wildflowers. There was, as Gertrude Stein would remark of nearby Bay Area city, Oakland, nearly 50 years later, almost "no there, there." That is, it was a place with little social depth, identity, or culture. But over time, the region became synonymous with a culture of entrepreneurialism and developed into the most significant innovation hotspot in the world. What factors, if any, made what was to become known as "Silicon Valley" unique? Will Silicon Valley remain a vibrant community of technological innovation and economic growth, or will it decline like other previously thriving U.S. regions?