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In 2014, Song Weiping, the founder, chair, and major shareholder of the high-end residential property developer Greentown China Holdings Limited (Greentown), based in Hangzhou, China, had started to consider decreasing his involvement in his company. Without any family to provide an obvious successor, Song had to evaluate different ways to leave the business he founded. The alternatives ranged from selling all or part of his holdings to keeping his shares but having someone else manage the company. If he chose to resign his position as chair and remain as a financial investor, he would have to find a suitable successor to act as chief executive officer. If he chose to sell his interest in the company, what criteria should he use to determine the best buyer or buyers? How much should he sell, and how could he determine a fair price?

Founded in 2008, Harsh Electricals was a supplier of electrical goods and home appliances to retailers in three states of southern India. After the company’s first few years of success and high profitability, the founder observed a steep decline in profits. In 2013, the founder was considering shifting the business to manufacturing and supplying air coolers, but needed to build a business plan that addressed the costs of manufacturing, the break-even point, and the new venture’s projected financial statements.

After more than a decade of development, US-based Synergy Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Synergy) received marketing approval from the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for its first drug, Trulance, which targeted a large market that had only two other approved competitors. Synergy now needed to scale up from a research-and-development shop to a sales-and-marketing powerhouse. The company had not partnered with a larger pharmaceutical company during the regulatory review process, which was typical for smaller drug development companies, and as a result, it retained 100 per cent of the sales revenue but had virtually no in-house sales or marketing capability. In September 2018, the company was heavily indebted and the stock was priced below US$2; many wondered if Synergy had been right to go it alone or if it should continue that strategy for developing the lucrative North American market. With a new chief executive officer, Trulance sales beginning to accelerate, and other products moving through the FDA approval process, Synergy needed to decide whether to stay the course and become a full-fledged pharmaceutical company or seek a partner and stick to its research and development competency.

Peter Alkema, chief information officer of Business Banking at First National Bank in Johannesburg, was puzzling over ways to ensure that codeFest, the event he had inaugurated, would continue to thrive beyond 2018 without his direct involvement. His brainchild had begun in 2015 as a one-day hackathon with 100 participants. Three years later, it had grown to become a six-day coding and innovation extravaganza. Now, in May 2018, Alkema wondered what features of codeFest should continue into the future. What should be improved upon? And what novelties should be injected to take the event to the next level?

From quitting a stable post-MBA job and starting FINDMINE, a start-up in the retail technology space, to finally negotiating venture capital investment offers, Michelle Bacharach-and FINDMINE-had come a long way. Two years of uncertainty with virtually no outside capital raised, a pivot from B2C to B2B, two accelerator programs, and numerous meetings with potential investors and customers had made her an entrepreneur who was comfortable with difficult times and choices. However, none of that had prepared her for the decision she faced in March 2016. After over two years of scraping by, Bacharach had finally found investors interested in putting in much-needed funding to help move FINDMINE forward. Just hours before signing the deal, however, one of the investors had requested additional terms at the last minute: he asked for advisory shares and, most importantly, he wanted to add pernicious terms that seemed very unusual. Bacharach's decision was bound to define the future of FINDMINE and, ultimately, her own career as an entrepreneur.

Nimit Sawhney scrolled through the tweet stream on his phone, unsure of what to make of it on August 6, 2018 or how to respond. Voatz, the Boston-based startup he co-founded and led, provided a mobile-voting platform. In March of 2018, had successfully piloted the new technology to enable U.S. servicemembers stationed abroad to vote securely in West Virginia's primary election. Two West Virginia counties had participated in the first test. Thirteen people voted from their mobile phones, a much more convenient alternative than the other options available to service members abroad. The very first West Virginia voter to use the app called it "slick." Two dozen West Virginia counties were preparing to make mobile-voting via Voatz an option for their citizens living abroad in the general elections slated for November. But the August tweets threw this plan into question. Kevin Beaumont tweeting as @GossiTheDog retweeted a CNN article about Voatz and the upcoming November election with his own commentary: "This is going to backfire." He accused Voatz of operating with out-of-date security for remote logins. It would get worse from there. And Sawhney's task was to figure out how to make it better.

Boxed.com ("Boxed") is an ambitious e-commerce retailer start-up, founded by visionary CEO Chieh Huang in 2013. From starting in Huang's garage in 2013, to winning Emerging E-Retailer of the Year in 2016, to having 4 operational distribution centers in 2018, Boxed used a variety of strategies in order to gain customers and grow its presence. This case explores the journey that the scrappy, new entrant navigated as it competed against large, goliath players in an already established retail and e-commerce industry.

Flipz is the pseudonym for a Hong Kong-based mobile classified app for consumer-to-consumer selling and buying of new and second-hand goods. Despite the initial skepticism towards their venture, the founders managed to gain traction with their app and eventually succeeded in raising venture funding at a valuation of US$500 million six years after the company was founded. In January 2016, Lee Ju Ning, the co-founder of Flipz, a peer-to-peer online selling platform for second-hand goods, ponders about the important decisions she has to make in the wake of being confronted with multiple setbacks in her entrepreneurial journey. Eighteen months earlier, Lee and her fellow university classmate, Caden Chan, had returned to Hong Kong, feeling energised after a one-year immersion programme in Silicon Valley. Shortly after, Lee and Chan spotted a business opportunity and brought their idea of simplifying the cumbersome process of online listing and selling second-hand items to a hackathon competition. They eventually emerged the champion and with the winner's prize, Flipz was founded, despite disapproval from Lee's parents. The entrepreneurship journey was indeed not as smooth as expected, and there were many lessons to be learnt from the school of hard knocks. Successive challenges began to dampen the initial high spirits - funding rejections, technical difficulties during product development, and dwindling user downloads following a successful launch. Lee faces a common dilemma encountered by many budding tech entrepreneurs - whether to channel the remaining limited funds to marketing or product development. She also begins to cast doubts on the future: Should she hang on to the start-up or call it quits?

The chief executive officer and founder of Global Metal Company (GMC), had been in the business of antique reproduction hardware for more than three years, having quit his successful corporate career to start GMC in his hometown of Aligarh in northern India. After seeing the initial response to the business, he was confident that within three years, GMC would realize the annual revenue of US$1 million he had envisioned. In 2018–2019, upon completing three years in business, GMC closed the year with $0.15 million in annual revenues. The CEO wondered what had gone wrong in those years. Had his target of $1 million been over-ambitious? Or had his assessment of the overall market potential been off the mark? During those three years, he had expanded his operations in baby steps from Europe—which was overly price competitive and served by a large number of exporters from Aligarh—to the United States. Now he was wondering whether he should plunge deeply into the US market to grow GMC, or seriously consider quitting this business and moving back into his corporate career.

Aparigraha Yoga was founded in 2012 as a sustainable entrepreneurship venture in Ontario that sought to balance the environmental, social, and financial components of the triple bottom line (3BL) while providing high-quality yoga classes in its community. The founder intended to utilize synergistic solutions, which fully integrated each 3BL component, to address any business problem. In 2018, she identified two issues at her studio that challenged her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and the reality of always finding synergistic solutions. The founder needed to either develop new synergistic approaches to these issues or modify her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and select which components to favour in which situations.

Between 2016 and 2019, the India-based budget hotel start-up Oravel Stays Private Limited (OYO) expanded into nine countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States. However, OYO faced several crises in its home country: contracted hoteliers of OYO threatened to file lawsuits against the start-up for breach of contract, and customers raised service quality issues. Critics believed that with such rapid internationalization, OYO’s founder was simply burning through the cash of venture capitalists. Nevertheless, the founder was determined to expand internationally while enhancing OYO’s service portfolio in India. Should he reconsider his decision to focus on international markets instead of the domestic market? Could legal issues in OYO’s home country create impediments to this growth plan? How should he deal with these issues?

In January 2016, the three partners of CampusHash Technologies LLP (CampusHash), an Indian start-up focused on conducting software training programs, had to make some pressing strategic decisions. CampusHash’s revenues had not grown as expected and the partners had to decide whether to continue with the existing business model or choose to pivot. While pivoting could potentially lead to a significant improvement in CampusHash’s performance, it could also lead to wide-spread organizational change and disruption, risking the survival of the start-up. Despite their constrained resources, the partners had to decide whether to pivot or not in the next two weeks, when they would present a business plan to angel investors to raise much-required funding.

The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its parts. Facing threats to its growth, digital marketing and sales company Clear Link Technologies, LLC (Clearlink) decided to run an experiment to test strategies for improving sales productivity. The experiment compares the efficacy of two interventions: group incentives and management-directed peer learning. The case surfaces some of the mechanisms driving peer effects in the workplace and the managerial levers to tap into peer effects for improving operations. The case also provides an introduction to experiments in organizations and how these experiments may differ from traditional randomized controlled trials in marketing or pharmaceutical development.

In January 2018, the three founders of Lighting Enhancement Corporation (Lightenco), a Canadian turnkey lighting solutions enterprise, were at a crossroads. After building a successful business enterprise over seven years by relying entirely on internal financial sources, the founders of Lightenco now faced a difficult decision. Energy subsidies from the provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario had underpinned part of Lightenco’s value proposition to customers, but these subsidy schemes were facing imminent termination in both provinces. Moreover, the financing option that Lightenco’s three founders had deployed—relying on internally generated funds and not taking external capital—no longer seemed tenable, and moving to the next level of growth seemed to necessitate new and innovative financing options. Should the founders persist with the bootstrapping that had now become part of their entrepreneurial mindset? Or should they scale the business by either giving up equity or subsuming their operations in a merger with a larger firm? The founders were at a tipping point and had to decide which option to take.

Sun Quan Education Inc. faced a variety of challenges on its path to expanding its customer base and building profitability through the operation of the We-GO club, a strategic business unit aimed at promoting education and training about the Go game in southern Ontario. Some of these challenges came from the low awareness of Go compared to other more popular intellectual products in Canada, the relatively late entry to the market of educational services, and more critically, the need for the company to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan starting with a clearly defined target segment. What was the right direction for the company’s marketing plan?

Located in Bengaluru, India, Xoxoday.com was an online marketplace for experiential gifting. The company started by offering social gifting, and selecting corporations as its target market. In 2013, the company decided to cater to both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets and entered into the niche sector of experiential gifting. The value proposition of the start-up was to provide the best gifting solutions for customers while delivering an experience that would build memories. Heading into 2016, Xoxoday.com aimed to grow by acquiring new customers. It promoted its experiences extensively on social media platforms, but the company’s hard work was not paying off. Xoxoday.com needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to its social media plan in order to attract new customers.

From his time as a young engineer at Microsoft in 1993, to the challenge of building Glassdoor from the ground up until it reached a valuation of over $1 billion, in 2018, Robert Hohman had come a long way. Now, from his spacious office with a picturesque view of Richardson Bay in Mill Valley, California, Hohman confronted one of the most important decisions of his life. Glassdoor, the company he cofounded in 2007 with Rich Barton and Tim Besse, had grown consistently over the years. It had been fueled by multiple different investors and VC firms, under various circumstances and deal structures. Like most start-up founders, they expected to take the IPO route at some point. Then, in early 2019, when it seemed that the company was finally ready to go public, one of its largest competitors placed an offer that was hard to refuse.

From his time as a young engineer at Microsoft in 1993, to the challenge of building Glassdoor from the ground up until it reached a valuation of over $1 billion, in 2018, Robert Hohman had come a long way. Now, from his spacious office with a picturesque view of Richardson Bay in Mill Valley, California, Hohman confronted one of the most important decisions of his life. Glassdoor, the company he cofounded in 2007 with Rich Barton and Tim Besse, had grown consistently over the years. It had been fueled by multiple different investors and VC firms, under various circumstances and deal structures. Like most start-up founders, they expected to take the IPO route at some point. Then, in early 2019, when it seemed that the company was finally ready to go public, one of its largest competitors placed an offer that was hard to refuse.

Co-founded by Raghav Kapoor in Singapore in 2014, Smartkarma was an innovative e-commerce-based independent platform for providing investment research - conceived in response to changes in banking industry regulations post the 2008 financial crisis. New industry regulations required investment research to be a separate entity from sales in banks and financial institutions. Consequently, large investment banks looking to slash cost centres had started to outsource investment research. Smartkarma used a Subscription based business model. Independent analysts could publish research content on the platform and client organisations brought monthly subscriptions to access all content. Analysts were paid based on revenues generated from their content, determined by quantified value add (QVA) calculation model. By the end of 2017, Smartkarma had established itself as Asia's largest investment research platform with more than 14,000 insights across several verticals. It had also expanded geographically, establishing offices in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, and London. Smartkarma's CEO and co-founder, Kapoor, however, was aware that the firm's business model was susceptible to several risk factors, including very short-term client commitment, economic downturns and industry regulations. Kapoor chose a strategy of quickly acquiring as many clients as possible, as well as continuously building a pool of insight providers to create an early mover market advantage. Would Smartkarma be able to scale from being an Asian leader to dominate globally? Ease of entry, informational efficiency, and simplicity in replicating an independent investment platform, made it extremely difficult for such a business to beat the market on a sustained basis. Would focusing on the quality of research and transparent payment be enough to make Smartkarma the choice for asset managers in large banks? Could the company's subscription-based business model stand the test of time?