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In mid-2015, India-based Titan Company, a joint venture between Tata Group and Tamil Nadu Development Corporation, was active in several retail businesses: watches; jewellery; eyewear; and youth accessories (e.g. backpacks and helmets). As of July 2015, Titan Company operated 1,300 of its own stores in 240 Indian cities and towns, and its products were being sold abroad through 2,300 third-party retail outlets in 32 countries. Titan Company's board of directors had developed an ambitious target—revenues of INR300 billion by 2020. The chief executive officer and his team needed to outline a strategy to achieve this goal. In particular, they needed to decide whether Titan Company should continue to launch new businesses or instead focus on consolidating its existing businesses.

Founded in 2012, DraftKings helped change the fantasy sports landscape by popularizing daily fantasy sports (DFS), or short-term fantasy sports tournaments that offered big cash prizes to winners. The company's valuation exceeded $1 billion by 2015, but DraftKings soon faced intense scrutiny from government agencies about whether its business model violated federal laws preventing sports betting and online gambling. Then, in May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal law that had prohibited states from legalizing sports betting. Now that states could legalize sports betting, what should DraftKings' next steps be?

In 2017, bike sharing was one of the hottest technology trends in China. Since its inception two years earlier, Mobike had quickly become one of China’s leading bike on-demand companies because of its bicycles’ superior quality, and the company’s intelligence capability, open innovation, alliance strategies, and big data applications. Mobike expanded aggressively to take advantage of opportunities in this emerging market and the need for efficient, green, and sustainable solutions to short-distance urban transportation. However, Mobike's aggressive expansion faced tough challenges, including shared bicycle operations and management, competition from rivals, and government regulations. By late 2017, several bike-sharing services had gone bankrupt. How could Mobike avoid the same fate, generate profit, and continue to prosper?

The case describes the journey of Rashmi Vittal, founder of Little Green Kid (LGK), an organic clothing company based out of Bangalore, India. A big believer is sustainability business, Rashmi started LGK to create and retail a line of 100% organic clothing. A technology professional by training, she struggled to figure out the various aspects of the organic clothing business and painstakingly put together each piece of the puzzle. She built the business by using various means of bootstrapping - outsourcing, partnering, sharing capacity, and leveraging the support of friends and family. The case is positioned at a point where Rashmi has built a modest but cash flow positive business. She now needs to decide the future course of action for LGK, that is, if and how to grow the company to the next level. The case provides rich material to discuss the concept of bootstrapping; the challenges of building and scaling a venture that seeks to carve out a new market (organic clothing); the trade-off involved in seeking venture capital funding, especially for a sustainability business.

Set in February 2018, the case follows Gillian Tee and Lily Phang, the co-founders of Homage, a Singapore-based tech startup providing on-demand home care service to the elderly. Homage was founded as a solution to the growing social problems caused by an ageing population-the proportion of Singaporeans aged 65 years and above was on the rise while the support ratio was declining rapidly. Challenged by the shortage of skilled labour, the limited capacity of facilities, and rising costs, the government was keen on promoting the concept of families and communities as the first line of care for the elderly. However, tending to the needs of elderly family members was affecting the social, family and work life of family caregivers. Such informal caregiving was also causing discomfort to the elderly care recipients. The incumbent care agencies relied on foreign workers due to the shortage of a trained local workforce; their conventional operating model was less effective in meeting the requirements of the care recipients, and coordination between the care recipient and the care professionals was erratic and tedious. Homage's smartphone-based application addressed these problems in caregiving by matching elderly care recipients to care professionals based on more than 50 different criteria. The application empowered heretofore dormant caregivers to choose service requests that matched their terms and skill levels. By automating the entire process, the application rendered a seamless and cost-effective on-demand service for the elderly while creating flexible income opportunities for those who had dropped out of the workforce. After gaining ground in the market and securing funds for growth, Gillian and Lily were gearing up for scaling the business by driving up its adoption and usage. However, they had to prepare for the accompanying potential challenges.

In 2016, Michael Rubin's Fanatics was the U.S.' largest sports e-commerce company, and operator of the official online store for all the major American sports leagues. That year, Fanatics began to dabble in manufacturing licensed sports merchandise, securing limited permissions from leagues to manufacture apparel in response to 'micro-moments,' sudden surges of interest in a team or player that were too abrupt for the league's usual licensees to react to. The success of these efforts raised the possibility that Fanatics might make a play to displace a major athletic wear manufacturer as the official merchandise licensee of a major sports league. For a company with little manufacturing infrastructure and experience however, it was unclear whether this was an advisable step for Fanatics, or how they would go about it.

In 2011, Alexis Horowitz Burdick founded Luxola, an e-commerce platform selling branded cosmetics online in Singapore. By 2015, Burdick was able to expand her venture across 12 markets in Asia Pacific region and was acquired by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennesey (LVMH) under its cosmetics arm of Sephora. However, the initial years of Luxola had been fraught with several challenges. The primary challenge for Luxola had been attracting funding from venture capitalists. Luxola had been established by a solo woman founder, and typically venture capitalists avoided investing in start-ups established by women. Another unexpected challenge for the company was the 'lack of trust' reputed cosmetic brands had on e-commerce platforms. Burdick used a lean business model and customer centric strategies to cope with these challenges. After the acquisition, Sephora retained the senior staff including its founder. Burdick now focussed her attention on more sophisticated channels of marketing and implemented digital analytic tools and behavioural messaging to drive customer conversion ratios. These strategies had begun to produce results, and Burdick was hopeful that she could further grow the company in the region fairly quickly. Luxola had tapped on an unmet user need of women in Southeast Asia - sourcing branded cosmetics from an online platform. The unmet user need had stemmed from a demographic transformation wherein the young women in the region were becoming increasingly independent and liked to splurge on themselves. Other than demographics, what other sources of innovative opportunity had Luxola satisfied? Was exiting through acquisition the right strategy for Luxola?

Dai Wei and his co-founders grew Beijing-based ofo from a school-based startup to a bike-share behemoth in a matter of months, topped an all-out market-share battle fueled with almost $1 billion in venture capital, provided 2 billion bicycle rides, soaked up the majority of the bike manufacturing capacity in all of China, and then, in July of 2017, hit pause. The proximate reason for halting their purchase of new bicycles was a supply imbalance: ofo had many more bikes on their way than they did the smart-locks that allowed their customers to unlock them with their cell-phones. But the breather would also give ofo's leaders a chance to re-assess their plans for the rest of the year. For how long, to what end, and at what cost, to wage their market-share battle with main rival, Mobike? How aggressively to pursue their international expansion and what adjustments, if any, to make from their model in dozens of Chinese cities? And what to do about the concerns from government officials that ofo's dockless bikes and those of dozens of competitors were creating hazards on city streets? Wei and four schoolmates at Peking University had launched ofo on their campus with 1000 bikes in fall 2015. Since then, they had deployed 6.5 million. The question now was how many more?

LaundryWala was an online, on-demand laundry service provider in the suburbs of Delhi, India. In 2018, three years after its inception, the firm had more than 30,000 individual and business customers. The 33-year-old owner had to make quick strategic decisions regarding the next phase of the firm's growth. She looked at the firm's operation details to assess the following: Was her service model viable and profitable? Should the customer segment focus be business-to-consumer or business-to-business sales? Was a company-owned business model the best option, or should she look at outsourcing operations? Could the young start-up move into new territories and service offerings?

The owner and sole shareholder of a Vanderbilt Financial Services brokerage in London, Ontario, must decide on the best course of action to grow his business. In 2018, the owner was concerned that he had not accomplished as much as he could with his current business strategy. He was a financial adviser specializing in life insurance and mutual fund products, and he was looking to find new ways to grow. The owner had come up with two options to help achieve growth within his brokerage: enter the real estate market by building business office space to use and to rent to prospective tenants, or build a larger team of life insurance and mutual fund representatives to help manage his growing client base.

As a pioneer and leading competitor among China’s online travel-service providers, Ctrip.com International, Ltd. (Ctrip) had successfully integrated technology into China’s rapidly growing travel industry by 2017. The company’s platform provided a comprehensive set of travel services including hotel reservations, flight and train ticketing, vacation packages, business-travel management, and dining reservations. Praised in the industry as the exemplary combination of traditional tourism and e-commerce, Ctrip had experienced significant success. However, the company still had to adapt to an ever-changing and increasingly complex internal and external business environment. How would the company evolve its business model to sustainably compete in the global online travel market?

In 2015, the chief executive officer of Natco Pharma Limited, a commercial manufacturer of pharmaceutical drugs in India, needed to raise funds either through debt or equity to meet the company's capital expenditure and working capital requirements of ₹3.41 billion. The company could finance a loan at an interest rate of 12 per cent or raise funds through public deposits at an interest rate of 13 per cent. The company could also use equity to raise the requisite funds through either a rights offering or a seasoned equity offering. The chief executive officer needed to present his recommendation to the board of directors the following week. Which option should the company adopt?

Datri Blood Stem Cell Donors Registry (DATRI), a not-for-profit social venture established in 2009 with 3,000 donors, was India’s largest stem cell donor registry. Since 2009, it had expanded until its donor base was over 267,000. While DATRI continued to work towards its vision to find a matching donor for every patient in need of life-saving stem cells, its dependence on voluntary donations was causing some pressing issues. Donors who voluntarily enrolled in the registry were backing out of the process when contacted for a transplant, and the organization was also facing fundraising difficulties. DATRI's co-founder and chief executive officer felt that not addressing these issues soon would undermine the organization’s purpose. In May 2017, he was preparing for a meeting with his team to finalize a future plan of action that would solve these problems.

Shanghai Contron Information Technology Co., Ltd. was a small technology company in Shanghai, China, established in 2011. The company's main customer was the government, and sales management was the company's primary department. In a rapidly expanding market, the company moved very quickly from the start-up phase to the growth phase. In 2016, the company’s chief executive officer faced challenges in terms of obtaining, stimulating, and managing sales talent, and improving the leading role of the sales department. What could the chief executive officer do to address these challenges?

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Freshii Inc., a leading Canadian-based, international franchised restaurant chain, had developed a distinctive corporate culture at the restaurant’s head office. In July 2017, Freshii was expanding its healthy food, fast casual restaurants at the rate of about one store per week, and the CEO wanted to ensure a common culture in the chain’s ecosystem. The task fell to the chief people officer to develop a plan that would take into consideration three developments that were relevant: the chain was on the verge of exponential growth; it was transforming from a restaurant brand to a health and wellness brand; and it was entering new lines of business by partnering with retail chains and airline companies. Given the diverse cultures at the store level, how could Freshii ensure a consistent corporate culture across the Freshii ecosystem? And how could Freshii convert its corporate culture to become both a sustainable and scalable competitive advantage?

In November 2016, the two co-founders of the Delhi-based Greenco Enterprises India Pvt. Ltd. were getting ready to launch a range of frozen snacks in the competitive Indian market. Their strategy was to penetrate the already established non-vegetarian frozen snacks market with fast-moving popular products and grow the vegetarian frozen snacks market with differentiated offerings. As the January 2017 launch date approached, they had to get their pricing and distribution strategy in place. For a new brand with a limited budget, securing shelf space was a challenge. The two founders wondered whether the company should focus all of its efforts on building a retail brand in the business-to-consumer segment, or whether it should consider institutional sales in the business-to-business space. How could the initial investment and running costs be balanced with the need to stay competitive in the market?

In Spring of 2018, Chris Ailman, CIO of the $200 billion pension plan for California public school teachers (CalSTRS) was mandated by his board to "prioritize engagement with makers and retailers of firearms in California" following a series of gun-related tragedies in schools. While CalSTRS had a long history of engagement and even divestment, as a fiduciary for the retirement assets of current and future teachers, calls for values-motivated screening or divestment always posed an inherently complex challenge. Having spearheaded the development of Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearm Industry released on November 14, 2018, Chris Ailman and his team had to decide what to do next.

Two friends started the company Whizz in 2013 with a fleet of seven cars and a team of 12 people in Delhi. Within three years, Whizz had increased its fleet to 2,200 cars, capturing approximately 60–70 per cent of the Indian car rental market. The company had ambitious plans to expand to other cities with the rapid growth in the industry and increasing disposable incomes among millennials—the typical Whizz customer group. When one partner quit for personal reasons, the other was left to manage the company’s marketing and business development divisions, and to secure new funding. Although Whizz was the first mover in the Indian market, it had not seen a profit since its inception, and now, in 2016, pressure was increasing, with Whizz's organized competitors having similar ambitious expansion plans. The remaining partner had to decide how to address these challenges and manage the risks of his business model, while maintaining operations and making a profit.

This case consists of conversations with six prominent venture capital investors in the United States. The topics covered include investment strategies and relationships with entrepreneurs in the United States and around the world.

In 2017, the French film producer and distributor EuropaCorp S.A. (EuropaCorp) announced a historical record loss of €119.9 million. The company had almost doubled its revenues between 2001 and 2010 by using an integrated studio model, but the recent losses had been substantial. After entering into a number of international joint production and marketing ventures, the company reported its highest revenues to date in 2015, only to announce in July 2016 that the company had incurred significant losses and that its revenues were the lowest since 2008. Once again, the company tried to turn itself around, strengthening its position by focusing on the founder’s core business and making some financial adjustments. A capital increase resulted in a positive shift in EuropaCorp’s shareholding structure; however, the company was still experiencing losses and was anticipating a continuing loss into the next year. Was there anything more EuropaCorp could do to change its position?