Publications

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October 2007 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Barclays Global Investors and Exchange Traded Funds

By: Luis M. Viceira and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Provides an overview of the Exchange Traded Funds (EFT) industry and highlights the leadership role that Barclays Global Investors (BGI) has played in this developing asset class. BGI launched its first ETFs under the iShares brand name in 2000, and by mid-2007 BGI was... View Details

Keywords: History; Venture Capital; Asset Management; Stocks; Investment Funds; Leading Change; Expansion; Competitive Strategy; Capital Markets; Global Strategy; Financial Strategy; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Asia; Europe

01 Sep 2009
News

Alumni Books

anyone in business and sales. The book ends with a series of analytical exercises to illuminate basic principles on which readers can base business plans. The Power Curve: Smart Investing Using Dividends, Options, and the Magic of... View Details

January 2023
Case

The END Fund: To Eliminate Neglected Tropical Diseases

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Courtney Han

Founded in 2012, the END fund focused on eliminating five Neglected Tropical Diseases that accounted for 80% of the tropical diseases affecting nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide. Its roughly $25 million/year annual budget was fully committed when it got news that the... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Health Disorders; Health Care and Treatment; Resource Allocation; Global Range; Decisions; Investment Funds

April 1998 (Revised November 1999)
Case

Hamilton Financial Investments: A Franchise Built on Trust

By: Robert L. Simons and Antonio Davila

Provides a vehicle for students to evaluate risk management in the fast-paced mutual funds industry. A new risk manager has been hired to install new management controls and procedures. A series of decisions will determine how much business and franchise risk the... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Management Teams; Managerial Roles; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment Funds; Performance Evaluation; Corporate Strategy; Change Management; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry

June 2007 (Revised April 2016)
Case

Octone Records

By: Anita Elberse and Elie Ofek

In February 2007, Octone Records founders James Diener, Ben Berkman, and David Boxenbaum had been highly successful with the first two bands they had signed, Maroon 5 and Flyleaf. Known for its grassroots marketing campaigns, Octone operated through a unique... View Details

Keywords: Arts; Joint Ventures; Investment Return; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Product Development; Outcome or Result; Creativity; Music Industry

September 2011 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Khosla Ventures: Biofuels Gain Liquidity

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Evan Richardson

Samir Kaul, a Partner at Khosla Ventures, looked out his office window. It was late June, 2011, and like almost every day in Menlo Park, the sun was shining. Kaul was reflecting on what had been a very positive 10 months in the venture capital business. Over that span,... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Financial Strategy; Business or Company Management; Partners and Partnerships; Product Development; Investment Portfolio; Financial Services Industry

11 Sep 2000
Research & Ideas

Riding the Internet Fast Track

such as Amazon.com, drugstore.com, E*Trade, and Priceline.com, firms that unflinchingly invest millions of dollars in advertising and promotion each year to rapidly build traffic and revenues. The high-octane fuel that these super trains... View Details

Keywords: by Peter Jacobs

01 Dec 2019
News

Regional Alumni Events Address Climate Change

HBS Professor Mike Toffel; Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966), cofounder and Chief Investment Strategist of GMO, LLC; Gina McCarthy, Director of C-CHANGE (Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of... View Details

Keywords: Jen Myers

19 Sep 2012
Research & Ideas

Funding Innovation: Is Your Firm Doing it Wrong?

common struggle for firms to get innovation investments right, says Josh Lerner, the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School. On one hand, firms large enough to house their... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

21 Feb 2005
Research & Ideas

The VC Quandary: Too Much Money

School. Intel Capital, the chipmaker's venture division, has scaled back somewhat from the hyper investment levels of 2000, "but I've always thought it was really important in the venture market to stay in the market, be in the... View Details

Keywords: by Julie Jette; Financial Services

28 Apr 2021
Blog Post

Alumni Spotlight: Cissy Chen (MBA 2019)

to going to HBS, it wasn’t until I took “Investing in the 21st Century: Return, Risk and Impact,” taught by Professors Shawn Cole and Vikram Gandhi, that I had a chance to learn about what impact investing was and understand how big the... View Details

04 Oct 2021
Blog Post

Tapping into “Nontraditional” Private Equity and Venture Capital Talent at HBS

Mbanusi (MBA 2021) and Morgan Sheil (MBA 2021), who came to business school from nonprofit and chemical engineering backgrounds respectively, prove that experience outside of investing can also be highly transferable and valuable to the... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Venture Capital

01 Dec 2005
News

Trillion-Dollar Fixer-Upper

knowledge that the industry today bears little resemblance to the industry of the late 1980s. In fact, real estate now is widely viewed as a new asset class that competes with stocks and bonds for investment capital. It earned that... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Real Estate

01 Jun 2017
News

The Exchange: Venture Forth

illustration by Peter Arkle When Professor Paul Gompers began studying the venture capital industry in the late 1980s, colleagues often wondered why. “They’d say that it’s such a backwater and unimportant industry,” he recalls. With more than $127 billion View Details

Keywords: April White

05 Aug 2014
News

A Diversified Portfolio

real business opportunity to invest in companies with high-growth potential and at least one woman in a leadership role that were being overlooked by the traditional VC community. Sometimes, in order to see an opportunity, you have to be... View Details

Keywords: Constantine von Hoffman

06 Dec 2010
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Doing Business in Emerging Markets

Protecting Foreign Investments After a string of forced nationalizations of private enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s, the pendulum swung back and companies were again encouraged by host countries to build and run major infrastructure... View Details

16 Mar 2018
News

Enabling The Pursuit of Entrepreneurial Dreams

she worked in real estate investment banking at Goldman Sachs and then pivoted to the Walt Disney Company and AwesomenessTV, a digital studio that produces original programming for the emerging Generation Z. Ng knew she wanted to pursue... View Details

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Where Main Street Meets Wall Street

For Boston, whose history is better known for its midnight rides and tea parties with attitude, this was, by comparison, a low-key moment. On a slow July day in 1924 in the Hub's financial district, a new investment product was quietly... View Details

Keywords: by Garry Emmons; Financial Services

January 2014
Case

Barclays Bank and Contingent Capital Notes, 2012

By: Lucy White and Trent Kim

In 2012, regulatory changes following the financial crisis mean that Barclays Bank is faced with the need to raise large amounts of capital in order to comply with increased capital requirements, tightening rules as to the "quality of capital," and increased risk... View Details

Keywords: Financial Instruments; Investment Banking; Capital; Banking Industry