Publications

07 Dec 2015
Research & Ideas

The Rise of Personalized Entrepreneurial Finance and Other VC Trends

and believe in. Consider that one of those tools, crowdfunding, is on track to account for more investment money than venture capital itself by 2016, rising from just $880 million in 2010 to an estimated $34... View Details

Keywords: Re: Josh Lerner; Financial Services; Banking

August 2000 (Revised July 2002)
Background Note

Fundamental Enterprise Valuation: Introduction

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this series of notes is to define the key "drivers" of the fundamental value of equity and to illustrate how these drivers determine the future cash flows and the "present value pattern" of the underlying common stock. The series includes one technical... View Details

Keywords: Equity; Cash Flow; Valuation; Investment; Investment Return; Cost; Capital

Vikram S. Gandhi is the Gerald P. Kaminsky Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the General Management Unit. He has developed and teaches two new courses in the Elective Curriculum of the MBA Program. The first is a finance and investing course, Sustainable... View Details

Keywords: financial services

Kristin W. Mugford

Kristin Mugford is the Melvin Tukman Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Finance Unit at the Harvard Business School and the Senior Associate Dean for Culture and Community. She previously served as Faculty Chair for field-based learning and... View Details

June 1975 (Revised September 2004)
Case

Angus Cartwright III

By: Kenneth J. Hatten, William J. Poorvu, Howard H. Stevenson, Arthur I. Segel and John H. Vogel, Jr.

Judy and John DeRight, looking to diversify their investment portfolios, have retained Angus Cartwright, Jr. to identify prospective real estate acquisitions. Mr. Cartwright has four potential properties that he feels merit an in-depth financial analysis. The case... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Cash Flow; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Taxation; Balanced Scorecard; Valuation

December 1967 (Revised May 2004)
Case

Super Project, The

Describes the proper use of incremental analysis for capital investment decisions. View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Corporate Finance

Working Paper Summaries

How do Private Equity Fees Vary Across Public Pensions?

Keywords: by Juliane Begenau and Emil Siriwardane; Financial Services

Jo Tango

Jo Tango is the MBA Class of 1962 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration. He helps teach "The Entrepreneurial Manager" (TEM), a required course for all 900 first-year students and of which he... View Details

February 2000 (Revised September 2001)
Case

edocs, Inc. (A)

By: Paul A. Gompers

Describes the development of edocs, an Internet company aimed at revolutionizing the on-line bill presentment market. Kevin Laracey must negotiate a venture capital investment with Jonathon Guerster, an associate at Charles River Ventures. Can be used as a role-playing... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Investment; Growth and Development; Negotiation Deal; Internet; Information Technology Industry

September 1994 (Revised May 2010)
Case

Hamilton Test Systems, Inc.

By: William A. Sahlman and Norman Klein

The protagonists must decide whether to invest in an auto emissions testing company as the first investment in the leveraged buyout fund they recently formed. Issues of how to raise the needed equity capital and how to structure the acquisition are emphasized. View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Leveraged Buyouts; Environmental Sustainability; Investment; Service Industry; Auto Industry

Find at Harvard

Article

Expected Stock Returns Worldwide: A Log-Linear Present-Value Approach

By: Akash Chattopadhyay, Matthew R. Lyle and Charles C.Y. Wang

This study provides the first large-scale study of the performance of expected-return proxies (ERPs) internationally. Analyst-forecast-based ICCs are sparsely populated and not robustly associated with future returns. Earnings-model-forecast-based ICCs are... View Details

Keywords: Expected Returns; Discount Rates; Fundamental Valuation; Implied Cost Of Capital; International Equity Markets; Present Value; Investment Return; Equity; Markets; Global Range

SSRN

Find at Harvard

Victoria Ivashina is the Lovett-Learned Professor of Finance and Head of the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School. She also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy... View Details

Keywords: investment banking industry; investment banking industry; investment banking industry; investment banking industry; investment banking industry; investment banking industry

April 2022 (Revised August 2022)
Case

Antler

By: Dennis Campbell and Iuliana Mogosanu

The case describes the founding, development, and scaling of Antler, an early-stage investment platform that invests in entrepreneurs pre-team and, in many cases, even pre-idea. The case explores the economics of venture capital investing at such an early stage and the... View Details

Keywords: Platform; Technology; Analytics; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Expansion; Financial Services Industry

April 2020 (Revised August 2020)
Case

WeWork—November 2018

By: Paul A. Gompers, Patrick Sweeney and Alex Gachanja

In May 2017, SoftBank announced the official launch of the Vision Fund — which promptly became the largest technology-focused investment fund in the world, with nearly $100 billion in capital under its management. Reports from a few months prior hinted that SoftBank... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Valuation; Corporate Governance

02 Aug 2018
Blog Post

Venturing into VC

I’ve spent my summer as an MBA Associate at Victress Capital, an early-stage venture capital (VC) firm focused on achieving outsized returns through investing in diverse teams. I originally met our firm’s... View Details

Dante Roscini

Dante Roscini holds the Professor of Management Practice Chair endowed by the MBA Class of 1952 at Harvard Business School. He joined the faculty in 2008 after a two-decades-long career in finance. He currently teaches the course Business, Government, and the... View Details

20 Aug 2020
Blog Post

“Business as Usual, In a Different Way” – Creating an Impactful Remote Internship at Actis

For Nikki Mason, Rachael Henley, and their team at Actis, it was never a matter of if they should continue their Global Summer Associate Programme in 2020, but how they would do it well. The Actis Internship Program Actis is a global emerging markets private View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital / Private Equity; Venture Capital / Private Equity

August 1997 (Revised September 1997)
Case

GMIMCo Venture Capital: September 1996

By: Josh Lerner, Peter Wendell and Catherine M. Conneely

Kathryn Stokel must choose between three venture capital groups (if any) in which to invest the pension fund of General Motors Corp. Each has distinct strengths and weaknesses. View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Asset Management; Retirement; Investment Funds; Venture Capital; Financial Services Industry