Publications

November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Bridgit: Persevere or Pivot?

By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti

In late 2012, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, two young women in their final year of college, founded Bridgit, a technology startup that developed solutions to simplify vital but laborious processes within the construction industry. In the Fall of 2013, after months... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneur; Founder; Co-founders; Women Executives; Pivot; Startup; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Product Launch; Research and Development; Competition; Construction Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Canada

April 2019
Technical Note

A Note on Boards in VC-Backed Ventures

By: Shikhar Ghosh, Ramana Nanda, Suraj Srinivasan and Terrence Shu

What is the value of a Board, and why does a company need one? The note documents the formal role of a Board of Directors as going beyond simply acting as legal representation of corporate ownership. Moreover, this role changes as the company moves through different... View Details

Keywords: Founders; Business Startup; Board; Board Of Directors; Business Startups; Governing and Advisory Boards; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship

August 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

DexAI

By: Jo Tango and Christina Wallace

During a challenging fundraising environment, the DexAI founders received two term sheets with nearly identical economic terms but very different legal ones. The entrepreneurs had to navigate: representations and warranties (their personal guarantees that the company's... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital Term Sheet; Term Sheet; Term Sheets; Founders; Legal Aspects Of Business; Seed Financing; Founders' Agreements; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Intellectual Property; Entrepreneurial Finance; Contracts; Business Startups; Agreements and Arrangements

June 2024
Case

Alignvest Student Housing: Keep Building or Time to Sell?

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Patrick Sanguineti

Sanjil Shah, Managing Partner of Alignvest Student Housing REIT (ASH), faces the most significant decision thus far in his career: is it the right time to sell the company? Together with his partner Reza Satchu, Shah had developed ASH into the largest student housing... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneur; Exit Strategy; Real Estate; Founder; Equity Valuation; Decisions; Entrepreneurial Finance; Interest Rates; Health Pandemics; Housing; Partners and Partnerships; Expansion; Canada

February 2022 (Revised November 2022)
Case

Nuritas

By: Mitchell Weiss, Satish Tadikonda, Vincent Dessain and Emer Moloney

Nora Khaldi had built a technology “to unlock the power of nature” in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company... View Details

Keywords: Cash Burn; Cash Flow Analysis; Pharmaceutical Companies; Founder; Artificial Intelligence; AI; Entrepreneurship; Health Testing and Trials; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Market Entry and Exit; AI and Machine Learning; Pharmaceutical Industry

February 2014 (Revised August 2016)
Case

Strava

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Sid Misra

Strava is a new fast-growing social network for the avid cyclist and runner. The Strava case traces the entrepreneurial journey of two serial entrepreneurs who have been co-founders in a prior venture, and who have co-founded Strava 3 years ago. The protagonists must... View Details

February 1998 (Revised December 2000)
Case

Nantucket Nectars

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Jon Biotti

The founders of Nantucket Nectars are trying to decide whether to sell their company. The case describes how the founders started the company and grew the Nantucket Nectars brand name. View Details

Keywords: Business Exit or Shutdown; Entrepreneurship; Brands and Branding; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

11 Jan 2021
Research & Ideas

Is A/B Testing Effective? Evidence from 35,000 Startups

School. “Instead, we find that firms that adopt A/B testing both scale and fail faster. Sometimes founders just have bad ideas and, in these cases, experimentation helps them move onto their next opportunity faster.” Indeed, companies of... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

16 May 2023
In Practice

After Silicon Valley Bank's Flameout, What's Next for Entrepreneurs?

investments and triggered a run on deposits, gave pause to startup investors and also holds lessons for founders going forward. Harvard Business School faculty suggest some key takeaways for the startup ecosystem as the dust settles and... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman; Technology; Financial Services

September 2011 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Airbnb

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Evan W. Richardson

Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, the three founders of Airbnb, an online private accommodation rental market, stared at each other across the kitchen table in their San Francisco apartment. It was March of 2009. A single sheet of paper sat on the table... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Housing; Information Publishing; Private Ownership; Online Technology; Information Industry; San Francisco

March 2020
Case

Braver Angels: A Grassroots Effort to Depolarize American Politics

By: Francesca Gino, Julia A. Minson and Jeff Huizinga

The founders of Braver Angels, an organization that uses family therapy principles to foster constructive dialogue between conservatives and liberals, consider how to improve its effectiveness and reach. View Details

Keywords: Political Polarization; Interpersonal Communication; Performance Effectiveness; Strategy; United States

16 Aug 2022
Op-Ed

Now Is the Time for Entrepreneurs to Play Offense

may be 20-40 percent lower than you had hoped, but you can still raise plenty of money to buttress your balance sheet and execute more vigorously on steps 1-5 of the “play offense” playbook outlined above. In talking to my best founders... View Details

Keywords: by Jeffrey Bussgang

April 2018 (Revised May 2018)
Case

Goldman Sachs: Making an Imprint in Impact Investing

By: Shawn Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Lynn Schenk

Goldman Sachs acquired Imprint Capital Advisors, a small firm that specialized in advising clients on environmental/social/governance (ESG) and impact investments. The founders sold Imprint with the belief that joining a global financial firm would help to scale impact... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; ESG; Investment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Growth and Development Strategy; Acquisition; Integration

January 2017 (Revised May 2019)
Case

Paytm: Building a Payments Network

By: Sunil Gupta, Das Narayandas and Rachna Tahilyani

By January 2017, Paytm, a mobile payments company that started in 2010, became India’s largest mobile payments platform with over 142 million users and $5 billion valuation. Could Paytm become a $100 billion company its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma envisioned it be? View Details

Keywords: Mobile Payments; Ecommerce; Mobile App; India; Entrepreneurship; Expansion; Service Operations; Mobile and Wireless Technology; E-commerce; Service Industry; India

January 1981
Case

Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc.

By: John P. Kotter

Introduces the student to Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc., its business, its strategy, and its organization. Provides the necessary background for understanding the contributions of Mary Kay Ash, the company's founder and chairman. View Details

Keywords: Management Teams; Business Strategy; Organizations; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

December 2022 (Revised August 2023)
Case

Circles.Life at a Crossroads of Growth

By: Juan Alcácer and Adina Wong

In June 2022, the founders of Singapore mobile operator Circles.Life had a crucial decision to make. Circles.Life developed a new business model in mobile telecommunications—a digital telco—built around its proprietary operating system. After expanding its brand in... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Decisions; Technological Innovation; Applications and Software; Business Strategy; Telecommunications Industry; Singapore

2021
Working Paper

Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs

By: Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu and Kaushik Vasudevan

Immigrant founders of venture capital-backed companies have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We document the channels through which immigrant founders find their way to the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Immigrants have been... View Details

Keywords: Immigrants; Entrepreneurial Ecosystem; Higher Education; Immigration; Entrepreneurship

Find at Harvard

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07 Jul 2003
What Do You Think?

Can We Have Too Much Productivity Improvement?

by economists from Alan Greenspan on down? Will it add to the ranks of the unemployed with attendant social and psychological costs, costs not factored into productivity calculations? Or does it provide the ultimate answer to foundering... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

March 2011 (Revised January 2015)
Case

H Partners and Six Flags

By: Robin Greenwood and Michael Gorzynski

Rehan Jaffer, the founder of hedge fund H Partners, is considering what to do with his investment in Six Flags. H Partners had invested a significant amount of the firm's capital in the senior bonds of U.S.-based Six Flags, following that company's bankruptcy filing. View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Finance; Private Equity; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Debt Securities; Bonds; Investment; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States