Publications

11 Aug 2021
Blog Post

The Equity Network: How HBS Helped Me Launch a Tech-Enabled Social Enterprise

we also took advantage of Harvard’s entrepreneurial resources. We conducted dozens of customer interviews in Startup Bootcamp, leveraged the Rock Center and Innovation Lab’s expert office hours, and became a semifinalist in the HBS New... View Details

20 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

Rocket-tunity: Can Private Firms Turn a Profit in Space?

space race have been blessed somewhat by the glamour of it all. Investors enthusiastically, maybe too much so, backed a host of startups including those headed by superstar names like Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. Rich... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Wallask; Aerospace; Tourism; Transportation

September 2023 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Honest Jobs: A Path to Redemption

By: Paul A. Gompers and Jeffrey Barkas

Founded by a formerly incarcerated job seeker, Honest Jobs' mission is to be the hub where people with criminal records come to build careers and employers come to find great talent. Honest Jobs faced early challenges as a two-sided platform for justice-involved job... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Venture Capital; Recruitment; Entrepreneurial Finance; Selection and Staffing; Digital Platforms; Job Search; Mission and Purpose; Expansion; Employment Industry; United States; Colorado; Ohio; Texas

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 2008
Case

Threadless: The Business of Community

By: Karim R. Lakhani and Zahra Kanji

Threadless.com, the online, Chicago-based t-shirt company, was not your typical fashion apparel company. The company, run by Jake Nickell, Jacob DeHart, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, turned the fashion business on its head by enabling anyone to submit designs for t-shirts and... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Product Design; Partners and Partnerships; Social and Collaborative Networks; Apparel and Accessories Industry

15 Mar 2017
Lessons from the Classroom

More Than 900 Examples of How Climate Change Affects Business

This word cloud is composed of blog posts by more than 900 students describing how individual organizations are likely to be affected by climate change. Image by Patrick Clapp Last fall, first-year MBA students at Harvard Business School received a new assignment in... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Green Technology

September 2022
Case

Proactive for Her

By: Rembrand Koning and Kairavi Dey

Proactive for Her began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2020 as a digital platform to provide accessible, evidence-based, primary, preventive non-judgmental healthcare services for Indian women, who were often dissuaded from seeking help as premarital sex and... View Details

Keywords: Women's Health; Healthcare; India; Start-up; Telehealth; Digital Platforms; Health Care and Treatment; Customer Focus and Relationships; Business Startups; Health Industry; Asia; South Asia; India

Profile

Philippe Rival

help and mentor on projects, cases or even startup brainstorming! This is clearly a network for life, one that is here for you. As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I have always been interested in building things and... View Details

Research Summary

Research

The founding and expansion of new firms is central to innovation and economic growth, but the determinants of a new idea’s success are difficult to ascertain. The decision to form a new firm and its ultimate outcome are impacted by ownership structure, financing... View Details

October 2008 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Apple's Core

By: Noam T. Wasserman

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are best friends who enjoy pulling pranks together and talking about electronics. After several small collaborations, Jobs pitches Wozniak on starting a company together to sell computers based on Wozniak's design for a personal computer.... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Equity; Managerial Roles; Partners and Partnerships; Conflict Management

November 2008 (Revised November 2012)
Case

Savage Beast (A)

By: Noam Wasserman and LP Maurice

For several months, things had been spiraling downwards at Savage Beast, the music-recommendation company started three years before by Tim Westergren. The company's founder-CEO recently left due to pressures both at home and within the venture. Dozens of investors... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Lawsuits and Litigation; Leadership; Groups and Teams

24 Oct 2019
Blog Post

Harvard’s JD/MBA: Viroopa Volla (JD/MBA 2021) Answers Your Questions

Student Advisors, and Harvard Legal Aid Bureau clinicians. At the business school, many JD/MBAs lead large student organizations, write cases with professors, work on startups and business proposals, manage Independent Projects, and... View Details

July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Pattern Brands

By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley

In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details

27 Sep 2021
Blog Post

Working to Change the Food System

living in San Francisco working at a data science startup as a product manager. I have always gravitated toward technology and science throughout my life, and machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science were fascinating as... View Details

Portrait Project

Dimitra Taslim

from a view that products made domestically were inferior, to now, where there is belief that they can build world-beating technology at will. I’d like the same for the 700 million people of Southeast Asia, my beloved homeland. It won’t take much, I think. Just a... View Details

22 Feb 2021
Book

Reaching Today's Omnichannel Customer Takes a New Sales Strategy

firm, that salesperson leaves all of that behind. Talk to the corporation that hires the star sales VP from a competitor and finds that she doesn’t perform there the way she performed in the previous corporation. Or consider the many View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

September 2008 (Revised December 2011)
Case

Frank Addante, Serial Entrepreneur

By: Noam T. Wasserman and Antony Uy

Frank Addante is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who is in the process of building his fifth venture. Of his first four ventures, two were sold, one went public, and in the last he decided to close the venture and return unused capital to his investors. With the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Equity; Selection and Staffing; Groups and Teams