Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(3,593)
- Faculty Publications (670)
Founder
→
- 2022
- Working Paper
Failing Just Fine: Assessing Careers of Venture Capital-backed Entrepreneurs via a Non-wage Measure
By: Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, Seniority. Based on a database of over 5 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in job titles and how long they take to attain. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, inference... View Details
- June 2022 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Platinum Capital
By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
How should a venture capital firm divide compensation and decision rights between its founders and its next-generation partners? Platinum Capital faced this decision in July 2020. Platinum’s younger partners had just requested a piece of the firm’s highly lucrative... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Byte
By: Boris Groysberg, Katherine Connolly Baden and Julia Kelley
In January 2021, Byte co-founders Scott Cohen and Blake Johnson reflected on how far their Los Angeles-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) orthodontics company had come since launching its clear aligners just a little over two years earlier. Cohen and Johnson were both... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
RacingThePlanet’s 20-Year Marathon
By: Daniel Isenberg and William Kerr
Mary Gadams, founder and CEO of RacingThePlanet, has managed to stage sporting events in some of the world's most inhospitable locations for the last 20 years. New challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have arisen. How can this small company navigate the global... View Details
- May 2022 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing
By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani
John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing... View Details
- May 2022 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
Founder Collective
By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
Founder Collective ("FC") launched in 2009 with a clear mission: to be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. In keeping with its mission, FC maintained smaller fund sizes and was not a lifecycle investor. By November of 2021, the seed market had become... View Details
- April 2022
- Case
NIO: A Chinese EV Company's Global Strategy
By: William C. Kirby, Shu Lin and Noah B. Truwit
Founded in November 2014 and based in Shanghai, NIO designed, jointly manufactured, and sold premium “smart” EVs. Its mission was to “shape a joyful lifestyle by offering high-performance smart electric vehicles and being the best user enterprise. At NIO Day 2021,... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Transferable Skills? Founders as Venture Capitalists
By: Paul A. Gompers and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
In this paper we explore whether or not the experience as a founder of a venture capital-backed startup influences the performance of founders who become venture capitalists (VCs). We find that nearly 7% of VCs were previously founders of a venture-backed startup.... View Details
- March 2022
- Case
GrowSari (A): Design for the Last Mile Customer
By: Brian Trelstad, Cam Carag and Michi Ferreol
Reymund (ER) Rollan and Shivapratim (Shiv) Choudhury, founders of the digital technology platform GrowSari, were at a crossroads. The feedback from their initial product roll-out were not what they had expected, and they needed to decide how to proceed. The pair,... View Details
- March 2022
- Supplement
GrowSari (B)
By: Brian Trelstad, Cam Carag and Michi Ferreol
Case supplement for HBS Case No. 322-036. Reymund (ER) Rollan and Shivapratim (Shiv) Choudhury, founders of the digital technology platform GrowSari, were at a crossroads. The feedback from their initial product roll-out were not what they had expected, and they needed... View Details
- March 2022
- Case
DealShare: Social E-Commerce for the Indian Mass Market
By: Krishna G. Palepu and Malini Sen
Launched in September 2018, e-retail startup DealShare has created a tech-enabled model for the Indian mass market that allows customers to buy together, save money on good quality goods, and at the same time have fun. It targets customers who are still getting used to... View Details
- March 2022
- Case
Metric
By: Christina Wallace, Rebecca Cink and Maria Lappas
Megan Murday, the founder of Metric, an environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) analytics startup, must decide which customer segment to target as a beachhead market. She received positive feedback from a Swiss venture capital (VC) firm, indicating their... View Details
- March 2022
- Teaching Note
Supreme: Remaining Cool While Pursuing Growth
By: Jill Avery and Sandrine Crener
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-006. Following VF Corporation’s acquisition of cult streetwear brand Supreme, consumers and industry pundits were nervous that becoming part of a large, public corporation would put an end to Supreme’s slow and careful growth... View Details
- Article
More-Experienced Entrepreneurs Have Bigger Deadline Problems
By: Andy Wu, Aticus Peterson and Amy Meeker
Professor Andy Wu and doctoral candidate Aticus Peterson of Harvard Business School tracked 314 entrepreneurs who launched multiple technology hardware products on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter from September 2010 to June 2019. The more projects the founders... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Resident 2020
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones
Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Ample Hills Creamery
By: Tom Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Tom Quinn
Ample Hills Creamery started in 2010 as a temporary ice cream pushcart in Brooklyn, New York City. On the strength of inventive flavors and clever marketing, husband-and-wife founders Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna built a premium, artisanal dessert empire of 16 retail... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
Launching the Social
By: Tom Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Tom Quinn
This case features the same protagonists as Ample Hills Creamery (HBS No. 822-073), and can be used as a continuation of that story.
Ample Hills Creamery started in 2010 as a temporary ice cream pushcart in Brooklyn, New York City. On the strength of inventive... View Details
- February 2022
- Supplement
Agora (B)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
This is the conclusion to Agora (A), where founder Elsa Sze decides if she wants to continue investing energy in her civic technology startup.
Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised April 2022)
- Case
Pushing Past the Boundaries of ESG Investing: AQR Capital Management
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Richard B. Evans, Umit G. Gurun and Quoc H. Nguyen
Cliff Asness was facing a dilemma into how he would plunge his hedge fund into the hottest investment area worldwide—ESG Investing. Founder and managing principal of AQR—one the most storied quantitative hedge funds in the world—Asness knew anything less than a big... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
Fondeadora
By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui and Mitchell Weiss
Norman Müller and René Serrano, cofounders of Fondeadora, a Mexican “neobank,” had lined up a $12.5 million in Series A funding round in 2020 only to run into a major obstacle: The lead investor was Gradient Ventures, a venture firm launched by Alphabet, Inc., and... View Details