Publications

January 1995
Article

Internal Labor Markets: Too Many Theories, Too Few Facts

By: George P. Baker and Bengt Holmstrom

Keywords: Labor; Markets; Theory

06 May 2022
Blog Post

Career Advice: Starting a Sustainable Startup

Career Advice: Starting a Sustainable Startup Tell us a little about what you were doing before HBS and what brought you to HBS. I’ve always found myself drawn to working on products and services that can have a positive impact on the... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Where Strategy Matters: Evidence from a Global Startup Field Study

By: Nataliya Langburd Wright

The role of strategy for innovative startups is theoretically ambiguous and much debated among practitioners. I interviewed executives of 253 scaling software ventures from 34 countries and scored the alignment of their market and organizational choices to detect... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship And Strategy; Scaling Technology Ventures; Global Contextual Intelligence; Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Global Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy

SSRN

01 Mar 2018
News

Making Sense of the Modern Startup

that related to risk. Here’s a bunch of people giving money at 50 percent to projects that really should only be charged 10 percent. Well, if markets work correctly, after a little while people will come rushing in, bidding up the price... View Details

Keywords: Jeffrey L. Cruikshank (PMD 51, 1986)

11 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Economic Jitters Push Pandemic Job Seekers to Big Companies, Not Startups

choices that you're making today are going to affect the choices that you're going to make tomorrow." The findings “contrast with the idea that higher quality and more experienced job candidates are better shielded from labor View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2011
Other Unpublished Work

Functional Centralization and the Division of Labor in Management

By: Julie Wulf, Maria Guadalupe and Hongyi Li

This paper shows that the trend towards flatter hierarchies in large US firms since the mid-80's has been accompanied by increased centralization of activities at the top of the organization. In particular, the number of functional managers (e.g., Chief Financial... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Management Teams; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Diversification; Information Technology; United States

25 Sep 2015
Blog Post

4 Challenges All Early-Stage Startups Face

diversity of skill-sets on the team. Through the process, we tackled four challenges that every early stage startup will face. Here's how we approached each of them. 1. Choosing a team Choosing a team can be difficult because there are... View Details

October 2002 (Revised December 2003)
Case

Collabrys, Inc. (A)-The Evolution of a Startup

By: Dorothy A. Leonard and Brian DeLacey

The CEO of a two-year-old start-up must now decide whether to become a technology provider or a service agency. In a time of enormous uncertainty about the viability of various business models for Internet-delivered services and products, Collabrys has survived the... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Internet and the Web; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Corporate Strategy; Technological Innovation; Cost vs Benefits; Partners and Partnerships; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Corporate Finance; United States

Educators

Purchase

13 Jun 2012
HBS Case

HBS Cases: A Startup Takes On the Credit Ratings Giants

investment decisions; fund managers employ them when describing the contents and risks of their bond portfolios; market makers use them to set debt prices. In addition, they're part of the regulatory processes of big banks. Given that the... View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish; Banking; Financial Services

Article

Preference Signaling in Matching Markets

Many labor markets share three stylized facts: employers cannot give full attention to all candidates, candidates are ready to provide information about their preferences for particular employers, and employers value and are prepared to act on this information. In this... View Details

Keywords: Signaling; Matching; Cheap Talk; Congestion; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Communication; Job Search

30 Oct 2020
News

Billion-Dollar Valuations and Exits for Harvard-born Startups

Lissy Hu (MBA 2014) Lissy Hu (MBA 2014) Two harvard-born startups announced big milestones this week. CarePort Health,a web-based health care software startup led bycofounder and CEO Lissy Hu (MBA 2014), was... View Details

06 Sep 2022
Blog Post

To Go-Go: A Foodtech Startup Serves Up Scale in Latin America

off the ground? That is exactly what Juan Azuero (MBA 2019) and Daniela Izquierdo (MBA 2019) are doing with Foodology, a foodtech startup with operations in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru. Azuero and Izquierdo both grew up in Bogotá,... View Details

Cold Call Podcast

Innovating in the Feminine Care Market

Keywords: Re: Rembrand M. Koning

29 Aug 2024
News

A Kick Start for Latin American Startups

When Monica Saggioro Leal (MBA 2018) and her business partner, Lara Lemann, started MAYA Capital, a tech-focused, Brazilian VC firm launched in 2018, they wanted to take a hands-on approach with their startup investments in their first 12 months. They wanted to support... View Details

October 2007
Article

The Art of Designing Markets

By: Alvin E. Roth

Traditionally, markets have been viewed as simply the confluence of supply and demand. But to function properly, they must be able to attract a sufficient number of buyers and sellers, induce participants to make their preferences clear, and overcome congestion by... View Details

Keywords: Market Design; Market Participation; Market Transactions; Information Technology; Internet and the Web

January–February 2023
Article

External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures

By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov

We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details

Keywords: Market Positioning; Professionalization; Scaling; Entrepreneurship; Strategy; Business Startups; Growth and Development; Organizational Structure