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May 2025
Case

'Net Zero in Action': Impact Investing at the McKnight Foundation

By: Lauren Cohen, Christina R. Wing and Sophia Pan

Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments at the McKnight Foundation, reflected on how to effectively advance the organization’s net-zero strategy. The foundation had committed 10% of its endowment to building a portfolio of impact investments and was among... View Details

2025
Chapter

Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change

By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones

This chapter explores when and why private regulatory governance systems became the primary form of global environmental governance. The chapter explores two different historical paths in such private regulation and how they came about. The first path involved... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Entrepreneurship; Environment; Climate Change; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Environmental Regulation; Standards; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

2025
Working Paper

With a Little Help from My Family: Informal Startup Financing

By: Brian K. Baik, Johan Ludvig S. Karlsen and Katja Kisseleva

Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior. Informal investors earn lower returns than external individuals, and the firms they back are less likely to secure... View Details

Keywords: Early Stage Finance; Informal Investment; Household Finance; Risk Taking; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Family and Family Relationships; Business Startups; Investment; Norway

November 2024
Supplement

Clara Wu Tsai and Brooklyn Loan Innovation (B)

By: Archie Jones, Mathieu Davis, Mourya Mamidala and Max Hancock

This (B) case provides an update on “Clara Wu Tsai and Brooklyn Loan Innovation (A)” View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Social Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Banks and Banking; United States; New York (city, NY)

July 2024
Case

Jacqueline Cook at Vendasta: Debating an IPO

By: Reza Satchu, Tom Quinn and Andrew Kosc

In May 2021, after a surge in demand for digital services that prompted high valuations for startups across the Canadian tech sector, Saskatchewan-based Vendasta entered the final stages of the initial public offering (IPO) process. COO Jacqueline Cook had invested her... View Details

March 2024
Case

Nomad: A License to Bank

By: Paul A. Gompers and Pedro Levindo

In late 2023, Lucas Vargas, CEO and co-founder of Nomad, a fintech that offered financial services in the United States for Brazilian residents, had to decide what to do to ensure the company’s continued expansion. Nomad launched its first product, a U.S. digital bank... View Details

February 2024
Case

Vespucci Partners: The New World of Venture Capital in Hungary

By: Paul A. Gompers, Tonia Labruyere and Emilie Billaud

Julia Sohajda was the young, female founding partner of the Hungarian VC firm Vespucci Partners, which focused on investing at seed stage into Hungarian deep tech startups and prepare them for a launch in the U.S market. Vespucci's first fund had largely been comprised... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Business Startups; Investment Funds; Financing and Loans; Entrepreneurship; Financial Services Industry; Hungary; United States

2024
Working Paper

Private Regulation, Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change: A Business History Perspective

By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones

Private regulatory systems, including voluntary efforts by firms to restrain their own behavior are the primary form of global climate change governance. However, when environmental challenges first rose up on the scientific and political agendas during the 1970s, the... View Details

Keywords: Certification; Climate Change; Environmental Regulation; Business History; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy

October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
Case

Rheaply: Circularity For Every Business

By: Rembrand Koning and Alicia Dadlani

In March 2023, Garry Cooper, cofounder and CEO of Chicago-based Rheaply, needed to demonstrate that Rheaply’s expanded vision could translate into building cash flows and metrics needed to raise a Series B and turn the business into a model for financial and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Social Entrepreneurship; Technological Innovation; Environmental Sustainability; Entrepreneurial Finance; Technology Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States; Illinois; Chicago

April 2023 (Revised April 2025)
Case

Eike Batista: Making or Breaking Brazil

By: Geoffrey Jones, Pedro Magalhães, Daniel Tong and Marcel Anduiza

This case explores the meteoric rise and fall of Eike Batista, once Brazil’s richest person and the world’s seventh wealthiest in 2012. Batista began his career by investing in gold mining in the Amazon, using the network his father had built after years serving as... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Investment; Energy Industry; Mining Industry; Brazil

March 24, 2023
Article

What Silicon Valley Bank Did Right

By: Lou Shipley

There’s a reason Silicon Valley Bank became such a fixture among startups: it understood their needs better than any other bank. Even now, many banks don’t have the flexibility and understanding to make banking easy for startups. With SVB gone, a lot of young companies... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Silicon Valley; Entrepreneurship; Bank; Finance; Business Startups; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry

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February 2023
Supplement

Astyanax Kanakakis at norbloc: A Founder's Experience with the DIFC Fintech Hive

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

norbloc was founded in 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Astyanax Kanakakis and his co-founders, Vitalii Demianets and Sam Saatchi. Kanakakis and Demianets got to work to address a key gap in the industry: Know Your Customer (KYC) data sharing. As the first distributed KYC... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Networking Frictions: Evidence from Entrepreneurial Networking Events in Lomé

By: Stefan Dimitiadis and Rembrand Koning

Spatial proximity between firms plays a crucial role in entrepreneurship by creating knowledge spillovers, enabling resource sharing, and sparking productivity gains. Building on these insights, research has explored whether institutions and organizations can engineer... View Details

Keywords: Local Range; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Productivity; Togo

January 2023 (Revised June 2024)
Case

Zaoui & Co. (A): Consigliere for High Stakes M&A Transactions

By: Ashish Nanda, Alex Kitsberg and Zack Kurtovich

In September 2019, Zaoui & Co.’s close-knit team of professionals convened for their annual off-site. In its nine years of operation, the boutique investment bank founded by the brothers Michael (HBS ’83) and Yoel Zaoui (Stanford GSB ’88), had garnered a track record... View Details

Keywords: Professional Service Firm; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Strategy; Investment Banking; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Growth and Development Strategy; Europe; United Kingdom

November 2022 (Revised October 2024)
Case

'A Marshall Plan for Africa': James Mwangi and Equity Group Holdings

By: Caroline M. Elkins, Debora L. Spar, Zeke Gillman and Julia M. Comeau

Financial Inclusion. Dignity. Trust. These were the core principles driving James Mwangi’s transformation of Equity Building Society, insolvent in 1991, into what is, today, Equity Group Holdings, East and Central Africa’s largest retail banking institution. Raised in... View Details

Keywords: Income Inequality; Micro Finance; Microcredit; Microfinance; Banks and Banking; Equality and Inequality; Mission and Purpose; Business Model; Social Entrepreneurship; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Africa; Kenya

October 2022
Case

Single.Earth

By: Rembrand Koning and Emer Moloney

Estonian greentech company Single.Earth is launching a nature-backed token that is linked to and funds the protection of a specific plot fo land. The first landowners had been onboarded to the company's Digital Twin, a virtual representation of the planet's natural... View Details

Keywords: Alternative Assets; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Natural Resources; Pollution; Analytics and Data Science; Marketing; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Markets; Market Timing; Strategy; Green Technology Industry; Estonia

October 2022
Case

An Heir with No Spare: The Deitch Family Office

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Joe and Matt Deitch, father and son, knew it was time to start their own family office. Matthew had recently joined his father at the family’s three enterprises, and they both realized that their family’s needs had grown increasingly complex over the years. In search... View Details

May 2022
Case

Rawbank's Illico Cash: Can 'Fast Money' Overcome Cash Dependency in the DRC?

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank’s launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank’s mobile money app, Illico Cash... View Details

March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Reclaiming the Land of Purple: Purpl’s Mission to Unlock Finance in Lebanon

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Karl Naim, Co-Founder and CEO of Purpl, embarked on a venture to lower remittance costs for his native Lebanon. Since October 2019, the Lebanese economy had entered a free fall as its banking sector collapsed and large swathes of its population were plunged into... View Details

Keywords: Business Startup; Fintech; Inflation; Deflation; Cross-border Frictions; Remittances; Business Startups; Diasporas; Financial Crisis; Money; Entrepreneurship; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Poverty; Financial Institutions; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Lebanon

March 2022
Case

In Data We Trust: Be Mobile Africa and Furthering Financial Inclusion Across the African Continent

By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Pierre Marchesseault

To Cédric Jeannot, leveraging technology to promote financial inclusion was personal. After no established financial institution would accept his technology platform to lower transaction costs for free, Jeannot launched FinTech company Be Mobile Africa in May 2020.... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Fintech; Emerging Market; Fundraising; Financial Inclusion; Strategy; Expansion; Management; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Growth and Development Strategy; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; Africa; Togo; Nigeria; Ghana

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