Browse abstracts and ordering information for case studies written and published by faculty at Stanford GSB.
For publicly available cases in this collection, Harvard Business Impact and Ivey Publishing distribute in North America, and The Case Centre and IESE Publishing in Europe.
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Tesh Mbaabu started MarketForce to help bring technology to the thousands of Kenyan merchants who ran corner shops that were often a centerpiece of their communities. MarketForce began as an inventory ordering platform for merchants, but has quickly…
Bevi was founded to enable a permanent transition away from single-use bottles and cans in order to make an environmental impact. The company built and sold thousands of IoT-enabled smart water dispensers that offered filtered, sparkling and flavored…
In this vignette, students play the role of a newly appointed CEO joining a successful private company with 100 employees. The CEO will plan to hold two meetings with employees. The first meeting will be with the eight key department managers who have…
A female GSB graduate assumed the role of CEO of a SaaS company operating at slightly above breakeven. Three weeks into the role, she had built trust with the VP of operations, but she had not been well received by her two other direct reports who were…
The Healthy Buildings case profiles Janet Rodriguez, CEO and founder of Healthy Buildings, a green building materials supplier. In her role as CEO, Rodriguez faces two difficult issues involving her employees. The first issue deals with Fred Payton…
The Healthy Buildings case profiles Janet Rodriguez, CEO and founder of Healthy Buildings, a green building materials supplier. In her role as CEO, Rodriguez faces two difficult issues involving her employees. The first issue deals with Fred Payton…
Josie Sung and Greg McNamara founded Denver-based Lighthouse Systems in 2006 shortly after graduating from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2005. After exploring several ideas, they landed on a technology solution for helping large corporations…
Jack Swain, the newly appointed CEO of Starling Systems, a call center software solutions company, had a problem. Swain had recently hired in a new VP of operations, Felicia Shaw, and while she had instituted a number of much-needed changes within the…
Coley Andrews could never have anticipated when he cofounded Pacific Lake Partners, a search fund investment firm, in 2009, that he would spend as much time managing people as he would the firm’s investment strategy. Pacific Lake had grown its portfolio…
Mary Jones was the CEO of the Richardson County Community Association (RCCA), a nonprofit with assets of $250 million and annual grants totaling $50 million to charitable organizations in Richardson County, Colorado. As CEO of RCCA, Jones engaged…
Bernard Wilsey, the athletic director at National University, had two challenging personnel issues on his hands. The first involved Sarah Carter, the coach for National’s women’s track team. Since her arrival at National five years ago, her teams had…
This case examines Nike’s push to broaden its definition of what it means to be a high-performing athlete and develop a sneaker specifically engineered for walking and a luxury apparel line which are both purposefully marketed to an older demographic, a…
The 2022 Search Fund Study reports on the financial returns and key qualities of search funds formed in the United States and Canada since 1984. This report updates the previous 2020 study with data through December 31, 2021.
The leadership team of Roblox was contemplating a public offering in December 2020. Roblox was an online video game platform that offered developers a platform for building new games and a global social network for publishing and hosting online games…
Mar Hershenson and Pejman Nozad founded Pear VC in 2014 to invest in early-stage start-ups in Pre-Seed and Seed funding rounds. Over the years, Pear developed numerous cohort-based programs to work with founders and build new ventures such as Pear Garage…
Lex Machina, a legal analytics start-up, needed cash to drive its continued growth trajectory, and had an appealing Series B term sheet in hand. Founded initially as a joint public interest project between SLS and Stanford’s computer science department…
