Case Studies

The Torani case tells the story of a 90-year-old company founded in San Francisco by two Italian-Americans, Rinaldo and Ezilda Torre.  In 1925, the Torres visited family in Luca, Italy, and brought back with them recipes for homemade flavored syrups which…

This case explores the Branch Metrics’ cofounders’ early days as a team and their pursuit of a viable idea for their startup. The three original cofounders, who met in business school, transformed their business concept entirely several times before…

What is Bitcoin?  How does it work?  Why is the technology so innovative, and what are Bitcoin’s potential use cases, specifically within Africa?  This case describes the potential for Bitcoin to transform and leapfrog traditional banking infrastructure…

Atmel Corporation is a manufacturer of semiconductors (chips). It is an engineering-driven business-to-business company, and prior to 2012 its marketing was largely limited to preparation of specifications, launching new products, and trade shows. In 2012…

This case outlines the fundraising history of Marin Software.  The case discusses the events that led up to the initial public offering (IPO) and the tumultuous aftermath of the stock going public.  This case examines who were the winners and losers from…

This case outlines the fundraising struggles faced by ASTRO Gaming.  The gaming company produced a best in class product that grew strongly but faced difficulties fundraising. The cash flow short fall left the company with limited options.  The founders…

The TourMonkey case and Wello case describe two start-ups that chose to sell to strategic acquirers within the first few years of operation.  Both of these companies had good ideas, strong teams, hard-working founders, and other attributes that helped…

The Wello case and TourMonkey case describe two start-ups that chose to sell to strategic acquirers within the first few years of operation.  Both of these companies had good ideas, strong teams, hard-working founders, and other attributes that helped…

Sarah would soon graduate from Stanford GSB, and had received entry-level job offers from a number of wealth management firms.  A tech-savvy Millennial, she wanted a career that would provide both intellectual challenges and a healthy work/life balance. …

The case follows PayPal, a digital payments platform that found early success processing online payments for purchases on eBay, which acquired the company in 2002.  The case begins by describing the decision by eBay in 2014 to spin off PayPal and the…

The Dawn Lepore case presents a series of dilemmas that one woman, Dawn Lepore, deals with in her professional career that present her with a series of challenging issues. The case starts off with background (to be read before class) about Dawn’s early…

The Dawn Lepore case presents a series of dilemmas that one woman, Dawn Lepore, deals with in her professional career that present her with a series of challenging issues.  The case starts off with background (to be read before class) about Dawn’s early…

The Dawn Lepore case presents a series of dilemmas that one woman, Dawn Lepore, deals with in her professional career that present her with a series of challenging issues.  The case starts off with background (to be read before class) about Dawn’s early…

The Dawn Lepore case presents a series of dilemmas that one woman, Dawn Lepore, deals with in her professional career that present her with a series of challenging issues.  The case starts off with background (to be read before class) about Dawn’s early…

This case explores the rise and fall of Nebula Inc., a company that industry experts had originally predicted would become the market leader in the hybrid cloud computing market. In its early days, Nebula seemed like a guaranteed success—the founding team…

Part B describes the challenging negotiations that Davis went through with VMware to finally arrive at a price before both sides reached the dreaded “deal fatigue.”  After presenting the price to his board, one board member asserted that he wanted to…

Virsto, a storage virtualization company, was founded in 2007 by Mark Davis, Alex Miroshnichenko, and Serge Pashenkov.  Davis founded Virsto after managing a series of technology startups, many of which were ultimately acquired by big name players such as…

As Box continued to mature as a company, the firm fought through the ups and downs of being a highly visible hyper-growth Silicon Valley firm. Box struggled to get its IPO completed, having to deal simultaneously with a volatile stock market and increased…

This case picks up where “LinkedIn and Modern Recruiting (A)” left off, detailing the company’s innovations in hiring practices, which included its highly effective use of LinkedIn profile and resume data. As part of these innovations, LinkedIn’s talent…

In 2015, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, was experiencing explosive growth, and it needed to hire the very best people quickly to support and fuel that growth.  This case discusses LinkedIn’s hiring approach and details how the company…

This 2015 case is about the internal organizational transformation of the Hewlett Packard (HP) Enterprise Group (EG), which brought in $28 billion in annual revenue and had 50,000 employees.  “EG Ignite,” led by a small team of 10 people who reported…

The B case begins with the consultants’ proposal to Kim Markey, executive director of revenue cycle at Huntington Hospital (HH).   The proposal is untraditional in that it is focused on more than revenue enhancement—it includes transforming the culture. 

Kim Markey began as executive director of revenue cycle at Huntington Hospital (HH) in November 2012.  Located in Pasadena, California, HH was a 625-bed non-profit regional medical center that was named among the top-performing hospitals in 2012 by U.S…

In early 2014, Tara Fela-Durotoye, the founder and CEO of House of Tara, was contemplating one of her greatest achievements to date. Her company had been named by L’Oréal as a strategic distributor for Nigeria of leading international cosmetics brand…