IB67G
Leandro Cuccioli, Steve de Bonvoisin, Raquel Gonzalez-Dalmau, Gustavo Lopes, R. McKern
2007
Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, American Colonial Heritage, Inc. (ACH) was a top-ten U.S. furniture manufacturer focused on the upper end of the indoor home furniture market. Alexandra Jones, who had earned her MBA a few years prior, worked on the…
E240
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In October 1991, Howard Charney, a co-founder of 3Com, and Bernard Daines, an expert on Ethernet and networking, began hosting brainstorming sessions for “the next big idea in networking” at Charney’s home in Los Gatos, California. Participants included…
E238
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Netflix, the online movie rental subscription service, did not contend with significant direct competition in online DVD rentals for six years until Blockbuster, the movie rental chain giant, entered the market in 2004 and began a price war. After that…
E305
Katherine Bose, Garth Saloner
2007
Two female GSB alums stumble on a new market - better fitting and more technologically advanced equestrian footwear. The vignette discusses the backgrounds of the partners, the idea discovery phase and their partnership formation.
E276
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In August 2007, Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials Corporation (SMC), was about to fly back to San Francisco from Rome, when he received a call from Scott Sandell. Sandell, a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), had…
E272
Katherine Bose, S. Wheeler
2007
The protagonists are Lara Jackle and Lynn Graham, CEO and VP Marketing for Lightfull Foods respectively. Lightfull is a beverage start-up based in Northern California that is struggling with a major strategic decision which centers around its use and…
E207B
Katherine Bose, Garth Saloner
2007
A female HBS alumna is convinced of the market possibilities for a gaming company aimed at Baby Boomers, but is strapped by the demands of her family as well as some potential pitfalls involved with getting the company off the ground. The vignette…
E270
Mark Leslie, Andrew Rachleff, Victoria Chang
2007
Xsigo had started on strong footing. Krishnamurthi was a former top Juniper Networks engineer and he had founded Xsigo with his two brothers, one of whom was also a former Juniper engineer, while the other had worked at Sun Microsystems. Right off the bat…
E265
Patrick Arippol, George Foster
2007
The International Fight League (IFL) case describes the sports company’s formation and growth, the mixed martial arts (MMA) industry in 2007, and culminates in the dilemma of what the company should to strategically in order to survive, at that juncture….
E273
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Early one morning in September 1994, Marc Porat, CEO of technology start-up General Magic (GM), dropped his daughter off at elementary school and then reached for his personal intelligent communicator (PIC) to check messages. GM had created the PIC in…
E258
Katherine Bose, Charles Holloway
2007
The Packet Design case looks at successful serial entrepreneur Judy Estrin and her efforts to build a technology incubator immediately before the Internet bubble burst. The incubator’s failure caused Estrin to look anew at the key drivers of success in…
A204
Antonio Davila, Daniel Oyon, Andrea Regazzoni
2007
Sebastien Solana had recently joined the research and development team at Bobst Group, a printing industry supplier. His first assignment was to examine the structural elements of the SPeria® Foilmaster 102 (a cutting machine for packaging products) with…
F271
Katherine Bose, George Parker
2007
In early 2007, Tech Roads management was assessing its financial needs for the coming year. A seven-year-old company started in Silicon Valley, Tech Roads was an online business-to-business used vehicle marketplace that focused on the wholesale used car…
E226
Andrew Rachleff
2007
Rapid Star is a case about a fictitious company that faces the challenge of one of its co-founders not scaling with the rapid growth of his company.
E307 Supplement A
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
CPG Inc. is an exercise for students to perform outside of class in groups of two and was designed for a specific trial section of the Stanford GSB’s “Managing Growing Enterprises” course. The section focused on negotiations.
E307 Supplement B
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
CPG Inc. is an exercise for students to perform outside of class in groups of two and was designed for a specific trial section of the Stanford GSB’s “Managing Growing Enterprises” course. The section focused on negotiations.
IB69
Leandro Cuccioli, Steve de Bonvoisin, Raquel Gonzalez-Dalmau, Gustavo Lopes, R. McKern
2007
This industry notes gives a thorough overview of the furniture market, focusing primarily on the American market. The note provides a general background, starting with market size, industry organization, and trends. It goes on to discuss manufacturers…
E243
Patrick Arippol, Charles Holloway
2007
The case chronicles the initial formation and growth of KongZhong, one of China’s leading players in the wireless value added service (WVAS) market. By 2007, KongZhong’s founders face the ‘perfect storm,’ given the highly dynamic nature of the WVAS…
E237
Bethany Coates, R. Ellis
2007
Ryan Snow and his business partner, Peter Pearson, faced challenges related to hyper-growth and maintaining customer satisfaction with regard to building Pacific Cares, a telephone technical support outsourcing company for laboratory and testing…
E248
Katherine Bose, Andrew Rachleff
2007
CacheFlow’s president and CEO Brian NeSmith was dumbstruck. His newly hired CFO, Bob Verheecke, had just informed him that sales productivity remained flat at $1.2 million per sales team per year (roughly 40 percent of the industry norm), despite a layoff…
E229
Erica Plambeck, Joshua Spitzer
2007
“Khosla Ventures: Investing in Ethanol” presents the background and premise of Khosla Ventures’ investments in the ethanol value chain. It asks students to determine where in the ethanol value chain Khosla should consider investing, how the firm should…
E279
Bethany Coates, R. Ellis
2007
In this fictional case, Jennifer Gaston, founder and CEO of mid-sized luxury jewelry company Aquamarine, was managing a couple of key hiring issues that had recently cropped up. In just six months, Gaston had brought in a new COO and was about to…
E306
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
Amanda West is a recent GSB graduate and first-time restauranteur, focused on healthy fast food. Two years into her venture, she has successfully secured funding, high quality advisors and talent, and yet has not been able to close on a lease for her…
E256
Patrick Arippo, Joel Peterson
2007
“Bruce Wallace” chronicles the travails of an executive (whose name was disguised) who had a sequence of career experiences that made of him a company turnaround expert. The case serves the purpose of allowing students to discuss and learn about three of…
