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…
E77B
William Barnett, Katherine Bose
2007
Webvan, a major player in the Internet grocery business, began the year 2000 aggressively. Many analysts were optimistic about Webvan’s prospects, predicting that the company would capture significant market share and had broad opportunities. This case…
E278
Bethany Coates, Kathryn Shaw
2007
Alejandro Ramirez, the CEO of Cinepolis, the largest film exhibitor in Latin America, sat in the back of row of the company’s flagship movie theatre in Mexico City one evening in January 2005. The company was preparing to roll out an expensive new IT…
E257
Patrick Arippol, George Foster, Martin Haemmig
2007
“WI Harper – Strategic Crossroads” presents the strategic dilemmas faced by a foreign venture firm with over one decade of making cross-border investments in Asia – with particular emphasis in China. The case is set in the 2006-07 time frame, as the…
E267A
Mark Leslie, Katherine Bose
2007
After significant changes in management, strategic direction and product focus, XenSource, a virtualization software start-up that relies on open source code, faces key decisions regarding the pricing and packaging of its products, a challenge which is…
E304
Robert Chess, Peter Reiss, Sean Harrington, Matt Saucedo
2007
In the spring of 2007, four budding companies were in the very early phase of their development. These entrepreneurial ventures illustrate the variety and breadth of new business ideas that can be pursued, and the unique issues that need to be tackled in…
E254
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Will Harvey hopped onto his road bike and began pedaling up Old La Honda Road, the famously steep and windy street in Portola Valley, California. As the climb became more arduous, Harvey, the co-founder and CEO of IMVU, a company that developed 3D avatar…
E249
Katherine Bose, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In early 2001, following a lack-luster consumer service launch, Tellme Networks made the decision to bet its future on a customer support operator elimination application aimed at enterprise companies. Unfortunately sales associated with the new strategy…
E299
Bethany Coates, R. Ellis
2007
Terminating employees is one of the most unpleasant, yet necessary, responsibilities managers have to carry out. The Wall Street Journal has reported that firing someone is one of three situations that make company presidents most uneasy. Due to a…
E263
Mark Leslie, Patrick Arippol
2007
Set in mid-2002, this case illustrates “a day in the life” of a district sales manager of a Silicon Valley company, as the technology market faced a downturn. The case enables a polarized class discussion about the tradeoffs that a new district manager…
E266
Katherine Bose, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In June 2007, Doostang’s cofounder, Mareza Larizadeh, was over-whelmed. His invite-only online career community for twenty-somethings had seen steady growth in the two years since its launch, but Larizadeh continued to run into problem after problem…
E252
Sean Harrington, Andrew Rachleff
2007
On June 8, 2005, Scott Cook, founder and chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit, sat down to a meeting with CEO Steve Bennett to discuss the future of TaxAlmanac. Intuit had developed a strong business selling software to tax professionals, but…
E275
Bethany Coates, H. Grousbeck
2007
This case asks students to evaluate how to handle three general management challenges that cropped up for John Stanton, the CEO of Western Wireless Communications, during a difficult period in the company’s history (the aftermath of the Internet “bust”)…
IB72A
R. McKern
2007
Dougal Simpson, an experienced Australian manager who had 20 years of experience with Industrial Products AG (IPAG), a large Swiss-based company in the field of industrial chemicals and plastics, accepted the position of managing director, Southeast Asia…
E307
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.
E250
Bethany Coates, Joel Peterson
2007
Chris Frederick, CEO of Cross Link Software (CLS), a human resources technology company, had just finished a meeting with John Fine, one of Cross Link’s most influential board members. As was typical with most of their interactions, Frederick and Fine…
CG07
David Larcker, Brian Tayan
2007
In 2007, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) was the largest proxy advisory company in the world, with over 1,700 institutional clients managing an estimated $25 trillion in equity securities. The ISS proxy advisory services were intended to give…
CG08
David Larcker, Brian Tayan
2007
In 2007, there were three prominent corporate governance ratings firms—The Corporate Library (TCL), Governance Metrics International (GMI), and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). These firms assessed the effectiveness and deficiency of the…
