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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”)…
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…
