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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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…
The ConvenientMD case highlights the role of emotion and ambiguity in business interactions. ConvenientMD, led by co-CEOs Gareth Dickens and Max Puyanic, operated urgent care centers (UCCs) in the northeastern United States. UCCs are medical facilities…
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…
Financial restructuring for a distressed firm and its significant counterparties is the process of “recontracting.” This involves significantly altering, replacing, or terminating key financial contracts for the purpose of rehabilitation. Most of these…
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…
When Afresh CEO and cofounder Matt Schwartz enrolled at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB) in 2015, he had a singular obsession—healthy food, to benefit both individuals and the planet—and an ironclad determination: to found a…
Ascend Behavior Partners provided applied behavioral analysis (ABA) services to families with children with autism. The growing autism services market presented a massive opportunity for Ascend to provide quality care to families in need. Ascend’s…
The case chronicles the challenges of a consulting team charged with developing and executing a negotiation strategy designed to help a large retailer cut costs by renegotiating their contract with their largest supplier.
The disguised case begins by…
This case tells the story of Graham Weaver as he forms and grows Alpine ventures, a private equity firm he started while still a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Over the course of twenty years, Weaver built a private equity firm…
In early April 2019, the executive team of San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications gathered in the company conference room to strategize about their messaging for a planned IPO, an event that only a few years earlier would have seemed improbable to many…
In January 2021, Chesca Colloredo-Mansfeld (MBA ’92), cofounder and executive director of MiracleFeet, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating untreated clubfoot for good, found herself at yet another crossroad. In just over a decade, the organization, which…
