Andrew Rachleff, Sara Rosenthal
2013
The Airbnb case describes the very early days of this startup, beginning with the founders’ original concept of renting out air beds and serving breakfast (“Airbed and Breakfast”) in their apartment to conference attendees as an alternative to expensive…
Mark Leslie, Russell Lewis Siegelman, Austin Kiessig
2013
Blue River Technology begins with background on company co-founder Jorge Heraud and the founding story of the enterprise. Blue River was created by Heraud and co-founder Lee Redden, who were both graduate students at Stanford University when they began…
Mark Leslie, Russell Lewis Siegelman, Austin Kiessig
2013
Blue River Technology begins with background on company co-founder Jorge Heraud and the founding story of the enterprise. Blue River was created by Heraud and co-founder Lee Redden, who were both graduate students at Stanford University when they began…
Robert B. Chess, Austin Kiessig
2013
Brown Robin Capital details the experiences of Stanford GSB graduates Ryan Robinson and Lucas Braun in pursuing a search fund acquisition. The case explains the search fund model and provides historical asset class performance statistics. Then, the…
Jeffrey Chambers, Jason Luther
2013
It was February 2009, when Eric Edelson wondered to himself how he had gotten into this situation. Less than two years earlier, Edelson had been an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business ready to market a footwear product to the elderly…
William Meehan III, Paul Pfleiderer, Michael Kennedy, Debra McCoy
2013
This case describes the history of the International Finance Corporation’s Private Equity Investment Funds Group, which invests the IFC’s capital in private equity funds located in Emerging and Frontier Market countries. The IFC began investing in private…
Jonathan Levav, Russell Lewis Siegelman, Austin Kiessig
2013
The Intuit’s Small Business Health Insurance Solutions case details a failed product launch experiment by Intuit, an innovative software company. The case first delves into Intuit’s history and competitive position. Then, the case discusses Intuit’s…
William Barnett, Gary Mekikian
2013
As 2013 approached, Marcos Galperin and his team of MercadoLibre top executives were meeting to celebrate the breathtaking growth of their company, and contemplate the challenges ahead. Since starting the company with his Stanford Business School…
Michael Marks, David Hoyt
2013
Ben Kaufman founded Quirky in 2009 to enable anyone with a product idea to access an online network of people to help evaluate and improve the idea, and potentially bring it to market. By the end of 2012, Quirky was shipping 74 products, and had many…
George Parker, Alan Rappaport, Jaclyn Foroughi
2013
Rina Castillo lived the American Dream. A recent graduate of the Stanford School of
Engineering, she was the first in her family not only to leave her native Mexico but also to attend and graduate from a university. While at Stanford, Castillo received a…
George Parker, Alan Rappaport, Jaclyn Foroughi, Vanessa Lide
2013
Paul Schroder had recently celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday and was beginning to feel his age. While he recognized that there were many good years ahead, he also realized that it was not too early to begin to think seriously about his retirement and…
George Parker, Alan Rappaport, Jaclyn Foroughi
2013
Having identified his “needs and dreams,” Paul Schroder had to figure out what to do next.
Putting emotions aside, he needed to identify the best options to come up with the required amounts of liquidity at the right times.
As Schroder thought through…
Maureen McNichols, Anne Casscells, Jaclyn Foroughi
2013
Amid worldwide market and economic uncertainty, Tesla debuted its stock in June 2010 on the NASDAQ Stock Market (Ticker Symbol: TSLA). The stock price jumped over 40 percent in its first day of trading to close at $23.89 in an upsized deal that valued the…
Sheila Melvin, Larissa Z. Tiedens, Webb McKinney, Yifat Sharabi-Levine, John Cronkite, David Hoyt, Margot Sutherland
2013
This is a role-play case, intended for use in a leadership development course for MBA students. The case has four roles, two each for students playing U.S.- and China-based managers. There are two versions of the case, one for students playing the role…
Sheila Melvin, Larissa Z. Tiedens, Webb McKinney, Yifat Sharabi-Levine, John Cronkite, David Hoyt, Margot Sutherland
2013
This is a role-play case, intended for use in a leadership development course for MBA students. The case has four roles, two each for students playing U.S.- and China-based managers. There are two versions of the case, one for students playing the role…
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, David Hoyt
2013
The Rapid Equipping Force (REF) was a center of innovation within the U.S. Army. Its origins traced back to 2002, and by 2013 it had developed solutions to thousands of problems faced by soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. It addressed problems as varied as…
Michael Kennedy, Debra McCoy, William Meehan III, Paul Pfleiderer
2013
The Global Environment Fund (GEF) is a private equity fund focused on investments in environmental and energy solutions in both developed and developing markets. The fund is currently examining the strategy of one of its portfolio companies–NEOgás, a…
Hau L. Lee, Sonali Rammohan
2013
Before opening its first store in India in 1996, McDonald’s spent six years building its supply chain. During that time, the company worked to successfully source as many ingredients as possible from India. However, French fries (“MacFries”) were a…
Glenn Carroll, Debra Schifrin, David Brady
2013
The case discusses Nike’s sustainability and labor practices from 1998 to 2013, focusing on the successful steps Nike took up and down the supply chain and in its headquarters to make its products and processes more environmentally friendly, and the…
David Hoyt, Hau Lee, Michael Marks
2013
This is an update to GS-61, describing developments at the company through 2011, including a major acquisition, distribution in China, and an initiative to cultivate start-ups that might grow into future clients.
George Parker, Alan Rappaport, Jaclyn Foroughi
2013
Richard Lund had reached an important crossroads in his life. At age 65, Lund had had a great deal of success—and amassed much wealth—but he needed to devise a plan for the future. Namely, he needed to figure out what to do with the wealth of which he was…
Robert Chess, Sara Rosenthal
2013
The Sunrun case profiles the evolution of this residential solar financing startup, focusing on the company’s hypergrowth during its early years. The case begins with Sunrun’s launch by two GSB graduates, Ed Fenster and Lynn Jurich, together with one of…
Ilya Strebulaev, Hornblower Jocelyn
2012
This case tells the story of OPENLANE and CEO Peter Kelly’s history with the company, from its founding in 1999 to its potential sale in 2011. The case describes the early stages of the company, the impacts of various economic downturns on the business…
H. Irving Grousbeck, Arar Han, Sara Rosenthal
2012
Since 1996, the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has conducted a series of studies on the performance of search funds. This study, as well as its predecessors in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and…