Stanford Graduate School of Business (USA)
-
Qualtrics: Scaling an Inside-Sales Organization
Patell, J; Quigless, M; Bowman, KCase SGSB-E503-EEntrepreneurshipCEO, Ryan Smith and the rest of the founding team at Qualtrics grew the company to 350 employees and an estimated $50M in revenue through an inside-sales model. After ten years of bootstrapping however, the company took on $70M in funding from prominent venture capital funds. With this milestone, the team faced a new inflection point in the company’s growth. To support the next phase of evolution, Smith brought in John D’Agostino as the new H...Starting at €8.20
-
Waste Management's Organic Growth Group
Burgelman, R; Siegel, R; Uribe, TCase SGSB-SM210-EStrategyIt was 2005 and David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management (WM), had just received a report from an internal advisory panel created some months before to assess the future of the waste management industry and propose how the company’s strategy should be adapted. The core of this report was the recommendation to create a special unit within the company, chartered with the central purpose of identifying ways to extract value from waste through new and ...Starting at €8.20
-
SoftBank Vision Fund: Changing Dynamics of Venture Capital
Beyer, Anne; Siegel, Robert; Bekele, GelilaCase SGSB-E782-EEntrepreneurshipThe SoftBank Vision Fund case examines the history and evolution of late-stage venture investing and explores SoftBank’s evolving investment strategy. SoftBank Investment Advisers, the investing arm of SoftBank group, manages two of the world’s largest venture capital funds - SoftBank Vision Funds 1 and 2. The SoftBank Vision Fund case follows Lydia Jett, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, as she describes the firm’s pre-investment...Starting at €8.20
-
Roblox: The Path to Going Public
Beyer, Anne; Siegel, Robert; Bekele, GelilaCase SGSB-E795-EEntrepreneurshipThe 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. Roblox had filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC, and registered to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the ticker symbol “RBLX.” However, at the last minute, a series of market ev...Starting at €8.20
-
Qualtrics: Bootstrapping Growth
LevavJ; Quigless, MCase SGSB-SM224-EStrategyIn March 2012 the founders of Qualtrics sat together in the Provo, Utah, office of advisor Duff Thompson. They stared down one of the toughest decisions in the ten-year history of the company. Thompson and Qualtrics’ CEO Ryan Smith had spent the last few months fielding calls from venture capitalists and strategic partners who were interested in becoming a part of the Qualtrics story. The culmination of their effort was a $500 million buyout o...Starting at €8.20
-
Pear VC: State of Early Venture in 2022
Beyer, Anne; Siegel, Robert; Bekele, GelilaCase SGSB-E783-EEntrepreneurshipMar 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, Pear Competition, and Pear Fellows. The case examines the history and evolution of the early-stage venture capital industry over the last two decades. The case also explores the challenges asso...Starting at €8.20
-
Vitana: Choosing Partners
Dodson, David; Bekele, GelilaCase SGSB-E813-EEntrepreneurshipThis case study examines the founding of Vitana, a dentistry-focused search fund founded by Ashish Bagai, Monika Srivastava, and Amir Fardshi. In this case, students are encouraged to explore the advantages and disadvantages of being solo founders versus having founding partners. The case also delves into the frameworks used to identify attributes, skills and criteria for evaluating prospective co-founders. Additionally, the case examines the pot...Starting at €8.20
-
Esusu: The Missing Link in Credit Reports
Siegelman, Russell; Bekele, GelilaCase SGSB-E770-EEntrepreneurshipAbbey Wemimo and Samir Goel founded Esusu in 2018 to help low-to-moderate-income renters build credit history. Esusu, a for-profit impact focused venture, collected rental payments from property managers and reported this data to major credit bureaus, which helped renters improve their credit scores. In April 2020, only six months after closing their first institutional round of capital, New York state issued a lockdown to prevent the spread of ...Starting at €8.20