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Under Fire, Microfinance Faces Falling Out of Favor

Harvard Business Review

Microfinance has come under fire in the past 18 months, triggered in part by SKS Microfinance's IPO. Critics complain that the institutions supporting microfinance have become too greedy, and many are using this as an argument to deeply regulate or, even more, cut support to microfinance operations.

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A Quiet Revolution in Clean-Energy Finance

Harvard Business Review

Between 2006 and 2008, more than $1 billion venture-capital dollars were channeled into startups focused on solar, wind and biofuel technologies. A star example is Google, which raised a mere $40 million in private funding before its IPO at a $23 billion valuation.

Energy 10
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Some of the Most Successful Platforms Are Ones You’ve Never Heard Of

Harvard Business Review

Then the banks decided to turn the associations into for-profit companies, IPO them, and cash out. MasterCard IPO’d in 2006, and Visa followed two years later. Around the world, though, many countries still have domestic payment networks that operate as not-for-profit platforms.

IPO 8
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An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal

Harvard Business Review

By mid-2004, however, the operation was mired in conflict over control and differences in management style. Zhou reportedly felt that the original Yahoos were overpaid and lazy, whereas the Yahoo team felt bullied and believed Zhou wasn’t focused on the Yahoo operations. We were ready to give Ma the keys to Yahoo’s operations in China.

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How Israeli Startups Can Scale

Harvard Business Review

As a result, tech-sector employment has declined as a percent of the workforce, from 11% in 2006–2008 to 9% in 2013. In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 What was once the story of ICQ’s $287 million exit to AOL is now the story of MobileEye’s NYSE IPO and $12 billion market capitalization.