Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 26, 2011

Between 2006 and 2008, more than $1 billion venture-capital dollars were channeled into startups focused on solar, wind and biofuel technologies. In the last year, however, early-stage investments in clean energy production technologies have fallen substantially (see the table at the end of this piece for more detail).

Energy 11

Energy Finance IPO Biotechnology 11

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 23, 2013

The most motivated and productive people I’ve seen recently work in an older company on the American East Coast deploying innovative technology products to transform a traditional industry. To a person, they look astonished when I ask whether their dedication comes from anticipation of the money they could make in the event of an IPO.

Motivation 13

Motivation IPO Norton Open-book 13

Harvard Business Review

JULY 17, 2017

Despite rapid innovations in data processing and machine learning, many businesses have yet to make the leap from the Industrial Age to the information age, and the gap between technological and organizational progress is widening. Closing this gap requires much more than short-term fixes, like adopting new technologies.

Industry 14

Industry Short-term Planning Long-term 14

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

On February 13, 2018, the New York Times reported that Uber is planning an IPO. Twitter reported a loss of $79 million before its IPO, yet it commanded a valuation of $24 billion on its IPO date in 2013. Uber’s value is estimated between $48 and $70 billion, despite reporting losses over the last two years.

Company 8

Company Intangible Assets Depreciation IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 8, 2012

Amid the flood of social media IPOs during the last 12 months, another "old guard" tech company has quietly built one of the most dominant, fiercely loyal and profitable social media businesses to date. I positioned it to my wife (who was less than enthusiastic) as a way of keeping up with my friends from home.

Media 15

Media Company IPO Business Model 15

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2014

As a member of a start-up advisory program, I regularly hear pitches from aspiring technology entrepreneurs. An -er position is a dangerous one to adopt. A well-conceived brand platform and positioning can relegate competitors to irrelevance. There are several ways to position a brand as breakthrough.

Brand 11

Brand IPO Marketing Strategy Airlines 11

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 8, 2012

Amid the flood of social media IPOs during the last 12 months, another "old guard" tech company has quietly built one of the most dominant, fiercely loyal and profitable social media businesses to date. I positioned it to my wife (who was less than enthusiastic) as a way of keeping up with my friends from home.

Media 14

Media Company IPO Business Model 14

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 30, 2016

Second, the company’s capital was spread uniformly across an extraordinary range of business types and competitive positions. The company’s success has made it one of the best-performing IPOs in Asia in the last decade. Most companies would have backed off from such an investment.

Supply Chain 15

Supply Chain Company IPO Talent Management 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 21, 2014

Does a bar graph, table, or pie chart more effectively present your position? Other companies with slicker marketing were gaining market share even though they had inferior technology,” Mason says. And in short order, the company achieved consistent double-digit sales growth — and a successful IPO. The price tag?

IPO 11

IPO Audience Chief Information Officer Case Study 11

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 30, 2017

A recent Washington Post investigation titled “The big problem for Uber now: Attracting talent” detailed the roots of this problem throughout the company and at the top, where 13 of the top 20 management positions remain empty, including the positions of COO and CFO.

CEO 13

CEO IPO Energy COO 13

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

also has a vibrant IPO system to take companies public. With foreign technology companies doing mostly of the trading in Africa, combined with a porous IPR system in the region, tech startups have limited opportunities for acquisition. So what can entrepreneurs in the developing world do? and run it from your own country.

Entrepreneur 14

Entrepreneur Exit Strategy Development Real Estate 14

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 7, 2016

In an instant, any business can find itself in the frightening position of watching the brand you’ve worked so hard to build being taken to its knees by a cyber breach. Here’s a generalized scenario similar to cases we’ve experienced: A hot new mobile technology company lands one of the most successful IPOs of the year.

Planning 10

Planning Company Crisis Brand 10

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 13, 2015

In Africa’s technology start-up scene, one of the most difficult challenges is attracting and retaining talent. With limited exit opportunities via initial public offers ( IPOs ) and acquisitions, smart young people understand that stock options rarely bring a big payday.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist IPO Entrepreneur Banking 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2015

Tech bloggers had jumped all over the story; many speculated that SimplePay had begun to slow its hiring and scrimp on security investments in an effort to spiff up its balance sheet for a potential IPO. They knew that technology (and the staff to support it) was the company’s bread and butter. Some of that was true.

Case Study 8

Case Study Crisis IPO CIO 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 18, 2014

Even what appears to be a small investment risk can turn into a big one, especially when information technology comes into play. However, cash flow from operations had shifted from positive to negative, the company’s cash pile was dwindling, and the new product would demand R&D investment. Forecasting acumen.

CFO 8

CFO Venture Funding IPO Retail 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 4, 2016

.” In a recent Strategic Management Journal study with a sample of more than 6,000 companies, Wasserman discovered that founders who keep a powerful central role in their startup as it grows — controlling the board or the CEO position, or both — can harm the firm’s prospects, reducing pre-money valuation by up to 22%.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Sample IPO Long-term 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 15, 2013

Lerner has another paper relevant to the Dell case, which looks at the performance of buyout companies'' stock prices after they IPO, including public firms taken private in the deal. As Lerner summed it up for me in an interview, "There seemed to be a pretty positive track record in terms of technology companies after buyouts.".

Rivkin 15

Rivkin Succession Short-term Case Study 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 7, 2018

Those benefits fall into three categories: To jumpstart network effects that provide a first-mover advantage: Many of the projects being built using blockchain technology are “protocols” that govern the interactions between users in a decentralized autonomous network. How ICOs Constrain.

Cost 8

Cost Decentralization Finance Entrepreneur 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 30, 2011

Since filing their S-1 ahead of their potential IPO , Groupon scrutiny has been intense. LevelUp is positioned as allowing merchants to give customers instant credit in place of a deal; where Mogl is a flat 10% discount for each visit, and the person who spends the most at a location receives a monthly jackpot.

Incentives 13

Incentives Loyalty Discount IPO 13

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 2, 2016

Before the company’s $155 billion IPO in 2014 — the largest initial public offering in history — he observed, “we want to help small businesses grow by solving their problems.” Payment platforms, for example, are in a far better position to identify and mitigate fraud than individual users.

IPO 8

IPO Human Capital Insurance Business Model 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 16, 2016

For example, as it grew, Facebook found that its early “move fast and break things” culture had to be funneled into focused technical teams and product groups to make its product development process faster and less erratic, and for it to have a chance of meeting the demands of its new public shareholders following its IPO.

Banking 15

Banking Strategy Film Operations 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 13, 2015

When markets or technologies change, it often requires entire segments of the value network to be reimagined. Meanwhile, sensor technology is both proliferating and dropping in cost, allowing the types of data captured by businesses to become ever more contextually relevant. And it’s not all basic cloud software.

Software 8

Software Trends Mass Marketing Marketing 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 6, 2014

In fact, you could say (and many did) that our previous attempts had failed, in that we hadn’t established a sustained market position. Zhou departed in 2005 and went on to found Qihoo 360 Technology, a $12 billion company that now trades on NASDAQ. billion — the world’s biggest internet offering since Google’s IPO in 2004.

Chief Financial Officer 11

Chief Financial Officer Operations Learning-by-Doing IPO 11

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2013

Investors are involved for the long haul, understanding that startup managers will have to experiment and fail along the way to a successful IPO. What about a novel technology partnership? A good management team will be dedicated to creating product market fit, otherwise the business will flounder. Go high enough.

Company 10

Company Ries Maturity Innovation 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2015

For many consumer tech companies, this post-IPO pressure on financial returns is too high. What compels these companies to IPO prematurely is that they need to provide a liquidity event for their institutional investors, and sometimes for their founders or early employees. Some of them go public before even turning a profit.

IPO 8

IPO Company Maturity Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

For instance, we considered Harman International’s development of the MOST (media oriented system transport) system, under CEO Bernard Girod, as a breakthrough (it established its strong position in the infotainment market), but Girod’s career background was largely in planning and finance.

CEO 8

CEO Innovation Pharmaceuticals Merchandising 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 18, 2015

This new entity could bring together human talent, technology scale, and long-horizon venture and investment approaches to construct business models that could pose a formidable challenge to those designed and perfected in the industrial age. The second era requires larger scale in technology and deeper R&D expertise.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Kleiner Business Model Health Care 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 20, 2014

As I pointed out in my earlier post , the only funds that Apple ever raised on the public stock market was $97 million (about $274 million in today’s dollars) at its IPO in 1980. You and your board are in the position to decide whether that happens or not. The decisions you make will have ramifications far beyond Apple.

Innovation 13

Innovation EPS Incentives Supply Chain 13

Harvard Business Review

MAY 12, 2014

I taught the first masters course on technological entrepreneurship in Israel at the Technion in 1987, 15 years after Israel’s first tech IPO on NASDAQ and when the entrepreneurial revolution in Israel was well underway. Family businesses squash entrepreneurial initiative in order to protect their “franchise.”. How well did you score?

Entrepreneur 11

Entrepreneur Incubator Bureaucracy Banking 11

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 9, 2010

In return, I would want a 25% stake, a board seat, a vote on all strategic decisions, and the ability to liquidate my position in five years, should I so choose, either through a public offering or a sale.". Why would an IPO be so bad? Gloria started to respond, but he cut her off. "My My lawyers have drafted a contract."

Case Study 14

Case Study Franchising Health Care Follow-up 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015

In the 1990s it subsidized venture capital, incubators, university R&D, and technology transfer programs. In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 After all, Israeli entrepreneurs are known to be tenacious and eager to tackle complex technological and entrepreneurial challenges. billion in 2013.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur Marketing IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2017

.” But their participation in cleantech deals also peaked in 2011, and as the authors note, “These companies, with legacy businesses to protect and sustain, are unlikely to expand their involvement and pick up more of the slack in funding disruptive clean technologies.” Perhaps it’s because the U.S.

Stage-Gate 10

Stage-Gate Kleiner Energy Proposal 10

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 6, 2015

You get your technology into the market and see who wants it. There’s nothing wrong with being in love with tech; we’ve all been there, because new technology enables innovative ventures. Technology is almost always best applied as a solution to a defined market problem. It enables the product to function.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur IPO Wireless 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 27, 2015

Of these, only three, Switzerland, Ireland, and Estonia, made it to a commendable “Stand Out” category – which means that their high levels of digital development are attractive to global businesses and investors and that their digital ecosystems are positioned to nurture start ups and internet businesses that can compete globally.

Crisis 8

Crisis McKinsey Policies Globalization 8

The Horizons Tracker

MARCH 19, 2020

This wastefulness was aptly highlighted by a recent paper from Nanyang Technological University, which found that companies who win the H-1B visa lottery were consistently more innovative and successful than their peers.

Consensus 68

Consensus Politics IPO Report 68