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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019

  Boxed

  Laura Huang, Andy Wu and Jiayi Bao

  Boxed.com (“Boxed”) is an ambitious e-commerce retailer start-up, founded by visionary CEO Chieh Huang in 2013. From starting in Huang’s garage in 2013, to winning Emerging E-Retailer of the Year in 2016, to having four operational distribution centers in 2018, Boxed used a variety of strategies in order to gain customers and grow its presence. This case explores the journey that the scrappy, new entrant navigated as it competed against large, goliath players in an already established retail and e-commerce industry.

  Keywords: e-commerce; entrepreneurial management; Business Startups; Leadership; Strategy; Success; Retail Industry;

  Citation:

  Huang, Laura, Andy Wu, and Jiayi Bao. "Boxed." Harvard Business School Case 719-496, April 2019.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised April 2019)

  Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital

  Laura Huang and Sarah Mehta

  Frustrated by an inability to convince existing venture capital firms to invest in companies led by women, people of color, and LGBT founders, Arlan Hamilton started her own firm, Backstage Capital, in 2015. Hamilton understood the untapped potential of companies run by underrepresented founders, a group historically excluded from venture capital funding, and was eager to demonstrate the significant returns on investment in such companies. This case explores Hamilton’s nontraditional VC background and her mission to fund startups where at least one founder of the company identifies as a woman, person of color, or LGBT. Now, three years after its founding, Hamilton is considering launching both an accelerator and a fund that will invest exclusively in Black women.

  Keywords: black leadership; LGBTQ; women; people of color; Entrepreneurship; Mission and Purpose; Venture Capital; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Identity; Personal Characteristics; Prejudice and Bias; Social Issues; Diversity; Gender; Race;

  Citation:

  Huang, Laura, and Sarah Mehta. "Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital." Harvard Business School Case 419-029, October 2018. (Revised April 2019.)  View Details

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• Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | April 2019

  Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

  Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang and Brian Hall

  People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of malicious envy in observers: revealing one’s failures. Despite a general reluctance to reveal one’s failures—as they are happening and after they have occurred—across four experiments, we find that revealing both successes and failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of the discloser’s status and cannot be explained by a decrease in perceived status of the individual. Then, in a field experiment at an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy while increasing their benign envy in addition to decreasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance) while increasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

  Keywords: Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy;

  Citation:

  Brooks, Alison Wood, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang, and Brian Hall. "Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148, no. 4 (April 2019): 667–687.  View Details

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