Facebook: The First Ten Years

Shane  Greenstein; Marco   Iansiti; Christine  Snively

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2015

Facebook: The First Ten Years

by Shane Greenstein, Marco Iansiti and Christine Snively

Abstract

Facebook celebrated its ten year anniversary in February 2014. Over the past decade it has grown into the largest social network in the world with one billion users. After filing an IPO in 2012 at a $104 billion valuation (the third largest IPO in U.S. history), the stock price steadily declined, but recovered after the company implemented an effective advertising strategy. Facebook worked to maintain its "hacker ethos" and remain nimble as it matured. The company was worth close to $200 billion. Could this kind of value sustain itself for years to come?

Keywords: social networks; technology; Facebook; Entrepreneurship; Profit; Open Source Distribution; Social and Collaborative Networks; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Online Technology; Technology Platform; Information Technology Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

15 pages

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Citation:

Greenstein, Shane, Marco Iansiti, and Christine Snively. "Facebook: The First Ten Years." Harvard Business School Case 616-012, October 2015. (More Info.)

An examination of the strategic and operating challenges that DeepMap faces in developing HD mapping software for the nascent autonomous vehicle market.

Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2019

Twiggle: E-commerce with Semantic Search

Shane Greenstein and Danielle Golan

Four years after being founded, in 2014, by former Google executives Amir Konigsberg (CEO) and Adi Avidor (CTO), Twiggle had developed a search enhancement that plugged into an online merchant’s existing framework. The company utilized advanced structuring and linguistic tools to build search technology that understood shopper intent and matched it with the right products. Konigsberg and Avidor believed e-tailers were losing enormous revenue due to poor search results. The team built a set of proprietary tools that created a human-like understanding of customer queries in the e-commerce search experience, using natural language processing that translated text into meaning. The team also constructed a semantic model of the e-commerce world for three product domains: fashion, home and electronics. The resulting “ontology” was a set of concepts and categories in a subject area that showed their properties and the relations between them. Twiggle’s tools could also unlock significant online sales revenue by increasing click-through and add-to-cart rates, ultimately improving sales conversions. So far, the company had secured deals with more than half a dozen large e-commerce retailers, and could improve search results in three product categories: fashion, home, and electronics.
The company initially targeted large direct-to-consumer e-commerce players. Yet the cofounders encountered challenges pursuing this type of customer. The customer acquisition process included lengthy, intensive face-to-face sales cycles, expensive and technologically complex proof-of-concept testing, and requests for customization. Konigsberg and Avidor wondered if they should expand their customer focus to target a wider set of smaller e-tailers that still had significant volumes of online search queries, but whose search quality tended to be less robust and might be easier to improve. They also contemplated a variety of growth opportunities.

Keywords: e-commerce; search technology; customer acquisition; Online Technology; Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; Israel;

Citation:

Greenstein, Shane, and Danielle Golan. "Twiggle: E-commerce with Semantic Search." Harvard Business School Case 620-025, August 2019. View Details

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