Bulb 2015: Foundation

John R. Wells; Benjamin  Weinstock

Case | HBS Case Collection | December 2018 (Revised July 2020)

Bulb 2015: Foundation

by John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

Abstract

This is the first case in a three-case series on Bulb Energy Ltd. It is followed by “Bulb 2017: Launch” (719-441) and “Bulb 2018: Rapid Growth” (719-442). It describes the foundation of Bulb, a renewable energy supplier entering the highly competitive UK market in August 2015. Founders Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka were hoping to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of customers switching their energy provider each month, by promising excellent customer service, a simple, low-price tariff, 100%-renewable electricity, and services to reduce energy consumption. At the time there were only about 250,000 households on renewable tariffs, typically paying a high price for the privilege. Gudka and Wood were convinced that many more households would opt for renewable energy and turn it into a mainstream product if prices were more reasonable. Their goal was to sign up more than 23,000 properties by March 31, 2017 to reach breakeven, and then grow to more than 69,000 properties by March 31, 2021. On Friday August 21, 2015, Gudka and Wood sent out a batch of 1,400 emails to friends and family, encouraging them to switch to Bulb. They waited anxiously for the first sign-ups.

Keywords: green energy; start-up; launch; customer acquisition; customer churn; Customer Engagement; Electricity; resources; growth strategy; B-Corp; Renewable Energy; Business Startups; Business Plan; Business Model; Working Capital; Customers; Growth and Development Strategy; United Kingdom;

Language: English

Format: Print

22 pages

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Citation:

Wells, John R., and Benjamin Weinstock. "Bulb 2015: Foundation." Harvard Business School Case 719-440, December 2018. (Revised July 2020.)

Related Work

Supplement | HBS Case Collection | December 2018 (Revised July 2020)

Bulb 2017: Launch

John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

This is the second case in a three-case series on Bulb Energy Ltd. It comes after “Bulb 2015: Foundation” (719-440) and is followed by “Bulb 2018: Rapid Growth” (719-442). It describes the launch of Bulb, a renewable energy supplier entering the highly competitive UK market in August 2015. By the end of March 2017, Bulb had grown to supply 29,311 properties, well ahead of its Launch Plan of 23,166 and beyond the point of breakeven. It had been a slow start, and growth had been volatile, reaching a rate of over 3,000 new members per week at one point, putting severe strains on service levels. Founders Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka had been forced to change many aspects of their plan and defer launching value-added services to help customers reduce energy consumption and create Bulb's vision of distributed generation. Now, the company was generating profits; enough to grow, but not at the level of the original plan. Should the founders scale back on their growth ambitions and delay adding services until they reached the scale to support them? Or should they seek more funding and accelerate growth?

Keywords: green energy; start-up; launch; customer acquisition; customer churn; Customer Engagement; Electricity; resources; growth strategy; B-Corp; Renewable Energy; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Model; Working Capital; Product Launch; Customers; Growth Management; Business Plan; Decision Making; United Kingdom;

Citation:
Wells, John R., and Benjamin Weinstock. "Bulb 2017: Launch." Harvard Business School Supplement 719-441, December 2018. (Revised July 2020.) View Details

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Supplement | HBS Case Collection | December 2018 (Revised July 2020)

Bulb 2018: Rapid Growth

John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

This is the third case in a three-case series on Bulb Energy Ltd. It follows “Bulb 2015: Foundation” (719-440) and “Bulb 2017: Launch” (719-441). After a wild and volatile year, Bulb, a new entrant in the UK residential energy market, ended March 2018 with 329,127 properties, 1.2% of the total residential energy market. This was 150% ahead of a plan for 130,000 properties and almost ten times the size the founders, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, had imagined in August 2015 when they first launched. Bulb was now one of the top 12 energy suppliers in the UK. Gudka and Wood were convinced that if they reinvested all their profits in growth, they would reach 500,000 properties by March 2019, and reach more than 1 million by March 2021. This would mean postponing the launch of a range of value-added services they had included in their original Launch Plan, but it could make Bulb number 7 in the industry and the first real challenger to the UK's "Big Six" leading energy suppliers to pass the one million-member mark. Was it time to seek more funding to really challenge the Big Six, making renewable energy mainstream? And did it make sense to delay value-added services to support energy conservation, distributed generation, and the switch to electric vehicles, or should they seek funding to support these initiatives too?

Keywords: rapid growth stage; green energy; start-up; customer acquisition; customer churn; Customer Engagement; Electricity; resources; growth strategy; B-Corp; Renewable Energy; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Model; Working Capital; Customers; Growth Management; Finance; Decision Making; United Kingdom;

Citation:
Wells, John R., and Benjamin Weinstock. "Bulb 2018: Rapid Growth." Harvard Business School Supplement 719-442, December 2018. (Revised July 2020.) View Details

Cite View Details Purchase Related
Case | HBS Case Collection | December 2018 (Revised July 2020)

Bulb 2015: Foundation

John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

This is the first case in a three-case series on Bulb Energy Ltd. It is followed by “Bulb 2017: Launch” (719-441) and “Bulb 2018: Rapid Growth” (719-442). It describes the foundation of Bulb, a renewable energy supplier entering the highly competitive UK market in August 2015. Founders Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka were hoping to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of customers switching their energy provider each month, by promising excellent customer service, a simple, low-price tariff, 100%-renewable electricity, and services to reduce energy consumption. At the time there were only about 250,000 households on renewable tariffs, typically paying a high price for the privilege. Gudka and Wood were convinced that many more households would opt for renewable energy and turn it into a mainstream product if prices were more reasonable. Their goal was to sign up more than 23,000 properties by March 31, 2017 to reach breakeven, and then grow to more than 69,000 properties by March 31, 2021. On Friday August 21, 2015, Gudka and Wood sent out a batch of 1,400 emails to friends and family, encouraging them to switch to Bulb. They waited anxiously for the first sign-ups.

Keywords: green energy; start-up; launch; customer acquisition; customer churn; Customer Engagement; Electricity; resources; growth strategy; B-Corp; Renewable Energy; Business Startups; Business Plan; Business Model; Working Capital; Customers; Growth and Development Strategy; United Kingdom;

Citation:
Wells, John R., and Benjamin Weinstock. "Bulb 2015: Foundation." Harvard Business School Case 719-440, December 2018. (Revised July 2020.) View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020

Minerva 2004: Discovery

John R. Wells, Benjamin Weinstock, John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

After nearly five years in operation, Doctor Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Corporation (Minerva), was reflecting on the company’s next steps. In a few short years, she and her small team had managed to develop a nanoparticle process for testing new drugs that was orders of magnitude faster than traditional approaches. Using this process, they had discovered the mechanism that caused 96% of all breast cancers and identified families of small molecule therapeutics that were effective in blocking this mechanism in live cells in the laboratory. Moreover, Bamdad did not think it would be long before the company could offer an early warning diagnostic for breast cancer, which would allow less invasive treatment of the condition. The company had filed several families of patent applications in support of these claims, but the challenge was funding. To date, Bamdad had relied on Federal Government grants and angel investors to fund the research, but the next steps would require much larger investment. Should Minerva seek to commercialize its drug development technology to help fund the riskier steps of drug development? Should it focus on a diagnostic which would make current treatments more effective? Should it license its small molecule therapeutics to one of the many well-funded companies seeking cures for cancer? Or should Bamdad raise capital to support tests in mice in order to reach the Federal Drug Administration IND (Investigational New Drug) application stage of drug discovery? This would allow clinical trials in humans, which would require more capital, but an IND would increase the value of Minerva’s intellectual capital substantially. What should Bamdad do?

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Biotechnology Industry;

Citation:

Wells, John R., and Benjamin Weinstock. "Minerva 2004: Discovery." Harvard Business School Case 721-389, September 2020. View Details

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In 2010, amid a flurry of new discoveries, Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Corporation (Minerva), raised $6.6 million to test her new cancer drugs in mice. It had been more than 6 years since she had announced that she and her small team at Minerva had identified the mechanism that caused 96% of all breast cancers and had discovered a number of small molecule drugs and antibodies to block it. Funding the next stage of development had proven very difficult, but, undeterred, Bamdad had raised enough to keep her laboratory open and continue her research work. In the process, she made the startling discovery that the “cancer” mechanism she had discovered was an integral part of the production of all human embryonic stem cells, and that cancer was a result of this mechanism going awry. As a result, Minerva developed the ability to produce high-quality stem cells, which opened up a whole range of new commercial opportunities for the company, including advanced therapeutics and processes for growing and replacing human cells of all types. However, resources were limited. Where should she focus her efforts?

In March 2020, Dr. Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Inc. (Minerva), was reviewing the first results of human clinical trials for the company’s novel CAR-T drug therapeutic, one of the first ever to target solid cancer tumors. The results looked promising.
CAR-T therapeutics were a new field attracting a lot of scientific interest. They involved genetically re-engineering a patient’s T-cells, a key element of the human immune system, to attack the cancer. The first CAR-T treatments for cancer were developed for the relatively small field of blood cancers, 7% of all cancers. For instance, early pioneer Kite Pharma Inc. (Kite) developed a treatment for a special type of lymphoma that only affected 7,500 patients a year. Still, the financial interest was huge, and Kite was acquired by Gilead Sciences Inc. in August 2017 for $11.9 billion. Similarly, Juno Therapeutics Inc. was acquired by Celgene Corporation for $9 billion in January 2018.
Minerva’s therapeutics targeted 96% of all breast cancers and 46% of prostate cancers, a market that was orders of magnitude larger. After 21 years, Bamdad believed that Minerva was on the threshold of something really big.
Should Bamdad sell the business and work within a larger organization? Or should she IPO and continue to develop the company’s long-term pipeline of therapeutics and diagnostics?

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