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• Case | HBS Case Collection | December 2020

  Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation

  Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull

  With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem. At the beginning, Prime’s role as a financial intermediary involved seeking out the most promising market-based technology solutions to climate change and recruiting foundations or philanthropists to fund them. In 2019, Prime changed course, adopting a portfolio approach with its Prime Impact Fund. By the end of the year, Prime had raised $40 million in philanthropic capital for its new fund. Once the funds were invested in promising energy startups, Prime planned to try its hand at recruiting traditional investors to back the same companies. Could Kearney convince traditional investors that these investments were worth the risks?

  Keywords: Energy Industry; Technology Industry; Green Technology Industry;

  Citation:

  Nanda, Ramana, Benjamin N. Roth, and Olivia Hull. "Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation." Harvard Business School Case 820-007, February 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2019 (Revised January 2020)

  NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries

  Shai Bernstein, Ramana Nanda and Allison Ciechanover

  While still a general partner at Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Ravi Viswanathan considered the challenges presented by evolving market dynamics in the venture capital space. Startups were staying private longer, which led to limited partners thirsty for liquidity and venture capital funds managing overloaded portfolios. Viswanathan and the senior leaders of NEA orchestrated the purchase of 31 NEA unrealized portfolio companies by the newly created $1.35 billion NewView Capital spinout that he would head. This secondary transaction provided liquidity to NEA’s limited partners and reallocated NEA partners’ time to shepherd other portfolio companies, while at the same time allowing NewView Capital to reap gains from future exits from a portfolio of diverse, high-quality growth stage technology companies. Now, as he prepares to raise Fund II, Viswanathan acknowledges that the unique circumstances that enabled the launch of Fund I would not be replicable, and he must consider alternative strategies to pursue next. Should he continue to focus on secondary transactions, focus on direct investments, or some combination of the two?

  Keywords: Venture Capital; Capital Markets; Private Equity; Strategy;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Shai, Ramana Nanda, and Allison Ciechanover. "NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries." Harvard Business School Case 820-038, October 2019. (Revised January 2020.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2017 (Revised December 2019)

  Delivering the Goods at Shippo

  Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Olivia Hull

  Laura Behrens Wu, CEO of software start-up Shippo, prepares her pitch for a Series A funding round following a successful seed round. Customer adoption of Shippo’s e-commerce dashboard application, which allows small and medium retailers to compare delivery rates between shipping providers and print package labels, has been steady in the nine months since it went live. But traction with the firm’s developer friendly product, an API that allows large enterprise customers to automate their shipping needs, had initially been slow until one customer single handedly tripled the API label volume in late August. Now in November 2014, with nine months of runway remaining, Behrens Wu must decide where to direct the company’s limited resources. Should Shippo stay focused on the app while raising the next round of funding, pivot to an API-focused strategy, or pursue both products?

  Keywords: application program interface; API; API strategy; customer cohorts; churn; retention; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Transition; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Valuation; Shipping Industry; Technology Industry; Retail Industry; San Francisco; California; United States;

  Citation:

  Bussgang, Jeffrey J., Jeffrey F. Rayport, and Olivia Hull. "Delivering the Goods at Shippo." Harvard Business School Case 817-065, January 2017. (Revised December 2019.)  View Details

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