January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
Case
HBS Case Collection

Juno (A): Leveraging Student Power

By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Kathleen L. McGinn and Amy Klopfenstein

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:14

Abstract

In March 2020, Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal were in the midst of preparing the annual auction for their student loan assistance startup, Juno. Both current MBA students at Harvard Business School, the duo founded Juno in 2018 to leverage student bargaining power to negotiate better student loan terms with private lenders. Their business model involved soliciting bids from banks through an annual auction; the lender who submitted the best terms then received the right to exclusively market their loan products to Juno’s members. The co-founders held their first official auction in 2019, and anticipated receiving several competitive bids from large banks in 2020. However, several weeks before the auction was scheduled to begin, a new entrant to the private student loan market, Eager Bank, expressed a strong desire to become Juno’s 2020 loan partner. Eager requested that Abkarians and Agarwal cancel the auction and negotiate directly with them. In exchange, Eager offered several attractive terms, such as involving Juno in the underwriting process. Abkarians and Agarwal must decide whether to partner with Eager, hold the auction as originally planned, or pursue both options simultaneously.

Keywords

Citation

Schwartzstein, Joshua, Kathleen L. McGinn, and Amy Klopfenstein. "Juno (A): Leveraging Student Power." Harvard Business School Case 921-032, January 2021. (Revised March 2021.)