Ramana Nanda is the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration and Co-Director of the Private Capital Project at Harvard Business School, where he is on a leave of absence for the academic year 2019-2020. His research examines financing frictions facing new ventures, with an aim to help entrepreneurs with fundraising and to shed light on how financial intermediaries, corporate R&D and policy makers can improve the odds of selecting and commercializing the most promising ideas and technologies in the economy.
Ramana is a Research Associate in the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at the NBER. He received his Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has a BA and MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. He is a recipient of the 2015 Kauffman Prize Medal, that is awarded annually to one scholar under age 40 whose research has made a significant contribution to the literature in entrepreneurship.
Prior to starting his Ph.D., Ramana was based in the London and New York offices of Oliver, Wyman & Company, where he worked primarily with clients in global capital markets as well as in small-business banking. He continues to advise startup ventures on their financing strategies and also works with philanthropic investors who use market-based solutions to address poverty and promote entrepreneurship in developing countries.
Abhiman Das, Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover, William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We use the construction of India's Golden Quadrangle (GQ) central highway network, together with comprehensive loan data drawn from the Reserve Bank of India, to investigate the interaction between infrastructure development and financial sector depth. We identify a disproportionate increase in loan count and average loan size in districts along the GQ highway network using stringent specifications with industry and district fixed effects. Our results hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present in “placebo tests” with another highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Importantly, however, results are concentrated in districts with stronger initial financial development, suggesting that while financing does respond to large infrastructure investments and help spur real economic outcomes, initial financial sector development might play an important role in determining where real activity will grow.
Exploiting random variation in the number of venture capitalist (VC) judges assigned to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more VC judges increases male participants’ chances of founding a VC-backed startup after HBS much more than this exposure increases female participants’ chances. A survey suggests this is in part because male participants more often proactively reach out to VC judges after the NVC. Our results suggest that networking frictions are an important reason men benefit more than women from exposure to VCs. Such frictions can help explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship and also have implications for how to design networking opportunities to facilitate financing of the best (rather than just the best networked) ideas.
Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We use Census micro data to shed new light on how growth in house prices boosts U.S. entrepreneurship. At the height of the 2007 real estate boom, 5% of self-employed individuals and 12% of employer-businesses used home equity to partly or wholly finance a new business. Despite this frequency, several analyses suggest that little of the observed city-level relationship between house price increases and entrepreneurship operates through expansion of the home equity collateral channel. First, home equity gains mostly appear to substitute against loans from friends and family. The vast majority of entrepreneurs used personal savings to finance their business, and these individuals usually hold sufficient start-up capital absent the house price increases. Second, we estimate that over 90% of the relationship between house price increases and entrepreneurship observed in city-level analyses comes from higher local demand that boosts entry. Our results provide a nuanced picture: while housing collateral is important for some entrepreneurs to access needed credit, the empirical relationship between house price increases and start-up activity is more about local demand than about financing constraints.
We study the impact of Quickpay, a federal reform that indefinitely accelerated payments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong direct effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm level. Importantly, however, we also document substantial crowding out of non-treated firms' employment within local labor markets. While the overall net employment effect was positive, it was close to zero in tight labor markets—where crowding out was stronger. Our results highlight an important channel for alleviating financing constraints in small firms but also emphasize the general-equilibrium effects of large-scale interventions, which can lead to lower aggregate outcomes depending on labor market conditions.
We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional IPO among a VC firm's first ten investments predicts as much as an 8% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments, though this effect erodes with time. In exploring its sources, we document several additional facts: successful outcomes stem in large part from investing in the right places at the right times; VC firms do not persist in their ability to choose the right places and times to invest; but early success does lead to investing in later rounds and in larger syndicates. This pattern of results seems most consistent with the idea that initial success improves access to deal flow and that preferential access raises the quality of subsequent investments, perpetuating performance differences in initial investments.
We examine the extent to which financial market development impacts the diffusion of 16 major technologies, looking across 17 countries, from 1870 to 2000. We find that greater depth in financial markets leads to faster technology diffusion for more capital-intensive technologies but only in periods closer to the invention of the technology. In fact, we find no differential effect of financial depth on the diffusion of capital-intensive technologies in the late stages of diffusion or in late adopters. Our results are consistent with a view that local financial markets play a critical role in facilitating the process of experimentation that is required for the initial commercialization and diffusion of technologies.
Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price – in terms of an investor’s required share of equity – that increases in the level of radical innovation. Financiers with investment strategies that tolerate early failure will endogenously choose to fund less radical innovations, while the most radical innovations (for whom the price of failure tolerance is too high) can only be started by investors who are not failure tolerant. Since policies to stimulate innovation must often be set before specific investments in innovative projects are made, this creates a trade-off between a policy that encourages experimentation ex post and the one that funds experimental projects ex ante. In equilibrium, it is possible that all competing financiers choose to offer failure tolerant contracts to attract entrepreneurs, leaving no capital to fund the most radical, experimental projects in the economy. The impact of different innovation policies can help to explain who finances radical innovations, and when and where radical innovation occurs.
Michael Ewens, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We study how technological shocks to the cost of starting new businesses have led the venture capital model to adapt in fundamental ways over the prior decade. We both document and provide a framework to understand the changes in the investment strategy of VCs in recent years—an increased prevalence of a "spray and pray" investment approach—where investors provide a little funding and limited governance to an increased number of startups that they are more likely to abandon, but where initial experiments significantly inform beliefs about the future potential of the venture. This adaptation and related entry by new financial intermediaries has led to a disproportionate rise in innovations where information on future prospects is revealed quickly and cheaply and has reduced the relative share of innovation in complex technologies where initial experiments cost more and reveal less.
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying their focus to finance less innovative firms. Potential shocks to the supply of capital create the need for increased upfront financing, but this protection lowers the real option value of the new venture. In equilibrium, financing risk disproportionately impacts innovative ventures with the greatest real option value. We propose that extremely novel technologies may need "hot" financial markets to get through the initial period of discovery or diffusion.
Nanda, Ramana, and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. "Financing Entrepreneurial Experimentation." Chap. 1 in Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 16, edited by William R. Kerr, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern, 1–23. National Bureau of Economic Research, and University of Chicago Press, 2016.
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In fields as diverse as technology entrepreneurship and the arts, crowds of interested stakeholders are increasingly responsible for deciding which innovations to fund, a privilege that was previously reserved for a few experts, such as venture capitalists and grant‐making bodies. Little is known about the degree to which the crowd differs from experts in judging which ideas to fund, and, indeed, whether the crowd is even rational in making funding decisions. Drawing on a panel of national experts and comprehensive data from the largest crowdfunding site, we examine funding decisions for proposed theater projects, a category where expert and crowd preferences might be expected to differ greatly. We instead find significant agreement between the funding decisions of crowds and experts. Where crowds and experts disagree, it is far more likely to be a case where the crowd is willing to fund projects that experts may not. Examining the outcomes of these projects, we find no quantitative or qualitative differences between projects funded by the crowd alone, and those that were selected by both the crowd and experts. Our findings suggest that crowdfunding can play an important role in complementing expert decisions, particularly in sectors where the crowds are end users, by allowing projects the option to receive multiple evaluations and thereby lowering the incidence of "false negatives."
We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its own puzzles. Our review outlines the growing body of work that documents a role for debt financing related to innovation. We highlight the new literature on learning and experimentation across multi-stage innovation projects and how this impacts optimal financing design. We further highlight the strong interaction between financing choices for innovation and changing external conditions, especially reduced experimentation costs.
We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality, and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient number of R&D intensive firms were located in counties with lower levels of bank distress, or were operating in less capital intensive industries, the negative effects were mitigated in aggregate. Although Depression era bank distress was associated with the stifling of innovation, our results also help to explain why technological development was still robust following one of the largest shocks in the history of the U.S. banking system.
Thomas Astebro, Holger Herz, Ramana Nanda and Roberto A. Weber
There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why certain individuals may be attracted to such an apparently unprofitable activity. Drawing on research in behavioral economics, in the sections that follow, we review three sets of possible interpretations for understanding the empirical facts related to the entry into, and persistence in, entrepreneurship. Differences in risk aversion provide a plausible and intuitive interpretation of entrepreneurial activity. In addition, a growing literature has begun to highlight the potential importance of overconfidence in driving entrepreneurial outcomes. Such a mechanism may appear at face value to work like a lower level of risk aversion, but there are clear conceptual differences—in particular, overconfidence likely arises from behavioral biases and misperceptions of probability distributions. Finally, nonpecuniary taste-based factors may be important in motivating both the decisions to enter into and to persist in entrepreneurship.
William R. Kerr, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Entrepreneurship research is on the rise, but many questions about its fundamental nature still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation: the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level, experimentation by new firms underlies the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction. However, at a micro level, investment and continuation decisions are not always made in a competitive Darwinian contest. Instead, a few investors make decisions that are impacted by incentive, agency, and coordination problems, often before a new idea even has a chance to compete in a market. We contend that costs and constraints on the ability to experiment alter the type of organizational form surrounding innovation and influence when innovation is more likely to occur. These factors not only govern how much experimentation is undertaken in the economy, but also the trajectory of experimentation, with potentially very deep economic consequences.
We find that VC-backed firms receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public are valued higher on the day of their IPO, have more patents, and have more citations to their patents. Our results suggest that VCs invest in riskier and more innovative startups in hot markets (rather than just worse firms). This is true even for the most experienced VCs. Furthermore, our results suggest that the flood of capital in hot markets also plays a causal role in shifting investments to more novel startups—by lowering the cost of experimentation for early stage investors and allowing them to make riskier, and more novel, investments.
We use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks-where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions-give larger loans to small firms and those with "soft information." However, decentralized banks are also more responsive to their own competitive environment. They are more likely to expand credit when faced with competition but also cherry pick customers and restrict credit when they have market power. This "darker side" to decentralized banks in concentrated markets highlights that the level of local banking competition is key to determining which organizational structure provides better lending terms for small businesses.
This study explores the importance of cross-border social networks for entrepreneurs in developing countries by examining ties between the Indian expatriate community and local entrepreneurs in India's software industry. We find that local entrepreneurs who have previously lived outside India rely significantly more on diaspora networks for business leads and financing. This is especially true for entrepreneurs who are based outside software hubs—where getting leads to new businesses and accessing finance is more difficult. Our results provide micro-evidence consistent with a view that cross-border social networks play an important role in helping entrepreneurs to circumvent the barriers arising from imperfect domestic institutions in developing countries.
We examine whether the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity is related to the prior career experiences of an individual's co-workers, using a unique matched employer-employee panel dataset. We argue that coworkers can increase the likelihood that an individual will perceive entrepreneurial opportunities as well as increase his or her motivation to pursue those opportunities. We find that an individual is more likely to become an entrepreneur if his or her co-workers have been entrepreneurs before. Peer influences also appear to be substitutes for other sources of entrepreneurial influence: we find that peer influences are strongest for those who have less exposure to entrepreneurship in other aspects of their lives.
We examine the effect of US branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms using micro-data from the US Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least four years, a greater proportion of firms entered either at their maximum size or closer to the maximum size in the first year. The magnitude of these effects were small compared to the much larger changes in entry rates of small firms following the reforms. Our results highlight that this large-scale entry at the extensive margin can obscure the more subtle intensive margin effects of changes in financing constraints.
We examine entrepreneurship and creative destruction following US banking deregulations using Census Bureau data. US banking reforms brought about exceptional growth in both entrepreneurship and business closures. Most of the closures, however, were the new ventures themselves. Although we do find evidence for the standard story of creative destruction, the most pronounced impact was a massive increase in churning among new entrants. We argue that creative destruction requires many business failures along with the few great successes. The successes are very difficult to identify ex ante, which is why democratizing entry is an important trait of well-functioning capital markets.
An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has largely abstracted away from the fact that a startup typically does not have just one investor but rather several VCs that come together in a syndicate to finance a venture. In this chapter, we therefore argue for an expansion of the standard perspective to also include frictions within VC syndicates. Put differently, what are the frictions that arise from the fact that there is not just one investor for each venture but several investors with different incentives, objectives, and cash flow rights who nevertheless need to collaborate to help make the venture a success? We outline the ways in which these coordination frictions manifest themselves, describe the underlying drivers, and document several contractual solutions used by VCs to mitigate their effects. We believe that this broader perspective provides several promising avenues for future research.
Financing constraints are one of the biggest concerns impacting potential entrepreneurs around the world. Given the important role that entrepreneurship is believed to play in the process of economic growth, alleviating financing constraints for would-be entrepreneurs is also an important goal for policymakers worldwide. We review two major streams of research examining the relevance of financing constraints for entrepreneurship. We then introduce a framework that provides a unified perspective on these research streams, thereby highlighting some important areas for future research and policy analysis in entrepreneurial finance.
Kerr, William R., and Ramana Nanda. "Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship." In Handbook of Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, edited by David Audretsch, Oliver Falck, and Stephan Heblich, 88–103. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011. (NBER WP 15498, HBS WP 10-013.)
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Nanda, Ramana, and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. "Regional Variation in Venture Capital: Causes and Consequences." In Moving to the Innovation Frontier, edited by Christian Keuschnigg, 44–71. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), 2016. Electronic.
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We document three facts related to innovation and entrepreneurship in renewable energy. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we first show that patenting in renewable energy remains highly concentrated in a few large energy firms. In 2009, the top 20 firms accounted for over 40% of renewable energy patents in our data. Second, we compare patenting by venture-backed startups and incumbent firms. Using a variety of measures, we find that VC-backed startups are engaged in more novel and more highly cited innovations, compared to incumbent firms. Incumbent firms also have a higher share of patents that are completely un-cited or self-cited, suggesting that incumbents are more likely to engage in incremental innovation compared to VC-backed startups. Third, we document a rising share of patenting by startups that coincided with the surge in venture capital finance for renewable energy technologies in the early 2000s. We also point to structural factors about renewable energy that have caused the availability of venture capital finance for renewable energy to fall dramatically in recent years, with potential implications for the rate and trajectory of innovation in this sector.
In recent years, much has been written about how the Blockchain is poised to transform traditional industries such as banking, real estate, and healthcare. More recently, it has gained attention as a way to finance new ventures, through what is known as an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Less noticed, though, is ICOs appear almost antithetical to the standard approach to financing a risky venture. Structured experimentation, popularized by Eric Ries' The Lean Startup, has been widely embraced as the gold standard for how to approach the commercialization of radical new ideas. From Boston to Beijing to Bangalore, entrepreneurs and investors rattle off the importance of designing focused experiments to test hypotheses in a capital-efficient fashion in order to achieve product-market fit. But ICOs substantially limit the benefits associated with such staged experimentation, for three reasons.
A case study is presented concerning a nonprofit organization that helps entrepreneurs in emerging-markets countries in regions including Latin America and Asia, focusing on the decision over whether to expand its services into the Miami, Florida, area, a question on which the two co-founders of the organization disagree. It presents perspectives on the case from nonprofit executive Linda Rottenberg and entrepreneur Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande.
Alberg, Tom, Ramana Nanda, and et al. "Financing Entrepreneurial Growth." Paper presented at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Washington, DC, May 2013. (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Research Paper presented at the 2013 State of Entrepreneurship Address, Washington D.C.)
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Mexico is often cited as one of the world's most entrepreneurial countries in terms of the percentage of its population that has started or is in the process of starting a business venture. Yet Mexico does not seem to be very friendly to entrepreneurs, as confirmed by the fact that a large portion of new businesses is created in the informal sector. The authors identify the main obstacle to this area as the country's insufficient access to credit for small entrepreneurs. The chapter is devoted to assessing recent programs adopted in Mexico to foster SME competitiveness (including programs to increase capital availability) and draws some important conclusions for policymakers in their efforts to improve the micro-components of national competitiveness.
Shai Benjamin 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?
Bernstein, Shai Benjamin, Ramana Nanda, and Allison Ciechanover. "NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries." Harvard Business School Case 820-038, October 2019. (Revised October 2019.)
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Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Ramana Nanda, Robert F. White and Nathaniel Schwalb
In 2018, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were an emerging fundraising method for blockchain-based projects. As the ecosystem grew, there were many open questions on regulation, pricing, and even which projects were a good fit for blockchain. However, there was already some emerging consensus on the benefits and challenges of building with blockchain and emerging best practices for Initial Coin Offerings.
Bussgang, Jeffrey J., Ramana Nanda, Robert F. White, and Nathaniel Schwalb. "Initial Coin Offerings in 2018." Harvard Business School Technical Note 819-057, November 2018. (Revised March 2019.)
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In October 2016, SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese conglomerate giant caused a significant shock to the worldwide market for venture capital and private equity by announcing the Vision Fund, the largest tech investment fund in the world at close to $100 billion. The reputation of legendary SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son depended on the success of the Vision Fund, a considerable challenge given the difficulties associated with organizing a large pool of capital, investing at scale, and generating VC-style returns. By effectively anointing category leaders and deterring competitive entry, would the Vision Fund accelerate innovation or undermine the market forces that have typically produced social value by spurring rapid technological change?
It was March 2018. Should proposed U.S. solar tariffs keep U.S.-based 1366 CEO Frank van Mierlo from starting up his 1st full-scale manufacturing plant overseas?
Accomplice, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Boston, is raising its second fund in November 2017. Since 2009, the firm has followed a seed-led investment model, investing in tech companies at the earliest stages, often when products and business models are still experimental. The firm’s partners are pleased with their preliminary returns and the deal flow they’ve been able to cultivate, in part by empowering local entrepreneurs to invest in promising new ideas on their behalf. The partners are confident their long-term returns will validate their investment strategy and positioning in the increasingly competitive VC market. Will investors agree?
In December 2012, less than two years into the founding of their music-streaming platform Anghami, cofounders Elie Habib and Eddy Maroun found themselves evaluating an unorthodox term sheet. Habib and Maroun needed to make a decision vis-à-vis the proposal put forth by the MBC Group, the region’s largest media network. The offer was a media-for-equity deal, which would provide Anghami with advertising towards the media giant’s millions of viewers and boost its chances of competing with the likes of iTunes and Spotify in the Middle Eastern market. However, the deal would also cost the cofounders a significant share of their company and might place them in the middle of a rivalry between MBC and Rotana, the region’s largest music label. The case takes the reader through the co-founders’ journey, from the founding of the company to the successes and challenges they have faced navigating product launch, scale-up, and partnerships.
Chai Point is India’s largest organized chai retailer. It has missed its target for retail store openings by approximately 25%, goals that are very important to its investors who are also board members. However, it has developed an exciting new internet-based tea dispenser that has the potential to dramatically increase Chai Point’s market opportunity and growth rate but can be seen as a change in their growth strategy. The founder needs to decide his strategy for his next board meeting. Should he focus on past performance? Or should he spend time outlining boxC.in’s technology and potential, since this will be the first time that the institutional investors will be seeing this new capability?
Ghosh, Shikhar, Ramana Nanda, and Rachna Tahilyani. "Chai Point: Disrupting Chai." Harvard Business School Case 818-020, September 2017. (Revised March 2018.)
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Nanda, Ramana, Robert F. White, and Liz Kind. "AngelList in 2017." Harvard Business School Case 818-041, October 2017. (Revised December 2017.)
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Nanda, Ramana, Robert F. White, and Alexey Tuzikov. "Initial Coin Offerings." Harvard Business School Technical Note 818-067, November 2017. (Revised December 2017.)
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As they prepare to graduate from Harvard Business School, the co-founders of greeting card company startup Lovepop need capital to cover the company’s operating costs and must choose between two seed financing offers. One offer is from an angel group and the other from a startup accelerator. Having bootstrapped the company’s operations since its founding a year and a half earlier, the founders must weigh the differences in valuation and pros and cons of the accelerator program to determine which option is appropriate for Lovepop at this stage. In addition to addressing the challenges of early stage fundraising, the case details the terms, offerings, and operations of startup accelerators.
In November 2015, Square, Inc. launched its initial public offering (IPO). The IPO had an offering price of $9 per share, lower than the $11 to $13 estimate that had been outlined in the preliminary prospectus and 42% below the $15.50 share price in its most recent financing less than a year before. The lower-than-anticipated pricing of Square’s IPO, and the implied valuation, had left investors and market observers wondering if this was an indication of a valuation bubble or a shift in the market. The case provides an overview of the IPO process and examines U.S. IPO trends from the 1980s to mid-2010s. It explores the rationales behind an increasing number of billion-dollar-plus private valuations, known as “unicorns” and explores who the winners and losers are when such firms go public at lower valuations.
Nanda, Ramana, Robert White, and Lauren G. Pickle. "Square, Inc. IPO." Harvard Business School Case 817-054, November 2016. (Revised February 2017.)
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William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda, Robert White, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga
This case explores the attempt of Shervin Pishevar, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, to shepherd hyperloop, a futuristic pod-in-tube transportation technology, from concept to transformative reality via Hyperloop One and Sherpa Capital, both companies he co-founded. The case outlines the technology—first brought to widespread attention by Tesla and SpaceX executive Elon Musk—then follows Pishevar as he builds a team, develops prototypes, recruits investors and partners, and navigates the many obstacles in pursuit of this "moonshot." Students are presented with historical parallels and precedents that may illuminate certain aspects of the challenge.
Sahlman, William A., Ramana Nanda, Robert White, Allison Ciechanover, and Jeff Huizinga. "Hyperloop One." Harvard Business School Case 817-027, November 2016. (Revised May 2017.)
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Ramana Nanda, William A. Sahlman and Nicole Keller
Based in Portola Valley, California, Western Technology Investment (WTI) specialized in a hybrid form of debt and equity financing for early-stage companies. Like traditional venture capital and private equity firms, WTI raised funds from institutional investors and evaluated deals. However, instead of making initial investments in the form of equity, WTI focused primarily on lending money to start-ups, charging them interest and receiving warrants that could later be converted to stock in the case of a liquidity event. Most initial investments—usually in the range of $3–$5 million—were made in tandem with or following a company’s early rounds of venture capital equity financing. In addition, like more traditional venture capital investors, WTI hoped to participate in follow-on debt and equity investments in its successful portfolio companies.
Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Ramana Nanda and Nathaniel Burbank
Branded as the "Millennial firm for Millennials," Mike Rothenberg founded Rothenberg Ventures (RV) in 2012 while earning his MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Over the following 24 months, Rothenberg raised $20 million and built a venture capital firm that made dozens of seed investments in technology-focused startups. Pitched as an event that could pack a year's worth of networking into a single day, Founder Field Day was perhaps the firm's largest bet to date. On a spring day in May 2014, as some 300 invited founders descended on AT&T Park in San Francisco, one attendee, Fran Hauser, had a much larger decision to make than just selecting which sessions to attend in the day's 7th and 8th "innings." Rothenberg had recently asked Hauser to join RV as a partner and investor and invited her out to the Bay Area to consider the offer. Hauser, who had left her role as the president of digital for Time Inc.'s Style & Entertainment Group three months earlier, wondered if Rothenberg's inexperience would prove to be a drawback or a strength.
John Davidson, a partner at Ware Street Capital (WSC) and a board member at Fast Ion Battery, had just received a phone call from Don Lerner at Bluelock Ventures telling him that Bluelock would not participate in the $5M bridge financing for Fast Ion Battery. Lerner's call could not have come at a worse time. Fast Ion was running out of cash and needed another round of financing urgently to continue developing its revolutionary battery.
Davidson faced a real dilemma. On the one hand, the company was finally gaining traction with developing its technology and the search to replace the current CEO had yielded two prospective candidates who were extremely well-suited to drive the company forward with a more capital efficient business model. On the other hand, Ware Street Capital and the two other investors had already invested $10 million into a company that had not performed up to investors' expectations. Would they be throwing more good money after bad by providing the bridge financing? Moreover, would other, later stage, investors be willing to provide the significant amounts of capital required to get the company to an exit event given the changing climate for clean tech investments?
These questions became more pressing following Lerner's call that Bluelock had chosen not to continue backing Fast Ion. Was Fast Ion Battery worth saving?
Nanda, Ramana, Robert F. White, and Stephanie Puzio. "Fast Ion Battery." Harvard Business School Case 815-025, September 2014. (Revised March 2015.)
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Oasys Water had developed a proprietary water treatment technology based on an innovative forward osmosis process that could remove dissolved solids from water more effectively and efficiently than existing technologies. As Oasys looked to scale, it was exploring partnerships with various incumbent firms—the most serious were with a set of international oil and gas production companies (IOCs); a global oil and gas (O&G) services provider called National Oilwell Varco (NOV); and Woteer, a Chinese EPC company specializing in industrial water and wastewater systems.
Woteer had expressed an interest in gaining exclusive access to Oasys' forward osmosis technology for water treatment applications in China in exchange for an equity investment. Jim Matheson, President and CEO, did not have the luxury of choosing a partner solely on the merits of its strategic value to Oasys. He was forced to evaluate the strategic benefit alongside the likelihood of actually closing a deal, the specific terms of each deal, and especially the speed with which a deal could be closed, given Oasys' pressing financing needs. Should he do a deal with Woteer, and if so, on what terms?
In early 2010, Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi posted a list of angel investors on the Venture Hacks blog as a resource for founders looking for funding prior to seeking venture capital. The list quickly evolved into AngelList, a separate matchmaking platform for founders and investors to make early stage fundraising more efficient. By June 2013, AngelList had garnered substantial media attention, and was used by many high profile angel investors and venture capitalists. It had approximately 100,000 startups and 18,000 accredited investors. Since the site was launched, almost 40 startups on AngelList had been acquired, and over 2,000 startups had been funded. For most entrepreneurs, posting a profile on AngelList had become as commonplace as setting up a personal profile on Facebook or LinkedIn. Most recently, the site added Invest Online, a new product that in partnership with SecondMarket, allowed accredited investors to make small investments—as low as $1,000—in startups at the same terms as larger investors.
While the co-founders were proud of AngelList's growth, as of June 2013, they were not charging for its use and had not yet determined its business model. Ravikant and Nivi wondered if they should reconsider and have AngelList apply for broker dealer status so it could charge transaction fees, but they were reluctant to enter what they considered a regulatory minefield. The recently passed JOBS Act was expected to relax constraints around crowdfunding, and Nivi and Ravikant knew that would be a logical extension for AngelList as well. Finally, they wondered if they should avoid any potential regulatory issues altogether and instead focus on generating revenue primarily from recruiting and other ancillary services.
Ramana Nanda, William A. Sahlman and Lauren Barley
It was September 2013, and NOWaccount Network Corporation (NOW®) co-founders John Hayes and Lara Hodgson were putting the final touches on the presentation deck for their annual shareholders' meeting. Along with co-founder Stacey Abrams, the pair had designed NOW's business model three years ago, and the company was at a critical juncture. NOW offered a program—called NOWaccount—that provided working capital to small businesses by converting their trade receivables almost immediately into cash. Founded in December 2010, Atlanta, Georgia-based NOW was serving clients in nine states. With 2013 year-to-date revenue of roughly $100,000, NOW was financed with $2.5 million of founder, and friends and family equity.
NOW's wholly-owned, not-for-profit special purpose entity (SPE), Trade Credit Guaranty Corporation (TCGC), purchased approved receivables, funding 90% of the invoice face values by electronic transfers into clients' bank accounts. As of September 2013, TCGC had purchased more than $13 million of small business trade receivables from more than 40 clients. Once TCGC reached a scale of approximately $150 million of funds in use for receivable purchases, the co-founders planned to tap into the securitization market for capital by issuing asset-backed securities (ABS), collateralized by a pool of receivables, much like the credit card industry. ABS would provide TCGC ongoing capital at a lower cost.
The question the co-founders confronted was whether they should get to the $150 million securitization threshold by piecing together smaller pools of capital from credit unions and possibly smaller banks (a slower approach but one that did not involve dilution because it was all debt finance), or by accepting larger chunks of capital from a major global bank and a private equity firm, getting them much closer to the threshold but at the cost of significant dilution (35%) as these financiers were also looking for a combination of equity and warrants in NOW. As they prepared to discuss their options at the shareholders' meeting, Hayes and Hodgson considered each option's trade-offs in timing, cost, control, and execution risk.
Nanda, Ramana, William A. Sahlman, and Lauren Barley. "NOWaccount." Harvard Business School Case 814-048, October 2013. (Revised August 2016.)
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William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda, David Lane and Lisa Mazzanti
Endeavor Global was a nonprofit that for 15 years had worked to nurture entrepreneurship in emerging markets by selecting local high-impact entrepreneurs for mentoring and aid in scaling up their businesses from committed local business leaders. In summer 2012, Endeavor received an invitation to replicate its model in Miami, Florida, and the Endeavor board was meeting to debate the value of such a move. At issue were questions of organizational mission and the relevance of Miami, as well as branding, funding, and focus. The invitation had come in the midst of a major expansion effort by Endeavor into new emerging markets and threatened to disrupt those efforts and tax a new hybrid funding model which Endeavor was implementing. Founder Linda Rottenberg, with the support of her board, must determine the implications of possibly opening in Miami on Endeavor's resources and mission. How could Rottenberg justify to overseas affiliates a choice to invest in a first-world city?
Sahlman, William A., Ramana Nanda, David Lane, and Lisa Mazzanti. "Endeavor: Miami Heats Up." Harvard Business School Case 814-043, November 2013. (Revised December 2013.)
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Sidharth Gupta, CEO of Getit Infomediary Ltd, had just received a term sheet from Helion Venture Partners (Helion), one of India's independent venture capital firms, offering to invest Rs 200 million in return for an equity stake in the company. His dream of transforming Getit from a regional print company into a digital company with broad geographical reach was within grasp. However, Gupta had to act fast; Helion's term sheet would expire in a fortnight if unexecuted. Bank finance and trade credit had tided Getit through tough times in the past, and Getit still had a Rs 250 million bank line to draw on. Should he take the venture capital investment? And if so, what implications would this have for his family business and for him personally?
William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda, Joseph B. Lassiter III and James McQuade
John Gilleland, CEO of TerraPower, returned to his office after a lengthy meeting with potential investors. It was October 2012, and TerraPower was in the process of raising a $200M Series C round to finance the ongoing development of its next-generation nuclear reactor. Though early in the fundraising process, Gilleland noted that this most recent conversation was similar to conversations with other interested cleantech growth equity investors. The conversations circled around a common theme: "This is the biggest idea that's ever been presented at our partners' meeting. We love what you're doing, but it's not right for us as an investment." Outside of raising money from typical growth equity and infrastructure funds, Gilleland could partner with a government and/or form a joint venture with an existing nuclear power player. Reliance Industries as an investor in TerraPower could provide an entry point into the fast growing Indian market. At the same time, Gilleland and Gates had talked with China National Nuclear Corp. about a possible cooperation with TerraPower. Whom should Gilleland call next?
Sahlman, William A., Ramana Nanda, Joseph B. Lassiter III, and James McQuade. "TerraPower." Harvard Business School Case 813-108, November 2012. (Revised December 2017.)
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This case describes a new venture attempting to bring early-stage entrepreneurial financing to Finland and other Nordic countries. Entrepreneurship is taking off in Finland, an area that historically has had little venture capital or high-growth start-up activity, but a gap remains for seed-stage financing. The founders are evaluating the best way to structure their private equity fund to reflect their own assets and abilities and the needs and resources of the entrepreneurial scene in the Nordics. The case evaluates whether to organize as an accelerator, a micro-VC fund, an incubator, a normal VC fund, or as a hybrid.
For the second time in fourteen months, Christopher Owen, the second-generation owner of Owen's Precision Machining (OPM), found himself running out of cash. Owen wondered what he was doing wrong. How much additional money would he need to raise to get OPM through the next twelve months, and what could he change now to fix his company for the long term? Owen's thoughts also turned to the conversation he had last month with two Harvard Business School alumni who were searching for a manufacturing business to acquire after spending the early part of their career in manufacturing at GE's Aircraft Engine division in Lynn, MA. Their offer of $1.1 million, or 6.9x times 2011 EBITDA of $159,292, was a pleasant surprise, but Owen was not interested in getting out of his family's business. Given the current cash flow situation, should Owen reconsider the acquisition offer?
Siddharth Kapoor, the Founder and CEO of H-Soft Mumbai reflected on his meeting as he walked out of VC Ventures' offices in Mumbai. After a few months of intensely pitching his startup to several different investors, he finally had a term sheet in hand. Despite this huge milestone, Kapoor knew it was only the start of a long process of raising money. He only had three days to get back to Sharma and indicate whether he would like to initiate the diligence process. While he was familiar with some of the terms venture capital investors put into their contracts, many others were completely alien to him. Which terms were important? Which ones should he focus on negotiating? He also knew that money was only part of what the venture capital brought to the table. Was VC Ventures the right partner for his business? Kapoor knew he had a busy few days ahead of him as he thought through all of the questions before getting back to Vikram Sharma.
William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda and James McQuade
In 2011, SecondMarket was an online platform that facilitated secondary transactions of illiquid assets, including private company stock. This case explores reasons for the decline in small-cap IPOs in the United States from the 1990s to the 2000s and how the emergence of SecondMarket provided liquidity to privately held companies like iContact, an email and social marketing software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
Ramana Nanda, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Markus Mittermaier
Using the financing history and exit choices of a German clean-tech startup as a lens, this case explores the reasons why venture-backed entrepreneurship is much lower in Germany than the US, despite a robust SME sector and large-corporate innovation in Germany. It also shows the tight link between investor incentives and a startup's product market strategy, including differences between "pure-play" VCs and corporate venture capital investors.
Nanda, Ramana, Carin-Isabel Knoop, and Markus Mittermaier. "inge watertechnologies, GmbH." Harvard Business School Case 812-002, October 2011. (Revised June 2014.)
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PunchTab was a Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2011, that was developing an Internet-based turnkey customer loyalty program for website owners, mobile applications developers, and brands. Founder/CEO Ranjith Kumaran must make strategic decisions about how to fund PunchTab's early operations and growth given the many options available: individual angel investors, super angel funds, incubators, and seed funds inside traditional venture capital firms.
Nanda, Ramana, William R. Kerr, and Lauren Barley. "PunchTab, Inc." Harvard Business School Case 812-033, October 2011. (Revised August 2017.)
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Kerr, William R., and Ramana Nanda. "PunchTab, Inc. Investor Presentation Deck." Harvard Business School PowerPoint Supplement 817-705, November 2016.
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Ramana Nanda, William R. Kerr and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In their second year, two Mexican HBS MBAs joined forces to start a search fund based in Mexico City. They had raised money to acquire an existing private company in Mexico with an initial enterprise value between $5 million and $15 million. Just seven months after raising the fund, they were about to close a deal on a target company, but the seller wants to renegotiate.
Joseph B. Lassiter III, Ramana Nanda, David Kiron and Evan Richardson
For some time, 1366's co-founders, Frank van Mierlo and Ely Sachs, had faced a choice, which was now made all the more stark: 1366 could expand to produce silicon wafers itself, raising the required capital from "friendly" investors and building shipment volume slowly, or 1366 could accelerate its market entry dramatically by partnering with the Asian manufacturers that had begun to dominate the world-wide solar industry. While accelerated growth was attractive to 1366 and its current investors, the company believed that it would face considerable risks if it were to expose its intellectual property to the "wrong" partners. 1366 had no intention of losing control of its technology, but given the pace of innovation and the active role of governments in the solar industry, van Mierlo and Sachs feared this might not be a race that could be won by the cautious.
Michael J. Roberts, Joseph B. Lassiter III and Ramana Nanda
The case focuses on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the $38 billion of stimulus funding the DOE received to encourage clean tech. They focus on "bridging the valley of death" (i.e., helping young, innovative companies finance technically risky and very capital intensive development and commercialization programs). The case focuses on two DOE programs in particular, the Loan Guarantee Program and ARPA-E. The case raises the question of why these valleys of death exist, what can be done to deal with them, and how these DOE programs are designed and implemented.
Joseph B. Lassiter III, Ramana Nanda and David Kiron
Just months after declaring their intent to become a solar cell equipment supplier, van Mierlo and Sachs were again revisiting the issue of what the company should be. Becoming a successful solar cell manufacturer would potentially be much more lucrative than becoming a successful equipment supplier. But, the latter was much less capital intensive and perhaps a less operationally risky approach. For van Mierlo and Sachs, the question—"What kind of company should 1366 become?"—was back on the table.
Lassiter, Joseph B., III, Ramana Nanda, and David Kiron. "1366 Technologies." Harvard Business School Case 810-005, October 2009. (Revised June 2010.)
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Biofuels start-up KiOR was developing a proprietary technology that had the potential to dramatically impact the emerging renewable energy landscape: a process that converted cellulosic biomass into "bio-crude," a hydrocarbon mixture with properties to those of crude oil. KiOR had been operating as a virtual organization, but with venture financing in place, founder and chief technology officer Paul O'Connor and the KiOR board needed to decide where to headquarter their business.
Shikhar Ghosh, Ramana Nanda, Suraj Srinivasan and Terrence Shu
What is the value of a Board, and why does a company need one? The note documents the formal role of a Board of Directors as going beyond simply acting as legal representation of corporate ownership. Moreover, this role changes as the company moves through different stages of growth. The note discusses the structure and composition of a Board (Board Committees, Board Chair and Board Observers), along with best practices for managing the Board process (including what happens before and after each meeting, as well as the meeting itself). Entrepreneurs need to set foundations for Board composition, structure, compensation, and terms, early on in the company’s journey. Many of the qualitative insights in the note are collated from the collective experience of the authors.
William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda and Robert F. White
A framework for assessing new business opportunities and the business plans used to describe them is developed. Useful for aspiring entrepreneurs in MBA programs.
Sahlman, William A., Ramana Nanda, and Robert F. White. "Evaluating Start Ups." Harvard Business School Technical Note 819-039, August 2018.
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"Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures" introduces students to the key issues involved in the financing of entrepreneurial enterprises. The Reading begins by examining how business models shape external financing requirements. It then contrasts the choice to bootstrap with the option to raise external funds, as well as the traits of debt versus equity investment. Students learn about the different types of equity investors-including angels, VCs, and strategic investors-and follow an entrepreneurial venture's path through the financing stages. Students also examine how entrepreneurs can adjust business models to match financial conditions, and how they can reduce financing needs through alternative models such as partnerships. Finally, the Reading covers emerging funding models-such as crowdsourcing and accelerators-and the global aspects of entrepreneurial finance. There are 6 Interactive Illustrations included in the Reading: "Calculating a Cumulative Cash Flow Curve," "Asset Intensity Ratio," "Building a Cap Table," "How Investor Expectations and Target Returns Drive Company Ownership," "Payouts from Simple Equity and Convertible Investments," and "Seed Note Ownership and Value." Additionally, a supplemental section at the end of the Reading covers the details of different debt financing forms, the structures of VC firms and angel investment groups, and the forms of entrepreneurial finance needed for breakthrough discoveries.
This note introduces convertible notes in angel financing. It begins by delineating the differences between a priced and non-priced round. It then describes a specific example of a convertible note, with attention paid to technical details regarding valuation caps.
Young, and particularly high-growth ventures often need to raise significant external finance, since their internal cash flow is usually insufficient to support the investments needed to grow. Although raising equity from venture capital or angel investors is the most well-known source of external finance for high-growth ventures, many entrepreneurs, particularly small business owners, rely on debt and other non-equity sources of capital to finance their ventures, either because equity capital is not available to them or because they want to avoid the ownership dilution and governance constraints associated with equity investments.
This note focuses on these non-equity sources of financing for entrepreneurs, paying particular attention to how the emergence of new technologies in risk assessment have expanded their availability for young firms.
Setting equitable and "market" level compensation for founders and early employees of startups is one of the most important elements of a new venture. It is not only central to attract and retain the best human capital for the startup, but is critical to align incentives between investors and management. This note provides a framework to think about compensation in startup ventures and is intended for entrepreneurs thinking about starting a venture, as well as for employees looking to join a young high-potential startup.
In this note, we examine the extent to which venture capital is adequately positioned for the rapid commercialization of clean energy technologies in the United States. The need for a revolution in clean energy is driven not just by environmental consequences of energy use, but also by the need for energy security, to address growing concerns about a crisis in the balance of payments, and as a potentially important source of domestic jobs. Our premise in this note is that a key aspect of such widespread change is that these issues cannot be "solved" by a single technology. Rather, technological changes will have to be pervasive and will require a whole range of different products and processes to come to market. Some of the technological progress will come from incremental innovations that do not depend on venture capital.
Location choice is a critical decision for entrepreneurs. This note explores how entrepreneurs should think about different city options through a systematic framework that encompasses professional and personal issues. We use the intellectual frameworks of the cluster and industry agglomeration literatures to organize these factors. We then provide some tactical advice and worksheets for entrepreneurs to consider when selecting the location for their new venture.
Ramana Nanda, William A. Sahlman, Robert White and Hunter Ashmore
Citation:
Nanda, Ramana, William A. Sahlman, Robert White, and Hunter Ashmore. "Business Models Problem Set." Harvard Business School Exercise 816-016, August 2015. (Revised August 2017.)
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