In 2017 Fawn Weaver launched a premium American whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest. It became the fastest growing and most awarded whiskey brand in America, despite the challenges Weaver faced as a Black woman and outsider to the spirits industry, which is capital-intensive, highly regulated, competitive, and male-dominated.

In October 2023, Weaver announced plans to expand into cognac with the goal of building the next major alcoholic beverages conglomerate. But the company was still heavily reliant on capital. How could Weaver convince new investors that her plans for cognac would yield success?

Harvard Business School senior lecturer Hise Gibson discusses Weaver’s leadership style, growth strategies, and her use of storytelling to connect customers with her brand in the case, Uncle Nearest: Creating a Legacy.

In February 2023, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was deciding whether or not to sign off on a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for $39 billion in direct semiconductor manufacturing incentives. But this NOFO had several unconventional provisions: a pre-application (pre-app) to the actual application, upside sharing provisions to align incentives, and funding milestones so that only awardees making progress would receive additional funds.

The funding had been made available through the U.S. Department of Commerce by the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) and Science Act passed a few months earlier. Raimondo’s team had proposed additional measures that would help the U.S. regain technological leadership while protecting taxpayer funds. Should Raimondo move forward with the “innovative” NOFO, despite the risks?

Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss explores the issue of risk-taking and innovation in government in his case, “The CHIPs Program Office.”

Angel City Football Club (ACFC) was founded in 2020 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman, entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, and actor and activist Natalie Portman. As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, ACFC had inverted the model, generating both global and local interest in the club during its first three years.

The club’s early success was reflected in its market valuation of $250 million as of its sale in July 2024 — the highest in the National Women’s Soccer League. Equally important, ACFC had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women’s sports — the club’s ultimate goal.

But the founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club’s momentum. As they developed ACFC’s first three-year strategic plan in 2024, they weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?

Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Rayport is joined by case co-author Nicole Keller and club co-founder Kara Nortman to discuss the case, “Angel City Football Club: Scoring a New Model.”

In early 2023, Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, started developing the EdTech firm’s strategy for incorporating generative AI into their offerings. He asked his teams to focus on value to the firm and cost of implementation, and they identified four key projects: powering translations and modifying content format and delivery, personalized coaching, an automatic course-building tool, and building out new GenAI-related academic content.

By early 2024, the firm had made significant progress in bringing these capabilities to market, but GenAI was evolving quickly and Coursera needed to continuously improve its offerings. While the firm had been an early mover, competitors were adapting fast.

Was Coursera taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by the technology? What more could it do to remain competitive? Harvard Business School professor Suraj Srinivasan discusses those questions in the case, “Coursera’s Foray Into Gen AI.”

In 2019, Nadine Vogel, founder and CEO of Springboard Consulting, needed to decide the best path forward to grow her small consulting firm. Springboard works with Fortune 500 companies on issues related to disability and workforce.

Should Vogel expand the topics she works on with her current clients, or should she explore the possibility of moving into a new market of smaller businesses?

Vogel joins Harvard Business School professor Lakshmi Ramarajan and Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles to discuss her experience starting and scaling her firm in the case, “Nadine Vogel: Transforming the Marketplace, Workplace, and Workforce for People with Disabilities.”

Ten years ago, Robin Kovitz became President & CEO of Baskits—now one of Canada’s leading gift services companies—by purchasing the company from its two retiring founders. Baskits was an acquisition that had many of the qualities that lead to success for first-time CEOs, including recurring customers and a record showing years of profitable operations. But it was also a seasonal business, which is a potential red flag.

This episode is an exclusive introduction to a new podcast from Harvard Business School: Think Big, Buy Small, hosted by HBS professors Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff.

The show is an extension of Ruback and Yudkoff’s courses on small firms, including Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, which has been taken by thousands of MBA students, and their highly-regarded book, HBR Guide To Buying A Small Business. The episodes guide listeners through the different milestones of the journey to acquiring an enduringly profitable small business.

In this episode, they chat with Kovitz about her search process, investment criteria, and how she managed risk before and after purchasing Baskits.

Listen to more episodes of Think Big, Buy Small and follow the podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/s_29KAs0?sid=coldcall.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which allow individuals to own their digital assets and move them from place to place, are changing the interaction between consumers and digital goods, brands, and platforms.

Harvard Business School professor Scott Duke Kominers and tech entrepreneur Steve Kaczynski discuss the case, “Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World,” and the related book they co-authored, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform The Way We Buy, Sell, And Create. They focus on the rise and popularity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and the new model of brand building created by owning those tokens.

In 2018, artisanal Italian vineyard Frank Cornelissen was one of the world’s leading producers of natural wine. But when weather-related conditions damaged that year’s grapes, founder Frank Cornelissen had to decide between staying true to the tenets of natural wine making, or breaking with his public beliefs to save that year’s grapes by adding sulfites.

Harvard Business School assistant professor Tiona Zuzul discusses the importance of staying true to your company’s principles while remaining flexible enough to welcome progress in the case, “Frank Cornelissen: The Great Sulfite Debate.”

The Insurtech firm Hippo was facing two big challenges related to climate change: major loss ratios and rate hikes. The company used technologically empowered services to create its competitive edge, along with providing smart home packages, targeting risk-friendly customers, and using data-driven pricing. But now CEO and president Rick McCathron needed to determine how the firm’s underwriting model could account for the effects of high-intensity weather events.

Harvard Business School professor Lauren Cohen discusses how Hippo could adjust its strategy to survive a new era of unprecedented weather catastrophes in his case, “Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis.”

In March 2020, Twiddy & Company, a family-owned vacation rental company known for hospitality rooted in personal interactions, needed to adjust to contactless, remote customer service. With the upcoming vacation season thrown into chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic, president Clark Twiddy had a responsibility to the company’s network of homeowners who rented their homes through the company, to guests who had booked vacations, and to employees who had been recruited by Twiddy’s reputation for treating staff well. Who, if anyone, could he afford to make whole and keep happy?

Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher, author of the book The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, discusses how Twiddy leaned into trust to weather the pandemic in her case, “Twiddy & Company: Trust in a Chaotic Environment.”