Jeff Bussgang (HBS) summarizes two LTV class case studies discussed on Oct 22, 2020. The first is RapidSOS, founded by HBS alum Michael Martin to modernize 911; an MIT case by Scott Stern frames strategic choices including whether to accept a large handset-manufacturer partnership versus staying close to target customers. The second is Codecademy, founded by Zach Sims after Y Combinator; early support from Michael Bloomberg (as NYC mayor) helped adoption, and the case centers on monetization experiments versus continued focus on product, content, and community. Bussgang praises the students' analysis and notes the companies’ subsequent success.
Questions this video answers
Michael Martin
Scott Stern (MIT professor)
Zach Sims
Michael Bloomberg
Chapters
Hey everyone, Jeff Busgang from HBS here. Just wanted to share with you this week's LTV class cases. First we had RapidSOS. RapidSOS was founded by an HBS alum, Michael Martin, who started the company right out of business school in order to modernize the 911 system. He really has a terrific case lined up by an MIT professor, Scott Stern. So, yeah, we did slum it a little bit and pick up an MIT case where we focus on the fact that Michael has some really important strategic decisions and very common for startup entrepreneurs. How do you choose among a series of strategic options? What Michael did with Scott's help was line up all the potential options and then work his way through each of them to select two and then test those two. What happened though, in the case, which is fascinating, is that a large partner, a large handset manufacturer, swooped in and offered a massive partnership deal for the company. And so then we faced the classic go to market question that many startups have, which is do you work with a big partner or do you ignore the big partner and try to initially stay close to the target customer? Really interesting case. Michael shared with us his wisdom from it afterwards and it's really fun to see how well the company has done since then. The second case that we had was Code Academy. Codecademy, as people may know, is the leading online coding school founded by Zach Sims in a very capital efficient fashion. Coming out of Y Combinator, the company launched and received a huge amount of support from Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg himself, when he was mayor of New York City, which just propagated the company. They built a really interesting acquisition machine based on free, excellent content, a very slick user interface and customer experience, and the promise of learning how to code for free. And so the case focuses on this moment in time where Zach is thinking about monetization and running monetization experiments and that tension between when do you think about monetizing if you're a consumer driven, adoption focused startup, versus when do you continue focusing on product and content and importantly community? So two really fascinating cases. We had a ton of fun with them and our students just did a phenomenal job, as usual, in parsing through them.
