Center for Entrepreneurial Studies,
Babson College © 1995

ISBN 0-324-00172-X

Case Teaching Package
A case teaching package, written by Bill Bygrave, is available for this case. It includes strategies for case presentation, key concepts, solutions to the assignment questions in the case, and suggestions for the most effective ways to work this case into your course.

Length
This case is 20 pages in length and its case teaching package is 12 pages.

Abstract

This case is positioned as the first high-potential startup in a new ventures course. It is an opportunity for students to compare and contrast this with the earlier cases: Scott Tompkins, Jack Sprat's, Streamline, and Andrew Zenoff. When they finish this case they ought to have a better understanding of what constitutes a high-potential company that attracts professional venture capital. But it's not a "perfect" high potential, so it gives students an opportunity to spot its deficiencies. The cases that should immediately follow Neverfail Computing in a course are the Jon Hirschtick-SolidWorks, two-part case series, which is an almost "perfect" high-potential startup.

As a financing case, Neverfail Computing works well as a linking case between 4F (Founders, Family, Friends, and Foolhardy) funding and formal venture capital. Neverfail Computing has a proven team, with a proven lead entrepreneur, in an exciting market niche, in a rapidly growing technology, RAID hot-pluggable, fault-tolerant, hard drive arrays using the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). It is the kind of high-potential venture that attracts venture capitalists.

• Location of the company: California
• Years spanned by the case: 1993 through 1994
• Industry segment: Fault-tolerant, hot-pluggable, computer memory using RAID technology
• Stage of the company: Pre-startup and startup
• Age of the entrepreneurs: 30s