ENTR 502 | Session 3 | Venturing from Opportunity to Market Validation

Summary:

Successful entrepreneurship begins with identifying a viable market niche or a specific problem to solve, often rooted in personal passion or experienced pain points. Centring a business on customer needs—including functional, emotional, and social requirements—is critical for driving innovation, fostering loyalty, and sustaining long-term growth. Identifying these needs requires a combination of market research, analyzing existing data, soliciting direct feedback, and monitoring social media trends to understand the "who, what, and why" of consumer behaviour. Modern businesses can significantly enhance this process by leveraging machine learning and AI tools to automate routine tasks, perform sentiment analysis, and gain deeper consumer insights at scale. To stand out in competitive markets, founders must articulate a clear product vision and positioning statement that defines their unique benefit and differentiation from existing alternatives. Finally, adopting a Lean Startup approach—prioritising "validated learning" through the build-measure-learn feedback loop—allows entrepreneurs to iterate products rapidly and pivot when necessary to avoid wasting resources on solutions that do not meet market demand

FIN 588 | Session 5 | Roche's Acquisition of Genentech - 2026

In 2008, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche proposed acquiring the remaining 44% of its fiercely independent biotech subsidiary, Genentech, offering $89 per share in a deal valued at approximately $100 billion.

This strategic move was designed to reduce operational overlap, secure unfettered access to Genentech's substantial free cash flow, and protect Roche's access to an innovative drug pipeline before a key licensing agreement expired in 2015.

However, the acquisition faced a significant valuation impasse when Genentech's special committee rejected the offer as inadequate, countered with a price of $112 to $115 per share, and refused to negotiate downward despite the burgeoning 2008 global financial crisis.

Roche's leadership, including Franz Humer and Severin Schwan, had to navigate the extreme difficulty of securing $44 billion in debt financing during a worldwide credit freeze while fearing that a hostile tender offer might alienate the star scientists and managers central to Genentech's success.

FIN 588 | Session 4 | CEO Compensation - Evidence from the field - 2022

Alex Edmans, Tom Gosling, Dirk Jenter

Summary:

We survey directors and investors on the objectives, constraints, and determinants of CEO pay. We find that directors face constraints beyond participation and incentives, and that pay matters not to finance consumption but to address CEOs' fairness concerns. 67% of directors would sacrifice shareholder value to avoid controversy, leading to lower levels and one-size-fits-all structures. Shareholders are the main source of constraints, suggesting that directors and investors disagree on how to maximize value. Intrinsic motivation and reputation are seen as stronger motivators than incentive pay. Even with strong portfolio incentives, flow pay responds to performance to fairly recognize the CEO's contribution.