Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Leverage AI to be a 10x Founder. Today’s most successful founders know that the startups that learn the fastest will win. In The Experimentation Machine, I reveal how AI is transforming the way startups find product-market fit and scale. Applying timeless methods and cutting-edge tools, I will show you how to turn your startup into an AI-powered experimentation machine—learning faster and building smarter with leaner teams. Join the new class of ‘10x Founders’ who are building valuable companies faster than ever.

• Journal of Finance 80, no. 6 (December 2025): 3223–3261.

We argue that stock market pressure to generate earnings encourages banks to increase risk. We measure risk using confidential supervisory ratings as well as financial information released in regulatory filings. We document that there is an increase in the risk-taking behavior of banks that become part of publicly traded bank holding companies (BHCs) either through a public listing (IPO) or acquisition by a publicly-traded BHC. This increase in risk is greater than the increase in risk for a control group of banks that intended a private-to-public transition through an IPO or acquisition, but where the deal failed. This finding is robust to instrumenting deal failure with an index of stock returns shortly after deal announcement. There are a number of explanations of this finding, but cross-sectional and time-series evidence points to stock-market earnings pressure.

• Management Science 71, no. 12 (December 2025): 9998–10021.

Using novel data on 1,240 credit agreements, we investigate sources of contractual complexity in the leveraged loan market. While negative covenants are widespread, carve-out and deductible clauses that qualify them are as frequent. We propose simple and comprehensive measures of contractual weakness based on the usage of such clauses. The economic significance of the actions allowed by these clauses, and the market-wide price reaction that followed the 2017 J.Crew restructuring, a high-profile use of such contractual elements, support this interpretation. Leveraged buyouts, large transactions, and non-bank funding are conducive to weaker contractual terms for credit agreements.

• Featured Case

On a chilly fall afternoon in Skokie, Illinois, Jennifer Holmgren had a few minutes of time between meetings to stop and reflect. The CEO of LanzaTech, a company dedicated to “recycling carbon with biology,” had, over the last decade, overseen the growth of one of the largest gas fermentation companies in the world. Under her watch, the company had achieved its first commercially scaled demonstration of its proprietary biorefinery1, launched a new jet fuel business line and had a long line of projects in the pipeline. She had accomplished what most CEOs dream of doing—taking the company public. Despite this success, Holmgren could not help but feel uncertain. The company’s current business model, licensing its technology to industrial partners, helped LanzaTech reach commercial scale. But the company had yet to achieve profitability, and it was time to consider whether it made sense to move operations in-house.

• Featured Case

Florence Luo started hand-sewing sun hats in her Vancouver, British Columbia kitchen in 2008; by 2025, her company, Jan & Jul, sold $20 million worth of children’s apparel and footwear worldwide annually. While it had some wholesale clients and limited brick-and-mortar exposure, 70% of Jan & Jul’s sales were through Amazon. Amazon made expanding to other countries easy, but as Jan & Jul grew, Luo considered other channels. At the same time, heavy U.S. tariffs complicated things in Jan & Jul’s largest market; the company was headquartered in Canada and contracted with factories in China. The case analyzes how Amazon sales work for a mid-sized retailer such as Jan & Jul and presents several options Luo is considering to grow with or without relying on Amazon.

• HBS Working Paper

This working paper argues that the use of bribery and corruption has historically been a well-established multinational strategy. It examines multiple cases of grand corruption by blue chip corporations in different time periods and geographies, although there is no means of confirming whether these prominent case studies were tips of an iceberg or outliers. The level of engagement in petty corruption cannot be established. The industrial distribution of multinational corruption has been especially skewed towards armaments and commodities. Its use was particularly prevalent in Africa, where it was frequently condoned by the home governments of the multinationals involved. Grand corruption was especially prominent when business involved large contracts with governments. Bribery was fueled by the pervasiveness of corruption in the host economies in which the multinationals operated, but the multinationals were active agents in facilitating further corruption. Although bribery and corruption are often associated in the public mind with rogue individuals, it has historically been more often the product of miscreant corporate cultures.

• Working Paper

Thousands of people die each year waiting for a life-saving organ transplantation. Cadaveric organ donations from the deceased provide the majority of transplanted organs in the U.S. and many other countries. In the U.S., a potential donor has to “opt in” to become a donor under the principle of informed consent. Many countries around the world have shifted cadaveric organ procurement to a presumed consent system where a deceased person is classified as a potential donor in the absence of explicitly “opting out” of donation before death. Using an event studies design and newly constructed cross-country panel data, we offer new causal evidence on the impact of presumed consent laws on donation rates. We offer theoretical predictions on when opt in yields more organs than opt out, and when the opposite is true.