"Founders' Dilemmas" Course: Founder-CEO Succession Cases

In prior posts about my “Founders’ Dilemmas” MBA course, I provided an overview of the course, details about the Introductory case and the cases in the “When to Found” module, details about four cases in the "Building the Team" module, and descriptions of the core new-venture hiring cases.

This post covers the course's founder-CEO succession cases. The first case ("Founder-CEO Succession at Wily Technology") examines the antecedents of succession: What are the events and conditions that lead to the founder's being replaced as CEO? Should the replaced founder be involved in the search for the successor, and how? Should the founder remain deeply involved in the venture after the successor takes over? The second case ("Les is More, Times Four") examines the challenges of taking over as the first non-founding CEO when the replaced founder is still working as an executive in the venture and serving on the board. The third case ("The Tale of the Lynx," a three-part case series that covers pre-founding through exit) explores in part the concept of a "bridge CEO," and looks at the coalitions that can form between investors and the other (i.e., non-CEO) founders during the founder-CEO succession process.

For each case, this post provides the official case description, a list of the case’s core issues, and a link to its full HBS Publishing entry.

As mentioned before, case studies are often valuable for helping founders, employees, and investors understand the difficult issues they are facing or will be facing in the future (or even help them gain insights into their past experiences!), so if you want to see any of the full cases, you can get them from the HBS Publishing site via the HBSP links below.

FOUNDER-CEO SUCCESSION:What causes it, Best practices and mistakes, Hiring the successor-CEO, Taking charge as the successor

• Case #1: “Founder-CEO Succession at Wily Technology” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: "Before he accepts the new CEO position, Richard Williams wants founder Lew Cirne to step down as chairman. While considering Williams' incredible demand, Cirne reflects on everything he has already given up to get Wily Technology to this point. He agreed to step down as CEO and take what could be a largely symbolic CTO title. He also agreed to give Williams roughly as much equity as he himself owned and far more in salary. As the founder, CEO, and chairman of Wily Technology, Cirne had worked hard to build the skills necessary to lead his start-up. He had developed Wily's early technology single-handedly, had hired 50 employees to help him build his company, and had successfully spearheaded a strategic transformation of his company. He had led Wily to the point where several important customers bought its flagship product and had successfully raised two rounds of financing from top investors. Cirne wonders what he could have done to be pushed to the side like this. What should he do now?"
  
  Core issues: Antecedents of founder-CEO succession, Searching for the successor-CEO, Managing your board of directors, Venture growth, Raising venture capital, The founder's post-succession role.
  
  
• Case #2: “Les is More, Times Four” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: "'I've had enough! I've decided that I need to resign,' read the email from the founder of Webpoint to the company's board of directors. Les Trachtman, the CEO of Webpoint, has to figure out how to react to the founder's 'it's Trachtman or me' ultimatum. Webpoint was Trachtman's fourth job as CEO, and in each case he had been hired as the first non-founding CEO, taking over from the founder-CEO of a tight-knit founding team. Trachtman had first taken over from a mother and son team, then from two brothers, then from a wife and husband team, and now from serial co-founders who were best friends. From these ventures, Trachtman had learned how to manage founders who had strong relationships, but those experiences had not prepared him for the current situation."
  
  Core issues: Founder-CEO succession, Successor-CEO's perspective, Organizational change, Managing the founder, Managing the board of directors, Doing due diligence on potential employers, Raising venture capital, Taking charge.
  
  
• Case #3: “The Tale of the Lynx” (3-part series, covering pre-founding through exit) (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: "The founders of Lynx Solutions have survived tensions within the founding team, the firing of Lynx's founder-CEO, and a crisis sparked by media allegations that it had been spying on its users. Now the founders are considering a proposal from one of their directors to make a dramatic shift in the venture's strategy and have to decide how to react."
  
  Core issues: Managing the board of directors, Bridge CEOs, Founding teams, Hiring challenges, Venture growth, Raising venture capital.
  
  

Up next: Founder exits, Franchising decisions, and Other Special Topics

Topics Covered in This Blog (So Far)

Here's the updated "thematic index" to the entries and links in this blog.

"Founders' Dilemmas" MBA Course Content

NEW Post: Course Overview
NEW Post: Introductory Case and "When to Found" Module
NEW Post: "Building the (Founding) Team" Module
NEW Post: New-Venture Hiring Cases
NEW Post: Founder-CEO Succession Cases
[More coming...]

Rich vs. King: The Entrepreneur's Dilemma

NEW Article: New Article in Harvard Business Review: "The Founder's Dilemma"
Post: Rich vs. King, Around the World
Post: Your Thoughts on Achieving Rich&King?
Post: "Rich vs. King" in HBS's Working Knowledge
Post: "Rich versus King": Charts and Impressions
Post: "Rich versus King": The Core Concept
Paper: Rich versus King (Academy Proceedings 2006)

Co-founder Issues

NEW Post: New: "A Note on the Legal and Tax Implications of Founders' Equity Splits"
NEW Post: The Idea Premium: How Much (Equity) is Your Idea Worth?
NEW Post: Idea People and Their Initial Roles Within Founding Teams
NEW Post: A Second Look at "Idea People" as CEOs: Should vs Do
Post: Equity-Split Results, Part 2: Implications for Team Stability
Post: Equity-Split Results, Part 1: When Do Teams Split Equally?
Post: Splitting the Pie: Jumping the Gun?
Post: Splitting the Pie: Founding Team Equity Splits
Post: Neverland, or Dictatorship?
Post: Founding with Friends, Founding with Strangers?
Post: Equity-Split Adjustments: Not Painful? (third bullet)
Case: Ockham Technologies: Living on the Razor's Edge

Founder-CEO Succession

Post: Yahoo's New Founder-CEO
Post: Interview about Founder-CEO Succession
Post: Bridge CEOs, Revisited
Post: Doomed CEOs and Bridge CEOs
Post: Nike, Cyberposium, and Jim Estill: 3 Takes on Founder-CEO Succession
Post: Succeeding at Founder-CEO Succession? (first bullet)
Post: After the Firing: Initial Research Questions
Post: Founder-CEO Succession
Paper: Founder-CEO Succession (Org Science 2003)
Case: Founder-CEO Succession at Wily Technology

Career Issues

NEW Post: The Gender Gap in Startups, Part 1: Women in IT and Life Sciences Ventures
NEW Post: The Gender Gap in Startups, Part 2: Compensation
Post: The Perils of Being a (Successful) Serial Entrepreneur
Post: Harvard Business Online: "Don't Wait Too Long to Become an Entrepreneur"

Entrepreneurial Compensation

Annual survey site: Compstudy.com (for IT and Life Sciences ventures)
NEW Post: The Gender Gap in Startups, Part 2: Compensation
Post: New Items on Entrepreneurial Compensation
Post: Founder Discounts in "Working Knowledge"
Post: Executive Compensation and the Founder Discount
Post: Changes in Founder Attachment (second bullet)
Paper: Founder Discount paper (AMJ 2006)
Paper: Entrep. Compensation paper (Academy Proceedings 2004)

Vesting and Other Equity Issues

Post: Unlocking Your Golden Handcuffs: How Common is Accelerated Vesting on Change of Control?
Post: Golden Handcuffs and Vesting: Initial Interpretations
Post: Golden Handcuffs and Vesting: Early Analyses
Post: Golden Handcuffs: Summary of Vesting Data

Hiring Issues

Post: Investors (and Managers) as Headhunters: Sources of New-Venture Executives
Post: Hiring Into -- and Demoting Into? -- Executive Positions
Post: Hiring Frustrations: Can Goliath Work in a David-Venture?
Post: HR 101: Hiring and Scaling Challenges

Building a Board

Post: Board problems: Even numbers? Multiple founders?
Post: “Do I Have an Effective Board of Directors? (How Can I Tell??)"
Post: Building a Board: Mentorship? Monitoring?
Post: Building a Board: The Impact of Company Stage
Post: Building a Board: Composition by Company Stage
Case: Ockham Technologies: Living on the Razor's Edge

Investor Issues

Post: Due Diligence As a One-way Street
Post: Due Diligence on Your Investors, Revisited
Post: Thanksgiving Dinner ... With Your Investors (or, "Funding from Friends and Family")
Series: "Upside-down VCs" (internal VC structure and hiring decisions)
- Part 1 (The "First Morning" That Sparked It)
- Part 2 (The Costs Versus Benefits of Junior Hires)
- Part 3 (Synthesis of Comments)
- Part 4 (Other Factors, and Performance Implications)
Series (by Matthew Louie and Cali Tran): "Investor/Entrepreneur Value Expectation Gap"
- Part 1 (Project Overview)
- Part 2 (Entrepreneur Results)
- Part 3 (Entrepreneur vs. Investor)
- A Postscript (Entrepreneur-Investors)

Other Topics

Post: Looking for (Movie) Suggestions: Your Favorite Founder Scenes?
Post: A Look Back, A Look Forward ... and a Request
Post: A Note on My Research Approach and Data

Thanks again to everyone who has been actively participating in this blog-dialogue -- I really appreciate your input!

"Founders' Dilemmas" Course: New-Venture Hiring Cases

In prior posts about my “Founders’ Dilemmas” MBA course, I provided an overview of the course, details about the Introductory case and the cases in the “When to Found” module, and details about four cases in the "Building the Team" module.

This post covers the two core new-venture hiring cases in the course, one of which is part of the “Building the Team” module and the other of which is an end-of-semester synthesis. Both of these cases also focus on serial entrepreneurs, exploring the lessons they learned in their early ventures that they then applied to later ventures. Both cases include co-founder lessons, but focus more extensively on the hiring lessons. For each case, this post provides the official case description, a list of the case’s core issues, and a link to its full HBS Publishing entry.

As mentioned before, case studies are often valuable for helping founders, employees, and investors understand the difficult issues they are facing or will be facing in the future (or even help them gain insights into their past experiences!), so if you want to see any of the full cases, you can get them from the HBS Publishing site via the HBSP links below.

NEW-VENTURE HIRING ISSUES: Whom to hire when, How venture growth changes hiring choices, How to incent and compensate hires

• Case #1: “Frank Addante, Serial Entrepreneur” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “Frank Addante is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who is in the process of building his fifth venture. Of his first four ventures, two were sold, one went public, and in the last he decided to close the venture and return unused capital to his investors. With the passing of each venture, he has learned about forming founding teams, splitting equity with his co-founders, hiring executives to work for him, and when to take outside funding. Now, he's facing pressure from investors who aren't happy with how he is building his current team and are questioning whether he should remain CEO.”
  
  Core issues: Lessons learned by young serial entrepreneurs, Hiring "best athletes" vs. specialists, Hiring stars vs. team players, Hiring executives older than you, Working with older co-founders, Splitting equity with co-founders.
  
  
• Case #2: “'Lather, Rinse, Repeat': FeedBurner's Serial Founding Team” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “'Is this the right time or is it still too early?' Dick Costolo wondered as he reflected on the latest acquisition offer. He had been building FeedBurner with his three co-founders for almost four years and was staring at the details of an acquisition offer from Google. He and his co-founders had founded three prior ventures together, each of which had had increasingly attractive outcomes, but none of which had reached their full potential. The number on the table from Google was a big one. Should the deal be completed, it would be the biggest win the founding team had ever had. However, was this the right time to exit? If Costolo didn't think so, would he be able to convince his co-founders who all had different personal risk profiles? This was going to be the biggest decision in the life of FeedBurner and its co-founders.”
  
  Core issues: Serial founding teams, Lessons learned by serial entrepreneurs, Pros and cons of hiring specialists vs. best athletes, Challenges scaling an organization, Crafting compensation packages, Making exit decisions.

Up next: Cases in the "Beyond the Team (Investors and Other Outsiders)" module

"Founders' Dilemmas" Course: "Building the (Founding) Team" Case Studies

In prior posts about my “Founders’ Dilemmas” MBA course, I provided an overview of the course and details about its first three case studies (which include the Introductory case and the cases in the “When to Found” module).

This post covers the four founding-team cases in the “Building the Team” module. (Another case in the module covers non-founder hiring issues, and will be described in my next post.) Collectively, these cases cover wide variations in prior relationships, in role allocations, and in approaches to equity splits. For each case, this post provides the official case description, a list of the case’s core issues, and a link to its full HBS Publishing entry.

As mentioned before, case studies are often valuable for helping founders, employees, and investors understand the difficult issues they are facing or will be facing in the future (or even help them gain insights into their past experiences!), so if you want to see any of the full cases, you can get them from the HBS Publishing site via the HBSP links below.

MODULE #2: “BUILDING THE TEAM” – Should I be a solo founder, or should I try to attract co-founders? If I attract co-founders, who should they be (e.g., my good friends?); how should we split the roles; and, how should we split the equity?

• Case #1: “Smartix: Swinging for the Fences” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “Vivek Khuller has built Smartix by attracting classmates to co-found it with him, learning how to pitch it to top VC firms and potential strategic partners, and honing the concept and business model by testing it in smaller venues. Now, he is facing the implications of the choices he has made in each of these areas and has to decide how to manage those implications.”
  
  Core issues: Founding with classmates, Attracting co-founders, Process of splitting equity within the team, How outside job options can constrain strategic and financing decisions.
  
  
• Case #2: “Savage Beast” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “For several months, things had been spiraling downwards at Savage Beast, the music-recommendation company started three years before by Tim Westergren. The company's founder-CEO had recently left due to pressures both at home and within the venture. Dozens of investors had turned thumbs-down on the venture; salaries had been cut; and, tensions had risen within the founding team. Now Westergren, the founder who has taken over as CEO, is facing even deeper pressures as he finds out about a lawsuit filed by former employees, and he is wondering if it is time to give up on ever achieving his vision.”
  
  Core issues: Founding with strangers/acquaintances, Adopting a strong division of labor within the team, Splitting equity equally, Salary deferrals, Founder persistence, The entrepreneurial “roller coaster.”
  
  
• Case #3: “Negotiating Equity Splits at UpDown” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “Michael Reich is having severe doubts about how he split the equity with his co-founders two months ago, when they completed a one-page ‘November Agreement.’ Since then, Michael has found an angel investor and has worked non-stop on the business, while one co-founder was off enjoying the winter break with his family and the other worked on lucrative consulting contracts for other companies. Michael has just sent his co-founders a proposal that would re-allocate the equity within their founding team, and all three founders are getting ready to reopen a negotiation they thought had been finalized.”
  
  Core issues: Adding co-founders, Negotiating equity splits within the founding team, Allocating equity to a drop-out co-founder, Re-opening equity negotiations.
  
  
• Case #4: “Ockham Technologies: Living on the Razor’s Edge” (HBSP link)
  
  Case description: “Describes the issues facing a founder-CEO regarding building a board of directors, assembling an executive team, managing tension between co-founders, and outsourcing system development work.”
  
  Core issues: Founding with prior co-workers, Adjusting roles as the venture scales, Dynamic equity splits, Outsourcing system development, Investor decisions (Angel vs. VCs), Building a board.

Up next: New-Venture Hiring Cases

"Founders' Dilemmas" Course, Part 1: Introductory Case and "When to Found" Module

As promised, this post outlines the first three cases of my “Founders’ Dilemmas” MBA course (see my previous post for the course overview).

This post covers the Course Introduction case and the two cases from the “When to Found” module, and provides for each case the official case description, a list of the case’s core issues, and a link to the HBS Publishing entry for that case. As mentioned before, case studies are often invaluable for helping founders, employees, and investors understand the issues they are facing or will be facing in the future (or even help them gain insights into their past experiences!), so if you want to see any of the full cases, you can get them from the HBS Publishing site via the HBSP links below.

COURSE INTRODUCTION – Provide an overview of key issues from across the course.

• Case: "Apple’s Core" (HBSP entry)
  
  Case description: “Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are best friends who enjoy pulling pranks together and talking about electronics. After several small collaborations, Jobs pitches Wozniak on starting a company together to sell computers based on Wozniak's design for a personal computer. Wozniak faces decisions about whether to quit the job he loves at Hewlett-Packard to join Apple Computer, how to define his role within Apple, whether to take on Jobs as his co-founder, whether to accept a third co-founder proposed by Jobs, and how to split equity with his co-founders. Early on, they add an outside investor who changes the company's trajectory and who brings in a new chief executive. Later, tensions rise between the two founders as their strategic visions diverge and as the company grows. Wozniak has now learned some disturbing news about his co-founder and has to decide whether that news will affect his continuing collaboration with Jobs.”
  
  Core issues: When to leave a comfortable corporate career, Founding with your best friend, Taking on a third co-founder, Shaping a new venture as an (active) outside investor, Growth tensions, Exit issues.
  

MODULE #1: “WHEN TO FOUND” – Should I start a company now, or work elsewhere first? What are the pros and cons of different career paths vis-à-vis my ability to successfully start and run a new venture?

• Case #1 (Early career decisions): “Humphrey and Cecilia” (revised video case, based on original case by Monica Higgins)
  
  Case description: “Addresses the career decision-making process of Humphrey Chen as he graduates from HBS with an MBA. In choosing between an offer from a top-tier consulting firm and launching a start-up entrepreneurial venture, Chen must weigh the expectations of many people--family, fiancee, friends--as well as his own desires.”
  
  Core issues: Founding early in a career, Founding with a technical background, Personal career management, Self-evaluation.
  

• Case #2 (Late career decisions): “Big to Small: The Two Lives of Barry Nalls” (HBSP entry)
  
  Case description: “Barry Nalls describes lessons learned during his 25-year career--his rise at GTE and shorter-lived ventures--and how these prepared him to found MASERGY, a telecommunications start-up. Even as a young boy in a family of entrepreneurs, Nalls had a reputation as a hard worker, but instead of becoming an entrepreneur himself, he built a long career at 'the biggest company around,' GTE. After years of working there in sales and marketing, he decided to venture out on his own. His GTE experiences armed him for some entrepreneurial challenges, but also caused additional problems as he tried to start, build, and grow MASERGY. Four years after founding the venture, he now feels that he should have 'taken the entrepreneurial plunge' much earlier in life.”
  
  Core issues: Founding late in a career, Founding with a sales-and-marketing background, Founding with big-company experience, Personal career management, Learning how to manage a board of directors, Scaling a high-growth venture.
  

(Note: The third session in the “When to Found” module is an in-class Careers Panel.)

Up next: The “Building the Team” module and New-Venture Hiring Cases

Course Overview for "Founders' Dilemmas"

Educating founders about the upcoming decisions and challenges they will face

Last week was HBS Graduation Week, marking the official end of the debut semester for my “Founders’ Dilemmas” course. I had a great semester with a terrific group of very sharp students (who generously bestowed on the course the 2009 HBS Teaching Award). In honor of those bold, risk-taking students who were willing to bet on a new course, I’m going to devote my June posts to outlining the course’s structure and content and to delving into the case studies I developed for it. In addition to their being useful for educating the future founders in my classroom, I have also found that these case studies are useful for educating current and future founders who are already off campus.

Below is the official course overview. The bottom half describes each of the course’s four “modules.” Each of my next four posts will describe the cases in those modules. In the meantime, I would love to get any comments or feedback on the high-level structure or any of the rest of the content!

Founders' Dilemmas: Money and Power in Entrepreneurial Ventures
Associate Professor Noam Wasserman
20 sessions + Paper

CAREER FOCUS

For students who plan to become involved in new ventures now or at some point in their careers. This involvement can occur in any of the following ways:

1. As founders of a new venture
2. As early hires, early advisors, or board members in new ventures
3. As potential investors (e.g., VCs), customers, partners, or acquirers of new ventures

This course was designed to help these potential founders, hires, and investors prepare for the decisions they will face both before and during their involvement with new ventures.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

This course examines the early decisions that have important long-term consequences for founders and their ventures. Potential consequences include losing control of their ventures, breaking up of the founding team due to tensions between founders, and jeopardizing the financial gains from their hard work and innovative ideas. The course’s goal is to help students be much more informed about those long-term consequences before they make the early choices that can lead to them. The course also arms students with tools and frameworks with which to assess potential outcomes and avoid common mistakes.

We will focus on “people” issues (i.e., the key challenges faced when deciding when and how to involve other people in the venture) and on “universal” issues (i.e., those issues faced by founders regardless of the industry, geographical location, or period of time in which they are founding their ventures). The cases emphasize high-potential ventures (as opposed to “mom-and-pop shops”), where the choices we examine have the most impact on the future success or failure of the venture.

COURSE CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION

The course is comprised of four major modules:

1. When to Found
   Should I start a company now, or work elsewhere first? What are the pros and cons of different career paths vis-à-vis my ability to successfully start and run a new venture?
2. Building the Team (Co-founders and Hires)
   Should I be a solo founder, or should I try to attract co-founders? If I attract co-founders, who should they be (e.g., my good friends?); how should we split the roles; and, how should we split the equity? Once I start hiring non-founders, should I hire “right” or “right now” employees?
3. Beyond the Team (Investors and Other Outside Resource Providers)
   What are the tradeoffs involved in attracting outside resources? How will my decisions affect my ability to keep control of my venture and also build its value? How should my motivations for becoming a founder affect the choices I make?
4. Achieving the Entrepreneurial Ideal
   How have some founders managed to build valuable ventures while still maintaining control of them? What general lessons can we learn from these founders about the decisions we should make at the outset and throughout the building of our ventures?

Most classes are structured around cases, but we will also feature video clips, a negotiation exercise, a panel discussion, and guest appearances from case protagonists to enhance the classroom experience.

Founder Cases in the News: Evan Williams (Twitter) and Apple

One of this week’s more intriguing (and controversial) rumors in the IT industry was about Apple's possible interest in acquiring Twitter.

I was planning to use my next blog-post to give an overview of my new MBA course ("Founders' Dilemmas: Money and Power in Entrepreneurial Ventures"), followed by posts on its individual case studies. However, given the Apple-Twitter rumors, I decided to jump the gun regarding two individual cases.

As it turns out, the course’s introductory case is about the early founding fireworks at Apple, and the middle of the semester features a case looking at Evan Williams' approaches to founding Blogger and to founding Odeo (which evolved into Twitter). If anyone is interested in seeing those cases, they’re available on the HBS Publishing site, with "Apple's Core" here and "Evan Williams: From Blogger to Odeo" here.

The broader course overview will be coming up soon!

Just Launched: 10th Anniversary Compensation Survey

Our annual Entrepreneurship and Compensation surveys are under way right now. Do you want to participate and get free access to compensation data?

The surveys focus on private companies in the Information Technology and Life Sciences industries. We have conducted them annually since 2000, making this the tenth year of the survey. I collaborate on the surveys with three professional services firms: executive search firm J. Robert Scott, Ernst & Young LLP, and law firm WilmerHale.

To mark the tenth year, we are introducing several (very positive) changes. Two of the major ones are as follows:

• Going global -- Not only are we surveying private ventures based in the US/Canada, but we are also expanding to include ventures based in the UK, India, China, and Israel.
• Sophisticated tools -- We are introducing a fully revamped survey site that will give survey participants multiple tools with which to slice and analyze the position-by-position data and other items from the surveys.
  

As in past years, survey participants will receive free access to all of the detailed compensation tables, including salaries, bonuses, and equity holdings for C-level and VP-level executives. However, this year, access to the tables will be through the much more sophisticated analysis site (rather than through paper or PDF versions of a static Compensation Report, as had been done in the past).

To qualify for the free access, please complete the questionnaire by May 29, 2009. Click here to go to the survey site.

If you participated last year, we should be able to pre-fill some of the data that would not have changed, making it quicker for you to participate now. (If you did not participate in the past, participating now will make it quicker for you to do so next year!)

Potential slices at the company-status level will include:

• # of financing rounds completed
• Company revenues
• Stage of product development
• # of employees
• Geographic region
• Industry segment

You will also be able to break out the data by founder vs. non-founder (a.k.a. "founder discounts") and other relevant dimensions, to delve into board compensation, and to examine how things change as ventures evolve.

All survey submissions are kept completely confidential; submitted information is seen only by me and the core research team, the analysis site will only show slices for which we have multiple data points, and we do not even list the names of participating companies.

So if you're a senior executive in a private IT or Life Sciences company and are interested in participating, please click over to the survey site, select your country and industry, and click on "Start Survey."

If you're an investor (VC, angel, etc.) and you get your portfolio companies to participate, both you and the participating companies will get free access to the site.

As I described in my inaugural blog post, the core of my research data -- e.g., all of the charts I post here and the econometric tables in the journal papers that underlie my blog-posts -- comes from these surveys. So participating in the survey will help you get scarce private-company compensation numbers, provide data for future blog posts about issues you're facing, and help me continue doing the research that serves as the foundation for this blog!