Babson Case Number: BAB069 | Length: 22 Pages

Abstract

This case is positioned as the first high–potential startup in a new ventures course to increase the 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 case that should immediately follow Neverfail Computing in a course is SolidWorks (BAB068), which is an almost "perfect" high–potential startup.
As a financing case, Neverfail Computing links 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 (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) hot–pluggable, fault–tolerant, SCSI (Small Computer System Interface, pronounced “skuzzy,” and used in a sentence as, “Basically, Neverfail sold SCSI drives.”), hard–drive disk arrays. It is the kind of high–potential venture that attracts venture capitalists.