Julianne Wu - Portfolio

PORTFOLIO Collection of Selected Academic and Professional Work by Julianne Wu

Please note that detail has been removed from case descriptions in order to ensure confidentiality is maintained

SELECTED ACADEMIC WORK Haas School of Business | UC Berkeley | 2010 - 2012

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Worked with a team of engineering and business school students in developing a high-tech opportunity to address an unmet need at the intersection of media and commerce

3 Commerzine – Linking demand generation to demand fulfillment

Opportunity Recognition | MBA 295C

Identification of ideas that can lead to successful entrepreneurial ventures

TEAM: Rahul Bijor | Brian Dunham | Nancy Unsworth | Julianne Wu

The Problem

•  Digital content consumers have unique needs which remain unmet by existing digital editions

•  Magazines fail to innovate and adequately engage users on tablet devices

•  Most digital content consumers are unwilling to pay for access to digital replicas of print magazines

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Even as adoption of digital devices grows, sales of digital editions of magazines lag for a number of reasons:

Magazine readers desire a digital offering that provides a unique, differentiated experience when consuming

magazine content

Commerzine – Linking demand generation to demand fulfillment

The Process

•  digital content consumer reading habits, needs and wants

•  Observed interaction with digital magazines

•  Performed contextual interviews

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•  range of solutions to meet needs of digital magazine readers

•  Brainstormed primary unmet needs

•  Created affinity diagrams

•  solution based on identified consumer priorities

•  Developed business model canvases

•  Selected best model through dot-voting

Understand Ideate Create

Observing consumers Brainstorming unmet needs Developing business models


Key Insights

•  the ability to save and aggregate discovered items •  With print magazines, readers can fold page corners when they discover

items of interest. However, with digital editions readers are unable to track featured products

•  a reading experience seamlessly integrated with commerce

•  Consumers desire a curated shopping experience. They want to purchase products directly from magazines and do not want their reading experience to be interrupted with advertisements, links that redirect them to other websites, etc

•  free digital editions of print magazines

•  While many digital content consumers express a willingness to pay for certain rich or unique online offerings, most do not want to pay for digital replicas of print magazines

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Digital content consumers want….


Solution •  Commerzine, technology to enable curated shopping – Provides

embedded technology within digital magazines for consumers to save and aggregate items, and purchase products directly from magazine-curated “shops”. The technology, while free to magazines and their subscribers, allows magazines to monetize products featured in digital issues through a revenue sharing partnership with Commerzine

7 Commerzine – Linking demand generation to demand fulfillment

Consumers can purchase

products they discover while

reading

Commerzine allows consumers

to engage with their favorite

digital magazines

Consumers can save and

aggregate items of interest

Developed a new Integrated Marketing Campaign (IMC) for a struggling brand

8 ¡Que Listo! – Reaching a new segment to grow a declining category

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) | MBA 265

Working knowledge of the strategic and tactical aspects of IMC

TEAM: Jenny Burns | Adrienne Cademenos | Sheila Vashee | Julianne Wu

•  Brand in a declining category and experiencing softening sales of pour-through water filtration systems

•  Consumer misperceptions about high cost and inconvenience of water filtration systems

•  Current Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) unsuccessfully dispelling consumer misperceptions and driving growth in category

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Problem Key Insights Solution •  Huge untapped market in

U.S. Hispanic segment, which is large and growing rapidly

•  Penetration of water filters is lower than other segments

•  Drink more bottled water at home than rest of population

•  Care about saving on household purchases

•  Women are key influencers and primary household shoppers

•  Receptive to product ratings and reviews, as well as product placement

•  ¡Que Listo! campaign •  Translates in English to

“Clever you!” •  Target Hispanic moms

who are in-home bottled water consumers

•  Drive cost savings message through

•  Word-of-mouth i.e. Latina bloggers, health and wellness celebrities, etc.

•  Partnerships with television series i.e. cooking, weight loss, etc

Water filtration system featured on Que Sabor cooking series

¡Que Listo! – Reaching a new segment to grow a declining category

Spent three weeks in Madagascar developing a business plan and go-to-market strategy for an international conservation organization

10 Project REDD – Translating environmental values into financial objectives

International Business Development (IBD) | MBA 298A

Teams of MBA students providing managerial expertise to clients around the world

TEAM: Rafa de la Guia Lopez | Juan Manuel de los Rios | Janice Yuen | Julianne Wu

•  Natural park representing 50% of Madagascar’s endemic biodiversity threatened by deforestation (largely due to swidden agriculture, illegal logging and quartz mining)

•  Inadequate and unsustainable funding to:

•  address the ongoing tension between environment and people,

•  and financially sustain protection of natural forest and support communities reliant on forest resources

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Problem Key Insights Solution •  Engagement of

community in region necessary to catalyze transition to sustainable financing program

•  Populations living in and around natural park heavily reliant on forest resources for subsistence and income

•  Importance of swidden rice production as a supplement to household food stores critical despite devastation associated with unsustainable and illegal practices

•  Communities require adequate compensation for lost economic activity due to forest conservation

•  Sustainable financing to prevent deforestation while improving livelihoods through:

•  a new market-based mechanism,

•  Sale of carbon credits generated through Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

•  Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) creates market value for standing forests

•  Market environmental and social co-benefits to investors

•  and community-managed conservation and development programs

•  Engage community in forest monitoring, sustainable agriculture programs and agro-forestry (vanilla, cloves, coffee)

Project REDD – Translating environmental values into financial objectives

Natural park community

SELECTED PROFESSIONAL WORK Google | ecoVC | Horsley Bridge | ThinkEquity | 2004 - 2011

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Provided actionable recommendations for investment by product line and core functional areas

13 Google – Business planning for Enterprise division

Google | Program Management and Strategic Planning MBA Intern

Google Enterprise provides solutions such as Apps, Search and Earth & Maps to meet the needs of businesses

The Problem

•  Insufficient data for profit and loss benchmarking with comparables

•  Lack of clarity with regards to resource allocation •  Necessary to drive growth and profitability •  Also, to guide new product investments

•  As a result, challenges with business planning prioritization and optimization

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Incomplete understanding of positioning in terms of investment by products (Apps/Postini, Search and Geo) and functional areas (sales, marketing, operations and

engineering)

Deep understanding of investment allocation by product and functional areas relative to comparables key to driving

strategic decisions

Google – Business planning for Enterprise division

The Process

•  SaaS and cloud computing landscape

•  Collected information from analyst reports, public filings, through interviews, press releases and articles

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•  to select best set of comparables

•  Identified criteria such as similar business models and growth profiles

•  Created comp matrix

•  data to provide strategic recommendations given division priorities

•  Conducted financial statement analysis and benchmarking

Research Synthesize Analyze

Collecting industry data Selecting comparables Conducting benchmarking


Key Insights

•  are on average larger in terms of total revenue •  While Google Enterprise is smaller than comparables, attributed to

nascent stage of development, it is growing at a faster rate than comparable businesses

•  invest less in engineering

•  Google is broadly known as an engineering focused organization, and thus investing heavily in engineering resources is deeply ingrained in Google Enterprise culture

•  invest more in for Search and Geo products

•  While Search and Geo have healthy margins, lower than average investment for these products potentially inhibiting growth

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Relative to Google Enterprise, comparables…


Solution

•  Increase investment and shift excess resources – in the near-term, continue to drive profitability in Search and Geo with further investment. Consider shifting some Apps resources to Search and Geo

•  Build scale and carefully manage investments – in the long-term, given size of Google Enterprise is smaller than industry average, invest in automation and process efficiency to build scale. Should carefully manage sales and marketing as well as engineering and COGs investments

•  Conduct further analysis – next steps should include: evaluation of go-to-market strategy for Enterprise products, identification of resources to be re-distributed from Apps to Search and Geo, and determination of appropriate level of investment to fuel growth vs. profitability

17 Google – Business planning for Enterprise division

Started organization to promote sustainable business practices in startups and small businesses

18 ecoVC – Driving sustainability from the ground up

ecoVC | Co-founder and Director Non-profit that offers startups and small companies web tools to find, share and implement sustainable business practices

•  Facing extraordinary environmental challenges (climate change, deforestation, water pollution, etc) globally

•  Small businesses generate 60% of all commercial waste and cause half of all environmental damage worldwide (EEA)

•  However, efforts to engage businesses in sustainability have only focused on large and mature companies

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Problem Key Insights Solution •  Small and early stage

companies realize the need to operate sustainably

•  And, want to implement sustainable business practices

•  However, startups and small businesses have limited resources

•  They lack the time and capital to devote to sustainability initiatives

•  They also lack access to sustainability tools tailored to their needs

•  Co-founded ecoVC, a non-profit that promotes sustainable initiatives within startups and small businesses to deliver environmental and economic returns

•  Managed design and development of free web tools to help businesses:

•  Find sustainability goals best suited for their needs

•  Share initiatives with peers, customers, etc

•  Implement and track progress toward goals

ecoVC – Driving sustainability from the ground up

www.ecovc.org Find a sustainability goal Share an initiative

Developed cleantech industry studies and conducted analyses on cleantech investment exposure

20 Horsley Bridge – Understanding cleantech industry and investment

Horsley Bridge | Investment Associate Private equity fund of funds with over $10 billion under management through domestic and international funds

•  With rapid growth of cleantech investment, firm faced with limited understanding of: •  trends in cleantech •  extent of investment

exposure to cleantech within portfolio

•  allocation to cleantech relative to other investment areas

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Problem Key Insights Solution •  Overall cleantech

investment limited relative to other investment areas

•  Of existing investments, more on supply- vs. demand-side

•  Supply-side investments tend to be more capital intensive

•  Primarily investments that do not depend on subsidies

•  Cleantech still early, but gaining traction

•  Created industry studies providing overview of space, industry players, landscape and key trends

•  Developed portfolio level analyses of investment allocation and exposure

•  Recommended: •  Increase in cleantech

investment due to under allocation

•  Avoid high capital costs and reliance on subsidies

•  Increase demand- vs. supply-side exposure

Horsley Bridge – Understanding cleantech industry and investment

Designed and developed weekly domestic and international capital markets report to be distributed to firm practitioners and clients

22 ThinkEquity – Launching ThinkCapital Markets report

ThinkEquity | M&A and Corporate Finance Analyst Investment bank that provides research, equity financing and

M&A advisory to technology companies

•  As a young boutique investment bank, ThinkEquity faced a number of growing pains associated with building a financial services company from scratch

•  Unlike more established investment banks, ThinkEquity lacked some fundamental resources for the firm and clients

•  For example, the firm did not have a formal process for providing a firm wide broad market update

•  Nor did it have materials for providing clients with a global market overview

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Problem Key Insights Solution •  Firm practitioners needed

to be abreast of: •  Overall market

performance •  Latest domestic and

international equity issuances

•  Movements in key economic indicators

•  They also required information regarding internal activities - IPOs, debt offerings, M&A deals, roadshows, etc

•  Most information was accessed and disseminated through numerous, disjointed resources and channels

•  Developed ThinkCapital Markets, a weekly Capital Markets newsletter with:

•  broad market overview of domestic and international equity issuances,

•  market performance, •  and other economic

indicators for firm and clients

•  Also included summary of recent and upcoming firm activities

ThinkEquity – Launching ThinkCapital Markets report

ThinkCapital Markets Report

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND CONSIDERATION

Julianne Wu | [email protected] | 303.589.2711

Julianne Wu - Portfolio

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