[Case Analysis] The Tale of the Lynx

1. What were the most critical choices faced by James Milmo early in the founding of Lynx? Do you agree with his decisions?
The most important issue was equity stake. Milmo insisted that Curtis should work for 2 years before being fully vested whereas Milmo himself would be fully vested immediately. Furthermore, Milmo considered Pascal as a critical piece of Lynx and argued that the three founders should be equal partners in Lynx and therefore should each receive a third of its equity. Pascal could participate in the Lynx as a co-founder with Curtis’ consent. Finally, Pascal received only 25% of the company equity, and Milmo and Curtis each received 37.5% of the equity, with Milmo’s vesting …show more content…

Without trust and productive conflict, they are not a team any more.
I think Milmo had two options in order to deal with this issue. The first option is to make Pascal leave the company through a grant from the board. If the first option would not be accepted by the board, Milmo needs to consider selling Lynx. Even though Pascal greatly contributed to broaden the breadth of product with the flexible architecture and fulfilled his role as a COO, I believe, it is time to go their separate ways in any way.

5. Summary
The Tale of the Lynx is a Harvard Business School case study with the learning objective of surveying a wide variety of choices encountered by founders of a new venture and the long-term ramifications of those choices. An analysis and overview to the company reveals a small organization that was initially formed by 2 partners, James Milmo and Doug Curtis, with the intent of introducing an untapped method of on-line real estate listings. During the development phase of the idea, two large real estate companies beat them to market a similar real estate service so the company focus was redirected to developing advertising supported screen savers for handheld wireless devices such as Palm Pilots and cell phones.
The new direction warranted a technical component the company did not possess so Milmo used his network of acquaintances and contacted Javier Pascal about his interest in the company. At first Pascal was utilized in a viability research capacity