Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#11

Post by jonahbenton » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right answer. This is also essential for general business administration.

Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial statements is a good, first tangible exercise.

Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial Statements.

Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a practice perspective, and appealing to an engineering mind:

http://furius.ca/beancount/

"Being able to level with CEOs and CFOs" is less about administering a business and more about being able to communicate with executives. This is essential for all technical people, whether or not they have management or executive ambitions themselves.

This also is a huge topic, I would suggest starting with concise definitions of what managing is, and what being an executive is about. When you understand the concerns of the people you are communicating with, you can do so more efficiently and effectively.

From a mindset perspective I would start with Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, and since everyone is their own CEO, his book Managing Oneself is very valuable.

These are all classic texts, still valuable and relevant, as these topics are as old as the hills.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#12

Post by Grae » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

colonelanguz wrote: post #6

Inb4 "Subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff"[1] Particularly in terms of generating what another thoughtful user dubbed "contextual understanding," this is a gold mine. Also occasionally gives very lucid, refreshing descriptions of how lots of things that other finance people take for granted work. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

Came here to say this. It's entertaining and enjoyable reading that happens to be about financial topics. It is to financial literacy what "take a long vacation in France" is to learning French.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#13

Post by pottertheotter » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #10

nknealk wrote: post #8

I just finished an MBA in June. A few thoughts outside of what’s been mentioned here already: If your company is publicly traded, learn about the variety of SEC filings that most C-level executives are responsible for. In particular, learn how to parse the footnotes of 10K/S1 filings — an income statement might be 1-2 pages but the footnotes are often 30+ pages. The interesting choices a company makes are often in th…

Just don't call them footnotes if anyone finance-y is around ;)

Why do you say that?

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#14

Post by inopinatus » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

nknealk wrote: post #8

I just finished an MBA in June. A few thoughts outside of what’s been mentioned here already: If your company is publicly traded, learn about the variety of SEC filings that most C-level executives are responsible for. In particular, learn how to parse the footnotes of 10K/S1 filings — an income statement might be 1-2 pages but the footnotes are often 30+ pages. The interesting choices a company makes are often in th…

People rag on MBAs but a smart and thoughtful person will take away three superpowers from a typical core curriculum:

1. Understanding the domain language and key processes of all the business units that you didn’t already, which is by the way all of them. The heightened ability to engage in their own domain terms with everyone in a standard company is a social and cognitive upgrade.

2. Finding actionable insights (sometimes dramatically so) within your customers, partners, and competitors financial statements.

3. Recognising your own decision biases. (Whether you bother correcting for them is another matter)

Interestingly I feel the most under-rated of these is #1, to the extent that many of us in tech carry the mistaken assumption that we already know all the machinery of firms, having learned it “on the job” or by deriving the existence of tax accounting from first principles. Unless you’ve been a general manager or founder already this is almost certainly a self-delusion. I can say it was for me, I am a mathematics major who appended the MBA twenty years later and despite directing many successful enterprise-scale projects and lurking around Day 1 startups for aeons still had scales removed from my eyes.

Never under-rate the value of understanding other people better; there is no diminishing return, quite the opposite, it is compounding.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#15

Post by dunce2020 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

https://openstax.org/subjects/business

Look up the curriculum/reading lists of MBA programs.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#16

Post by bitL » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC

UIUC iMBA has all classes on Coursera. I think Coursera+ is <$400/year so you can take them all without paying individual subscriptions.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#17

Post by gen220 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

jonahbenton wrote: post #11

The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right answer. This is also essential for general business administration. Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial statements is a good, first tangible exercise. Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial Statements. Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a…

I would like to strongly second your recommendations regarding accounting. Double entry accounting is the root of all finance. If you understand it well enough to keep accurate accounts of your personal finances (credit cards, 401k, salary, pre/post-tax expenses, etc), you understand it well enough to fumble through a financial statement. I’d plug GNU Ledger, but really any double entry accounting software is good to get started.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#18

Post by sneakerdadbod » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

The expert on teaching Corporate Finance and Valuation is Aswath Damodaran at NYU. And he also happens to offer all his lectures, class notes, and exams for FREE at his website: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#19

Post by wtvanhest » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

jonahbenton wrote: post #11

The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right answer. This is also essential for general business administration. Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial statements is a good, first tangible exercise. Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial Statements. Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a…

CTOs at most Fortune 500 companies do not need a strong working knowledge of double entry accounting beyond accruals and capex and how it depreciates.

You can be ahead of most technology peers by simply knowing the basics of accrual accounting. How to learn it? When working on a project, talk to the finance person you work with about the accrual process. They will be happy you asked. If they don’t help, google “when should I accrue an expense or revenue”

Once you get that down, you will want to spend a little time doing some NPV practice. When it comes time to getting your project approved, you want to show benefits in your NPV model. 99% of this is not the math around the NPV, that part is easy. The hard part is getting business partners onboard with supporting the benefits case.

Most finance people at large companies are mainly doing basic math, but doing it well and spelling out logic in a small program called a financial model. The best way to get good at this besides working in finance is to model everything you can. Small widget models are the key to building that skill

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?

#20

Post by adamcharnock » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

A few people are saying that a grasp of basic accounting is important, and I just realised I've written something relevant on this front.

A while ago I developed a library for double entry accounting in Django. To do this I had to learn how double entry accounting worked from scratch. I was therefore briefly in a position to remember not knowing how it worked, while also grasping at least the basics.

I therefore add a page in the docs titled "Double Entry Accounting for Developers":

https://django-hordak.readthedocs.io/en/latest/accounting-fo...

I kind of cringe posting this here, because 1) I wrote it a long time ago, 2) it may not actually be entirely accurate, and 3) it may be overly simplistic.

That being said, I think a fair few companies are running their finances from Hordak, and I haven't had any angry issues opened yet. So I can only assume I wasn't too far off the mark.