Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 81 posts

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

#21

Post by drunkpotato »

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…

The two books on accounting I liked (no affiliation):

Accounting Made Simple: Accounting Explained in 100 Pages or Less by Mike Piper

How to Read a Balance Sheet: The Bottom Line on What You Need to Know about Cash Flow, Assets, Debt, Equity, Profit...and How It all Comes Together by Rick Makoujy

Then I started doing my personal finances on GnuCash, and now on ledger-cli. It's helped a lot both professionally and personally.

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

#22

Post by rsweeney21 »

8 years after starting my own company I discovered Kay and Jim Stice. I wish I had discovered them years ago.

They are world renowned accounting professors from BYU and their courses are easy to understand and surprisingly entertaining. They have several excellent courses on LinkedIn learning.

Here's a good one to start with: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/accounting-foundations-2

I highly recommend them.

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

#23

Post by timsally »

Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-40.... You can view the first lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP....

Prof. Lo taught this course at MIT in the Fall of 2008, which you can imagine would be a very interesting time to teach finance. The course is excellent. I think you'll really enjoy it.

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

#24

Post by arthurcolle »

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 have always felt like the thought that comes from engineers (particularly in CS/SWE) that business/finance isn't technical to be a pretty trite attitude. Financial statement analysis is very technical, and things like operations research which many executives have come out of is a highly mathematical subject matter.

Just my thoughts.

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

#25

Post by barry-cotter »

Josh Kaufman’s book “The Personal MBA” is a good, short introduction to what’s covered in a typical MBA with a recommendation for further reading for each topic[1]. MIT’s MicroMaster’s in Finance is a great place to start if you want to learn finance[2].

[1] https://personalmba.com/ [2] https://micromasters.mit.edu/fin/

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

#26

Post by jonahbenton »

drunkpotato wrote: post #21
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…

The two books on accounting I liked (no affiliation): Accounting Made Simple: Accounting Explained in 100 Pages or Less by Mike Piper How to Read a Balance Sheet: The Bottom Line on What You Need to Know about Cash Flow, Assets, Debt, Equity, Profit...and How It all Comes Together by Rick Makoujy Then I started doing my personal finances on GnuCash, and now on ledger-cli. It's helped a lot both professionally and per…

Agree, have seen both and like them too. Cheers.

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

#28

Post by jonahbenton »

wtvanhest wrote: post #19
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…

Absolutely, very few CTOs in my experience understand double entry or know how to read a balance sheet. To their detriment, IMO, but there are all kinds of effective CTOs across all kinds of orgs.

But OP was asking for guidance in learning how to engage on those topics- as opposed to communicating about technical things to that audience. Hence the recommendations.

I agree about the value of NPV, tho I would argue that NPV without some accounting chops is tricky waters. "Value" in that context has an accounting meaning, not the largely useless goofy ROI calculations that tech folks usually create.

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

#29

Post by omarhaneef »

I consider finance to be a subset of “business administration” (which I assume you mean in the sense that the MBA uses it i.e. as a catch all) and what a CFO does is an important subset of what a CEO is responsible for.

Finance is an important component but other MBA topics would be strategy, marketing, organizational dynamics, operations and so on.

In a business school you would learn many of these through case studies (to the extent the school is influenced by HBS which every school is to some extent).

These topics also have recognizable curricula. Operations courses will delve into queue theory (exercise: one oven bakes a cookie in 5 min but your constraint is the strainer which can only ... blah blah, or something to tell throughout from latency), a course in marketing might describe the 4 ps (price, placement, product, promotion). A course in strategy night talk about a swot analysis (strength weakness opportunity threat) or Porter points out that the pricing power in an industry is set by workers, customers, competitors, new entrants, substitutes and so on.

Most MBA courses have their class requirements online. You can even click through the classes and add the curriculum and the books required. The materials, quite frankly, are not technically difficult but you have to practice them in order to remember to use them when you need them.

Other important components of the actual experience inckude working in teams and presenting to the class.

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

#30

Post by rwalk »

The title is regrettable but I’ve learned a lot from the CFO Thought Leader Podcast https://cfothoughtleader.com/

I am not a finance person but what, to me, this series gets right is that (a) the technicals are just a tiny part of what makes someone “good” at finance and (b) what seems to make CFOs “good” is very strong discipline around measurement, a deep understanding of the product/market and ability to lead people.

Post reply on HN