As a software engineer, I want to learn more about business administration and finance. I want to able to level with CEOs, CFos or other managerial positions.
Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
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Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#2One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to read books written by people who have run technology companies, or about technology companies by insiders, or by venture capitalists, or biographies of important figures, or about the history of technology world, or books recommended or mentioned by any of the above. You get examples on a canvas you're familiar with.
I'll read books mentioned in interviews of people who have a track record. Even watching a video like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U (check out the first comment and replies). It only lasted a few seconds, but we got the books in the background figured out. We recognized some by the spine.
There are a lot of things that are the way they are because someone did something at some point, and it's only reading a book where the author mentions an anecdote that you piece things together. There are entire deals that didn't happen because someone was a jerk to another years before that. These books also expose a situation, and the decisions made in a certain context, the tradeoffs, etc. How people went about the product, which strategies they used to find a market, how conflicts arose and were handled with.
But, back to your ask:
Wharton has a "Business Foundations"[0] series on Coursera which includes entire courses on marketing, accounting, finance.
Microeconomics (two or three books you find in every course: the ones by Pindyck, Perloff, and Mankiw. Either named "Microeconomics" and "Principles of Microeconomics").
You can checkout the MIT OCW courses on these.
[0]: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business-fo...
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#3I would say that the skills really break down into 2 areas:
- Fundamentals that can be learned and quickly applied. This means taking an Accounting 101 and 102 course. Then applying those accounting principles to your own personal finances. They're not that different from a small business. I would also encourage you to take a couple of intro to law courses, they have been very helpful to me.
- Contextual understanding. This is the ability to take what you have learned in the fundamentals, and understand how it applies to a current set of data. This is significantly harder, and there isn't a general solution here. For example, cash flow seems like a fairly simple concept. But once you take into account enough variables, it gets very complex. Those variables are specific to one organization.
Finally, while not directly tied to your skills, I can tell you that as a founder, having an excellent accountant who I can trust to understand the minutia of all of this is super helpful. I focus on the high level and making sure that it's driving in the direction I need, he focuses on the guts. My understanding of the fundamentals means I can understand what is going on when he explains why something happened that I may not have understood initially. All of what I wrote here applies to our lawyer as well.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#4I would say that the skills really break down into 2 areas: - Fundamentals that can be learned and quickly applied. This means taking an Accounting 101 and 102 course. Then applying those accounting principles to your own personal finances. They're not that different from a small business. I would also encourage you to take a couple of intro to law courses, they have been very helpful to me. - Contextual understandin…
Yep, I'd say it's all about learning some accounting. Get a beginner accounting course, not sure where to go. Lots of terms to understand, assets, cash, capital, depreciation, revenues, taxes, cost of goods, expenses.
In layman terms, it's all sorts of revenues and expenses, short term or in the future, interacting together. Ask yourself, how much do you pay for salary? for office? for equipment? for materials? when? and a hundred more questions...
A good chunk of it is rather straightforward really, yet it takes a course or a discussion with an accountant to learn the proper terms and the broader concepts formally. Seen all of that in university long ago, to be able to make our own companies when we graduate.
That being said, I am not sure this would help to talk to the CEO. I'm not sure CEO generally care or understand about this sort of this. Just outsource accounting.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#5I can’t recommend How Finance Works by Mihir Desai enough.
There are a few cool things about it:
1. You get the feeling that the author has developed a deep sense of how learning works, and is using the same teaching methods in the book that have been honed over a lot of in-person classes. For example, having you puzzle out which balance sheet belongs to which company early on in the book, and it being surprisingly doable.
2. There are different levels of abstraction discussed in close proximity - the math, then the account from a cfo.
3. It’s concise. That lets it cover a pretty wide range without feeling like a textbook, and I think that helps a lot for developing an early understanding.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#6Inb4 "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...
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#7One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to read books written by people who have run technology companies, or about technology companies by insiders, or by venture capitalists, or biographies of important figures, or about the history of technology world, or books recommended or mentioned by any of the above. You get examples on a canvas you're familiar with. I'll read books mentioned in interviews of peo…
Reading books written by people who have run tech companies definitely helped me. I recommend books by Basecamp.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#8I 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 the footnotes. For example, the related party transaction for WeWork’s “We” trademark that everyone was up in arms about appears on page 199 of the filing.
Finance is about cashflows. GAAP accounting is about subjectively spreading costs across periods. The two are often at odds. Learning to navigate both and knowing which your audience cares about is critical. You often need years of context about a business to be able to make contributions on this front.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#9[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?
#10I 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 ;)