
Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance? - dattl
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.
======
jonahbenton
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/](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.

~~~
gen220
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.

~~~
znpy
What's the opinion about gnucash?

~~~
gen220
Big caveat that I’ve never seriously tried using it, but my perspective is
that GNUCash and GNU Ledger have different target audiences. The way I think
of it is (Cash is to LibreOffice) as (Ledger is to some combination of Vim and
SQLite).

Cash aims to replace non-free accounting software, Ledger is both a file
format and a general purpose tool for parsing and transforming that file
format, that is designed for accounting but can be used to drive a wide
variety of applications.

------
nknealk
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 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.

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

~~~
pottertheotter
Why do you say that?

~~~
Havoc
Nobody calls them that in practice so I'd avoid it if trying to sound
knowledgable. They're just called notes.

Its also quite common for FS to have actual footnotes (ie in bottom margin of
page) in addition to notes.

~~~
pottertheotter
In my experience, I hear and see "notes" and "footnotes" used interchangeably
when referring to financial statement notes. I've also not heard anyone react
negatively to someone using footnotes instead of notes. Have you run into many
people who insist on using only "notes"?

For reference, I've worked in finance for several years (investment banking
and as a professional public markets investor [hedge fund]), and I also have a
PhD with a focus on capital markets disclosure.

A quick search finds many examples where "footnotes" is used by the SEC [1],
the FASB [2, 3, 4], the CFA Institute [5, 6], KPMG [7], and Investopedia [8],
to name a few. I also saw several papers in both The Journal of Finance and
The Accounting Review that use the term "footnotes".

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-
publications/invest...](https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-
publications/investorpubsbegfinstmtguidehtm.html) [2]
[https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616858...](https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=1176168589034)
[3]
[https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=117616372...](https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Page/SectionPage&cid=1176163728733)
[4]
[https://www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/599/128/ASU%202014-15.p...](https://www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/599/128/ASU%202014-15.pdf)
[5] [https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/membership/professional-
deve...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/membership/professional-
development/refresher-readings/2020/introduction-financial-statement-analysis)
[6]
[https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/support/progr...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/support/programs/cfa/2019-L1V3R26-footnotes.pdf)
[7] [https://www.scribd.com/document/335028195/Disclosure-
Overloa...](https://www.scribd.com/document/335028195/Disclosure-Overload-
Complexity) [8]
[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/050102.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/050102.asp)

------
marcus_holmes
Software engineer with an MBA here.

I didn't have a bachelor's degree, got into coding as a hobby and turned it
into a career. I needed a degree to put on my CV. All the hard problems I'd
encountered weren't in the technology (99.9% of business coding is simple), so
learning more CS wasn't actually going to help that much. So I took an MBA
(they accepted my board experience as good enough to not require a bachelor's,
with some hoop-jumping).

The MBA itself wasn't that instructive. The Leadership unit was the highlight.
Knowing how to read a balance sheet and understand Corporate Finance was
interesting. The Entrepreneurship unit was farcical - the first step was
always to create a 40-page business plan and then consult a lawyer about IP.
At the time I was getting heavily involved in the startup scene, and the
differences between what I was learning at Uni and learning from actual
entrepreneurs were huge. The rest of it was OK, not great, not bad. Certainly
not difficult.

Having an MBA is useful. It has landed me interesting jobs. It does act to
dismiss any "but he's just a code monkey" arguments. It looks great on my bio
when part of a startup team. The leadership training has been great when
managing people.

But it doesn't stop the bias against people who build things. I still get
regularly sidelined in meetings in preference to sales and marketing people. I
still find it hard to argue my case even with the correct finance terminology.
It's annoying, and it was one of the things I hoped the MBA would fix.
Apparently not.

~~~
jbarnett2
Where did you get your MBA?

~~~
marcus_holmes
Curtin Uni in Perth, Australia. It was (briefly) one of the top 100 MBA
courses in the world, though apparently they gamed the system to get that, and
there was some controversy.

------
cdbyr
I 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.

------
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.

------
sneakerdadbod
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/](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/)

------
adamcharnock
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...](https://django-hordak.readthedocs.io/en/latest/accounting-for-
developers.html)

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.

------
bberenberg
I 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.

~~~
user5994461
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.

------
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/](https://personalmba.com/) [2]
[https://micromasters.mit.edu/fin/](https://micromasters.mit.edu/fin/)

------
timsally
Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-
school-of-management/15-40...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-
management/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-2008/). You can view the first lecture
here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOsImI7FjCf6eDW).

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.

------
andrewlgood
As a CFO myself, I notice there are a few concepts it is important for
successful managers to understand to help discussions regarding performance
and investment.

1) Time value of money - internal rate of return (IRR) and net present value
(NPV). Both are easily learned on the web in 30 minutes.

2) Broad accounting concepts. Others have recommended learning double entry
accounting on this thread. I do not think that necessary - too much in the
weeds. You need to understand what is revenue, when it is created (different
industries and companies have different rules), what are operating expenses,
what is EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization)
and why it is a good approximation of cash flow, and why capitalizing some
expenses matters. In my experience, the FP&A (financial planning & analysis)
team is often the best people to discuss this with as they are responsible for
reporting these metrics to management in a manner consistent with how the
executive team runs the company.

3) Option theory - more decisions are being discussed as options. Developing a
new product idea is an option to ultimately produce and sell the product. The
initial investment to blueprint the product, get regulatory approvals, etc can
all be thought as the cost of the option. Importantly, you can always walk
away from the option if you determine the payoff is too risky (unlikely to be
realized) or too low.

While there are more finance concepts to know, they tend to build off the ones
above (e.g. reading financial statements builds off the accounting ideas).

A final note, if you are looking for formal online courses on these topics,
the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School has a great series of their
fundamental courses for MBA students online that were free last time I looked.

------
narak
If you don't want to go through thousand page textbooks on financial
accounting, managerial accounting, and corporate finance, I recommend the
following two short books to everyone:

1\. Financial Statements, Thomas Ittelson - [https://www.amazon.com/Financial-
Statements-Rev-Thomas-Ittel...](https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Statements-
Rev-Thomas-Ittelson/dp/1601630239)

2\. Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman - [https://www.amazon.com/Financial-
Intelligence-Revised-Manage...](https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Intelligence-
Revised-Managers-Knowing/dp/1422144119)

I've also found this website useful:
[https://www.accountingcoach.com/](https://www.accountingcoach.com/)

------
mathattack
Think of it as Accounting is how you keep score, Finance is how you justify
strategy. For better or worse you have to learn financial accounting first.
I’ve been unable to learn it on my own - I needed to take courses. If you
don’t want to be a full time accountant, where you take the courses doesn’t
matter. The material is the same. Finance my require coursework or book
learning, but you can advance a lot on your own if you have the basics. Just
apply NPV and ROInto everything you see. You didn’t mention Econ, but most
senior execs think in terms of Micro. Supply and Demand.

------
hippich
I am taking MBA course at UoPeople. Because I do not have much of career plans
and wanted to "check it out" more than anything, I ignored lack of prestige.
What I find so far - a lot of stuff is very superficial to anyone who did at
least some business on their own, and invested in stock market (not
speculated/traded/yoloed).

But at the same time, some material kinda helps to put disjointed pieces
together.

Based on my experience there (I did not finish it yet, btw), I think the best
approach would be to actually get your hands dirty with running a business AND
investing first for quite some time, and after that take an MBA class to
organize all the knowledge you gained. Without getting hands-on experience, I
am not sure much of MBA program will make sense or help beyond learning the
vocabulary and getting connections (connections if you go to a prestigious
school of course, that what most pay for I think). It is much easier to
understand the importance of financial statements after you actually traded or
run books for a business, filed taxes.

------
frankc
If you want a really well rounded finance background, you could pursue the
level 1 CFA exam, or the curriculum of it. If you are not looking to pass the
current exam, you can get older books for almost nothing used.

If you want to actually pass the exam, you need to register and get the
current curriculum. You should be prepared to put in to 200 to 300 hours of
study for this, though. Its a lot of material.

If you are not looking to pass the exam, I would recommend going through the
accounting section and the economics section. The corporate finance section
would probably also be useful.

If you were to pursue all 3 exams and pass, you would have a knowledge base
that exceeds an MBA in finance. The MBA has other things the CFA can't give
you though like project and presentation experience.

------
amix
William Ackman: Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in
Under an Hour [https://youtu.be/WEDIj9JBTC8](https://youtu.be/WEDIj9JBTC8) —
An excellent crash course for the most critical concepts.

------
staysaasy
I recommend taking a formal college accounting course online, via any online
learning platform. I took accounting in undergrad and found it to be one of
the single most valuable and generally applicable courses that I took.
Accounting is the language of business – knowing accounting for business is
like knowing object-oriented programming or something similarly basic for
coding.

A great unrelated line that I heard from an MBA who works in Marketing:
Everyone thinks that Marketing is a creative field and Finance is a methodical
quantitative vocation. But in reality, the best marketers are methodical and
quantitative, and the best Finance folks are highly creative.

------
madballster
I know this is off-beat, but I found Warren Buffett's annual letters
invaluable as a resource to learn about corporate finance. They don't
substitute a good textbook, but they give a great insight into real world
application.

They're available for free on www.berkshirehathaway.com ("Annual Reports" ->
"Chairman’s Letter"), for those who prefer a book Lawrence Cunningham wrote a
great compendium with annotations and context called "The Essays of Warren
Buffett".

I re-read these every once in a while over the years and found endless useful
insights as my real-world business and finance experience grew.

------
dunce2020
[https://openstax.org/subjects/business](https://openstax.org/subjects/business)

Look up the curriculum/reading lists of MBA programs.

------
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](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/accounting-foundations-2)

I highly recommend them.

------
justathrow1
I’ve done MBA and been involved in small family business my whole life. I
think more relevant than finance or accounting practice are the business
fundamentals which I think are different but related. If you want to learn the
former there might be good resources in this thread.

To level with the CEOs, I think many CEOs value few things above else: either
have a great understanding in relevant specific industry niche like residental
construction or copper mining or in specific technology like web applications
or weather measurement hardware. Another few things CEOs have to constantly
think about are investments, in what and how much to invest to balance optimal
risk reward ratio. Third thing is maybe the strategy/business/industry
language like SWOT, business model canvas, balace scorecard, revenue, roi,
roe, equity, debt, corporate taxes, ebitda, earnings, customer life time
value, product lifecycle, growth drivers, organic/nonorganic, acqusitions,
divestments...

------
jimnotgym
Accountancy was my second career. I currently do a mixed
accountancy/technology management role at an SME.

I learnt to code from books and the internet. I'm not bad at using high level
languages to get things done. I couldn't pass a Google whiteboard test, I
couldn't write a compiler, an os, a db or anything. I know _about_ coding, but
I am not a software engineer.

Becoming an accountant actually does not have a prequsite much beyond basic
maths, ratios, percentages etc. Then it requires 2-3 years of intensive on the
job work and study to get to the basic level. In the UK that would also mean
passing 10 intensive exams in that time. To get to CFO would probably mean
another 7 years experience.

But it sounds like you want to know _about_ finance. I would learn to read
financial statements. Get some financial statements for some smaller companies
from whatever your local corporate register is (uk companies house has them
free online). Start with the balance sheet (sometimes called statement of
financial position) and profit & loss (sometimes called an income statement).
Go through it line by line and read the acounting policy and Google the terms.
You can also look them up in your local accounting standards.

Next take a look at a cash flow statement. Notice how different looking at
cash is to looking at profit. Work it why and why it is much more important to
have cash than profit.

Learn some accounting ratios like Return on Capital Employed, see if you can
calculate them from those statements.

A bit of knowledge about Mudigliani & Miller, and NPV (not the maths, Excel
can do that. The assumptions) would be good. Learn the Sunk Cost hypothesis,
and relevent costs.

I think this will get you where you need to be without long coursed of
material that you may not use. You don't need to be able to prepare financial
statements.

------
Jugurtha
One 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](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...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business-foundations)

~~~
ernbllg
Reading books written by people who have run tech companies definitely helped
me. I recommend books by Basecamp.

------
vmurthy
The second part of your need is interesting. I'm being a bit generic but to
speak with CEOs, it would greatly help to know about strategy and competition.
It's a loaded term and here's what I would recommend:

1\. Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage [0] or Understanding Michael Porter
[1]

2\. One of the things that really applies well to tech businesses has been
Platform Business Model. This book [2] is a good starting point

3\. The Lean startup [3] and Hacking Growth [4] round up the tech books that I
have benefited from.

3b. Warren Buffet's letters are a classic to learn about businesses and help
when you are dealing with CXOs.

4\. With these basics in place, I would recommend Stratecherry - the blog and
Economist for keeping up with the current developments in the field.

Good luck!

[0] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-
Sus...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining-
Performance/dp/0743260872/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=michael+porter&qid=1595738730&sr=8-2)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Understanding-Michael-Porter-
Essen...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Understanding-Michael-Porter-Essential-
Competition/dp/1422160599/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=michael+porter&qid=1595738730&sr=8-1)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Platform-Revolution-Networked-
Tran...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Platform-Revolution-Networked-Transforming-
Economy/dp/0393249131/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=platforms&qid=1595738819&rnid=5367991051&s=books&sr=1-1)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Lean-Startup-Innovation-
Successful...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful-
Businesses/dp/0670921602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=181L2D9T18GCR&dchild=1&keywords=lean+startup&qid=1595738874&s=books&sprefix=lean+star%2Cstripbooks%2C314&sr=1-1)

[4] [https://www.amazon.com.au/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-
Com...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Companies-
Breakout/dp/B06Y15ZS35/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=growth+hacking&qid=1595738900&s=books&sr=1-1)

FYI, I come from a similar background. Was a techie for 9+ years before
switching to an MBA and can personally attest to the materials given above :)

------
alistairjallan
I have worked in non finance areas of large corporations and can highly
recommend this [https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-
statement](https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-statement)

------
ArtWomb
UPenn just announced an online FinTech Boot Camp. Looks really current. Master
python, portfolio optimization and crypto in one semester ;)

[https://bootcamp.sas.upenn.edu/fintech/](https://bootcamp.sas.upenn.edu/fintech/)

------
sunilkumarc
I'm not sure whether product management is something which you're interested
in.

But my friend Adam Bader has been creating a video course on How to become a
good Product Manager and it is almost done!

It's gonna be a video tutorial. I've see the content which is almost done and
really loved how it's presented!

He will walk you through what he does in his day-to-day job, the fundamentals
of product management, development, design, stakeholder management, user and
market research, how to find and get your first PM job, as well as everything
else you need to know.

I highly recommend buying this course:
[https://gumroad.com/a/84636787](https://gumroad.com/a/84636787)

------
ericskiff
As a developer turned co-CEO, developing an understanding of the differences
between cashflow, revenue, profit, and overhead was critical.

My recommendations are a little different from most other folks here, in that
they relate to understanding the business as a whole and how finance figures
into it:

Norm Brodsky's "The Knack" [http://theknack.info/](http://theknack.info/)

Jack Stack's "A Stake in the Outcome" [https://www.amazon.com/Stake-Outcome-
Building-Ownership-Long...](https://www.amazon.com/Stake-Outcome-Building-
Ownership-Long-Term/dp/0385505094)

If you're in a startup environment, Brad Feld's "Venture Deals"
[https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitali...](https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitalist/dp/1119259754)

------
shripadk
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-financial-
accounti...](https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-financial-
accounting/home/welcome)

University of Virginia Financial Accounting Fundamentals! This is the only one
that you need to get started. Luann J. Lynch is a fantastic teacher. She
guides you through all accounting fundamentals with lots of example problems
(including a breakdown of the Coca Cola's Balance Sheet).

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

------
exdsq
I work as a software test engineer in crypto, so I thought it’d make sense to
learn more about finance the other week. It might be overkill for many but I
started studying for the CFA Level 1 and it’s been really interesting so far.
Depending on your goals, it might be worth the 300 hours.

------
simonjgreen
Second to the suggestion about accounting. For the general business side, try
picking up some business framework books such as Traction/Get A Grip(EOS) or
Good to Great or Scaling Up. They lay out challenges almost all businesses
have and proposed frameworks to manage them.

------
colonelanguz
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...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-
s-levine)

~~~
Grae
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.

------
alistairjallan
This is extremely useful [https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-
statement](https://www.causal.app/blog/whats-a-financial-statement)

~~~
sbmthakur
This was posted on HN few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825606)

The thread has some interesting comments.

------
somid3
[http://www.youexec.com](http://www.youexec.com) — we have business frameworks
and spreadsheet models to help you pick up the skills you list

------
throw699117485
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23552667)

~~~
znpy
That resolves into a blank page for me. Am I missing something?

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

------
ryansmccoy
Take a semester of Basic Accounting then a semester of Financial Accounting at
a local Community College.

------
sbmthakur
Any good sources for understanding behavioral finance?

------
known
Enrol in a good MBA college

