The Idea for Next Book: Financial Literacy

People often ask me when I am going to write another book. This is a funny question because I did not intend to write the first one. It is also incredibly hard to do it and get it right. Don’t get me wrong, I am very glad I did but I only did it because I knew there was a big need for it.

That being said, I am considering writing another one and I need your feedback. A topic that I think would be very helpful is “Financial Literacy for Entrepreneurs.” I will be releasing chapters and resources in the following weeks/months on this website, so make sure you subscribe to get notified:

Understanding the fundamentals of finance is not that difficult but too often I have seen entrepreneurs, especially engineers, who are just mystified by it and tend to ignore this critical part of any business for no good reason. This does not mean you have to be an accountant or a finance geek but every entrepreneur should know enough (that 20% that gives you 80% of the value and 95% of the confidence) to effectively run their own business and guide a finance group at a high level. It should not be a mysterious black box part of the business.

So my goal is to make the basics of finance accessible to all entrepreneurs who are willing to put in a little work. You don’t need to get an MBA to understand finance enough to run your business more effectively and to build models to improve decision-making on tradeoffs for an important decision. It is also imperative when the entrepreneur is thinking about and then executing a fundraising process – unless the entrepreneur just wants to delegate based on blind faith this dimension of the business. I strongly recommend against this. I am always saddened to see great entrepreneurial teams not realize their full potential because of a blind spot for understanding the critical scoreboard for their business, finance.

After all, if you don’t have money, you don’t have a business and if you don’t have enough money, your business will die and help no one.

My hypothesis, based on seeing thousands of entrepreneurs now, is the first gap that needs to be addressed is financial literacy and then this leads to fundraising. To do the latter before the former is to put the cart before the horse, i.e., the order is backward.

I should note that I am currently working on an edX course on this topic with MIT finance professors Antoinette Schoar and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf so your feedback will help focus this on the right topics as well.

Thanks for your feedback in advance. If the feedback is sufficient, I will post a new chapter here on a regular basis (depending on how long it takes to complete but it would be approximately every two weeks or so to start) and the project will move forward.