Last week I expressed my frustration with the current lack of financial literacy that I see all around me. In the spirit of Fred Wilson’s awesome blog series MBA Mondays, I’ve decided to write a series of posts about this and asked for suggestions. I got a bunch, but one that stood out was from a group of incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago Booth. Their suggestion was to write a series of posts that follows the development of an imaginary startup as the company navigates various events, focusing on how each event will impact not only the P&L, but also the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement.
I thought this was a great idea, so I engaged Jonathan, Simon, Kevin, and Kevin (you can meet them below) to help out. They are going to help me prepare the posts each week, which will include developing excel spreadsheets that we will upload to complement the posts. They suggested we call this “Finance Fridays” to bookend Fred’s MBA Monday’s – I checked with Fred to see if he was ok with this and his response was “Hell yes. The more the merrier.”
We would love to get your suggestions in the comments section for (1) the type of company that we should follow, and (2) the types of issues that the company might encounter (reminder: the goal is to illustrate common difficulties entrepreneurs face when it comes to understanding their financials). At this point we are planning to use a consumer Internet company as an example, but we are also considering using a SaaS-based software company.
As a special bonus for me, I get to work with four students on a project. I love working with and mentoring students, and am especially thrilled when they proactively reach out to me.
Our first substantive post will be up next Friday. In the mean time, please meet the Finance Fridays team:
Jonathan Wolter has been a lead consultant and software engineer at ThoughtWorks working for clients in Silicon Valley, Texas, Chicago, and India. Now he is slated to enter Booth at the University of Chicago in the fall. On the side, he started a company selling accounting training to landlords. Previously he was at FeedBurner, and has never met a side project he did not love.
Kevin O’Leary has spent the past year working as an independent financial consultant to start-ups in the healthcare, telecom and nonprofit industries on projects both domestically and internationally. Prior to that, he was an investment banking analyst in the Medical Devices group at Piper Jaffray. He will be entering Booth as an MBA Candidate this fall.
Simon Zhang spent three years as a financial and tax consultant at Deloitte Canada with a focus on businesses in mining, financial services and technology sectors. He is a Canadian Chartered Accountant. He also lectured an undergraduate tax course at Simon Fraser University and frequently facilitated professional education courses with Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. With a strong interest in entrepreneurship and technology, he subsequently joined a technology start up project at Orbis Investment Management Ltd, an asset management firm with over USD $25 billion under management. His focus was to incubate an internal start-up which is built on state-of-the-art technology, novel business model and innovative products. He will be entering Chicago Booth to complete this MBA with a focus on entrepreneurship and finance in the Fall 2011.
Kevin McCaffrey left his job as a strategy consultant in the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company to found Dot-to-Dot Children’s Books, a nonprofit social enterprise that works with children around the world to develop children’s books that are marketed to raise funding and awareness for the authors’ communities. Dot-to-Dot relies entirely on earned income and employs a unique cause-related marketing strategy designed to establish a successful position in the competitive children’s lit market. Kids from eight countries, including Cambodia, Eastern DR Congo, and Afghanistan, have participated in Dot-to-Dot projects. Kevin’s experience with Dot-to-Dot has him hooked on entrepreneurship, which will be his focus at Chicago Booth.