Episode 0 – What the heck is Finance anyway?!
First off the bat, thanks for taking the time to read this, whether you’re a founder building your first ever venture or someone working in a startup who just wants to understand how some of this stuff works.
Your time is valuable, so we won’t waste it, that’s a promise!
So now you’re here, let’s get stuck in by addressing a few baseline questions:
Who should be reading this?
Why you should be reading this?
What the heck is ‘Finance’ anyway?
Why Five Minutes?
The Who: Anyone interested in understanding how finance works in a venture, founders, finance directors, controllers, employees or someone toying with the idea of launching a startup but wants a bit more knowledge before jumping right it. A lot of the things we’ll chat about are pretty geographically agnostic, but some will be pretty UK centric.
The Why: Let’s face it, finance is not always the sexiest subject; it’s way more interesting to think about product, marketing, tech build, hiring and all the other critical areas it takes to build or scale a venture. But, when all is said and done, you can’t run anything if you don’t have a good handle on numbers, how they work and how they influence the business.
The What: Let’s get to the crux of the matter – what the heck does finance even mean in the context of a growth venture – and why this whole thing can seem so opaque. Finance can mean, well, lots of things! Otherwise we wouldn’t bother writing about it.
At EmergeOne, we think about finance at is most basic to be about the flow of money. We also think about it in terms of a venture’s transactional, operational and strategic management of that money alongside the things that can have an impact on it and, importantly, how the venture presents and disseminates that information to those that want or need to see it.
I know. That was a lot of words, and don’t worry, we’ll be unpacking a lot of it in the future where we’ll cover things like cap tables, venture capital and angel investment, growth and scale, metrics, basic accounting principles, valuations, options, term sheets, the roles of CFOs, finance directors and more.
And because we know that we don’t know it all, we’ll be referring you to other sources we’ve found useful that can give you that additional boost from the basics.
Finally, why five minutes? Pretty simple, we know the most valuable asset you have when you’re growing a venture is time. You’ve got a million and one things to be on top of, our aim is to give you the information you need to move forward with confidence, not overwhelm you.
And there you go, not so painful right?!
In Episode 2 we’ll dive into one of the things we get asked most about here at EmergeOne – building a financial model; why you do it, some best practices and how you can use it to influence your business.
Finally, because we know there’s no cookie cutter approach to venture building you can let us know what you want us to talk about by emailing us at [email protected] and if you want to ensure you get this straight to your inbox every week, just sign up here.
Right, back to building!
Aarish and the EmergeOne team
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