Career advice Sitting down this afternoon with a widely traveled friend I realized that there is a lot that we now know and take for granted that we didn’t know as fresh graduates. Simple things like the specialized courses we should take, the career focus we should build and the jobs that we should turn…
Category: Columbia Business School
Finance Careers: A tale of two startups.
You will never know how wrong you were till you actually do it with your own hands and fail. If you are really lucky you get a chance to compare your performance against a benchmark that you can relate to. I was wrong and I was lucky. My first two ventures were inspired by Luke…
Career choices: From banking and consulting to Startup land in southern California
New York 1999. I am a business school student with a combination of dangerous ideas, irrelevant experiences, incomplete education and out of control ambitions. In any other country I would be institutionalized. In New York City, I am the startup guy, the dude with the business plan. While a few leads from Goldman and an…
Career Choices: From Columbia to Goldman and back – Switching from consulting to investment banking …
So here I was with an offer letter from Columbia, no job (I quit) and no money to cover my Ivy League business school tuitions. Back in 1998 these were days where your email account only caught a handful of emails every day, unlike the raging horde of spam that lands every morning in my…
Career choices that I made – early professional consulting career – lessons learnt
Career Lesson One – Opt for computer science The reason why I have such a soft corner for computer science is that I don’t think it is an optional undergraduate degree. I think it is a mandatory skill set that teaches us how to think and approach problems and then gives us an opportunity to…
The Online Finance Course store goes live
A full ten years after I wrote my first finance course, the Online Finance Course store is now live at the Learning Corporate Finance Portal. Over the last 30 months, our model for selling content online has taken some unexpected routes. Figuring out word press hacks, digital rights management and payment gateways in this part…
Business School Admissions: Short answers for the road to your MBA Application
Business School Admissions: Twenty two answers for the road to your MBA application I wrote these answers 10 years ago. I had just started at business school and the pain of the business school admissions process to a top ten MBA program was fresh in my mind. Other business school applicants were now asking the…
Online Finance – Good and Bad bosses – A review of leadership trends across the decades
Over at the Startup Insights blog, we posted a research paper completed at Columbia Business School 10 years ago as a class project that reviews the perception of good and bad bosses in management media all the way from the pre-war years from the Second World War to the late 1990’s. While the research is…
Startup Guide: The Darden Reboot Chat – Videos are here
And they are here. Seven episodes due to the youtube 10 minute rule. Many thanks to Uzma for burning the midnight oil, encoding the video and solving the volume problem once and for all. Thank you Adnan for ensuring that the session gets recorded for the family (as well as agents and friends) and shipping…
Startup Guide: Lessons from a failed startup
Looking through the wreckage of an old folder, found this post for the really early days of Reboot – the original list of lessons from a failed startup that became the book. Here is the list, with one new addition, five years later. 1) Technology is not a competitive advantage. Focus on the business problem…