Conclusion

The popularity of entrepreneurship in this country and throughout the world has never been higher. When I began my academic career over 23 years ago, there were virtually no undergraduate schools and only a handful of graduate business schools that offered a single course on entrepreneurship. Today, the opposite is true. Entrepreneurship courses and even entrepreneurship majors are in abundance throughout academia.

At the same time, there are more movies and television shows about entrepreneurship than ever before. While this pleases and excites me, I must confess to a growing concern. I believe that the proliferation of successful entrepreneurial stories has made it look too easy. This underestimation of the difficulty of entrepreneurship has led too many young people, in particular, to believe that all that is needed to be successful is passion, drive, and the willingness to work hard. While these traits are indeed important, I am absolutely convinced that knowing the fundamentals, ideally through experience of leadership, marketing, sales, operations, and/or finance, is most important. That is why I have always recommended to my students at Kellogg and HBS that they take a job after graduating so that they can learn the aforementioned skills on “somebody else’s dime,” instead of “on the job” at their own firm. Everybody knows that “on the job” training is oftentimes inefficient and quite expensive, due to the learning process, which is usually rife with mistakes.

I have taught hundreds of entrepreneurs who have companies with $10 million to $200 million in annual revenues, in Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program. Every time I taught the course Entrepreneurial Finance, which covers the fundamentals of finance, at least half of the entrepreneurs volunteered to me, “I wish I took this course before starting my company because I have made so many costly mistakes that I could have avoided.” This comment supports one of the key discoveries in a survey of entrepreneurs who failed. The most popular reason given for their failure was “lack of training.”

Therefore, I close this book by applauding you for not being guilty of that deficiency. Your completion of this book is confirmation of your interest in learning the fundamentals of entrepreneurial finance. I implore you to keep it up by embracing the practice of continuous lifelong learning.

Continued good luck, and thank you for acquiring this book.