Learning Paths

Guided routes through lessons

Each path sequences modules, tools, and case studies so you always know the next step. Start anywhere — prerequisites are suggestions, not gates.

• Business Foundations — A guided first route through how businesses make money, what a business model actually is, and why customers buy.
• Starting a Business — From idea to structure to first customers — the sequence of decisions a new founder actually faces.
• Business Structures and Entities — Sole proprietorships to holding companies — what each structure is for and when it fits.
• Scaling a Business — Margins, channels, capital, and the risks that appear only after a business starts working.
• Buying a Business — Sourcing, verifying, structuring, and closing an acquisition, then surviving the first 100 days.
• Rental Economy — Utilization, pricing, maintenance, and the economics of access over ownership.
• AI and Business Transformation — What AI changes in real operations, which businesses it helps or harms, and where moats still exist.
• Equity and Ownership — Shares, vesting, dilution, valuation, and the difference between earning and owning.
• Capital and Financing — Bootstrapping to venture capital — where business money comes from and what each source costs.
• Consumer Psychology and Demand — The buying brain, offer design, pricing perception, and the removal of friction.
• Distribution and Growth — Owned audiences, rented reach, platform risk, and building distribution that compounds.
• Risk and Due Diligence — How to verify before committing, and how to see the quiet failures before they happen.
• Supply Chain and Product Businesses — Freight, suppliers, inventory, and the cash mechanics of moving real products.
• Real Estate Thinking for Business — Return math, asset ownership, and the property concepts every operator should hold.
• Negotiation and Deal Structure — Payment terms, rights, instruments, and negotiating without destroying relationships.
• Taxes and Legal Structure — Entity strategy, tax mechanics, deductions, and protecting what the business builds.
• Emerging Business Opportunities — AI services, infrastructure gaps, demographic shifts, and picks-and-shovels positions.
• Contrarian Business Lessons — Where conventional wisdom fails: growth, pricing, partnerships, and what actually compounds.
• The Finance Professional — For people who do this for a living, or intend to: reporting, corporate finance, the capital menu, and the deal machinery on top. Runs all the way into the judgement calls — consolidation, deferred tax, hedge accounting, equity allocation — that separate someone who can read a model from someone who can build one.
• Deal Craft — Sourcing through closing and beyond: diligence, terms, the paperwork that binds them, the same process read from the sell side, distress on both sides of the table, and the modelling underneath.
• Marketing and Growth — The full craft: positioning and offers, copy that gets read, paid and organic channels, funnels, and honest measurement.
• Founding a Company — From opportunity to default-alive: testing an idea, landing the first ten customers, the economics of one sale, splitting equity, and choosing whether to raise at all.
• Selling or Passing On a Business — The whole arc of leaving: what buyers actually pay for and how to be worth it, running a real process, the money mechanics that quietly move the price after the headline is agreed, the tax structures that decide what you keep, and the succession route for owners who are handing the business on rather than selling it.
• The Restructuring Desk — The hardest route in the catalog. Credit agreements clause by clause, the liability-management playbook and the lender-on-lender fights it created, the doctrines a court reaches for when a structure is attacked, and the modelling that sits under all of it. Assumes you can already read a credit agreement and build a debt schedule.
• Evidence, Experiments, and Optimization — Read evidence without being fooled by it, design a test that can actually detect the effect you are hunting, recover a causal answer when you cannot run an experiment at all, then optimize what you found and price it. Written for someone with a P&L rather than a statistics degree.
• Platforms and Marketplaces — How a two-sided market is actually built and governed. Which side to subsidize and why, what breaks the chicken-and-egg problem, why liquidity and not user count is the number that matters, where a take rate can safely sit, and the rules a marketplace has to enforce so its own users cannot route around it.
• Market Design — The formal half of the category, taught for use. Mechanism design and the revelation principle, what revenue equivalence assumes and what happens when the assumptions break, why VCG is correct and nobody runs it, deferred acceptance, and the microstructure underneath a quoted price — the spread as adverse selection, inventory risk, and the cost of trading size.
• Running a Team — The working manager's route. Who owns which call, how to hire so the loop predicts something, what delegation actually has to specify, how to run a one-to-one that surfaces a resignation before it happens, and how to handle performance without waiting for an annual review. Written for someone with a team on Monday.
• The General Manager — The whole system, for someone accountable for a unit rather than a team. Decision rights, measurement, and reward as one architecture; the coordination cost of every extra team and the internal markets that price it; profit centers, shared services, and the accountability each one creates; the unit economics the whole thing is judged on; and the agency theory — moral hazard, screening, the optimal contract — that explains why the incentives keep behaving the way they do.