I used to panic when someone asked me what I thought about an acquisition. I had vague opinions, weakly held, because I didn’t know enough to reason about it. My opinions were about the product and the team. Knowing that most acquisitions fail to deliver their value (and having seen a couple up close) the idea of justifying an acquisition as a good idea was inconceivable to me.
This gap was a product of both the kind of work I’ve done and the environments I’ve worked in. I’ve never managed a budget. I’ve never been in a “monthly business review”. I decided it was more than time to fill it, and so once I had more time on my hands, I registered for the LSE MBA Essentials course.
I had wanted to do this for a year, but my last job wouldn’t pay for it. It was hard to allocate several thousand euro when I had just given up a regular salary, but I really believed it was the next thing for me to learn, and I finally had time. It was good timing beyond that – leaving a “normal” job for the unknown is scary, and having a structure where whatever else was happening, I was at least learning, was good for me. It was relentless, and it was hard – one weekend in Prague giving a talk had me paying for it for weeks – so I’m really glad I didn’t try to do it on top of a more than full time job that didn’t support it. But it gave me a structure and sense of accomplishment that was good for me.
The Limit of Reading Books
I did the altMBA back in 2017. It was a writing-and-reflection course more than a business one – writing prompts, feedback from your cohort three times a week, and a reflection script after each one. The most useful part, I decided afterwards, was the reflecting, and it was useful independent of whether the feedback was any good. The value was in the process. My goal going in was vague on purpose – get better at product, get better at carving out strategic time – the whole point was exposing myself to things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
There’s an idea that if you read enough of the right books you can replace an MBA – this is the foundation of the altMBA. It deliberately and explicitly avoided accounting, finance, and operations. Perhaps it’s not surprising that was the gap that remained.
MBA Essentials was the opposite course. A specific gap, a subject with right answers, and feedback from people who knew them. I don’t think you can really read your way into understanding the financial apparatus, but what would I know, I was too intimidated to understand even the financial reports from my own Ltd company in depth.
The Diff
Finally, I understand how acquisitions get reasoned about. An acquisition isn’t priced on what something earns now. It’s a question about future cash flows and when they arrive, discounted back to today. It’s a way to reason about money and opportunity cost, a fundamentally different way of thinking about it than “what does this group of people and product add, and what does it cost to make that work?”
Now the justifications made sense, as did the only one I thought was a good idea not going anywhere. I saw this with other bits of financial stuff that had gone by – repeatedly, I found myself seeing the number on the P&L that seemingly random or arbitrary decisions had contributed to.
I learned to read a company report. 100+ pages? Where to begin. I stuck it in Claude and started querying it. I finally know what kind of questions to ask in order to get under the overarching narrative to what lies underneath. Everything is (or should be) in a company report, but not everything makes the index page or letters from the CEO or Chair of the board. Those letters tell you what they think you should pay attention to. The numbers themselves can help you form your own opinion of how true that is.
One concrete takeaway: I built a break-even model for DRI Your Career. Which is helping us reason about how we’re doing, model partnerships, payback periods for course development. I find it incredibly useful.
These things matter more than the grade, but I did score in the high nineties. Possibly a function of me working too hard to prove something and being too in need of validation. But usefully, there was an assignment where I didn’t get full marks. I’d worked hard on it, I’d committed to one reading of an ambiguous figure, and I was wrong. There’s value to that – I won’t make that mistake again.
Capitalism from the inside
Everyone who knows me knows I’m mad about capitalism, so perhaps it’s strange that I wanted to do this so much. It was jarring, to see something I dislike from the inside. But I always think there’s a distinction between playing the game that’s on, and making a new one. Here I wanted to understand the game that’s on better. And I do.
Some of the negotiation and power material. There’s a technique where you commit to a supplier up front and pay them below market, and the justification offered is that they “know what they’re getting” – certainty in exchange for money. It’s a way of using a stronger position to pay less.
Uber, taught as a triumph of the platform model. The innovation, substantially, is that the costs and the risk were pushed onto the workers – classified as contractors, in some places now ruled illegal.
I did economics at A level, and there I enjoyed the cleanliness of the model. But having been out in the world for a while since, it was both familiar and jarring: market forces get taught like physics. As if they were discovered rather than designed, natural laws with no politics in them. They’re not. And the models assume people are rational, which they are demonstrably not.
Now what?
I’m glad I did it. It filled the gap I’d identified, and gave me the structure I needed at that time. Deadlines, concrete wins, the feeling of making progress on something that mattered to me. Part of me wants to keep going, part of me wants to focus less on the theory and more on the reality of building a business.
I wasn’t sure how much of this was about learning and how much was about confidence. Having finished, I think the answer is both, and that’s healthy. My instincts weren’t bad or wrong, but they were incomplete and at times misdirected. Now I understand the framework better.
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