For example, great businesses tend to have high returns on capital, long growth runways, strong competitive positions, recurring revenues, pricing power, great cash flow conversion, and a host of other traits. We'll help you appreciate the power of each of these.

If a business is high quality, it'll show up in the numbers sooner or later. The problem is: these numbers are expressed in a rather strange language: accrual accounting. We'll show you how to read and speak this language, and how to use it to glean valuable business insights.

To take good decisions, you need:

• The right information (eg, from financial statements),
• The right concepts (eg, time value of money, opportunity cost), and
• The right modeling/analysis technique (eg, LTV vs CAC, DCF).

We'll show you how to bring all these ingredients together.

Businesses have to do 3 things well:

• Raise cash (eg, issue debt/equity) opportunistically,
• Generate cash via operations (eg, manage working capital) intelligently, and
• Use cash (eg, in internal projects, acquisitions, dividends, etc.) wisely.

We'll help you learn these skills.

In our experience, there are widespread mis-conceptions about many business fundamentals. For example, using debt is NOT always bad. Growth is NOT always good. By reasoning from first principles, we'll help you work your way to the truth -- even if it's counter-intuitive.

Throughout the course, we'll build, analyze, and simulate financial models and spreadsheets to help us understand various businesses. We'll give you access to these models, so you can tinker with them, build on them, run your own analyses and simulations, etc.