Studying a small amount of economics will also give you this perspective, far more cheaply. (My GF is an economist.)

Where did you get your MBA? I have heard that getting an MBA is more about the connections you make than what you learn. Which school would you recommend if someone wanted to learn all of those things and didn't care about the connections? Preferably somewhere without a 200k price tag.

It is popular to 'bash' MBAs, so everybody says that - in defense of the MBA. But I am fairly certain that most MBA programs will cover this stuff.

I did mine at the University of Tampa, but I don't think you need to necessarily go there to have the same experience I did.

Once you go with an open-mind, I would encourage you to take Econ, Accounting & Finance courses. You don't have to go nuts with these courses either, you can take the other management courses....but the ones that provided the most value to me are those.

Learning to think like someone on Wall Street - with respect to seeing the world as it is, not seeing it how I want it to be - is the most valuable thing I learned.

That being said, the connections are good too - but I am yet to have to draw on them.

Given that I am in the tech startup industry, I don't suppose they will help me much right now. But who knows what the future will hold.

Also, for what it's worth, understanding finance and not being intimidated by legal contracts is also very useful in a startup environment. Every dime I earn, I can visualize my financial statements in my head - which I guess is a good thing.

I guess the trick is to just want to learn these stuff, and in most reputable programs, you will.

It's easy to get into the "I just want to get an A" mindset - don't do that.

Hey, I'd like to know a bit more about how you look differently with a finance foundation. Are there any resources you could recommend for a laymen? I have some basic economics but not much else.

It's kinda hard to quantify exactly - but I look at many things differently. For instance, when I see a product (say in a store, or on TV or something) one of the first things I think about is margins. As in, I immediately start to try and figure out if the margins are fat or thin. Thin margins means that the manufacturer is selling it at barely above cost (which is bad, in my humble opinion - but it depends on your perspective and your goal for that product, because Amazon sells all its hardware on thin margins because that fits into a broader goal which is to sell digital products to you once you own their hardware).

I like to see high-quality products that can command a fat margin in the marketplace, because it usually means that the company will be profitable and can continue making high-quality products (all other things being equal - like they don't commit PR suicide or they don't fumble on the production, etc.).

So that's one subtle way, another way is by evaluating public figures.

One of the most eye-opening things I have experienced is seeing "knowledgeable" people talk absolute garbage and many people listening to them without questioning what they are saying.

One such example is when Jack Welch did his rant about the jobs numbers right before the elections. I am not even talking about from a political perspective, but here you have a "world renowned" ex-CEO of a large company (one of the largest on the planet) and he is talking shit. He knows that the numbers can't be fabricated easily because of the way the system is setup, he also knows that any candidate that fudges the numbers has more to lose than to gain. As in, if Obama did fudge the numbers and the word got out, that would be the end of him. Period. No questions asked. The risk is too large for the reward.

But there are many people that would see who he is, and what he did and assume that he is speaking gospel. But because they don't understand the way the system works, and the incentives at play (Welch is going to be hit with much higher taxes, so obviously he has a vested interest in attacking Obama) they are oblivious and they believe him. Obama "must be" fudging the numbers. It doesn't quite work like that.

Yes, gov'ts do hide things and there are stuff they do that they don't want to get out - but when you understand the incentives that reporters/journalists (and more recently bloggers and every day ppl with smartphones, etc.) have to break "huge stories" you appreciate that it is harder to keep "huge" things secret.

Plus, I see startup ideas and companies differently - again...one of the most drastic changes is that I look at margins more, because they kinda tell you what type of company you have to build. In a thin margin company, there is very little room for error....because the profit you earn on each transaction is so small, so it takes you longer to build up a buffer to help you weather storms. Whereas if you have fat margins, you are more likely to be able to weather winds that will kill thinner margin companies.

One glaring example is looking at the differences in margins of two large companies. Walmart & Apple.

Walmart - $445B in revenues in the last reported year, $15.7B in profits. Apple - $156B in revenues, $41.7B in profits.

So Apple did 1/3rd the revenues, but 3X the profits.

I would much rather run Apple than Walmart. That's just a personal preference. Many people thrive in the low-margin business....Walmart & Amazon are.

That decision, dictates the culture of the company you create. With a fat-margin business, you can invest more liberally in innovation and pay a premium for talent - it's much harder to do that (at the same scale) as with a fat-margin business.

Hope that provides some clarity, let me know if you have any other questions.

Edit 1: As for resources, I would check the finance & economics section of Khan Academy for starters. Then from there just do some reading on the various topics you have learned and start to consume quality journalism like the Financial Times or the Economist. It is staggering the garbage printed/shown elsewhere. Also, try to turn off CNN if you can.

Life: Quitting a stable software job to do a PhD in Finance. The additional technical skills (Writing, Mathematics, Finance, Law, Accounting) and interpersonal skills (Networking, Explaining complex topics) I've gained have been invaluable. I now look at the world in an entirely different way.

I share the same feelings as marcamillion regarding having the "veil" lifted on world affairs. I have a BEng in Aerospace Avionics (Electrical Engineering for air and space craft) but have always worked as a Software Engineer / Developer. After a few years of working full time (big multinational then small ~20 person company) I was wondering "there has to be more to life than this."

While reading online I came across recommendations to read this weekly magazine called "The Economist". It was super hard to get through at first: I didn't know the people, some of the countries, or the financial jargon. But I persisted and each week I'd go and buy it at the newsagent. I'd systematically read each issue from cover to cover. Those first ~15 issues looked like a rainbow; multicoloured post-it notes fanning out from three sides. Whenever I came across a person, word, country, concept I didn't recognize I'd write it on a post-it and affix it to the page. Later, I'd systematically revisit the notes and resolve my ignorance using Google + Wikipedia.

A lot of the time I didn't want to read the whole thing, only the Business, Finance, and Technology sections. However, I forced myself to read about issues in Sudan, or Kyrgyzstan, or politics in South America. I am now so much more aware of the way the world works, what's happening in world politics, financial markets, business, literature. As marcamillion mentions, acquiring this knowledge was liberating.

Programming: Persisting with Haskell until it "clicked".

Over the past 5 years I've revisited Haskell a number of times. Reading tutorials and books; watching videos. I "got" Monads as a mathematical concept, but didn't have a strong grasp of how and why they should be used.

On about 6th crack at it I just sat down and read code. Thousands and thousands of lines of code. Once I'd "groked" a concept from seeing how it was used in real world code I'd go and implement it from scratch. I'd recreate Maybe, then build the Monad typeclass, and finally implement the Monad typeclass for Maybe. I'd do this for Monad transformers, Monoids, Applicative, etc. This was really hard for me. Looking back I realise I was optimizing my learning by always pushing the edge of what I could do.

Over time I gradually became competent at writing Haskell as well as reading and understanding other people code. This additional understanding of functional programming has dramatically change my programming style. I now create a lot more immutable data types. In C++ I'll liberally use const, in Python namedtuples. I get frustrated when a language prevents me from easily mapping and composing functions. I really really value algebraic data types and use them wherever I can.

tl;dr Read The Economist and went to grad school. Learned Haskell and now use immutability and pure functions much more often.

Funnily enough, now that you mentioned it, The Economist did the same for me too. So both my MBA and The Economist completely changed my world view.

One tip is, I actually find the magazines hard to read. Something about the typeface and spacing just screams "dense" to me.

But...what I have done is get the audio version. They are hella long, like 3.5 hours total, but so well produced and VERY nice to consume. Each "article" is about 4 - 7 mins on average, then there are a handful that are 20 minute special reports.

When I think of product/market fit, I think of my addiction to The Economist. I don't think there is a price they could raise it to, that I wouldn't buy it at. And...if I couldn't afford it, I would definitely pirate it :)

I don't think you need to learn Haskell to understand the benefits of immutability. Debugging the java code of someone who wrote big classes with lots of functions changing members of the class did the trick for me.

On the other hand, kudos for going through the hardship of learning Haskell, I will try it at some point.