Entrepreneurial Finance: Strategy and Innovation

From entrepreneurs to executives, this Specialization provides an opportunity for you to learn how to advance business innovation in your company and gain insights from leading faculty in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. In the first course, you will learn how to valuate entrepreneurial ventures—including high-growth startups—using Excel spreadsheet models. You will also learn how to discern between the tradeoffs of different financing strategies: loan investments, venture capital, angel investing, and crowdfunding. The second course will teach you how to manage a startup’s financing strategy, where you will learn how to build capitalization tables (or “cap tables”) in Excel. Cap tables will help you explore different financing strategies for your startup company and determine which financing decisions are best for your entrepreneurial venture. The third course transitions to an analysis of blockchain technologies, where you will learn how to identify opportunities to disrupt and innovate business models using blockchain as well as avoid poorly executed applications of blockchain to business. The fourth course will teach you how to use R programming to calculate the return of a stock portfolio as well as quantify the market risk of that portfolio. This Specialization is also an excellent opportunity for professionals interested in Fuqua’s master’s programs to get an inside look into Fuqua’s faculty expertise and courses

• Evaluate entrepreneurial ventures using Excel models
• Build capitalization tables in Excel and analyze financing strategies
• Identify blockchain opportunities to innovate business models
• Use R programming to calculate stock portfolio returns

• Basic familiarity with common terminology in the field
• Willingness to engage in applied exercises or case studies