What you'll learn

Skills you'll gain

Specialization - 4 course series

Learners will learn how to valuate entrepreneurial ventures, build capitalization tables and explore different financing strategies for your startup company, identify opportunities to disrupt and innovate business models using blockchain, and use R programming to calculate the return of a stock portfolio.

How do different types of investors think about an investment opportunity? What kind of securities and contracts do they offer? How should a company decide what is a "good deal"? This course is designed to introduce you to the challenges and pitfalls of financing new enterprises. You will learn the basic tools for valuating companies, including using discounted cashflow analysis in Excel and understanding how to apply this model to your entrepreneurial venture. You will then learn how valuation works with different types of securities that investors use to finance startups, from bank loans to venture capital to angel investing.

This course concludes with a module featuring cutting edge research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business on the financial technology industry. In this module, you will learn how financial technology companies are disrupting the credit scoring industry by developing new methods for credit scoring using consumers’ digital footprints. In addition, you will explore how financial technology platforms have introduced new, experimental forms of financing, such as crowdfunding.

Blockchain is an emerging and highly disruptive technology that is poorly understood. In this course you will learn what blockchain is and how it can create value by tokenization in cryptocurrencies and in many other practical applications. The applications include: stablecoins (like Facebook’s Libra and JP Morgan’s JPMCoin), machine to machine payments, identity protection, supply chain management (Walmart, Maersk, IBM), secure voting, distributed exchanges, decentralized finance, property transfers, central bank fiat crypto (e.g., Fedcoin and China’s digital Renminbi), dispensing prescription drugs, private records, intellectual property, financial reporting, and media and advertising, to name a few. The goals of the course are to: (i) provide an advanced understanding of the various blockchain technologies; (ii) determine the specific business situations where blockchain technology can be deployed to solve important problems; (iii) select the specific blockchain technology that has the best chance of success for a particular problem; and (iv) detail the risks presented by this new technology.

This course teaches you how to calculate the return of a portfolio of securities as well as quantify the market risk of that portfolio, an important skill for financial market analysts in banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other financial services and investment firms. Using the R programming language with Microsoft Open R and RStudio, you will use the two main tools for calculating the market risk of stock portfolios: Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). You will need a beginner-level understanding of R programming to complete the assignments of this course.

Financing for Startup Businesses

Blockchain Business Models

Financial Risk Management with R