You don’t need to be an accountant to start a company but you should become intimate with key accounting metrics. Lack of financial literacy is the greatest threat to a global surge in entrepreneurship. Most companies fail because their founders had little or no financial acumen.
Such was almost the case with my first company. Pockets filled with seed money, I worked hard on creating nice products and chasing down new customers only to be in deep trouble within a year. The only financial focus I took was to deposit cheques and pay bills. The only metric I looked at was my bank balance and as money ran dry. The less I had in my account the more I looked at it. The disaster was avoided only after I brought in a great CFO and took classes on accounting.
Dispatches From The Front 