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.

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.

The Program

1. Startup Valuation Methods
   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.
2. Financing for Startup Businesses
   This 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. You will also learn about innovations in the digital space that allow new ways to finance entrepreneurial ventures. These include different forms of crowdfunding, and alternative credit scoring mechanisms based on web-based data.
3. Blockchain Business Models
   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.
4. Financial Risk Management with R
   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.

What you will learn

• V​aluate entrepreneurial ventures using Excel.

• ​Build capitalization tables in Excel and explore different financing strategies for your startup company.

• Identify opportunities to use blockchain to disrupt and innovate business models.

• ​Use R programming to calculate the return of a stock portfolio.