Eleven years ago to this day I decided to start something that would help people who wanted to understand and learn finance, learn finance.  A decade and some change later in a long forgotten folder, a dusty database yielded 150 concepts we had written for an online education venture that was bootstrapped at Columbia in 1999, but died in May 2001 and was buried in June 2002.

I have dug through the deepest reaches of my storage and started uploading what I found on the Learning Corporate Finance blog.  Some of you may just want to take a peek at the content that made Avicena the exciting place to be that it became at the turn of the century.  Others may browse through the content looking for that interesting nugget that may hold their interest.  Irrespective of your original motivation, I thought you would probably get as big a kick out of this trip down the Reboot lane as I did sifting through old word files and memories.

While the content and the examples posted here are quite dated (turn of the century and the boom years of 1999-2000) the covered concepts, applications and tools are still very relevant for the audience we had targeted 10 years ago – first timers who wanted to get a little deeper into finance, preferably online, without cracking a thick book.  Didn’t matter if you were an MBA student or a first year Associate, rather than digging up your notes or text books out of storage boxes, the content we wrote would serve as a quick and dirty refresher.

In the interest of historical integrity (right) and my time constraints the interface is quite spartan (putting it mildly).  It’s just text and tables, no better than a simple data dump. For in 1999, it was a world before Ajax, WordPress and Web 2.0.  Searchable, reasonably well written, but still text and tables.

On the plus side if you do know of someone who is struggling with Finance, I would love to hear their take on this content.  That of course means that you would need to forward this blog link onwards to them.  (Nothing short of shameless self promotion will be acceptable.) And if you are a fellow blogger, a blog post,  a tweet, even a face book link would be very much appreciated.

Course material is broken down into bite sized concepts and topics and giant application oriented cases.  If you are new to this, start with the first course on Corporate Finance, followed by Ratio Analysis, followed by Leverage or the Credit Analysis course, followed by the Credit Process course.

To learn more about the sequence of events that led to these pages being written and uploaded here, follow the white rabbit.

I was introduced to Finance when I built my first financial model in Lotus 123 at the tender age of 14 years.  Since then, spread sheets, financial models and financial analysis have been the main stay of my work.  For a more interesting history of all the mean and nasty thing I have been up to take a look at me and myself as well as my blog that acts as my primary ranting and blood pressure control mechanism.

Over the last 17 years, I have worked as an actuary, built and implemented insurance, risk  and treasury systems as part of my day job, spent all of four months at Goldman in London, picked up an MBA from Columbia Business School, valued derivative contracts and taught in Karachi, Dubai and Singapore on the Alchemy, Consultnomics and S P Jain platforms.

To learn more about Jawwad:

Read reviews about the first edition of Reboot (the Blue Screen of Death).

Download the first 25 pages from the first edition of Reboot (the Blue Screen of Death).

Learn more about Reboot

Jawwad’s slideshare presentation deck

Jawwad’s Facebook Fan Page

Reboot and Jawwad on Green and White

Reboot review in The News

Jawwad Farid, Reboot and the CIO Webstudio Interview