Economics of Entrepreneurship. Raaj Chatterjee's Lecture!

Hi everyone, my name is Thamira Seralathan and I’m currently a student at the Illuminate Leadership Academy. Last Thursday we had the pleasure of meeting Raaj Chatterjee as a lecturer for the weekly lecture series at the academy. Here are my thoughts highlighting what I took away from his lecture!

Before I get into the details of what we learned from Raaj I’d like to say that it was a true blast to meet someone more close to our age and talk. The whole 2 hours we spent together was very interactive and had a nice “vibe”. Everyone was comfortable with asking questions and participating as well.

He first started off by introducing himself as the founder and CEO of Meaningful work, Researcher at the SFU Centre for Engineering-Led Brain Research, and Former Apple Engineer. Afterwards we had a Q&A session where he answered all of our questions and the questions everyone asked and the answers he gave were very useful.

After the Q&A session we had, Raaj got into talking about the economics of entrepreneurship which was basically what the lecture was about. He introduced the money model to us which is the numbers behind a business.

The money model has two major parts and he explained that one is the core money model (pricing,cost,market) and the other is the pro formula (financial projections). Understanding the money model is very important when running a business because it's one of the key components into running your own company. It’s also important to have financial documents such as income statements, balance sheets, etc. You need to be able to explain why an item is priced the way it is.

7 Core Money Model Steps:

1. Unit Economics

2. Repeatable Opportunity

3. Positive Earnings/Positive Cash-flow

4. Growth Multiplier/ Scaling Mechanisms

5. Capacity Considerations

6. Cash Funding Requirements

7. Terms, Timeframe, Target Return

One thing he told us that I believe is very important in finding a career for yourself is to find a career path that you are passionate about, and tips for developing your passion is through hands-on experiences. Overall, it was a great lecture and it was a pleasure to meet Raaj Chatterjee as his lecture was very informative!