Welcome to Personal Finance for Startup Founders!

This course is everything I have learnt about money and personal finances — and a playbook for the knowledge I wish I had when I was building and selling my first business.

My Background

My name is Ankur Nagpal and I’m a second-time startup founder. Everything in this course is a result of hard-won lessons over the last decade building and investing in startups.

• I was born in India and grew up in Oman in the Middle East before moving to America for college.
• I started a business out of my dorm room that built and monetized Facebook applications. I made millions of dollars in this business (that I paid stupidly high taxes on)
• At 24, I started Teachable. Over the next 6 years, we scaled the business to $60M in ARR and an eventual ~$250M acquisition. Selling the company here was an inflection point for getting interested in personal finance and startups.
• At 31, I started Vibe Capital, an early stage venture fund that raised ~$80M and invested in 80+ tech startups.
• At 32, I started Carry — the platform you are on now with the mission of helping business owners build wealth by being smart about money and taxes.

General Principles

1 - The majority of your time should not be spent on Personal Finance

Ironically enough, you should not spend too much time on personal finances.

Startups are largely a binary outcome — if your business is successful, you will be rich — otherwise, you will likely make nothing.

Spend most of your time making something people want — talk to customers, improve your product and grow your revenue.

2 - Beware of premature optimization

It’s worth getting some of the basics right upfront, but beyond that it’s a game of optimizing when the time is right. There are a couple of really important things you don’t want to mess up:

• How you incorporate
• Accidentally messing up your QSBS eligibility

But beyond that, a lot of what’s in this course will help you optimize. It will unfortunately not be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful company.

3 - The goal is not just to win financially yourself — but also enable those around you to participate in the upside.

As a founder, you directly impact the lives of so many people around you — your team, their family, your investors and so on.

The goal of this course is not just to teach you how to win yourself, but how to enable those around you to share in the success as well.

How to Use This Course