Interview pt. 2
We are continuing our interview with Nelson and his career experience in Accounting and Finance.
Can you elaborate on the puzzle aspect of accounting?
If you think about the game of monopoly as an allegory for the game of capitalism then you know that strategy and understanding [of the game] are necessary to navigate successfully. Similarly with business or personal goals, having an appropriate understanding and strategy is important to be successful and not energetically diluted or exploited.
So, part of the puzzle is figuring out how to fill up your cup and create a structure so that it's almost automatically refilled? If you set it up properly, then it should require a minimal amount of incremental effort on your behalf, mainly just management. And that's what really fascinated me about these types of accounting and finances structures.
Accounting can also be viewed as a language to learn and is often considered the language of business. This because financial reports “speak” the story of a particular business. As another language example, think of the tax code. It is certainly difficult and challenging but it is a code that can be deciphered. Helping people that are not familiar with the language of accounting, of taxation, is very enjoyable.
You mentioned your father’s influence. What are some stories he shared with you?
Very, very early on, my dad worked for Procter & Gamble in Sales and Business Development which, for those roles, meant he had to drive his own business. He was always very entrepreneurial and he was always very inclusive with me about it.
He would talk and tell me stories, even at a very young age, about things like types of investments. One particular story was the half million dollar BMW that he bought in the early eighties before I was born. The moral being: if he had put the money used to buy that BMW into P & G stock, or some other appreciating asset, then it would be worth close to half a million dollars versus owning a depreciated asset, like a BMW that's essentially in the scrapyard. So that sort of time/ value of money concept was something that I started thinking about early which is essentially a crux of all of the assumptions related to our monetary system.
