Edward Rogoff, NYU professor and author of Bankable business plans. Photo courtesy
“I knew Ed before I started Amazon.com, and I believe his experience with his own successful ventures and as a professor of entrepreneurship make him an outstanding person to accompany you from the first idea to the creation of an effective plan that needs of your customers and investors.”
– Jeff Bezos, excerpt from his foreword to Edward Rogoff’s Bankable business plans.
Longtime New Yorker and NYU entrepreneurship professor Edward Rogoff recently wrote his third iteration his book Bankable business plansA Step-by-step guide to creating a business planwith a foreword by none other than Amazon founder and once richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.
Rogoff’s book “Bankable Business Plans”
How he and Bezos met is “one of those New York stories,” laughs Rogoff.
Rogoff and his wife owned a three-unit building in Manhattan in 1993. They lived in one apartment and rented out the other two.
“A young man shows up and says, ‘I graduated from Princeton, work at an investment bank, and would like to rent an apartment,'” Rogoff says. Poets and Quants.
The young man was Bezos and eventually rented a job at Rogoff for three years.
A snapshot
“He’s a lovely guy and what he’s accomplished is incredible,” says Rogoff, who says Bezos initially moved in with a friend who later became his wife, Mackenzie. “They bought a dog and my children looked after the dog when they were away, so we became and remained friends.”
When Rogoff contacted Bezos, his former tenant was happy to write the foreword. “He couldn’t have made it easier,” he says.
The book is now in its third edition. While some authors update their foreword for new editions, Rogoff chose to keep the original, written by Bezos. It is a snapshot, he says, of one of the most successful businessmen of all time.
“For any student who is at the stage where they say, ‘I’m thinking about starting a company, I’m starting to write a plan,’ this book couldn’t be more relatable,” says Rogoff. “That’s the stage Bezos was in when he wrote this foreword.”
INSPIRATION FOR WRITING BANKING BUSINESS PLANS
A young Jeff Bezos rented a New York apartment from NYU professor Edward Rogoff. Years later, Bezos wrote the foreword to Rogoff’s book. Photo by Business Insider
Rogoff learned the ins and outs of his father’s delicatessen as a child. He attended Columbia University with dreams of going into politics. He changed his mind and decided to study economics instead.
“The business suited me much better,” he says.
Rogoff studied under none other than Nobel Prize-winning economist William Vickrey, who coined the term “congestion pricing,” and focused his doctoral research on the economics of the New York taxi industry. Vickery, he says, “was the most supportive faculty mentor I could have asked for.”
The next step was to step forward. He got a job teaching the first entrepreneurship course at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, which he said was one of the largest business schools in the United States at the time.
Rogoff says that at the time, he thought the textbooks he and other teachers used had limited value.
“In class, I only criticized the books,” he laughs. That was the motivation to write his own book, the first edition of which was published in 2002.
“I am satisfied with the development of the book”
He saysThe biggest difference between the first and third edition of Bankable business plans There was a new feature called “Entrepreneur’s Toolkit” with information on the basics of entrepreneurship, creativity as a process, successful teamwork, brainstorming and interview techniques.
“I’m pleased with how the book is developing,” says Rogoff, who currently teaches entrepreneurship and business communications courses at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
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