Edward Rogoff, NYU professor and author of Bankable Business Plans. Courtesy photo
“I knew Ed before I started Amazon.com, and I believe his experiences with his own successful ventures and as a professor of entrepreneurship make him an excellent person to guide you from initial idea through the creation of an effective plan that will serve the needs of your customers and investors.”
– Jeff Bezos, excerpt from his foreword to Edward Rogoff’s Bankable Business Plans.
Lifelong New Yorker and NYU entrepreneurship professor Edward Rogoff has recently written his third iteration of his book Bankable Business Plans, a step by step guide to setting up a business plan, with a foreword written by none other than Amazon founder and onetime world’s richest man Jeff Bezos.
Rogoff’s book, Bankable Business Plans
How he and Bezos met, Rogoff laughs, is “one of those New York stories.”
Rogoff and his wife owned a three-apartment building in Manhattan back in 1993 in Manhattan. They lived in one apartment and rented out the other two.
“This young guy shows up and says, ‘I graduated from Princeton, I work at an investment bank, and I’d like to rent an apartment,’” Rogoff tells Poets&Quants.
The young guy was Bezos, and he ended up renting from Rogoff for three years.
A SNAPSHOT IN TIME
“He’s a lovely guy, and what he accomplished was incredible,” says Rogoff, who says that Bezos initially moved in with a girlfriend at the time, who later became his wife Mackenzie. “They bought a dog, and my kids took care of the dog when they were away, so we became and stayed friendly.”
When Rogoff reached out to Bezos, his former tenant happily wrote the foreword. “He couldn’t have made it easier,” he says.
The book is now on its third edition. While some authors choose to update their foreword for new editions, Rogoff chose to keep the original written by Bezos. It’s a snapshot in time, he says, from one of the world’s all-time most successful businessmen.
“For any students who are in the phase of ‘I’m thinking of starting a business, I’m beginning to write a plan,’ this book couldn’t be more relatable for them,” says Rogoff, “That’s the stage Bezos was in when he wrote this foreword.”
INSPIRATION BEHIND WRITING BANKABLE BUSINESS PLANS
A young Jeff Bezos rented a New York apartment from NYU prof Edward Rogoff. Years later Bezos wrote the foreword to Rogoff’s book. Business Insider photo
Rogoff grew up learning the ins and outs of his father’s deli. He attended Columbia University with dreams of going into politics. He changed his mind and decided to go to business school instead.
“Business was a much better fit for me,” he says.
Studying under none other than Nobel Prize-winning economist William Vickrey, who coined the term “congestion pricing,” Rogoff focused his Ph.D. dissertation on the economics of the New York City taxi cab industry. Vickery, he says, “was the most supportive faculty mentor I could possibly expect to have.”
The next step was moving to the front of the classroom. He won a position teaching the first-ever entrepreneurship course at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, which he says was then one of the largest B-schools in the U.S.
Rogoff says that at the time, he thought the information in the textbooks he and other teachers were teaching from had limited information.
“All I was doing in class was criticizing the books,” he laughs. That was the motivation behind writing his own book, with the first edition published in 2002.
‘I’M HAPPY WITH HOW THE BOOK HAS EVOLVED’
He says the biggest difference between his first and third editions of Bankable Business Plans were a new feature called the “Entrepreneur’s Toolkit,” with bits on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, creativity as a process, how to work successfully in teams, brainstorming, and interviewing techniques.
“I’m happy with how the book has evolved,” says Rogoff, who currently teaches entrepreneurship and business communications courses at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
