I work in consulting and have been working for a client in finance for the past two years working on greenfield applications for them.
I haven't gone too far out of the way to learn aspects of finance other than through exposure and osmosis. As long as there's someone on the team that really understands it on a deep level, you don't have to be that person to be effective, at least on the frontend (which has been my focus for this client, although I am doing a bit more backend now).
Hasn't stopped me from implementing complicated features as requested and discussed, just asking questions for what's expected, what the data should look like when it's done correctly, etc, but now I do understand it a lot better and I can mostly follow along during deep discussions (some of it still goes over my head though).
That being said, you can pick up books on finance to help you understand things better. For me, I discovered recently (stumbled upon it at a used bookstore, actually), that I should probably pick up textbooks on Quantitative Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management in order to understand those deeper discussions better, but the focus of your startup might be different.
I haven't gone too far out of the way to learn aspects of finance other than through exposure and osmosis. As long as there's someone on the team that really understands it on a deep level, you don't have to be that person to be effective, at least on the frontend (which has been my focus for this client, although I am doing a bit more backend now).
Hasn't stopped me from implementing complicated features as requested and discussed, just asking questions for what's expected, what the data should look like when it's done correctly, etc, but now I do understand it a lot better and I can mostly follow along during deep discussions (some of it still goes over my head though).
That being said, you can pick up books on finance to help you understand things better. For me, I discovered recently (stumbled upon it at a used bookstore, actually), that I should probably pick up textbooks on Quantitative Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management in order to understand those deeper discussions better, but the focus of your startup might be different.