The Holloway team is thrilled to announce our second production, The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital. At Holloway, our mission is to publish the best knowledge on navigating the challenges of modern work, for all to find. We believe the best knowledge is most helpful when it’s all in one place — without scavenger hunts for reliable sources and endless sifting through ad-driven content.
At a special event with AngelList this evening, we’ll be opening up the Guide to a group of 200 beta readers and reviewers from the community. It’s still a work in progress — we believe it’s important to get feedback on where the Guide is helpful and where it can be better. Over the next two months, we’ll be inviting several more batches of beta readers. If you’d like to get early access, join on the waitlist here.
Our Guides are a lot like books, but with a few key differences. Like books, our authors have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours researching and writing the material, and are subject matter experts with years of hands-on experience. Each title goes through rigorous edits, review from experts, and feedback from the community. What began as an outline in the fall of 2016 is now a 200+ page manuscript with over 600 linked resources. We’ve consulted with professional attorneys, studied hundreds of blog posts currently scattered all over the web, and we’ve poured thousands of hours into research, writing, and editing.
Holloway Guides are lengthy because they consolidate all the material a reader would need to navigate the entirety of a large, gnarly challenge. Each chapter is written to be the most useful resource possible for navigating a part of that challenge. These are reference works. You don’t need to read every single chapter all at once, but can navigate to the chapters that speak to where you are in a given process. “Assessing Whether to Raise,” for example, should be the best resource you can find anywhere when thinking through the costs and benefits of raising venture capital. We don’t believe in fluff, unless it’s on sandwiches.
So what’s different from a book? Our Guides are written from the ground up to be living, and built for the web. We do our best to make a great reading experience on every screen. We’ve built context-specific mouseovers to help with tricky terms. We link heavily to other useful resources you can quickly click your way to. We can gather feedback and make updates on the fly. We’ve built search functionality that goes beyond what we’ve come to expect from media sites, from Google, and reading apps like Kindle.
But our challenges are not only in the reading experience. To make this all possible, at a scale to help millions of people navigate challenges, Holloway has to be a good business as well the best source of knowledge on modern work. We released our first Guide on Equity Compensation, for free. This new Guide, when released, won’t be entirely free. The way we see it, we have a choice to make: chase advertising dollars, or ask readers who benefit from the content to pay for it. We’ve all seen how an internet built on the back of advertising turns out, so we ruled out ads when we started the company. We are not in the business of selling ads or user data. No shenanigans except the occasional office prank.
When we announce the release of The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital, it will be accessible to the broader public via a subscription or sliding purchase system. We’ll spend the next few months excitedly going through feedback from early readers on how we can make it the most helpful resource in existence on navigating the challenges of raising venture capital. Join the waitlist here.