The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital


Book Description

Venture capital is a powerful tool for entrepreneurship--one that can help overcome some of the challenges of starting and scaling a new business. It's notoriously easy for founders to take wrong turns in their path to financing a company--but many mistakes are avoidable with the right knowledge. Author Andy Sparks is a three-time founder whose goal is helping entrepreneurs avoid pain, costly mistakes, and fruitless research. Topics covered include: assessing whether to raise; determining how much to raise and understanding how valuation and dilution are connected to how much you raise; choosing a financing structure; creating a target list of investors; designing and delivering your pitch and what to expect in investor meetings; everything a founder needs to know about term sheets (created with startup lawyers!), including sample term sheets.




Angel Investing


Book Description

Angel Investing: Start to Finish is the most comprehensive practical and legal guide written to help investors and entrepreneurs avoid making expensive mistakes. Angel investing can be fun, financially rewarding, and socially impactful. But it can also be a costly endeavor in terms of money, time, and missed opportunities. Through the successes, failures, and collective experience of the authors you’ll learn how to navigate the angel investment process to maximize your chances of success and manage downside risks as an investor or entrepreneur. You’ll learn how: - Lead investors evaluate deals - Lawyers think through term sheets - To keep perspective through losses and triumphs This book will also be of use to founders raising an angel round, who will be wise to learn how decisions are made on the other side of the table. No matter where you’re starting from, this book will give you the context to become a savvier thinker, a better negotiator, and a positive member of the angel investing and startup communities.




The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring


Book Description

Learn how the best teams hire software engineers and fill technical roles. The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring is the authoritative guide to growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Hiring is rated as one of the biggest obstacles to growth by most CEOs. Hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers all wrestle with how to source candidates, interview fairly and effectively, and ultimately motivate the right candidates to accept offers. Yet the process is costly, frustrating, and often stressful or unfair to candidates. Anyone who cares about building effective software teams will return to this book again and again. Inside, you'll find know-how from some of the most insightful and experienced leaders and practitioners—senior engineers, recruiters, entrepreneurs, and hiring managers—who’ve built teams from early-stage startups to thousand-person engineering organizations. The lead author of this guide, Ozzie Osman, previously led product engineering at Quora and teams at Google, and built (and sold) his own startup. Additional contributors include Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox; Jennifer Kim, former head of diversity at Lever; veteran recruiters and startup founders Jose Guardado (founder of Build Talent and former Y Combinator) and Aline Lerner (CEO of Interviewing.io); and over a dozen others. Recruiting and hiring can be done well, in a way that has a positive impact on companies, employees, and every candidate. With the right foundations and practice, teams and candidates can approach a stressful and difficult process with knowledge and confidence. Ask your employer if you can expense this book—it's one of the highest-leverage investments they can make in your team.




Outsmarting Social Media


Book Description

The war is on. The titanic battle between Google and Facebook has begun—and you can use it to earn more profits! In this book, Evan Bailyn reveals how to attract friendship-based recommendations that will motivate customers more than any ad or algorithm. Bailyn explains how today’s Internet titans are battling to control the future of search and social media, and shows how to use their newest innovations to supercharge your marketing. Packed with case studies from Bailyn’s pioneering clients, Outsmarting Social Media offers detailed predictions, careful analysis, and—above all—practical techniques. Read it, get ready for the future, and start reaping the rewards! You’ll Learn How To: • Discover where search and social media are headed, and what it means to you • Implement strategies that work right now–and will work even better in the future • Begin profiting from friendships, personal relationships, and tastemakers • Start using today’s new currency of trust: likes, comments, retweets, shares, and video responses • Use social discovery to deliver messages with stunning personal relevance • Master the “Search and Sell” method for profitingfrom real-time search • Sell through personalized recommendations delivered straight to smartphones • Build your business with Foursquare and Facebook Places check-ins • Learn effective, low-risk ways to use Groupon-style “daily deals” • Mine cash from social data in entertainment, beauty, shopping, food, travel, health, and other verticals • Prepare for emerging shifts in pay-per-click, organic SEO, and web display ad markets • Preview tomorrow’s most exciting new social players, platforms, products, and services







Land Your Dream Design Job


Book Description

You've just found the most detailed guide ever written to landing a product design job. Understand what you want, build your portfolio, interview with confidence, and get the job that's right for you.




The Fundraising Strategy Playbook


Book Description

How do you raise startup capital to bring your vision to life? The Fundraising Strategy Playbook teaches you how to deliver a compelling pitch, generate investor demand, negotiate your terms, and determine your founder/funder fit. You’ll learn how to build your funding stack and get creative with how you source capital to achieve different milestones in your company’s journey. Written by a founder for founders, this book empowers entrepreneurs to know their options and take charge of their company’s financial future whether it’s by supercharging early revenue generation, sourcing non-dilutive financing (equity free money!), or raising venture capital. Packed with insights from entrepreneurs with $600M+ exits, legendary VCs (Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Techstars, 500 Startups, and more), and innovation enthusiasts like Jason Feifer (Entrepreneur Magazine), this book is filled with answers to the questions you wish you could ask the most accomplished entrepreneurial minds. This is the smart entrepreneur’s playbook on how to intelligently raise capital for the long haul success of a startup. The contents of this book include: • Part 1) Fundraising Fundamentals (sources of capital, venture capital fundraising process, and more) • Part 2) Elements + Design Principles of a Pitch Deck • Part 3) The Art of Persuasive Pitching • Part 4) Fundraising Strategy (how to plan a raise, types of investments, designing your funding stack, evaluating founder/funder fit, and more) • Part 5) Fundraising Strategy for Female Founders • Part 6) Fundraising Strategy for International Companies




Startup Boards


Book Description

An essential guide to understanding the dynamics of a startup's board of directors Let's face it, as founders and entrepreneurs, you have a lot on your plate—getting to your minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups, especially to keep you on track, call you out when you flail, and in some cases, save you from yourself. In Startup Boards, Brad Feld—a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist—shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help you understand your startup's milestones and get to them faster, and hold you accountable. Details the process of choosing board members, including interviewing many people, checking references, and remembering that there should be no fear in rejecting a wrong fit Explores the importance of running great meetings, mixing social time with business time, and much more Recommends being a board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation Engaging and informative, Startup Boards is a practical guide to one of the most important pieces of the startup puzzle.




How To Raise A Venture Capital Fund


Book Description

Despite all of the writing on venture capital, there is a missing part of the literature. There has been no book written about raising a venture capital fund. It remains a secret to a few privileged venture capitalists who have gone through this fundraising process. Until now . . . This book serves as a guide. It dives into the process of raising a venture capital fund, the how-tos, the unique language of the limited partner (LP) world, secrets of how LPs think about fund diligence and alignment, the best practices in fundraising, what works, and how you can best prepare for success. I've written this book after spending a decade investing into venture capital funds at a $30B wealth management firm and a $160B technology company. I've been on both sides of the table, the VC and the LP side. I've been behind the scenes managing every aspect of the fundraising process, investing into 80 funds, and reviewing thousands of fund investments. I also co-founded a company that specifically focuses on co-building venture capital businesses, which includes helping VCs understand the intricate dynamics of raising a venture capital fund. After reading my book, you will gain the knowledge and insights gained from these experiences.




Risk-Taking in International Politics


Book Description

Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions