Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital

This guide is the most comprehensive resource of its kind available, with contribution and review from experienced founders, lawyers, and investors-including Brad Feld, José Ancer, Camille Ricketts, Leo Polovets, Clerky co-founders Darby Wong and Chris Field, Danielle Morrill, Joe Wallin (co-author of the Holloway book, Angel Investing: Start to Finish), and many more. It will help any founder raise the right way, with confidence. This print edition includes lifetime digital access to additional features and future updates at Holloway.com.

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

This book also includes appendices on networking and mentorship for founders, how venture capitalists make money (think returns, management fees, and carried interest), and a list of example pitch decks.

Raising venture capital isn''t inevitable for every startup or every founder. The best founders go into the process of raising money with their eyes wide open to all the possibilities, including alternate ways to raise, and the options available to them, from financing structures to pitch designs to what terms to fight for. They can anticipate the next steps in the process before they begin, and ask themselves the important questions along the way. They know what will change between each round, and what to keep an eye out for when it comes to risks and pitfalls. They''ll know how those good relationships-with investors, other founders, their team, and their customers-are the most important part of building a successful company, and they know just how to find, foster, and sustain those relationships.

Let the Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital be there for you, the trusted friend you can turn to again and again.

"Founders shouldn''t have to figure fundraising out the hard way when they can learn from those who have already been through the process. The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital is full of practical advice that will be helpful to any entrepreneur." -- Brad Feld (Foundry Group)

"Though it''s getting better, venture capital has traditionally been a fairly closed, blackbox field. This Guide democratizes and demystifies the VC ecosystem, which is an important step toward building a more diverse and inclusive industry." -- Lindsay Knight (Chicago Ventures)

"I wish this resource had existed back when I was a CEO raising money from VCs. In my work today as a seed investor, I share with my portfolio founders a lot of the knowledge gathered in this Guide. Now that this definitive resource exists, I''m going to send it to every founder I work with!" -- Rafael Corrales (Background Capital)