Founders need to get smart quickly about the many nuanced aspects of building a company, from understanding weird language in a big term sheet to hiring a key software developer.

But the best practical advice is scattered across blog posts, podcasts and books, and it gets outdated quickly as industry norms evolve. Even experienced founders spend a lot of time searching and still end up with the wrong information.

Holloway has an ambitious solution: Today, it’s launching a library of book-length online guides about work, written and regularly updated by teams of industry experts.

The flagship title is called Raising Venture Capital, which features 340 thoughtfully organized pages in 15 sections and three appendices on all aspects of the funding process. Designed for easy reading and easy searching in spite of the information density and length (it has a 14-hour total read-time), the guide could become a go-to resource for the startup world.

Some sections will be most appealing to newer founders, like the part on whether to raise VC in the first place. Other portions are relevant to even the most experienced serial entrepreneurs — like how to think through potential drag-along and pay-to-play provisions, full-ratchet anti-dilution clauses and other tricky terms one might find. Did you know that investors can include more than 20 types of conditions in a term sheet? Do you know how to handle each one?

With $4.6 million in seed funding from a combination of top tech investors and The New York Times that it is also announcing now, Holloway intends to expand to cover the wide variety of work-related topics about startups and technology, and beyond. The next guide, currently in progress, will be on technical hiring and recruiting. A relatively shorter sample guide on equity compensation is already available for free.The goal is to democratize access to how the best are doing business today (and take on traditional publishing).

“We didn’t just do this for Silicon Valley and New York,” and other startup-heavy cities, co-founder and chief executive Andy Sparks tells me, “we did this for people in cities like Columbus and Atlanta where startup communities are growing, but knowledge is harder to come by.”

The lawyers and other experts who author and edit the guides could otherwise cost more than $800 an hour, he explains, and won’t have time for many clients in the first place. (The company estimates there are $40,000 worth of legal fees in the VC guide.)

Sparks, previously the co-founder of analytics platform Mattermark, is also the lead author on “Raising Venture Capital” — along with another 20 or so contributors, like Brad Feld of the Foundry Group, and Darby Wong, co-founder of the popular legal document startup Clerky . The lead author of the technical recruiting guide is Ozzie Osman, former head of product engineering at Quora, and a main contributor to it is Aditya Agarwal, the former CTO of Dropbox.

The current pricing is $100 per guide forever (including future updates), with a discount available if you pre-order. Sparks says this may change to ensure the guides stay affordable, as well as cover the very real costs of producing this quality of content.

The big-picture bet is that the startup market is large enough to create strong demand for the initial guides, in the same way that many successful tech startups of this decade have started out serving companies like themselves. Some of the topics that Holloway is working on, like tech recruiting, naturally blend in with the rest of the business world and those wider audiences. Eventually, through expansion into broader work-related topics, Holloway’s online-first approach could compete against the existing book publishing industry at a bigger scale.

This is why the company is investing heavily in its software, in addition to its content. The interface was inspired by the experiences of co-founder Joshua Levy, a veteran technologist who found himself writing popular third-party guides on GitHub about how to use common services like AWS. Features in the software include search results that break out sections and sources, a detailed left-hand index view, a hyperlinked in-house glossary of hundreds of key terms, notes of warning and importance from experts and numerous links to third-party sources.

“We decided to invest in a digital reading experience that makes reading book-length content in a browser a great experience,” Sparks said, “which also means you will land on the right guide when you go hunting for answers on search engines like Google .”

Holloway co-founders Joshua Levy (left) and Andy Sparks (right)

You’ll even see a number of links to TechCrunch and Extra Crunch articles in the guides. Sparks tells me that the company plans to continue to link to a wide variety of sources in the future — so when guest columnists write something great and practical on Extra Crunch, we will help them to get this work featured in Holloway as well. The company is also accepting a variety of contributor types for its guides going forward, which you can find more details about here.

(On that note, we’ve published an excerpt from Holloway’s “Raising Venture Capital” guide, about pro rata terms and issues, on Extra Crunch. Subscribers can go check it out here, and find a special discount to Holloway inside.)

Sparks is careful to say that the current guides are not literally finished, despite all the effort put into them so far. And indeed, they will never be. Holloway is named after the “hollow ways” seen in the European countryside, where well-used roads have gradually sunk through hundreds of years of regular use. The company intends for its guides to be the paths that people who build companies tread year after year, where the knowledge that accumulates from the usage of many forms the clear direction that those in the future take.

The company’s investors include NEA, South Park Commons, The New York Times Co., Precursor Ventures and Comcast Ventures as well as Day One Ventures, Social Capital, Abstract Ventures, 415, Royal Bank of Canada, Lightspeed Ventures, & Full Tilt Capital. Angels include Leo Polovets, Lee Linden, Raj De Datta, Neil Parikh, Mikhail Larionov, Danielle & Kevin Morrill, Srinath Sridhar, Dennis Phelps and Kevin Lee.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Holloway launches in-depth startup guides, aims to rewrite publishing with .6M from NYT, tech VCs

In the context of a term sheet, pro rata rights (or pro rata) govern whether investors may continue to invest in subsequent rounds of funding in proportion with their ownership. Investors with pro rata rights can invest in the company’s next round an amount that will allow them to maintain their ownership percentage.

This is an excerpt from the Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital, a comprehensive resource for founders of early-stage startups, covering technical details, practical knowledge, real-world scenarios, and pitfalls to avoid. Read our accompanying article about the company over on TechCrunch.  

Pro rata is Latin for “in proportion.” Most people are familiar with the concept of prorating from dealing with landlords: if you’re entering into a lease halfway through the month, your rent may be prorated, where you pay an amount of the rent that is in proportion to your time actually occupying the property.

Almost all investors try to negotiate for pro rata rights, because if a company is doing well they want to own as much of it as possible. After all, why not double down on a winner than use that same money to invest in a newer, unproven company? In the 2018–2019 fundraising climate, though, it’s safe to say we’re at “peak pro rata.” Everybody wants pro rata, even those who don’t entirely understand how it works or affects companies.

Some founders include a major investor clause in the term sheet, which reserves certain rights and privileges to those they deem “major investors,” based on amount invested or number of shares purchased. Whether to grant pro rata rights to all investors or only those above a major investor threshold is a tricky decision for two reasons.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | What founders need to know about pro rata rights

Figma, the startup looking to put design tools in the cloud, has today announced new plug-ins for the platform that will help users clean up their workflows.

Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field says that plug-ins have been the most requested feature from users since the company’s launch. So, for the last year, the team has been working to build plug-in functionality on the back of Figma’s API (launched in March 2018) with three main priorities: stability, speed and security.

The company has been testing plug-ins in beta for a while now, with 40 plug-ins approved at launch today.

Here are some of the standouts from launch today:

On the utility side, Rename It is a plug-in that allows designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work. Content Buddy, on the other hand, gives users the ability to add placeholder text (for things like phone numbers, names, etc.) that they can automatically find and replace later. Stark and ColorBlind are both accessibility plug-ins that help designers make sure their work meets the WCAG 2.0 contrast accessibility guidelines, and actually see their designs through the lens of eight different types of color vision deficiencies, respectively.

Other plug-ins allow for adding animation (Figmotion), changing themes (Themer), adding a map to a design (Map Maker) and more.

Anyone can create plug-ins for public use on the Figma platform, but folks can also make private plug-ins for enterprise use, as well. For example, a Microsoft employee built a plug-in that automatically changes the theme of the design based on the various Microsoft products, such as Word, Outlook, etc.

Field says that the company currently has no plans to monetize plug-ins. Rather, the addition of plug-ins to the platform is a move based on customer happiness and satisfaction. Moreover, Figma’s home on the web allows for the product to evolve more rapidly and in tune with customers. Rather than having to build each individual feature on its own, Figma can now open up the platform to its power users to build what they’d like into the web app.

Figma has raised a total of nearly $83 million since launch, according to Crunchbase. As of the company’s latest funding round ($40 million led by Sequoia six months ago), Figma was valued at $440 million post-funding.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cloud-based design tool Figma launches plug-ins

Asana, the work management platform led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, today launched Workload, a new feature for its paying users that aims to help prevent burnout. It does so by making it easier for businesses to fairly distribute work across their teams and, if necessary, redistribute it.

“The most productive and happiest teams are those that have clarity of who is doing what by when,” said Alex Hood, the head of Product at Asana . “While today’s workplace has more ways to communicate and collaborate than ever before, the majority of teams are still turning to outdated spreadsheets and email chains to plan and manage work.”

The general idea behind Workload is that it provides a central view of how much more work any given team can currently handle. Team members can customize their own workload based on criteria like points or hours and, maybe most importantly, set capacity limits.

One of the first companies to test Workload was fast-casual food chain Panera. “Panera’s creative team averages 45 projects a week, and before Workload, we didn’t have a simplified way to review the team’s bandwidth,” said Jenny Williams, Marketing Traffic manager at Panera Bread. “With Workload, we can easily see assigned tasks and react to bandwidth concerns by negotiating deadlines and, if needed, make a case for additional resources.”

The general ideas behind all of these tools always sound good, of course. It’s no secret that burnout is a major problem and, according to Asana’s own research, 80% of global knowledge workers say they consistently feel overworked and close to burnout. I would take those results with a grain of salt, though, given that few people are going to say that they are barely doing anything — even if they are and their colleagues consistently wonder what they are doing all day. Still, anything that helps to bring down the actual number of burned-out workers is a good thing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Asana launches Workload to help prevent burnout

As two of the largest players in online-food ordering and delivery in Europe work on a $10 billion merger to expand their footprint and economies of scale, one of its biggest rivals has made an acquisition to expand its own tech muscle.

Deliveroo, the London-based food delivery startup backed by Amazon that is itself valued in the billions, has acquired a small Scottish startup called Cultivate, a software development and user experience design house that has worked with a number of big names, including Deliveroo itself.

Deliveroo — which today has 80,000 restaurants and 60,000 riders on its books across 500 cities in 14 markets in Europe and beyond (Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and the United Kingdom) — is subsequently creating a new fintech hub in Edinburgh, where Cultivate is headquartered. It will be run by Andy Robinson, currently chief commercial officer for Cultivate.

“We have a fantastic relationship with Deliveroo, supporting them through an amazing period of growth. We were attracted by the array of interesting problems being tackled by their team, and how they are addressing them using modern and emerging technology,” Robinson said in a statement. “We’re proud to have built such a great team here in Edinburgh, and today’s announcement is a testament to their hard work and expertise in building world-class software. We are excited to continue this work, create highly skilled jobs, and build a centre of tech excellence here in Edinburgh.”

The plan will be to expand the team to 50 in the next three years, hiring engineers, product managers, user researchers, and designers and data scientists. (It’s worth pointing out too that Amazon has been a major employer in Edinburgh, where it also has a key R&D operation working in various areas including AI and search.)

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but it’s likely to be a modest deal.

Cultivate itself was a small (likely around only 15 employees) but profitable business, from the looks of its filings with Companies House. It was also off the radar somewhat as a startup. Originally founded in 2007, Cultivate was initially acquired in 2009 ago by Texas firm EdgeCase, which was then itself acquired by Canadian web firm GroupBy in 2017 in a bid to take on Shopify and rebranded to become Neo. Subsequent to that, Cultivate was amicably spun out again. In that time it had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from unnamed investors.

Deliveroo, founded in 2013 by William Shu and Greg Orlowski, was most recently valued at over $2 billion, although that was before Amazon put $575 million into the company earlier this year. It has raised around $1.5 billion in funding to date.

Cultivate — which had worked for many of clients — will now be working for just one, its owner. The two had already built Deliveroo’s payments technology, but as Deliveroo continues to work on ways to differentiate itself from its competitors through tech, it will be investing more in this area.

In addition to building new (not yet launched) services, some of the other areas of focus for the new Edinburgh operation will be to create more efficient payment systems for riders (which today use a Cash Out feature to access earnings quickly) and restaurants; to expand Deliveroo’s analytics for restaurants to figure out how to better plan for surges and to figure out what is popular and what is not; and (for both restaurants and riders) to better manage finances.

Cultivate had been involved in a number of social enterprise community initiatives to promote technology education alongside its paid work and Deliveroo said these efforts will continue.

“Cultivate have always been at the centre of the tech scene in Edinburgh and have supported events and initiatives across the board,” said Stephen Coleman, CEO of CodeBase, the tech campus in Edinburgh where Cultivate was based. “We are really pleased for the Cultivate team and Deliveroo’s plans to grow here in Scotland and are looking forward to having one of Europe’s top tech companies based here at CodeBase.”

News of this acquisition comes in the same week that Takeaway.com and Just Eat announced that their respective boards had agreed on the basic terms of a merger to create an expanded footprint across Europe.

The deal, if it completes, will not only give the two more economies of scale, and thus a better return on their own tech investment, but the aim will be to help them compete better against the likes of Uber Eats (a major priority for now-public Uber) as well as Deliveroo, which is now continuing its growth now with the might and will of Amazon behind it.

In that context, the Cultivate acquisition is demonstration not just of Deliveroo’s own investments into its tech, but specifically into what is a sizeable and important tech hub in the region, where Amazon has also been very active.

“Deliveroo is proud to be investing in Edinburgh and creating more high skilled jobs in the UK,” said Dan Winn, Deliveroo VP of engineering, in a statement. “Edinburgh is one of the UK’s fastest growing tech hubs, with access to an excellent talent pool of highly skilled people and university graduates. Deliveroo is committed to offering riders flexible, well-paid work and helping restaurants to grow their businesses. Building on Cultivate’s expertise, we are excited to create new products and services that will help us achieve this.”

Notes to Editors

Deliveroo is one of the UK’s leading tech unicorns and a British tech success story. Its investment in world-leading proprietary technology yields substantial benefits for customers, restaurants and riders. The Frank algorithm – which finds the optimal way to deliver food from restaurant to customer – has cut the average delivery time by nearly 20%, significantly reducing customer wait times. Frank’s machine-learning capabilities improves the allocation of orders and reduces restaurant waiting times for riders, helping them to earn higher fees without riding longer hours. And Deliveroo’s innovative products and tools give restaurants unique insights into their customer base, allows them to provide in-app offers to customers and improves their efficiency when preparing meals.

A photo of Andy Robinson (Chief Commercial Officer, Cultivate), Dan Winn (VP of Engineering, Deliveroo) and Paul Wilson (Managing Director, Cultivate) is available here.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Amazon-backed food delivery startup Deliveroo acquires Edinburgh software studio Cultivate