all right. How is it going? Everyone? Welcome to another episode of forward thinking. Founders were talking to Fallon Ear's about their companies. The visions for the future and have a two collide today. I am so excited to be talking to Andy Sparks is the cofounder of Holloway Andy. Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Thanks for having here. It's going great.

Fantastic. I am so excited to be talking to you. That's when I first saw Holloway on Twitter. No, whatever it was, I'm like this is genius idea, and I'm very intrigued to see how it grows before we talk about that. A lot of people listening to don't even know where all the way is yet. Can you give the audience an idea of what you're working on with all the way

I would love Thio. So Holloway is a new publishing and technology company, and we're devoted to building a new way to read books on the Internet. So in our vision, books will be a little different once they're online and some people tilt their head and they go. What do you mean? Books were definitely on the Internet. I can already buy stuffs her kindle. But what we believe is that you should be able to read a book on the Web, and the way that would look would be like reading Harry Potter on a website like Harry potter dot com slash chamber of Secrets slash chapter four. Instead of having to go to Kindle and buy it and downloaded on the delights, you should just be able to read it in a browser. And so we're starting not with fiction, my carry water, but instead with professional reference and the reason why we're doing this, we think it's where we could be the most helpful. And also it's what people go to Google looking for.

And so when content is published on a Web page, when you type in how to start a business, you should be able to get the results and content of a book on how to start a business, not just articles on websites like entrepreneur dot com, et cetera. S O. The whole idea here is that we believe that books contain in depth research, professional writing, editing, back checking and a lot more than you don't just get from articles and magazines and newspapers that we think should be accessible and discoverable from the tool that everyone uses. The look for stuff Google.

So that's awesome. And And again, as I said when I first discovered this man was blooming as a writer myself, I just super intrigue in what's going on with what you're working on. Something I'm curious about is how does it actually get made? And so with with a standard book, you have an author, they might have a researcher, but they rights, you know, I never enough. So actually don't know I'm destiny that they just they just write from their brain on Thio, a paper, you know, and then they and then it gets published as a book. I'm curious like, how does the publishing process go from ideation from How do you decide what to write on? Do How does it go through the process, too, then publication and then promotion?

Yes. So the first step in our big vision for publishing books on the Internet is to publish a few of our own right to just prove that if you publish something that is buckling on the Web, that people will find it and buy it And so the first kind of type of content we decided to do is what we call a Holloway guide. Holloway guide is usually 100 plus page document that is, uh, on a single subject with an equity compensation raising, venture, capital, technical recruiting and hiring. And next up is remote work. And the way that we do, these is we outlined what we think should be in the guide, right? So just like you would when you're writing a big college paper, you put together everything you think should be in it. You get a rough structure, you show it to a few people who know what they're talking about.

Say, hey, what do you think of the outline? Is there a Mrs anything you think we should really out in here? And then once we have the outline, the first couple that we wrote we pretty much found one or two authors to write the majority of the content of the Allies, and they would write a draft, and then we have an editor or a couple editors on staff that'll work with that content. They'll give the writer feedback on the structure and the content. How we're telling a story. We have our own set of editorial guidelines on how to make the content super practical and actionable. So it's not just a bunch of abstract theory, but going forward. We learned a lot about publishing, and you can either be very author centric or you could be very editor centric. And so author centric is just saying,

Hey, you know, author Jane Doe, You know what you're talking about. So why don't you go write your content than a Google doc, and then we'll edit it and make sure that it's, you know, well written, and it's got a good structure and there's not a bunch of grammar mistakes, and then we'll just publish it. As is, Uh, that's not what we've done so far. We haven't done as much for that. We've done more of an editor centric model where we have someone who's an editor here in a hallway who I am really is in charge of putting together the outlet and finding people to go right all the different parts of it on. Then the editor kind of axes like a product manager for the content itself,

so there's multiple ways to do this so far we've done is very comprehensive guys where we pull together, like 50 or 60 people. So it's not just one perspective, because we want additional case, the most comprehensive, helpful type of book length content online that we could make to show people what's possible.

That makes a lot of sense. And I think the fact that you get all those perspectives is fantastic. Something I didn't know about when I first discovered Holloway Is that you? The plan was to do some of your do some of your own to start, but I'm sure in which is what you've done. But do you have a plan to enable Holloway to be kind of like a platform where people can write their own books in the future? I guess it looking forward, we usually ask this a little later, but it's kind of top of mind. Like what? Did you see the platform of Holloway plane in the next 10 years? A CZ ah, in the operating, Publishing this,

yes, and one of the next things we want to start experimenting with is started publishing other authors in a certain type of content. So the type of content. We're really excited about Justo focus. Our audience is content that is helpful to employees of fast growing companies. So there's a lot of stuff out there that's focused on, uh, Founders, which most companies have. 12 maybe three founders and most everyone else who works at a company is an employee, and they're trying to navigate howto create a successful career. They're trying to figure out how to help be a part of building a successful company, and we wanna publish content that makes that easier. We think it's an audience that's gonna be willing to pay for content. But there's a lot of people, whether they've written, you know, or they have a draft of a book in a Google doc on sales or product management or marketing or some offset of any of those things. We want to start to talk to those authors and see if there's a way that we could be in publishing them away here in 2020.

That's very exciting. I love to hear a little more about the reading experience on Holloway because I've seen this on your website and also Internet. Just now, anyone can get an e book of a book and read it on, you know, on the Internet. But it's it's not sit down easy or fun. It's not natural. He and you're trying to build a kind of Internet. First. You tell me a little bit about what it's like to read a book on Holloway and what the experience is like.

Absolutely so when we started Holloway, we we love reading. We also love print books. Um, and we looked at what Kindle has, whether it's on their native abs or on Kindle, or whether it's even in their browser based reader, which in my opinion, is atrocious. And we just kind of tilted our heads up and were like, What's going on here? I mean, if you go look at all these print books, there's beautiful, and then everything's just kind of translated to this stripped down version of what you get on Kindle. It just really takes a lot of a soul out of a book. So we spent a lot of time on the basics up front,

just choosing great typefaces and making sure that the layout of the content was clean. So you conduce a distraction, free reading mode, which pulls the table of contents away to the side. Um, we got a table of contents that makes things super navigable. It's kind of like a basic of pretty. And then we have invested a lot in search, especially for a professional reference. We think that search is something that could be super powerful when you're just trying to navigate a several 100 page document and you're trying to get to what you want to get to. So research is really powerful. We've also put in all these cool, little interactive things, which really get into the medium of reading digitally. So paper has limitations. You can't do a hyperlink and paper very effectively,

but once you have something published digitally, then you should just be able to click out to something really easily. Not only that, we've done kind of a preview before you click, so you can get some context. We've also done something really fun with definitions of terms where if you're publishing digitally again, there's a lot more that you can do where print has limitations, where when you publish digitally in a look, there's a lot of terms that need to get to find need context and one choice you could make us Well, you're just gonna rely on a dictionary. You can hover over a dictionary dot com, or we could write a kind of a custom glossary for all the major terms that air that are being covered in the books. They're all a bunch of different things that we wanted to do in order to showcase other authors. The different things you could do once you're publishing digitally first. So that's one of the things that we've done. And we also made a decision early on that way won't put ads on it.

So much of the Web is text with some ad on it because the company is making money off of advertising. And we thought that advertising inherently creates the wrong incentive for us as a company, because if we put ads on the site that our customer becomes the companies who are trying to advertise, and what we wanted to do was build a reading experience that was so good content that was so good that people would be willing to pay for it. Uh, we feel like that aligns our interest with the reader's interest because If we don't know something that's so good or we're paying for, then obviously we just We haven't created something good enough yet. And so we'd rather build at an entire company and build the incentives into the company so that we have the feedback from readers that what we're doing is something that's really great, as opposed to just putting ads on it and create, you know, making a bunch of money from Day one by selling people's information or something like that. So it's a super clean, crisp experience. We plan in 2020 to add things like highlighting and some of the more basics that you would expect to get up to parody and pass by everything that you would that you would see in the Kindle type product and hopefully get into a lot more interesting things as we go on. Because we feel like reading a book length document on the Web should should and can be so much more interesting than than what it is that Kendall served up, that everyone's pretty much accepted by this point because Kendall has what is a defacto monopoly on book publishing and no competition.

This is fascinating something that I was kind of two realms. I want to travel down one being the next decade of the Internet And how ads aren't. In my opinion, it seems like in yours, too. You ads. You know, we're probably not gonna be the prevalent way people make money. It's going to be charging for value, kind of like what you're doing. And the second realm I wanna explore is this realm of what is an author like If if Holloway grows to be a giant company and you know you're getting thousands of, you know, tens of thousands of books eventually being published on all the way what is how does that change life for an author and what is an author look like? But I want to start with the former. So So what do you do? You notice any trends or changes in the macro economics kind of Internet companies of people shifting away from from ads and it being more creator centric? And that's kind of a leading question, I'll admit. But I'm kind of leading to like I'm curious. Does Holloway and a play in this creator sphere as a 16 z would say it with the passion economy. How do you think about all that stuff?

Yeah, that's a good question. So, first, to address the idea of advertising as much as I would love for advertising to go away on the Internet, I don't I don't think that it will. There are too many legacy media companies that are run by people who built entire careers around monetizing content through advertising, and they, frankly, just got too good at it. I think if anything really changes in advertising, it will just be a change in control over who owns the pipes. Um, and there's also the other side of advertising. It's very easy to criticize advertising. It's I'm no stranger to doing. But a lot of businesses,

small businesses, large businesses, you know, people who are trying to manipulate you. Thio vote a certain way, but also people that are just trying to get you to buy their new product. This There's a lot of companies that depend on advertising to get off the ground on. That's the other side that if you if you talk to a lot of business owners, it's like, you know, as much as I hate Facebook, we advertise on Facebook right now, and I kind of hate myself for doing that. But two degree, it really works. And so you kind of make this bargain with the devil.

I So I don't think advertising. We'll go away as much as I would like it, too. That's your next question. Their next point about the passion economy a term I read yesterday for the first time that I hadn't seen was the luxury Inter. And the luxury Internet is kind of this term for all of the places you can go on the Web and pay extra money to get a premium product. And the cool thing about that is that in lines incentives that creates, I think, a better structure for businesses to make sure that they're building products that people actually want. And, uh, the other thing about it, though, is how many subscriptions can each one of us really tolerate? And by tolerate, I mean,

how much can we really afford? Can you afford a subscription to six or seven different streaming digital video service is can you afford Ah 67 10 different subscriptions, the wired and business insider And then there are times and the Washington Post and no everybody else. And then also for education. Are you gonna subscribe Toe master class and hallway course era? And you know, suddenly you start to look at the amount of spend from everything from Spotify. Tow the tools. You haven't worked all these different media companies, You said. You realize this is this is adding up, and so everything on the Internet has to be paid for. I don't think that's the solution, either, because people can really mean there's a There's a thin amount of budget right, and it's I don't know what.

The solution is kind of past the horizon for me of where we go. What's this next phase, post subscription Internet? Because I think that what we're gonna come to is a little bit of a reckoning where you know everything's got a subscription and you're like, you know, I just don't have room in my budget for another subscription. On the other hand, it do you think that it ze Baron is competitive, so people have to make choices about what they want. So it's crime to, because you can't get everything for free, and I think that's also part of the reckoning is that the initial explosion of the Internet that we all gotta use to growing up was that you could get anything for free. And that was so awesome. But ultimately providing all this stuff for free. And there's people that are working behind most of these companies, and they've got to find a way to get paid.

And the way that you paid is that you sell products that people buy. And that's kind of how selling goods and services has worked for time immemorial. And now on the Internet. We're just getting used to that. I don't know if that answers your question.

I think it's a very valuable response in one that makes me appreciate this show so much because the founders of companies are found us for a reason. They bring different perspectives and very intelligent, thoughtful perspectives I never thought of, and I think what you just mentioned is super thoughtful. And I, uh, I wanna like marinate on that over the next couple of days, right? Yeah, I appreciate that. So now yeah, I can't get past this thought in my head of what does it look like to be an author or a writer in, You know, let's say on all the way. And I'm gonna use that kind of myself as a case study because it's like a I think I think I might be a good one. Like I have been a raider like blood logger since 2015 rating topics. Uh,

writing. I've never actually gotten like much distribution made my life, you know, probably get like 1000 2000 hits a month medium or something. And there's like, doesn't not just doesn't want me thousands of other people, uh, that love writing, but they haven't been able Thio find that distribution or they haven't really cared. They haven't really, like, tried to push it so much to get that this profusion, I'm curious, is hauled away a product for people like that, or is a product for people that are already kind of authors. And they want distribution on the Internet or just like what is the what is the standard first author looked like on Holloway?

If you have to paint my persona, uh, you know, their background what they do, because I just think it's interesting as a radar myself.

Yeah, it's a good question. So one of the metaphor is that we really like to think about A lot is did prior to the Internet. You walk into a library. If you wanted to get some kind of knowledge and inside of a library, there all kinds of different call them knowledge products. There's a magazine, there's a newspaper, and there's all kinds of different books. There's textbooks, there's biographies, there's encyclopedias. There's dictionaries. There's comics. Name it right. Our belief is that each one of these knowledge products is or needs a full digital transformation, right,

and some of these are more obvious, and they've already happened. Wikipedia is the is the transformation of the encyclopedia medium has done a great job of going after, you know, expanding the market of who can write in a magazine use one of their vertical publications is essentially a digital magazine. Same thing you see with wire. The New York Times is an excellent job of transforming what it means to be a newspaper on the Internet, and the type of writing that you do for each one of these different products is very different. Writing for a newspaper being a journalist is very different from writing features. For The New Yorker, this is a different type of writing. Uh, another type of writing is when you decide that you want to write a book. I'm writing. A book is an endeavor because, especially with nonfiction,

you're saying, Look, I've been through a lot. I've seen a lot. I know how to do something. There's some idea that I want to share with the world that is complex. It's comprehensive, It's complicated, and it needs can be explained in 1000 or 1500 word medium, most because it's just there's just too much going on, right? So if you were just getting started in a career, whether you switched careers or you just finished up high school or college and you're interested in marketing, you can't just learn marketing by reading. You know, blood posts after block post after Bokros,

because you don't even know you're looking for. But when someone who's really experienced puts together really swell, structured, tight together 300 page book on marketing, you can you can learn a lot at once because it's all couldn't the right order and and really assembled in a way that's meant to be learned from, in a way that the type of writing that you publish on plugs or magazines or newspapers. It's just This is a different purpose for that type of content. So what Holloway is that we're excited for is that people have decided that they want to write a book. Say, if you decided that you wanted to write a book on how to be a time cancer and you've been working on that, maybe you have an editor. Maybe you don't have an editor, but you believe that you've got a lot of knowledge to share that's really consolidated, and you put it together in a Google doc. We want to be able to say, Hey,

if you're somebody who's thinking, Ah, publishing that saying whether it's a kindle our publishing on your website, we'd love to talk to you about how we can help you with that. And one of the reasons why is that you take the content. There's two ways to read a Holloway guy right now and what we imagine that people will read any type of, uh, look on Holloway. The first way is that you can read it all in one page, just like a single scroll, like he would read an article, except it's a hell of a lot longer. The second way that you can read Holloway guides is you can actually read them one section at a time. So if you Google we have the first example is, if you read our guide on equity compensation, which is totally free,

you could just google the Holiday Guide Equity Compensation. You'll be able to read a top to bottom on one page. But you could also Google things like taxes on equity compensation, which is one chapter of our guide on that on that subject. And the first thing that shows up is our guide on equity compensation. But it's not the full thing. It's just that part that's actually on that subject. So when people are typing in questions that are relatives that are relevant to the content of the book, they start to find it in all these pages. So what we can offer an author is to say, Hey inside of your book, which the reason why books existed because you just need to pull a bunch of information together in one place in order to be really helpful are inside of that book are the answers to hundreds of questions. And when those books are published inside of an ecosystem like Kindle, Google can't they can't even see the content of those books. And so when someone's looking for an answer, let's say you write a book on half a start up company and maybe how to start a company.

Chapter two is about Inc So how should I incorporate my company? And you've probably written 20 paragraphs on how you should incorporate a company. But when someone types into Google how to incorporate my company, they don't find your chapter in the way that books are currently published. But with us, they be able to find that, and so you'd be able to get traffic from that from the search engines, and you'd be able to get more readers in that way, and then we could give some of the content away for free. And then we could also put up a wall and say, Hey, now that you Brett, you know an entire chapter. It's time that you pay for the book and we think that that's a new, really exciting way for authors Tol Thio find an audience not just because they're Seth Godin and they have a huge following on Twitter, and every time they pull there's something people gonna read it matter what,

but if you're in aspiring up, coming off there, one of the cool things about Google is that if the content is really good, it's conditional. But the top of search results and you're gonna be able to find people that come to it just by nature of content being very good. And that's what we've seen from different bloggers and people great content that shows up in search. In that way, content marketing is all built around this, but we think that anyone who is writing a book is putting a ton of effort into writing something really high quality that they believe will be very helpful. And it got a editor and approve read a proof reader and all these different people that come in to make sure that content is great. But then it's just not being published on the Web, which is crazy. It's like there's this entire industry built up around published knowledge that's deciding not to take advantage of the fact that the Internet exists. So in short, we're for people who are interested in writing books. So if you're interested in running a blood and we'd be interested in working with you,

that's awesome. I think it's seriously one of the coolest Cos I've ever talked Thio Probably because I love I love writing and I love the empowerment of individuals. Thio Mac to become like the you ink there's this. There's this is the same lines of passion economy by it, just a neighboring people with a skill thio in this case rating to kind of create a book. Otherwise, in a situation where they may not be able to get distribution, I think it's cool. I questioned. That is very unrelated to what? We've been talking about it on my mind since since we've been talking, it might take you off guard, but like you, he very you're very good speaker. I don't know what it is about how you communicate, but I feel like you talk like a CEO should talk, which is calm and like,

thoughtful and it and it just you just it seems like you're very collected. I'd love to know. Have you always been such a good public speaker or the speaker in general. And if not, did you have to make any changes as you've gone on your professional career, if you don't mind me asking and I totally left field, but I didn't want to ask

Oh, man, I don't know if anyone's ever told me that before. Um, it's definitely something that I worked on. Uh, I think that as a writer, I spend a lot of time considering what I'm gonna say, but also as a founder of Cos this is now, Holloway is technically my fourth company. The first was a microbrewery I started in college, so it's not like these were big, successful endeavors. But when you start, companies are in your founder or you're a leader of any kind, Whether it's a student organization or a company, you find yourself spending a lot of time talking with people and trying to express ideas and communicate and saying the wrong thing often has pretty significant costs because either have to correct yourself or someone thinks you meant something else and something that's not a lot of sort of public speaking.

One of my favorite tips that I ever got was when I started my second company, and we're doing a demo day for the exploration we're in. And the one of the guys that ran the accelerator told me one of the best tips of all time was, If it doesn't feel awkward to you, you're talking too fast. And any time that you find yourself saying, um, we're saying so or some kind of filler word, just pause and take a breath. Think Barack Obama is really good at this in his speech, where he will just pause instead of saying, and it sounds very collected, but he's just trying to get past the killer. And so these are things. Sometimes they listened. When they do a podcast,

I'll go back and listen to it and see if there's anything that I want to fix their change. But yeah, it's something that I have work that I guess somewhat consciously and when most of your job is, is a leader in a company sitting there in meetings, talking to people. It's something I guess you tend to just do a lot of. But I don't know if I have a much better of an answer for you other than if it's something that you decided that you want to be good at. I think communication is incredibly important. Most of our lives, they're spent working with other people. And so getting better at being the communicator is something that I've definitely made a priority in my life. Um, so, yeah, I don't know if that's super rewarding of an answer, but

I hope it's help. Uh, is especially for me. I definitely struggle a little bit with public speaking and speaking in general. Usually when it comes to Steve, and, uh, you think that because I'm a podcast host would just solve the problem. But you're right. You saw the problem when you decided to solve the problem. And I am better than I used to be. Just as you were talking about it. I just noticed that you're very intentional with your words. And I wanted to point out, get some tips and you give some good ones. So thank you. So I

do love us. Sorry. Dinner. Okay. I do love this idea. I'm so not a an athlete, but I love the metaphor from from I guess I think football, where people your watch the tape to see how you can get better, and I'm not. There's not so many. You can't go watch the tape of every meeting you're in to find out how you get around the meeting better. But when your podcast thing or you're on video or you're giving a talk publicly, you can usually go watch it or you can listen to it. You can pick out a few things that you wish you could get better AB instead of being a jerk to yourselves and being like, Oh man, you said the word like so many times I hate I hate myself for that, just like that. That's a very easy thing for me to try to get better at and be conscious about. And put a sticky note on your desk or your computer that has the word like with an extra it, and you'll find yourself incrementally getting better these things as you just pick off one thing after another.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I think that's good advice, so kind of slowly rounding out the conversation. I am curious, too, you know, very big picture. Let's go like a century from now. I'm talking about. Let's say Holloway becomes the biggest company in this space and it is just blowing up. Can you paint the vision or the picture for me of what it looks like? And that this doesn't have to be like in your in your plans that could just be coming from your brain from just, you know, as you speak. But how big could haul away get? And if it gets that big, what does it look like? And what impact does that have on the world and having people engage with it?

Oh, boy. So one of my favorite ideas around thinking about the future is Ah, I recently heard this talk from Andy Bechtel Shine, who was the founder of Sun Microsystems, and he also put the 1st 100 K check and Google. So he's done well for himself. Uh, and he gave this talk and he talked about how there was this idea that he learned from a class on a I called the Horizon Effect, which is basically that there's just some point where you try to forecast on, think about the future so many steps forward, you just can't see beyond the horizon anymore. it's just impossible. There's too many variables to consider. And so when thinking about you know, 100 years from now to me, I think is so far beyond the horizon,

it is so hard to predict what that would be. But to what extent I can try to think about the future. What Holly would be. I think that one really interesting point for us is Can we become kind of like the Apple App store for books in that we have built all the infrastructure to make publishing a book easy for an author to make it easy for them to publish the first time to make it easy for them to update their content? If they find that there's an error or something that they want to change, or when they talk with their audience fans that there's something that they decided they want to adjust? Um, those are things we want to make very easy. We also want to make it easy for people to publish content and distributed and get it out there right. There's all kinds of tools for enabling an author to engage with an audience. One thing right now that's fascinating is that how many authors or or thought leaders are creating all these websites with the same infrastructure, Right? It's a website with an email capture, and it's got kind of a blogger saying, With that we get busy wig on it. What they're trying to do is just build an audience so they can continue talking.

Thio a song is that audience feels like they're providing value than they can continue to do that. Um, so one of the things with books is like, If you publish a book and a 1,000,000 people buy your book, you have no idea who they are, which is absolutely crazy to pay and most other companies that you have the concept of a customer and you have a C. R M and you know who those customers are. But if you publish biography, say and once you publish it, you learn more about that person, and you wanted to go send out a small, incremental update to everyone who, by your by obviously it's impossible. And so we hope that and whether it's 10 years or 20 years, that we've made it really easy for authors to build an audience. People who are excited about reading their work and reach those people build their reach.

I also get really excited about the idea of, you know, not all of the content has to be behind a paywall. I think that that's something that we can decide with authors is. Some others may want to publish everything for free. Some others they want to publish it for very cheap. Yeah, so in this world, where books which represent, well researched, well edited material, great knowledge that when you go searching for stuff on Google, whether it's how to start a business or whether it's how to interview somewhere or how to be a better parent, that the stuff that shows up in books is starting to show up there in Google and it's the place that people look for it now that all depends on the idea of Google continuing to exist in a way that doesn't stay. And I'm not sure that the way that we search for information what? Who's to say that that Google will become and continue to be the dominant paradigm for how you'll look for stuff in 20 or 30 years?

I have no idea right the cool thing about the next 30 years. I'm sorry the next 10 years, is it all of the sort of technological advancement that we've been privy to over the last 30 years? All that. So Everything from 1990 up to today, we're going to see just a CZ much advancement in technology over the next 10 as we did in the last 30. And that's you know, however, an exponential curve works. And if you picture an exponential growth curve, you know the part right where it starts to go up and really start to be almost like a vertical line, were there result the bottom part where you wouldn't be thrown in jail for mistaking the line is looking kind of linear. And so, for is much of the as much as the world has changed for the better, and also for costly, the worse.

And we don't really know. We didn't really proceed. What would happen with social media. We all thought it was so cool 10 years ago. Then suddenly it's now become the biggest vehicle for propaganda in the world. We don't know what to do about that. Over the next 10 years, it's gonna explode There's gonna be more technology where you go to fit more on smaller and smaller computers continually and who knows what that's gonna change. But we hope that one thing that will stay consistent over the next 100 years one thing we asked ourselves when we started all the way what will be the same in 100 years if human beings have been wiped down? Uh, we believe that people will still want to learn and they'll still want to read. And they'll still want to consume information from people who have come before them looking new generation, every generation and those people are gonna wanna learn from people who you know, showed up and made already done the thing and we think that reading is not gonna go away. And so we're basically making a bet for the next 100 years that this Internet thing isn't going away either. And people are gonna want to read. And so we should embrace making sure that books which represent the most well research information that people produce for each other should be easy to get online and that people who are producing great knowledge to be able to make sure that the people who are looking for it to find it,

That's a great answer. And it leaves me Thio. I think the most obvious question I can ask in that. York you were allowing authors to do their thing on, spread it on the Internet. You mentioned reading and books many times on the podcast. I have to ask, What's your favorite book or favorite couple of books?

Oh, so hard, so hard to choose. I have so many, Um, let's see one of the most useful books for my career personally, that I found, um, I think I was in my just finished college when I found this book called Mastery by Robert Greene. Robert Greene is more well known for having written a book called The 48 Laws Power, which is super Machiavellian. But Master is just basically like, Hey, there's his model for building a career that's been around for hundreds of years, and it's called a friendship. And instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on questionably valuable degrees, one other model for getting good at some things to find some things very already very good to find a master and study underneath them that work with them for years until you have absorbed enough knowledge to strike out on your own.

The master is a really practical book that anyone, no matter where you are in your career, especially everything of switching careers, are starting a new career. You should read, mastery and use its revival practically revisited once every year. Eyes for his fiction want efficient. I really loved recently read a book called The uh The Name of the Wind, which is a really fun piece of fantasy that I love. Uh, two minutes to me. Great books to choose from here. Another really fun one is called The Art of Possibility. Bye husband waste couple Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. I think on the art of Possibility is just kind of all these life lessons this couple has learned, and they've been narrated the book together. Seth Godin said that he listens to parts of this book every month, and that was a real and is a really fun read. Different recommend that with I could continue going on and on about books. There's just so many good things that have been written but polls.

Yeah, for sure. No, I love it. I love asking someone what their favorite book is when I know they love books because they have a similar answer. It's like, Oh, my gosh, how can I How can I pick just one or two? You, um I am curious. Have you read the book? The enlightened CEO? No, I'm not. So I've read a lot of Goethe's books for, like,

founders and, like, CEO stuff. I have to say the enlightened CEO, which is not something I've heard of before before I picked it up from this, uh, bookstore has to be the best book on how to be a CEO I've ever read in my life. It's very just almost is almost a playbook to be a CEO, and it covers, like, obviously the functions, but also the inner work. You have to dio like the, you know, self awareness, discipline,

stuff like that. I'm getting a lot of value out of it on, uh, I don't know. I just feel like no one's heard of it trying to spread the word about

cool. I think I found it is the title it doesn't cover have like the the Illuminati Pyramid. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, we'll

take a look at it. Yeah, for sure. Well, I feel like time as if by on this, because it's just talking about something that I love so much, which is words. But do you need? Thio cannot leave with my final question. Awesome. So you have been around the block. You've been in start ups for a little bit. You're not building all the way, which is which is getting some traction and taking a big bet on something I think it's gonna it's gonna play out to your favor. But there's a lot of people that are listening that they have an idea for a company or they have a vision and they see a problem and they don't really. They don't really know how that solve the problem or get started into entrepreneurship. What advice would you have for people listening, who want to get started with their own company but don't necessarily know the first step on how to do that?

So I think I'll respond with someone else's idea. I for my whole life, I think, devoured almost everything that Seth Gordon's ever written. I think that well, his books are ostensibly self help books. He's a E. I just really like the way he thinks about marketing and business, and a lot of the way that he thinks about it is that business is about service. And if you want to start a company, what starting a company really is is that there's a group of people that have a problem and whether that problem is that there he can't find healthy enough breakfast food or whether the problem is that they're trying to sleep better or whatever. That thing it is, it's finding a group of people and say, Hey, we as a company, this company that we're starting is gonna exist to help you with nothing. And so it's finding an audience.

So what matter? Mark our audience for a long time was venture capitalist, my last company. Haul away our audience that we're gonna begin targeting out here is startup employees. People who work at companies whether they're three people, are about ready to go public or they work in Patagonia, private companies that are growing. We want to help those people build successful careers and successful businesses. So when you're just getting started, I think that oftentimes people think about the thing they want to build, You know, they've got something in their backyard or a website or an idea. This thing they put together and they're they're so in love with that thing that what they forgot is that building a company is all about finding an audience and saying, Hey, audience, our company is gonna be devoted to making stuff for you and then really listening to those people.

So I love Patagonia's A company, not because of the vest that every single VC wears in the midterm uniforms. But I love Patagonia because Patagonia has so clearly said we're a company that makes products for people who are environmentally conscious. And they do that from the clothing they make to the how door supply things that they make. And then also they make food. I mean, they make sustainably sourced. Salmon is one of their fastest growing parts, their business and a lot of people would look at a company like that and say What the hell? They're making food and then be an easy way to misunderstand their business. But when you look at it through the lens of Patagonia, being a company that exists solely for the purpose of helping environmentally conscious people byproducts without screwing up the environment. Then you start to understand a lot more of their business moves and also understand why that their company that's probably doing north of a $1,000,000,000 in revenue

absolutely that's rates a great example in great advice. Well, if someone's listening in the once you learn more about Holloway or get in touch with you, um, just find you online. Where can the can take you to get in touch with you or your company on the Internet?

Yeah, so if you win is you can go toe holloway dot com h o l l o w a y dot com and we have a newsletter that we write every week. All good work. All good work is is ah, four paragraphs every week on what it means to do good work. And then we have a collection of links of fun things that we found right around the Internet. You can sign up there. I read it almost every week. We have guest authors as well. You can also find me on Twitter. I'm Sparks Zillah S P a R K s Z I l A And my direct messages were open and all that. I love to talk to people there and made a lot of good friends strangers I met on the Internet on. And you can also shoot me now. I'm just an idiot holloway dot com.

All right, Andy, this was one of the top episodes, for sure. Uh, in the forward thinking founder kind of collection. So thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Sure thing. Thanks for having me on.