This book, The Tao of Startups: A Guidebook for Your Entrepreneurial Life (A Step-by-Step, How to Guide for Doing a Successful Startup) is the one book you need if you are considering doing, or in the process of doing, a start-up.

Face it. Odds-wise you have a much better chance of becoming a pro athlete than a successful start-up entrepreneur. Internationally successful serial entrepreneur James LaLonde takes you through the key things you need to get right in the early days of your start-up before you turn the next five-plus years of your life and your start-up into a stress-laden nightmare.

How to do all the things that most first-time entrepreneurs get wrong or ignore are here in this book:

• How to select the right cofounders
• How to build a winning Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• How to make a bulletproof pitch deck and then successfully use it to get VC funding

Also, a lot of essential information that has never been organized and gathered in one place is all here:

• All the ways you can get funding without giving up precious equity to VCs
• How to split the equity between cofounders to ensure it's fair and won't end up being a point of contention that destroys your start-up
• How to set the valuation for your start-up and how to get investors to accept it
• How to get through all the investor meetings and the inevitable due diligence so you can get the investment you need to grow your business
• And much more!

The author is a sought-after speaker and start-up mentor with 15 years of doing multiple start-ups in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. In addition to his start-up and investment activities, James LaLonde serves as a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing (affiliated with Loyola University) and is a mentor for ChinaAccelerator, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and The Beijing Center. This is the one book you need if you are thinking about doing your own start-up.