The Tao of Startups

Book excerpt: 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 startup. Face it. Odds-wise you have a much better chance of becoming a pro athlete than a successful startup entrepreneur. Internationally successful serial entrepreneur James LaLonde takes you through the key things you need to get right in the early days of your startup before you turn the next 5+ years of your life and your startup 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 co-founders- 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 co-founders to ensure its fair and won't end up being a point of contention that destroys your startup- How to set the valuation for your startup 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, James LaLonde, is a sought-after speaker and startup mentor with 15 years of doing multiple startups in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. In addition to his startup and investment activities, James 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. The materials contained in this book have perfected over years of the author's actual startup experience, thousands of hours of startup founder mentoring, hundreds of hours of presentations and university lectures to people who are planning to start companies. The book gives you everything you need to get you and your startup team and product launched and funded without any fluff or non-essential filler. The 8-minute presentation that formed the genesis of this book idea and subsequent university course is on YouTube. Feel free to have a look at the video before you buy to get a feel for the content: https: //youtu.be/3Goi2z-7bXQ