Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the cliches they hear about how to make a start-up succeed - from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions.

This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of start-ups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey. Instead of start-up myths - legends spun from a fantasy version of Silicon Valley - Rizwan Virk provides start-up models - frameworks that help make thoughtful decisions about starting, growing, managing, and selling a business. Rather than dispensing simplistic rules, he mentors listeners in the development of a mental toolkit for approaching challenges based on how start-up markets evolve in real life.

In snappy prose with savvy pop-culture and real-world examples, Virk recasts entrepreneurship as a grand adventure. He points out the pitfalls that appear along the way and offers insights into how to avoid them, sharing the secrets of founding a start-up, raising money, hiring and firing, when to enter a market and when to exit, and how to value a company.