About This Game

Most people can't tell a future unicorn from a future failure. This game teaches you how.

Invest through 20 years of tech history, from the dot-com crash to the rise of the smartphone era. Question founders, spot the patterns that matter, and discover why some startups become Google while others disappear.

HOW IT WORKS

Each year from 2000-2020, you evaluate startups inspired by real companies. Through a terminal-style interface, interrogate founders to uncover what really drives success: timing, distribution, team, defensibility.

Your decisions compound across market cycles, platform shifts, and bubble bursts. When your picks fail, post-mortems reveal exactly where your thinking went wrong.

THE SEVEN LENSES

You'll learn to evaluate startups the way top investors do, using frameworks from Peter Thiel's Zero to One:

• Timing - Is the market ready, or are they too early?

• Engineering - Is this a 10× improvement or incremental?

• Secret - What do they understand that others miss?

• Monopoly - Can they dominate, or will they compete on price?

• Distribution - How will they actually reach users?

• Team - Can these people execute?

• Durability - Will this last 10 years?

BY THE END, YOU'LL HAVE

• Evaluated hundreds of startups across two decades

• Developed intuition for why timing kills more startups than competition

• Understood the patterns that separate 100x outcomes from failures

• A framework you can apply to real investment and career decisions

FOR

Anyone curious about startups, aspiring founders, and players who enjoy text-driven strategy and first-principles thinking.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Players interview AI-generated startup founders through free-form text dialogue. All conversations are single-player and confined to fictional investment scenarios within the game.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Contains strong language and mature thematic discussions about business, competition, power, and real-world events. No sexual content, nudity, or graphic violence.