Overview
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.
