Show HN: Startup Equity Adventure Game
options-game-polymathrobotics.pythonanywhere.comI put this together (with Claude) as a semi-gamified way for folks to learn about startup equity. Take a look, and share your scorecard :)
I put this together (with Claude) as a semi-gamified way for folks to learn about startup equity. Take a look, and share your scorecard :)
This is a clever way to make a dry, high-stakes topic actually approachable, and the game framing makes equity tradeoffs much easier to internalize.
How did you decide where to simplify versus stay financially accurate, and were there any startup-equity edge cases you intentionally left out because they made the game less intuitive? :)
Quick equation:
1. is it an ai lab with a well know founder -> equity might be worth something
2. are you the CEO founder? -> equity might be worth something
3. are you a non CEO co founder? -> equity might be worth something, will probably be stolen from you
4. is the company a year or two from a certain IPO? equity might be worth something
5. all other cases likely zero
Seems like 3 is a bit pessimistic. After all, if there are 3 founders then that greatly decreases the chance that the CEO steals equity from the other 2 cofounders. The CEO generally wouldn't have > 50%, so the non-CEO co-founders could keep the CEO in check.
Is there even a CEO per-se in this situatuon?
Depends on country and type of business entity. Some of them require one legal representative.
Seems accurate according to my experience. It’s the new investment banks in later rounds that cause it. Bigger investments, stronger guarantees, better preferences, and lack of understanding on the part of inexperienced founders, plus lack of power held by the employees options pool … recipe for “only the banks see any upside.”
Add the effects of "preferred overhang" on employee payouts for various different exit outcomes like acquisitions. Usually only founders and investors with "preferred shares" see anything and those with common stock (employees) see theirs get completely eaten by the overhang.
SaaSyCryptoAI - Leverage our custom AI driven backend to mint your own coin! Seriously though, great little lesson. It would be nice to factor in internal raises and a bit of granularity for when exercises happened to see final payouts and similar bonus topics but I would recommend this to anyone thinking about taking a job with options involved.
It doesn't understand authorized vs issued shares
Thank you for python anywhere, I will add that to my chasm of free hosters.
Yeah, that’s not how my company operates. I’m maintaining my majority share by splitting only. The VCs can go along, or they can hope their next investment is the unicorn.
Yeah, also seems very US-centric with "outstanding shares". Other countries don't allow you to have outstanding shares. Also, where is the "reinvest" option during series rounds. Like, what founder also doesn't reinvest to keep their equity during fund raising?
so many erroneous statements in this game. also it's not much of a "game", is it.
Care to explain where are the errors?