Founder Mode: San Francisco

3D founder RPG with fundraising, accelerators, board, hiring, tough meetings etc. Added Stripe dashboard for Real MRR.

One thousand dollars in the bank and fifty a day going out.

That is twenty days if you do nothing at all. Founder Mode is a startup simulator built on a real map of San Francisco — the actual streets, the actual hills, the fog that comes in over Sutro in the morning and goes back out by eleven.

Walk into the hacker house in Hayes Valley. Ship until the product is worth showing. Talk to users in Dolores Park, because it does not scale and that is exactly why it works at ten. Then drive to Sand Hill Road to be told no by somebody with a name.

TWO ACCOUNTS, WHICH IS THE WHOLE GAME Investors wire into the company. You cannot buy lunch with it. Put yourself on payroll and choose the number — too high and the runway you raised is the runway you ate, too low and you are the one who burns out. Every burrito comes out of the correct account, and the company card is counted where investors will see it.

THE PAPERWORK IS REAL Quarterly estimated tax on what you pay yourself. Delaware's franchise bill every March. Health insurance with a deductible, which costs nothing until a car hits you on Folsom. Workers' comp, which is not a risk once you have payroll — it is a fine. All of it is on the calendar weeks early, and all of it can be missed.

GROW IT, OR WATCH IT SHRINK Shipping is half of it. Host a hackathon, run a monthly meetup, start an ambassador programme, put on your own developer conference. Every one of those builds a community, and a community multiplies the people arriving and stops the ones you have leaving. Leave it alone for a month and it decays, churn goes back up, and the revenue graph turns over. Every round you raise unlocks more of the list — that is what the money is actually for.

THE PEOPLE YOU HIRE DO THE WORK Candidates arrive as a profile: a headline they wrote themselves, four jobs with the dates showing, skills with endorsement counts that mean nothing. All of it is marketing. What is true about them costs you an hour of interview per question to find out, and you find out after you have signed either way. Once they are in, they work every night whether or not you sit down — engineers on the product, sales on the users, operations holding the community together.

A ROUND IS A PROMISE WITH A DATE ON IT Close a seed and your investors set the numbers you have to hit and the day they will check. On that day the market prices the company at whatever those numbers earned — a step-up, a flat round, or a down round at 1.5x participating — and nobody asks you first. Board meetings open with questions from named directors, and what they think of you afterwards is what the next round is priced on. Every term sheet seats somebody new and retires somebody who was there first.

READ PAGE NINE Every round goes on a cap table with its terms. Most investors are ordinary. A few will hand you two times participating preferred, and it costs you nothing for two years and then takes the entire exit. When the offer comes you see the waterfall line by line — who gets paid, in what order, and what is left. You get two goes at pushing back, and your leverage is mostly just how much runway you have, because a founder who cannot walk away is not negotiating.

THE BOOKS ARE THE BOOKS A Stripe dashboard with thirty days of MRR drawn as bars, ARR, customers, ARPU, churn, and the 2.9% plus thirty cents that comes off every charge before any of it reaches you. It is the one screen in a startup that cannot be argued with.

A CITY, NOT A MENU Twelve thousand buildings you can walk into. Real restaurants with real prices, because $28 of lunch against a $50 burn is a decision. Muni runs actual routes. Weather that behaves like this city's does.

EVERY RUN ENDS Four ways. The end card tells you which, what your peak was, and every decision that got you there.

No accounts. No ads. No in-app purchases.

Landscape, iPhone. Best with headphones.