On the App Store
Founder Mode is a single-player startup simulator. You take a company from a spare room towards an IPO or an acquisition, and usually you don’t get there. It runs entirely on your phone — no account, no server, no ads.
$4.99. No ads, no account, no subscription.
A run, month by month
What you actually do
The clock runs on its own — one game day every real second, and up to ten times that — so things happen whether you are ready or not. You are not optimising a single number. You are deciding what to do about the month you are having.
Term sheets are negotiable — liquidation preference, anti-dilution, pro-rata, vesting acceleration — and every round dilutes you. Investors run due diligence and can find something in it. Investors who backed you before remember it, across companies.
Investors take seats. Past a certain point the board approves your IPO, your acquisitions, your pivots and your own salary. Fall far enough below ten per cent of your own company and they can remove you as CEO — which, measured across hundreds of simulated runs, kills more companies here than running out of money does.
You name the salary and the equity, and they can still say no. A company in the middle of layoffs or a crunch is harder to hire into. Then you have to keep paying the ones who said yes.
Competitors keep their own books, raise their own rounds when you start beating them, undercut your pricing and poach your engineers by name. Get big enough and a new one shows up in your category.
Cap Table Quarterly writes up your company every ninety days — lead story, the numbers, one line of verdict. It will not flatter you. If you have two months of runway, that is the headline.
Your bank account is not the company’s. You start with some savings and a monthly cost of living, and you are paying yourself nothing. You can set your own draw — until an outside director joins the board, after which your pay is something the board votes on.
IPO or direct listing; a share price that answers to revenue growth and earnings; quarterly results measured against analysts’ estimates; a 180-day lockup before you can sell a single share; dividends, buybacks, splits — and an activist investor who may decide you should not be running it.
On your phone
The whole company lives on your phone, one game day every real second. What follows is a single company, Northwind: five people and two weeks of runway at one end, a $19.8B business ringing the opening bell at the other. Same run, both ends.
Five people, 1,940 users, about two weeks of runway, and you lose money every month. The only question the game asks is what you are going to do about it — tonight, with the clock running.
A rival mocks you in the press, a co-founder asks for a walk, a regulator calls. The simulation pauses and waits. There is rarely a right answer here — only different ones, each with a bill attached.
Every round you raise takes a board seat. Fall below ten per cent of your own company and, measured across hundreds of simulated runs, the board removes more founders than running out of money does.
Cap Table Quarterly writes you up every ninety days — the lead story, the numbers, the competition, one line of verdict. If you have two months of runway, that is the headline.
The same company, thirty-two months on: public, $19.8B, beating the analysts' estimate — or watching the stock the quarter it misses. Dividends, buybacks, splits, and an activist who thinks you should not be running it.
This is meant to be hard
The game ships with a headless harness that plays the real thing — thirteen scripted strategies, twenty-four random seeds each, seven hundred and thirty game days. It is how balance gets measured here rather than guessed at.
The biggest killer is not running out of money. It is the board removing the founder.
How it ends
A run always ends. Which ending you got is recorded and graded, and it follows you: your reputation, your money and the fact that you have done this before all carry into the next company you start.
Somebody bought the whole company. The best ending in the game.
Activists forced a sale of your public company. You cashed out anyway.
Nobody wanted the product. Somebody wanted the team.
You wound down a company that had quietly stopped going anywhere.
The board removed you as CEO. It is your company right up until it isn’t.
The company ran out of money.
Revenue flatlined. Burn never did.
Your technical leadership left, and there was nobody behind them.
You ignored a rule long enough that regulators closed you down.
In the box
Your slice, round by round
Status
On the App Store for iPhone. $4.99, paid once.
| Platform | iOS first. |
|---|---|
| Price | $4.99. There is no in-app purchase and no subscription. |
| Network | Not required. The whole simulation runs on the device. |
| Accounts | None. There is nothing to sign in to. |
| Ads & tracking | None. The privacy policy is written to be checked against the code. |