A 3D startup simulator that runs in your browser. You leave Big Tech with $500, a garage, and one cofounder, and you try to reach the IPO bell before the market or your own burn rate reaches you first.
It is a city builder about the only city it is qualified to satirize. Underneath the jokes is a real financial model, which is the part that makes the jokes land. A focused run takes roughly 25 to 40 minutes.
Play the gameIn a normal city builder, land is the scarce resource. In a startup, the scarce resource is the total addressable market, so the board is literally the TAM: a 16 by 16 grid you expand across. Rival startups incorporate the day you do and found their own headquarters on that same grid, taking lots that should have been yours. Your market share is visible as territory, and any building of yours with a rival on an adjacent lot runs at reduced output. Fold them, out-ship them, or acquire them.
Picking a firm does not wire a check. Each investor is a path you have to walk, level by level, and each one changes how your company actually operates.
"Make something people want"
Checks are 20% leaner. Apply to the batch, survive office hours, pitch Demo Day.
"Get to default alive"
Standard checks, high expectations. Partner coffee, default-alive metrics, the board deck.
"Software is eating the world"
No operating edge: you win on scale. Viral demo, podcast circuit, term sheet negotiation.
Every dollar in the simulation comes from a small set of pure functions calibrated against published SaaS benchmarks, refreshed with their sources rather than invented:
Hype moves your multiple, not your dollars. Pre-revenue, a deck slide is worth about $10 of priced-round story value per hype point, which is either cynical or generous depending on the year you raised.
You will rent AWShucks clusters, rack NVIDIYEAH GPUs, hire through LurkedIn, and collect revenue through Stripey. No real brand appears anywhere in the game until that company takes the slot, which is the one honest advertising model we could think of: native placement where users voluntarily pay upkeep on your logo. The build palette also shows a DIY scraper option that is permanently disabled, because everyone tries it and nobody succeeds. The slots are openly for sale.
The one exception is the SV Wire ticker along the bottom, which carries real cited technology headlines. Those are news, not ads.
Sim-SiliconValley is three.js and Vite, with a handful of serverless functions for the leaderboard and the social image. There is no game engine, no art pipeline, and no asset store: the buildings are low-poly meshes built in code, the icon set is hand-written inline SVG, and the sound is synthesized in WebAudio at runtime with no audio files at all.
It was vibe coded end to end, and it stays alive the same way. A daily agent picks one item off the roadmap, implements it, runs the tests, and ships it. The commit log is the devlog. That is also why the balance is covered by a scripted full playthrough in the test suite: when an agent retunes the economy, something has to notice if the game became unwinnable overnight.
Built by Raz Kaplan, who works in go-to-market and writes about treating marketing as an engineering practice at gtmascode.dev. This game is a side project, and also an argument: the satire only works if the underlying model is accurate enough to be uncomfortable.
Start in the garage