It is 2026. You just walked out of your Big Tech job with $500, a garage, and one loyal cofounder. Five levels stand between you and the IPO bell.
Nothing here spoils the run. It is the briefing you would want before your first board meeting: what the numbers mean, what the grid is for, and which mistakes quietly end most runs.
Play nowCustomers pay you recurring revenue. Revenue funds three resources: Compute, Data, and Humans. Those three build products, and products let you raise prices and win bigger customers, which pays for more resources. Everything else in the game is a variation on protecting that flywheel.
One rule catches everyone: before you ship a product, your customers are pilots, so your ARR is genuinely zero no matter how many logos you have. Revenue only compounds after the first product exists.
Each level is a checklist. Clear every task to earn the milestone badge and its reward, which is usually your next funding round.
Pick a product idea, run market research, set up recruiting, open an office so there are desks to sit at, make your first hire, and land one paid pilot customer. Desks before hires: the garage seats two.
Write the GTM strategy and build the pitch deck, then walk your investor's actual playbook, which differs per firm, and sign five pilot customers yourself. The GTM choice is permanent, so read it twice.
Plug into a data source, ship your first product, stop renting and rack your own GPUs, raise a sales tower so customers start arriving on their own, and publish a pricing page. Pricing compounds forever.
Commission a superpod, grow to 25 people, ship five products, close the enterprise mega-deal, and reach $5.25M ARR and a $30M valuation. Not a unicorn yet: that word costs a billion, and it arrives on its own when your valuation earns it.
Eighteen products, sixty humans, $350M ARR, 72 lots of the grid captured, 75% market share held, and an S-1 on file. This is where the grid stops being scenery and becomes the whole problem.
The 16 by 16 board is the total addressable market. Rivals found headquarters on it and keep building, so empty land is not neutral, it is a lot you have not lost yet. Any building of yours with a rival on an adjacent tile runs at 85% output.
Buildings pay adjacency bonuses to their four neighbors, so the layout is a real decision and not decoration:
Cafeterias matter for a second reason. Staffed buildings accumulate fatigue and eventually burn out to half output until they rest. An adjacent cafeteria halves the rate at which that happens, which is why it tends to be the most beloved building in the game.
Your team splits into juniors, seniors, and execs, and they behave differently. Idle humans bill consulting hours, which is free money early and a trap later: consulting income fades as you ship more products, so late-game revenue has to come from customers. Staffed humans stop billing but make things. Everyone draws a salary either way.
Every market, standard checks, rivals at a polite pace.
The thaw never comes. Only cold markets rotate and every round wires 25% lighter.
Six clone factories incorporate the day you do, and they ship fast.
There is also a weekly challenge: one shared scenario variant that rotates every week and has its own slice of the leaderboard, so a new week is always an empty board.
Every completed IPO can post to the Hall of Unicorns, ranked by fastest garage-to-IPO time. A focused run lands somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes. The board is public, and the fastest run on it is the number to beat.
Start in the garage