The Startup Game
Students live through the chaotic and exciting early days of a startup
- Entrepreneurship
- Leadership
- Strategic Decision-Making
An entrepreneurial marketplace in a class
Students live through the chaotic and exciting early days of a startup in a single class session, and then learn to make sense of what they experienced.
Each player takes on the role of either a founder, an investor, or a key early employee and works to secure the right combination of funding and talent in order to make their startup a success. Players actively move around the room, competing and cooperating with one another to fund, join, and grow startups.
The game introduces students to the latest academic findings that support real-world lessons about key startup concepts such as hiring, equity, salary, and funding considerations. Included in the simulation is a comprehensive Instructor Toolkit.
The Instructor Toolkit includes detailed videos, instructions and teaching notes about how to run the game, how to analyze team strategies and team scoring and how to conduct an impactful and memorable post-game debrief. The game can be played at any point during the semester and is crafted to get students of all backgrounds interacting in new and exciting ways.
Interested in running the Startup Game in your class? Please contact us.
For more simulations on entrepreneurship, check out the Entrepreneurship Game, the Corporate Innovation Game, and BlueSky Ventures.
How our experiences work
Access teaching materials, support and notifications every step of the way
Configure for your learning objectives, set up classes in the experience
Invite learners to enroll and set up their groups
Run the experience and access support and notifications as you go
Summarize the experience for your learners and the outcomes
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Create a ‘My Interactive’ account *This will unlock these across all of our experiencesLessons of The Startup Game include:
Introduction to the complexities of the startup experience
- Illustrates the interplay between the many factors that are required to make entrepreneurial ventures successful, including compensation, fundraising, employee selection, equity allocation, and valuation
- Allows students to try out multiple strategies to acquiring resources, and allow them to interact with others trying alternate approaches
Introduction to many key concepts in entrepreneurship
- Valuation approaches and implications
- Equity versus salary compensation
- Fundraising considerations
- Rich versus King
- Exploration versus exploitation, and the effects of diversity
- Acquiring skilled employees
Introduction to the complexities of the startup experience
- Illustrates the interplay between the many factors that are required to make entrepreneurial ventures successful, including compensation, fundraising, employee selection, equity allocation, and valuation
- Allows students to try out multiple strategies to acquiring resources, and allow them to interact with others trying alternate approaches
Introduction to many key concepts in entrepreneurship
- Valuation approaches and implications
- Equity versus salary compensation
- Fundraising considerations
- Rich versus King
- Exploration versus exploitation, and the effects of diversity
- Acquiring skilled employees