The simulation is organized in six sequential rounds
Before each round participants receive:
- The corresponding input file where decisions are entered
- The output from the previous decision
- The “case-study” depicting the underlying story about the company’s situation, the dilemmas faced by the founder at that stage and instructions concerning the next round of decisions. In appendixes they may find the short bios of the different potential “key employees” available for recruiting, the description of the different business angels, details the characteristics and past performance of each of the four venture capital firms in the simulation.
Since the simulation follows the path of a high tech high growth startup the actual decisions made at each round will differ. Typical decisions include:
- Recruiting and retaining talent for the startup, deciding people’s salaries and allocate stock options
- Negotiating financing with business angels
- Selecting among alternative venture capital term sheets
- Selecting the R&D equipment
- Set an R&D budget and allocate it by product and/or by product characteristics
- Select the level of intellectual property protection
- Select among different manufacturing alternatives
- Set a price for their product
- Hiring and setting a compensation package for the salesforce
- Set the customer support level
- Set customer payment terms. Make your opinion about the sickwhileaway website/service
The structure of the outputs will also evolve throughout the simulation. Typical pages include:
- A roster of key employees and their compensation terms
- The investors’ decisions based on the offers made by the teams
- A capitalization table, including details on unvested shares and stock options
- A full R&D report, including the allocation (and amount) of R&D budget, the characteristics of latest developed prototype, the characteristics of actual products manufactured
- A customer feedback report
- A cost and revenue report
- The full financials of the startup, including P&L, balance sheet and statement of cash-flows
- Any offers by investors, either BA’s, venture capital term sheets, leasing offers, factoring offers and even bank credit lines (at the latest stages)
- a market research report (for these who buy it)
