RUN THE FUND

Would you have written the check?

A real startup, at the real moment it raised — name stripped, numbers intact. Invest or pass; then find out who it was and what your call would have cost you.

Deal me one — 60 seconds No account. No signup. One real deal is below.

Demo deal · A real company · Every number sourced

DEAL 001 — "DRIFTWOOD" Consumer marketplace · Seed · United States · Spring 2009
Raising
$585Kseed round, as reported
Post-money
~$2.4Mas reported
Revenue
~$4K/mofounder-reported, barely profitable
Launches so far
3in 18 months

The signal

The founders have kept the company alive by designing and hand-selling novelty breakfast cereal at $40 a box. The cereal has out-earned the product.

The bear case

Growth flatlined for months. The founders are financing operations on personal credit cards. Of seven investors pitched last year, five passed and two never replied. The premise requires strangers to pay to sleep in other strangers' homes.

Fixed check, one tap, no term sheet. Decide, and the card opens up: the real name, the round-by-round path, the dollars — with a citation on every number.

You've read a hundred "how they almost died" startup stories and never once found out whether you would have gotten it right — a post-mortem tells you nothing about your own judgment, because you already know the ending. This card takes the ending away first.

Nothing is invented

Every number on every card is the real company's real number at the real moment it raised, with a citation. If we can't source it, it doesn't ship.

Sixty seconds a day

One card, identical for every player in your region. One tap — invest or pass. No jargon required to make the call; all the finance arrives after you've committed.

Then run a whole fund

In the full game, you'll raise a fund, lock a mandate, deploy across twelve deals and ten simulated years, and get a decision-by-decision breakdown of where your returns came from.

Questions

Are the companies and the numbers real?

Yes, all of them. Every card is a real company at a real funding moment, built from public sources — regulatory filings, S-1s, founder posts, reputable press — with a citation attached to every numeric claim. We anonymize the name, the founders, and the exact location and date. We never invent a number, round one for effect, or adjust one to make a card play better.

Won't I just recognize the famous companies?

Sometimes — and in the daily deal that's part of the fun. In the competitive fund mode we'll pair famous winners with lookalike companies from the same era, sector, and metric band that failed, so recognizing a story without reading the numbers will actively cost you money. And we'll measure it: any card where knowing the answer reliably beats reading the card will be pulled from competitive play automatically — that check is written into our build spec.

Do I need to know venture finance to play?

Not for the daily deal — one card, one tap, no check sizing, no term sheets. The plan for the full game is to explain each financial concept the first time it actually costs you something, using the numbers from the deal you just played — the cheapest financial education there is, because the lesson arrives attached to a mistake you personally just made.

Is it free? Will it be pay-to-win?

The daily deal is free and needs no account. If we ever charge, it will be for depth — deeper analysis, the case-study archive, richer post-run breakdowns. We've written a hard rule into our own build spec: nothing purchasable will ever touch a score, an attempt, or a deck. A leaderboard you can buy your way up is not a leaderboard.

What do I get for joining the waitlist now?

New deal cards by email as they ship, and first access when the daily deal opens (in batches, India first). We'd rather let a few thousand people in early and fix what breaks than launch loud and burn everyone.