You can't learn entrepreneurship from a textbook. So I turned it into a game.
Everyone talks startups. Almost nobody understands the machinery.
Everyone knows the words. Runway. Equity. Dilution. Term sheet. They show up in every founder podcast, every other LinkedIn post.
But ask what actually happens in a funding round. Who owns how much of the company when the dust settles. Why a "great" term sheet can leave you poor years later, even as the valuation climbs. Suddenly it goes quiet.
That's no accident. This knowledge lives in cap tables, contracts and experiences you normally only get once it's expensive – in the middle of your own startup, with real money and real risk.
I always found that absurd. Maybe the most important economic skill of our time – understanding how an idea turns into value – is taught nowhere in any systematic way. So I decided to change that. Not with a course. With a game.
Why this game exists
I'm Janosch. I've been building digital products for over five years – and I'm the father of two daughters. This game is born exactly at the intersection of those two sentences.
My first product failed. Not dramatically, just: failed. What helped me back then wasn't what I'd learned in school or at university – it was what nobody had taught me and what I had to piece together the hard way: How does value actually get created? What is a price, what is a margin, what does it mean to give away shares? Why do some companies survive a mistake and others don't?
Today my wife and I run a small, profitable company. Two people, no investors, no employees – but modern tools and the freedom to decide for ourselves what we work on. This game, by the way, is proof of that way of working: it would once have been a job for an entire studio. I build it essentially on my own, with AI tools.
And then came the real question
The faster AI reshapes the world of work, the more often I ask myself a question many parents probably know: what do my daughters actually need to learn to live well twenty years from now? I don't think the answer is "more vocabulary." I think it's: understand how the economy they'll live in works – so they can actively shape it instead of being driven by it.
Entrepreneurial thinking, to me, doesn't mean every young person should found a company. It means: seeing problems, building solutions, dealing with risk, knowing the value of your own work – and knowing that behind every price, every investment and every "free" product there's a bill. That's self-efficacy. And you don't learn it from a worksheet, but by making decisions and feeling their consequences.
Why a game – and why this kind
Because play is the most serious form of learning we know. A lecture on dilution goes in one ear and out the other. But when you've just happily accepted VC money in the game and realize three months later that you only own half of your own company – that lesson sticks. For good.
In The Startup Game you make hundreds of real founder decisions, and the game does the math honestly: bet on hype alone and you fall. Never invest and you stay small. Treat your team unfairly and you'll feel it.
Two things were non-negotiable for me. First: success only counts together with positive impact – the final score is wealth times impact, not wealth alone. Second: the tech world shows up as loving satire. Young people should get to know the billionaires and their myths – with a grin and a healthy distance, not as hero posters above the bed.
Money isn't the only score
The first of those two points matters enough to me for its own paragraph. You can become a billionaire in the game and still lose if you wrecked the world on the way there. And this impact isn't a donate button you press at the end. It grows out of real operating decisions – how you pay your people, where your power comes from, what your supply chain looks like – and its weight scales with the size of your company. Responsibility scales too.
Not because it sounds educational, but because I believe it's economically right. The "move fast, break things, cash out" myth has shaped how a generation thinks about success for long enough. I wanted a game that rehearses a different truth: creating value and taking responsibility belong together.
What the game is
In short: a browser tycoon game that looks like a modern 3D animated film. Not a dashboard full of numbers, but a walkable world – your own tower, which you build higher month after month. Customers, team, product, cash. You work your way up through angel and VC rounds, all the way to the exit and beyond. The goal: become a Squillionaire – and along the way you actually grasp how runway, equity, scaling and sustainability fit together.
It runs entirely in the browser – no download, no sign-up, in German and English.
Who I'm building it for
For curious young people. For young founders and everyone who dreams of their own startup. For families gaming together on the weekend – and, honestly, for anyone who always wanted to understand what a term sheet is.
In short: if founding and startups fascinate you, this game is for you. And yes – for my own daughters too. One day they'll play this, and I want it to be the best economics game I can hand them.
Play it yourself
The Startup Game is free, ad-free and playable without signing up – all you need is a browser and half an hour of curiosity. By the end you won't just know what a term sheet is. You'll know what it feels like to sign one.
Start here: startupgame.eu.
And if you notice something that could be better: there's a 💬 button inside the game. Every message gets read. Promise.
The Startup Game is a game by Squills. Squills builds AI-driven products and helps teams work faster with AI. More about how we work: talk to us.