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Each game of Infinite CEO runs 52 in-game weeks. Every week you get 3 Executive Points (EP) to spend on strategic actions — growth, finance, R&D, marketing, political influence, philanthropy, and workforce moves each cost 0-3 EP. Trading stock (buying, selling, shorting, or covering any competitor's shares, or your own once you IPO) never costs EP and can be done any time. When you're done for the week, click Advance Week — your three AI rivals act, the market moves, your board reviews your performance, and a new week begins.

FAQ

Can I abandon a run and start again? Yes. Start Over sits at the bottom of the sidebar while you are playing (at the bottom of the Dashboard on a phone). It asks once before doing anything, then opens the founding form with your current company's details already filled in — name, city, colours, icon and mission — so founding a near-identical company again takes one click. Change whatever you like first.

Nothing is lost until you press Launch Company. Up to that moment the old run is still yours and still resumable, and there is a Never Mind — Keep Playing button to go back to it. Once the new company launches, the old run ends where it stood: it is not scored, it earns no career experience, and it never reaches the leaderboard. A run you walk away from is a run that did not happen — which is the point, and also why walking away from a good one is worth a second's thought.

What ends the game? Reaching week 52, the board firing you for sustained poor approval, or running out of cash with debt it can't cover.

What is the board looking at? A weighted mix of profitability, growth, share price, financial risk, ethics, innovation, and reputation. Falling below its patience threshold for too many weeks in a row gets you fired.

Do my mission statement's words actually matter? Yes — at creation it is scored for innovation, trustworthiness, profit focus, sustainability, public impact, ambition, and credibility. Those hidden traits color how your run plays out.

How does hiring actually work? Instead of adding one employee at a time, a Hiring Wave (1, 2, or 3 EP) opens a pool of new headcount sized to a percentage of your CURRENT total staff — the same three buttons stay meaningful whether your company has twenty employees or twenty thousand. You then allocate that pool across departments yourself, or use "Match Sector Ratio" to fill it the way your own industry typically would. Each department's ongoing effect on the company depends on how well its share of your total headcount matches what your industry actually needs, and whether your headcount has kept pace with how big the company has grown — so staying well-staffed is an ongoing job, not something a single hiring wave locks in forever. Layoff waves work the same way, in reverse, and are always free.

What is a Moonshot pitch? When you launch a Moonshot Initiative, you can optionally write your own pitch for what the breakthrough actually is. A sharp, specific pitch that clearly fits your company's own industry can make the payoff bigger if the moonshot lands — but leaving it blank ("let the team decide") never makes the outcome worse. Either way, a moonshot stays a genuine coin flip: no amount of preparation, or writing, changes the odds of it paying off, only how big the win is when it does.

Where Revenue Comes From

Revenue in this game is not a number that drifts. It is the identity every chief executive already works in:

weekly revenue = customers × revenue per customer

Both halves are on your dashboard, both are built from named parts, and every part moves for a reason you can point at and act on. If revenue changed this week, one of the things below changed. Nothing else can move it.

The customers half

Your customer count is built from four things multiplied together:

Customers per commercial employee. What one Sales or Marketing person can carry in your sector. This is your industry's business model in a single number, and the nine industries are as different as the real ones: an aerospace account manager carries a single programme customer worth half a million dollars a year, a gaming community manager carries four thousand players worth a hundred and thirty each.

Commercial headcount. How many Sales and Marketing staff you employ. This is the direct, physical limit on how many customers you can reach, and it is why hiring is a revenue decision and not only a cost. Every other department builds, protects or administers what is sold; these two carry it.

Distribution reach. The permanent footprint you have built — offices opened, countries entered, companies acquired, channels won. It multiplies what each commercial employee can carry, because a salesperson at a company selling in forty countries through established channels genuinely reaches more people than the identical salesperson at a company selling in one city. This is where operating leverage honestly comes from. It has steeply diminishing returns: your first new country roughly doubles the market you can address, your fortieth adds a rounding error, because you entered the large accessible markets first.

Appeal. Of the people you reach, the share who actually choose you — a conversion rate, shown as a multiple against a starting company at 1.00. It is built from your product quality, how well known and trusted you are, your pricing position, and how strong your rivals are. Product quality is weighted hardest of all, deliberately: a better product winning more customers is the most important causal link in any business.

All of that is capped by the size of your sector. Nobody owns a whole market — there are always customers who will not switch, buyers with a second-source policy, regulators who notice, and segments one product does not fit.

The price half

What one customer pays is your sector's base price, multiplied by what you have earned and what you have chosen: a quality premium (better products command more), a brand premium (a trusted name commands more for the identical product), your pricing position, and the ordinary price level you can already see in the expense ledger.

The quality premium is deliberately shallower than the quality effect on volume. That asymmetry is real: a superb product wins a great many more customers and charges somewhat more, and companies that try to take an entire quality advantage in price rather than in share tend to be overtaken by the ones that did the opposite.

Pricing: the one free lever, and the one that teaches the most

You can change your pricing position on the Dashboard at any time. It costs no Executive Points and no cash, because it is a policy rather than a programme — you announce a price position, you do not fund one.

Volume prices for share: more customers, less from each. Premium prices for margin: fewer customers, more from each. Balanced sits between them.

At an ordinary product all three earn roughly the same, so none of them is simply correct. What settles it is quality. Charge a premium for something excellent and you barely lose a customer; charge it for something mediocre and they leave in numbers. Compete on price with a weak product and you win a great many customers; do it with a superb one and you are giving away margin you had already earned. You earn the right to charge more — it cannot be taken, only built.

Gross margin, and why your industry decides how your business feels

Serving a customer costs real money: components, hosting, support, delivery, warranty, materials, field service. That is cost of revenue, and it is now its own line in your expense ledger, scaling with what you sell rather than with how many people you employ. What is left of each dollar after it is your gross margin, and it is fixed by your industry: around 78% for an AI company, 42% for consumer hardware, 22% for aerospace.

This is why the nine industries start at very different weekly revenues while earning roughly the same profit. A low-margin business has to run far more money through itself to make the same living, and every decision it takes is shaped by that. It is probably the single most useful thing to understand about a business you are looking at.

Which wall are you up against?

The line above your revenue cards names the constraint that is actually holding you back right now, because each one has a completely different answer:

Capacity. You could sell to more people than you can currently reach. More commercial staff and wider distribution turn straight into customers. This is where almost every company starts — a twenty-person business can serve a few thousand people out of a sector containing hundreds of millions. Selling is not your problem. Reaching is.

Appeal. You are reaching people and too few of them are choosing you. More salespeople will not fix that. A better product and a better-known name will.

Market. You hold about as much of this sector as anyone realistically does. There is no more growth to be had here at any price, and the answer is a different market — which is what international expansion and acquisitions are for.

What this means for your decisions

Every action that used to "add revenue" now works through one of these parts instead, which is why the effects are slower and why they last. Opening an office, expanding internationally and acquiring a company all add distribution reach. Launching a product and investing in R&D raise product quality, which raises both how many people choose you and what each pays. Campaigns, events and endorsements raise trust and awareness, which do the same. Hiring Sales and Marketing raises capacity.

And customers arrive over a sales cycle and leave over a bad week — they move toward what your company can support rather than jumping there. That asymmetry is what makes a market position an asset: it is slow to build, which is exactly why it is worth something once built, and why sustained investment beats a burst of it.

What Your Company Is Worth

A valuation is earnings times a multiple. That is not a simplification for the sake of a game — it is how companies are actually bought and sold, and it is probably the single most useful thing on this page.

Your Company Value is not a score that goes up when you spend money. It is what a buyer would pay for the business you have built, recomputed every week from what that business actually earns.

The three ways a business is valued

Your company is worth the highest of these, which is the order a real valuation is argued in:

On earnings. Annual profit multiplied by a multiple. This is the normal case and the one you should be trying to be in.
On revenue, if you are growing but do not yet earn enough for the first number to be higher. Real pre-profit companies are valued exactly this way, at a fraction of the multiple their earnings would command.
On net assets — cash and holdings less debt — which is the floor under everything. Nothing you do makes the company worth less than what it could be broken up for.

What moves the multiple

The multiple starts at a figure a solid, unremarkable business commands, and then a handful of things add or subtract a few turns — the word the people who argue about this actually use. It is clamped to a band no real company trades outside, so it cannot run away from you in either direction.

Growth is worth the most turns by a distance, because it is worth the most in reality. A business growing fast is worth several times an identical one standing still.
Your sector. A high gross-margin industry earns a premium. That is the actual reason software is worth more than heavy engineering per dollar of sales, rather than a preference for software.
Reputation, modestly. A trusted name is worth something. It is not worth as much as people expect.
Risk, downward. Debt compresses what the equity is worth, because the lenders are paid first. A thin cash runway compresses it further.
The economy. When the cycle turns, the whole market re-rates at once, and nothing about your company has to change for that to happen to it.

The multiple moves slowly. What you earn does not.

Two different things move a valuation, and they move at different speeds on purpose.

What you earn reaches your value immediately. A good quarter is a fact about your business, and facts do not need time to be believed. Sell more, spend less, and you are worth more that week.

The multiple arrives over weeks. Opinion is the slow half — how fast you are judged to be growing, what the market thinks of your name, and above all what the economy is doing. When the cycle turns, every company on earth is re-rated at once, and letting that land in a single week would make your company's worth a slot machine rather than a verdict. So it closes part of the gap each week, the way a market actually reprices.

One consequence worth knowing: spending money does not make your company worth more. Opening an office, shipping a product or buying a competitor is worth precisely what it does to your customers, your reach and your margin — and if it does nothing to those, it has made you poorer, not richer. There is no way to buy a valuation.

Listed companies are different

Before you float there is no market, so there is nothing to argue with: you are worth what a buyer would pay, full stop. Once you have floated, your value is whatever the market says your shares are worth — and a market is an opinion, not a measurement.

That opinion is anchored rather than free. It moves with your business one for one, so growth is priced rather than trailed, and it wanders around it. It can have you a third below what your numbers support, or half again above, and it can stay wrong for months — but not forever, and not by any amount. Both figures are shown to you.

When the two diverge, that is information. A market pricing you well below what your numbers support is the moment a share buyback stops being a gesture and becomes a genuinely good trade: you are buying a dollar of your own business for less than a dollar.

Reading the Expense Ledger

Cost of revenue is the direct cost of serving the customers you have -- components, hosting, support, delivery, warranty, materials, field service. Unlike every other line below, it scales with what you SELL rather than with how many people you employ, and the share it takes is set by your industry (see Where Revenue Comes From above). It is the first thing subtracted from revenue, and what is left is your gross profit -- the number every other cost on this page has to be paid out of.

Every operating cost in this game is derived from something real about your company — how many people you employ, in which roles, in which industry, in how many offices. Nothing is charged as a share of what the market currently thinks the company is worth, and nothing grows for a reason you cannot point at. The Financials tab shows each line separately so the arithmetic is always available to you.

Payroll. The sum of every employee's salary, by role, plus your executive team and your own pay as CEO. Roles are priced individually and absolutely: an engineer costs what an engineer costs, whether you employ twenty people or twenty thousand, in your first company or your fifth. Engineering and Research sit at the top of the scale, Sales and HR toward the bottom, reflecting real market rates for those functions.

Benefits & Payroll Tax. Thirty per cent on top of every salary. This is the employer's side of employment, and in a real company it is the single largest cost that never appears on a payslip: health cover, the employer's share of payroll and unemployment taxes, retirement contributions and matching, workers' compensation, and paid leave accrual. Thirty per cent is the standard planning figure for a US employer. It is tracked on its own inflation index because healthcare costs genuinely rise faster than wages do — so this line creeps up slightly faster than payroll even when nobody gets a raise.

Facilities. $210 per employee per week, plus any offices you have opened. This covers rent and the property taxes and service charges bundled into it, electricity, water and climate control, internet and telephony, cleaning and waste, security and access control, reception and mail, kitchen and supplies, furniture amortised over its life, and periodic repairs and refit. Twenty employees is $4,200 a week.

A new office you open adds a permanent line of its own, sized to your commercial team — a site that extends your distribution is staffed by the people who sell, so a company with three salespeople opens a room and one with sixty opens a building. That matters because of what an office BUYS: distribution reach multiplies your commercial headcount rather than standing on its own. With few salespeople, more reach multiplies very little, and a site sized for a big company would cost you more rent than it could ever earn. Fill the capacity you have before you buy more of it — and your Revenue panel tells you which of the two is actually holding you back.

Facilities scale with the number of people you seat and nothing else — a company whose valuation doubles does not start paying more rent.

Technology & Vendors. $95 per employee per week. This is the modern cost of equipping somebody to do their job: a laptop and monitors amortised across a replacement cycle, phone and connectivity, and the stack of per-seat software licences every business now carries — email and productivity, chat, video conferencing, document storage, the CRM, the HR and payroll platform, the finance and expense systems, endpoint security and antivirus, password management and single sign-on, VPN, backup, and for technical staff the development tooling, source control, build infrastructure and cloud compute. Add helpdesk support and the vendors who keep it all running.

Insurance & Compliance. $55 per employee per week, multiplied by an industry factor. This is the cost of being a legitimate operating company: general liability, professional indemnity and errors-and-omissions cover, directors' and officers' insurance, cyber liability, property and business interruption cover, external audit and accounting, legal retainer, regulatory filings and licences, and the training and record-keeping your regulator expects. The industry factor is real: a biotechnology firm running trials pays 2.2× per head, aerospace 2.0×, finance 1.8×, clean energy 1.5×, cybersecurity 1.4×, robotics 1.3×, artificial intelligence 1.1×, and a games studio or consumer business the baseline 1.0×. Twenty employees at a biotech firm is $2,420 a week; the same twenty at a games studio is $1,100.

Efficiency Savings. If you have run cost-cutting programmes, this shows what they are actually saving each week. Note carefully what efficiency can and cannot touch: it applies to benefits, facilities, technology and compliance, and never to base payroll. You cannot retroactively reduce what you agreed to pay the people already working for you. To spend less on salaries you have to employ fewer people, which is a different decision with different consequences.

Corporate Tax. Twenty-one per cent of operating profit, charged only in weeks where the company actually made one. A company losing money pays none. This is the one cost in the entire model that is genuinely a percentage, because in reality that is exactly what it is.

Debt Service. Interest plus scheduled principal, both leaving the bank account every week. The interest rate comes from your credit rating, which is assessed from your leverage and from whether your earnings actually cover what you owe. The ledger shows debt service as a share of revenue as well, because that single figure is the honest answer to whether the company can carry what it has borrowed: comfortably under a fifth is healthy, past a third is a squeeze.

Why do my costs rise even when nothing changes? Three named indices, and only these three. Wages rise about 3.5% a year, benefits about 6% a year because healthcare outpaces pay, and prices for rent, tooling and vendors about 3% a year. Those are real-world figures. A company that employs the same people and runs the same offices should see its cost base creep up by roughly 4–5% a year and no more — and if its revenue keeps pace, it stays profitable. Standing still is not supposed to kill you. Losing customers to a competitor who kept investing while you did not is a different matter, and that pressure is real, visible, and attributable to a named rival.

What do one-off actions cost, and why? Recruiting is a share of the role's own annual salary — roughly a quarter for engineering and research, less for support functions — plus a premium for hiring in a hurry rather than steadily, which is what agency fees and richer signing offers really cost. Bonuses, perks, office fit-out and restructuring consultancy are priced per employee, because that is how those budget lines genuinely work. Marketing, R&D, philanthropy and crisis response are charged against annualised revenue, the way real companies budget them as a percentage of the top line. Only three costs in the game move with company value, because for those three it is correct: a share buyback is by definition a fraction of market capitalisation, and acquiring a company or mounting a takeover are transactions in equity.

What Actions Cost, and Why That Changes

The price of an executive action is never fixed and never drifts upward for its own sake. Two separate forces move it: this week's market conditions, and how large your company has become. Both are worth understanding, because both can be played.

This week's market prices. Your company buys in four markets, and each is priced separately every week on the dashboard. Talent covers hiring, bonuses, perks, R&D and product work. Advertising covers campaigns, events, endorsements and public giving. Deals & Capital covers acquisitions, buybacks, offices and expansion. Professional Services covers legal, consultants, lobbying and crisis response.

Those prices move for three real reasons. The economy: advertising inventory collapses in price during a downturn because every budget is cut at once, while deal prices run hot in a bubble and capital gets dear in a credit crunch because nobody will lend. The calendar: advertising is at its most expensive in the weeks before the holidays and its cheapest in January, recruiting runs hot in the new-year hiring rush and quiet over Christmas when nobody changes jobs, and professional services bill their peak through audit season. And your rivals: while a competitor is actively raiding your people, you are bidding against them for every hire. The calendar repeats every year, so the rhythm is learnable — running the same campaign in January rather than December can save you close to forty per cent.

How costs change as you grow. A larger company does not simply pay more for everything in proportion. Real businesses see three different patterns, and this game follows all three.

Most things get cheaper per dollar of revenue as you grow. Marketing, research, product development, philanthropy and expansion all scale at less than one-for-one. A company ten times the size does not need ten times the advertising budget to reach its market: media buying earns volume rates, brand awareness compounds so each impression costs less to land, agencies get replaced by in-house teams, and platform and tooling investment amortises across everything built on top of it. This is why marketing spend runs above forty per cent of revenue at a startup and between eight and fifteen per cent at a mature company. In this game those costs rise in dollars but halve as a share of revenue by the time you are a hundred times larger. That efficiency is the reward for scale.

Influence barely scales at all. Lobbying is bought on retainer, and a retainer is not a percentage of anyone's top line. Even the heaviest corporate lobbying budgets top out around ten to twenty million dollars a year in total, nothing like proportional to the revenue of the companies spending it. Political donations do not scale whatsoever: they are legally capped, so they cost the same absolute figure at every size of company you will ever run.

Trouble gets disproportionately more expensive. Crisis response and answering a rival scale at more than one-for-one — the only costs in the game that do. A larger company in difficulty faces more jurisdictions and more regulators, more plaintiffs, more customers to notify, far more press attention, and years of it rather than weeks. A data breach at a twenty-person company is a bad fortnight; the same breach at scale is a multi-year legal event. By the time you are a hundred times larger, a crisis costs double as a share of revenue.

What this means for you as CEO. Growing makes you more efficient at everything except getting into trouble. That is the genuine trade of scale, and it is why a large company can afford ambitions a small one cannot while still being far more vulnerable to a scandal. It also cuts the other way: because these costs fall more slowly than revenue does, a shrinking company finds its cost base does not shrink with it — contracts run on, retainers are committed, and a crisis costs what it costs regardless of what happened to your sales. That asymmetry is what makes a downturn genuinely dangerous rather than merely smaller.

Getting Good At Something

Every strategic action you take belongs to one of six disciplines, and your company gets permanently better at each discipline it invests in. This is the one mechanic that most rewards being understood, so this section explains exactly how it works and what the numbers on your dashboard mean.

The six disciplines are Product & R&D (research, development and shipping what you sell), Brand & Reputation (campaigns, events, endorsements and corporate giving), Operations & Scale (offices, countries, acquisitions and efficiency programmes), Capital & Finance (raising, repaying and structuring money), Talent & Organisation (hiring, the executive bench, pay and perks) and Government & Public Affairs (regulators and lawmakers).

Responding to a crisis, an opportunity, an executive insight or a rival's move belongs to no discipline. Reacting to what the world throws at you is not the same as choosing a direction in it, so those actions neither build experience nor draw on it.

Why doing something repeatedly makes it cheaper

This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in industrial economics. In 1966 the Boston Consulting Group measured that the unit cost of producing something falls by a roughly constant percentage every time cumulative experience doubles — typically fifteen to thirty per cent per doubling, across industries as different as aircraft, semiconductors and insurance policies. It is called the experience curve, and it is not mysterious: by the fiftieth time you run a campaign, the playbook exists, the agency relationships exist, the creative brief is a template rather than a research project, and the people running it have done it before.

Your company works the same way. Every point of executive attention you spend in a discipline is remembered, forever. As that total doubles, operating programmes in that discipline get cheaper — up to a ceiling of about forty per cent below what the same programme costs a company running its first one. Work in that discipline also lands better, and gambles in it succeed slightly more often, because an organisation that has done something fifty times does it better and not merely cheaper.

What this never does

Experience only ever goes up. It does not decay, expire, or need maintaining, and there is no penalty anywhere for a discipline you ignore. A discipline you have never touched is priced exactly as it is for any company starting out — you are never worse off for having specialised elsewhere. The entire cost of doing a bit of everything is the compounding you did not get, which is an opportunity cost and nothing more.

The one thing experience does not make cheaper

Opening an office, entering a country, buying a company or funding a moonshot are capital deployments, not programmes. Ten million dollars buys ten million dollars of office, and no amount of having done it before changes that. What experience buys on a deployment is a better chance it works and a better job of integrating it — never a cheaper asset. This distinction matters more than it sounds: if experience made assets cheaper too, every dollar deployed would create more than a dollar of value inside a loop that feeds itself, and company values would run away to absurdity. It is the difference between a real advantage and a broken one.

Why focus is worth more than breadth

You have the same number of executive points every week regardless of how you spend them, so the only question is where. Because the benefit grows with the number of doublings — and doubling something small is easy while doubling something large is not — effort concentrated in one discipline builds a deeper advantage than the same effort split six ways builds in any of them.

Michael Porter put the underlying point more bluntly in 1996: the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Activities inside one discipline reinforce each other, so investment in a discipline raises the return on further investment in it. That is why a company known for something outperforms one that is merely busy.

It is not an argument for monomania. You still have to hire, you still have to fund the business, and neglecting reputation, ethics, security or morale will get you fired by your board or flattened by a crisis regardless of how good your product organisation is. The shape that works — in this game and in reality — is a real centre of gravity plus genuine competence in the disciplines that support it.

Reading the panel

The What You Are Good At panel on your dashboard shows every discipline, including the ones you have never invested in, because seeing the empty ones is the decision. For each it shows a grade (Untested, Learning, Competent, Practised, Expert, World-class), the share of your company's lifetime attention that has gone there, and the actual benefit in plain numbers: how much less programmes cost, how much harder work lands, and how many percentage points are added to the odds on a gamble.

Once one discipline holds both a real share of your attention and a real depth of it, the panel's heading changes to What You Are Known For and that discipline is marked with a star. That is the point at which your company has stopped being a company that does things and become a company that is about something.

Where else it shows up

Two disciplines pay out somewhere other than the price of an action. Talent & Organisation lowers your cost per hire: an employer brand, a referral pipeline and in-house recruiters are exactly what a company builds by hiring repeatedly, and an organisation that has run a hundred searches pays a fraction of what one reaching for an agency pays for the identical person. Capital & Finance lowers the rate on new borrowing, because a company with a standing revolver, audited forecasts, a covenant history and bankers who have lent to it before genuinely borrows inside the spread a first-time borrower is quoted. It only ever narrows the spread over the best available rate — a sophisticated treasury at a distressed company still pays distressed money, just less of it.

Owning and Shorting Other Companies

Your rivals are publicly traded from week one, and you can take positions in them. There are two very different things you can do, and they carry very different risks.

Buying: a holding, and eventually a company

Buying shares is what it sounds like. The cash leaves your account, you hold the stock, and it is worth whatever the market says it is worth. You can only ever buy up to the shares actually outstanding — there is a real float, not an infinite one.

Cross fifty per cent and you own the company. At the end of that week the rival is folded into yours: you take the share of its value you actually own, its distribution footprint is added to yours, and if its product work was better than yours, some of that carries across. It leaves the competitive set permanently, which eases the pressure on your own appeal for the rest of the run.

This is the patient route to the same place a hostile takeover reaches by force, and it should be: you paid market price for every share, over time, entirely legally, so it carries none of the regulatory and reputational risk a hostile bid does.

Shorting: borrowing shares you do not own

Shorting is betting a company will fall. You borrow shares, sell them, and owe the shares back later. If the price drops you buy them back cheaper and keep the difference. If it rises, you pay the difference out of your own pocket.

You do not receive the sale proceeds. The broker holds them as collateral against the shares you owe — that is what collateral is. Shorting is therefore never a way to raise cash, and it is worth being clear about that because it is the single most common misunderstanding about how a short works.

Three things follow, and all three are real:

You must post margin. Half the value of the position has to be sitting free in your account before the trade is allowed — the real Regulation T requirement. A short is a committed use of capital, not a free one.

You pay to borrow the stock. A fee of roughly eight per cent a year is charged every week against the position's current value. Small each week and relentless, which means a position held for a year has to be right by more than it cost to hold.

You can be bought in. If the price runs against you far enough that the cash backing the position falls below thirty per cent of what it would now cost to close, the broker closes it for you at market, and you take the loss whether you were ready to or not. Your dashboard warns you while the cushion is still thin rather than after it is gone.

This last point is the reason a short is a genuinely different kind of decision from a purchase. A share you own can only fall to zero. A share you owe can rise without limit, and so can the loss.

Running a Venture Capital Firm Instead

When you found a company you choose an industry, and that choice is a promise to your board. Pick a sector and you are answerable for building a business in it — products, customers, margin, a reputation with the public. That is the mandate, and the board will hold you to it.

There is one other option. Choose Venture Capital and you are telling your board something different at the outset: that you intend to make money with money. No product, no customers, no sector of your own. You buy, sell, short and take positions in other companies, and when you are good enough at it you take control of one.

The board agreed to that, so it judges you on that.

What changes

You are founded as a firm, not a factory. Eight people rather than twenty — analysts, compliance and the systems to trade — and considerably more capital, because for you the capital is the business. There is no product to inherit and nothing on the market with your name on it.

You never sell anything to anybody. You have no customers and no share of any sector, and you never will. What you earn instead is what the companies you control pay you, and that is your revenue line in the plainest sense — it is the money the business takes in for what the business does. Your people, your office and your compliance still cost exactly what they cost, every week, in the same ledger as anyone's.

You are worth what you hold. Your company value is recomputed every week as cash, plus the market value of your positions, plus or minus whatever your shorts are currently up or down. That is a holding company's net asset value, and it is the only honest way to value a company whose entire business is its book. Note what this means: a gain on a share you hold is not revenue. It is a change in what the book is worth, and that is a different line on a different statement.

Your board scores you differently. Return on the capital and growth in the book carry most of the weight, then whether you stayed solvent doing it, then your ethics and whether investors still believe in you. Product innovation and public reputation are not scored at all — you never claimed to have either, and marking you down for their absence would be grading you for not being a company you never said you were.

And it judges you on the quarter, not the week. Your book is marked to market every week, and markets move several per cent in a week on nothing at all. Your board reads your return across its whole review window, so one ugly week inside a good quarter is not a firing offence — and a quarter of steady losses very much is.

Some buttons are gone. Product launches, research, campaigns, expansion and pricing all act on a business you do not have. Everything a firm like yours genuinely does stays: raising and repaying capital, hiring, public affairs, philanthropy, running yourself leaner, buying companies, and the whole of the Markets tab.

Owning More Than Half of a Company

Cross fifty per cent of a company's shares and you do not merely hold a large position. You control it: you take a seat on its board, its chief executive answers to you, and it pays you your share of its profits.

What you do not do is start running it. This is the part people get wrong about investment firms, and it is worth being exact. A real firm with majority stakes in a dozen businesses does not staff their sales teams or approve their product roadmaps. It sits on each board, gives the chief executive a standing direction, replaces them when the direction is not being followed, and collects the dividends. The companies go on being their own companies — their own names, their own sectors, their own customers — and the firm goes on being a firm. That is exactly what happens here.

So a venture capital firm stays a venture capital firm however much of the market it ends up owning. And an operating company that buys control of a rival keeps its own business and gains a subsidiary; it does not merge with it.

The one dial that matters

Each company you control is being run to a standing direction you set, and it is the most consequential instruction a real board ever gives. Every week that company earns a profit, and that profit can be handed to its owners or left in the business. It cannot be both. That is the whole of it.

Grow. Reinvest everything. Nothing comes back to you; the company compounds faster and pushes harder on its product. Its margin gets worse, because chasing growth is expensive — that is not a penalty, it is what growth costs.
Balanced. About two fifths of the profit comes home, the rest stays in the business. The default, and rarely the wrong answer.
Harvest. Most of the profit comes home and the company stops chasing growth. Its margin widens, because it has stopped paying for the chase — and it stops investing in its product, which means it stops being a threat to anyone. If it competes with you, that is a strategy in itself.

A board meets monthly, so a direction stands for four weeks before you may change it. A chief executive re-directed every week is not being directed at all.

The trade is genuinely a trade. Growth usually wins over a long run, which is why firms like yours chase it. Cash wins when you need liquidity — to meet a margin call, to make payroll, to buy something else — and it wins when the market is falling, because a dividend in the bank does not care what the share price did this week.

Replacing the chief executive

The other half of what a board seat is for. It costs real output before it buys any: the shares take the news badly, the staff take it worse, and no distributions come out of the company for a month while the new team settles in. Then you find out. It is close to a coin toss whether the replacement is genuinely better — changing the person running a company is the least reliable thing a board does, and any game that made it a dependable upgrade would be teaching you something false. A track record in Capital & Finance improves your judgement, because that is what that discipline is.

You may do it once a quarter per company. A board that replaces a chief executive every month has not got a chief executive problem.

Two routes, two different things

Buying control on the open market and launching a hostile takeover now reach genuinely different places, and the difference is the real one:

Buy more than half the shares and you have a subsidiary. Slower, and you pay the market's price for every share, but it is entirely legal and carries no regulatory or reputational risk at all. You end up with a company that still exists.
Take the company over and you have absorbed its business into yours. Faster and far more aggressive, it can fail outright, and the market notices the aggression whether it works or not.

One last thing, and it is not a small one: you cannot short a company you sit on the board of. Betting against a business whose direction you set is insider dealing, and no broker will take the order. If you want that trade, give up the board seat first.

A Year on Your Own Account

At the end of every year you get a choice: take the company that is offering you the top job, stay where you are, or take twelve months on your own account — your own money, your own office, and nobody to report to.

It is the only role in this game that is not a company, and almost everything that follows from that is deliberate.

There is no board, and no score

Nobody is grading you. There is no board approval, no mandate, no leaderboard place and no legacy record at the end of it. Nothing you do in this year is written down anywhere, which means nothing in it can be got wrong in the way a year running a company can be got wrong.

There is exactly one way to fail: run out of money. That is the entire brief.

It is your money

You start with everything you personally had when you walked out — banked pay, shares you held, and your founder's stake in the company you left, sold on the way out at what it was worth. There is no salary, because nobody is paying you one. What you earn this year is what your book earns, and what you lose is yours to lose.

What you are worth is simply cash plus the market value of everything you hold, plus or minus whatever your shorts are currently up or down. For once there is no distinction between the company's money and yours, because there is no company.

An office is not free

You are not doing this from a basement. There is an office, an assistant who answers the phone and keeps the diary, a market data terminal, a clearing account, and an accountant who will have opinions in April. Together they run to a few thousand a week — deliberately small, because overheads are not the challenge here. They are what makes the year feel like being self-employed rather than being unemployed.

The risk in this year is the market and the deals, and those scale with your book all by themselves.

A share is a share, however many you own

This is the one rule that separates a year on your own account from running a venture capital firm, and it matters. Buy more than half of a company here and nothing happens. No board seat, no direction to give anybody, no distributions. You are trading shares out of an office, and owning all of a company from a desk does not make you its chairman — it makes you somebody with a very concentrated position and no easy way out of it.

Private deals

Occasionally something crosses the desk that is not on any exchange: a seed round, a film slate, distressed bank debt, a farmland fund, a friend's restaurant group, your cousin's crypto venture. These are what a year like this is actually for, and they are nothing like the shares on the Markets tab.

A share can be sold on any Tuesday at a price you can see. A private deal cannot. You commit the money, you wait the months, and then you find out. There is no selling early, no changing your mind and no price to check in the meantime. That illiquidity is the asset class, and it is the one thing this year can teach that no amount of trading public shares ever will.

You are told what the deal is, what it costs, how long your money is gone, and the shape of the risk — "most seed rounds return nothing; the ones that do not can return everything." You are never told the odds and never told the payoff. Deciding anyway is the exercise.

They come one at a time, and one sits on the desk until you take it or pass on it. Nobody withdraws a private deal because you took a week to think about it.

While the money is committed it still counts as yours — carried at what you paid for it, because a private position has no price to look up. What it does not do is come back quickly. If you leave mid-deal, your open positions are sold into a secondary market at a discount to what you paid. Nobody buying you out early knows what it is worth either, so they price it accordingly. A good job offer arriving while half your capital is locked up for another three months is a genuine decision, not a formality.

Things happen

The tax bill on last year's gains arrives. The building serves notice of a rent review. Your assistant gets a better offer and you match it. An old colleague puts you on their advisory board for a retainer, a conference pays you to talk for forty minutes, your accountant finds a deduction you had been missing for two years. None of these is a decision — the decisions this year are the market and the deals — but a year in which nothing happens is not what a year like this is like.

And then the year ends

At week fifty-two you get exactly the same three choices as anybody else: take the company that wants you, keep trading, or do it again. Whatever the year was worth, it is yours, and it goes with you into whatever you do next.

Company Stats

These aren't shown as exact numbers on purpose — you'll get a feel for where you stand from the gauges, the banded labels (Strong/Steady/Strained/Critical), and the after-action summary, the same way a real executive reads the room rather than a spreadsheet.

Product Quality: How good what you're actually selling is. Driven mainly by product launches and how well-staffed Engineering is for your industry.
R&D Level: How far ahead your underlying technology is. Driven by R&D investment and how well-staffed Research is for your industry.
Security: How well-defended your systems and operations actually are. Driven by Security investment and staffing — letting it slide for too long is what opens the door to a Data Breach (or an industry-specific equivalent).
Ethics: Your company's ethical standing. Moved by real choices — philanthropy and General Counsel help it, aggressive cost-cutting hurts it — and it feeds directly into how the board sees you.
CEO Stress: Your own personal toll. Cash trouble and heavy debt raise it; a COO helps ease it. Sustained burnout has real consequences.
Consumer Trust / Investor Confidence / Employee Morale / Media Sentiment / Government Relations: The five reputation dimensions, each owned by a different part of the business (Sales/Marketing, Finance, HR, Marketing/CMO, Legal/Political actions respectively) — found on the Reports tab.

Unprompted Events

Not everything that happens is something you clicked — four systems can surface on their own, each shown as its own banner on the Dashboard when active. They all look the same: same colour, same shape, same buttons. That is deliberate, and the section below explains why.

Opportunities: A real inbound offer — a partnership, a discounted financing round, an available hire, a grant. Some flavors only ever show up for companies in a matching industry. Most are pure good fortune, with no penalty for letting one quietly expire if you're busy with something else. A minority are compromises rather than gifts — those pay far more, carry a second button, and are covered in their own section below.
Rival Moves: A named competitor coming after you — a patent challenge, a talent raid, a whisper campaign. The one event class that is not about anything you did: a well-run company cannot prevent these, only answer them well. Ignoring one costs real ground.
Executive Insights: A perk from a hired member of your C-suite — something a real domain expert would notice that you alone wouldn't (your CFO flagging a tax-advantaged financing window, your General Counsel spotting IP infringement worth litigating). Only ever offered for a role you've actually hired. Same no-penalty shape as an Opportunity.
Crises: An unprompted bad event — a data breach, a product recall, a compliance violation — but never a bare surprise. Each one is tied to a specific stat (Security, Product Quality, Ethics, and so on) sitting low for several consecutive weeks, with its own escalating warning in the news before it becomes possible at all, and even then it's a real chance, not a certainty. Once one fires, you get a response window — responding costs something real, but ignoring it costs more. Several crises are specific to one industry, so what can go wrong for your company reflects the business you're actually running.

The Offers With a Bill Attached

Roughly one inbound offer in five is not a gift. It is a compromise — a defense program your customers will have opinions about, a data broker who will pay handsomely for what you already collect, a tax structure that is entirely legal and will read terribly the first time somebody prints it. This section is the honest explanation of how those work, because the game deliberately does not tell you which is which while you are looking at one.

They pay about three and a half times what the clean version pays

That is the point. A distribution deal that hands a partner your customer relationship pays roughly three and a half times what an ordinary distribution deal pays. If it paid the same, there would be nothing to think about — you would take the clean one every time, correctly, and never think about it again. Real compromises get taken because the number is genuinely very good.

What it costs is rolled, and both ends move together

When you accept, the game rolls once and settles the whole thing: how well it pays and what it will cost. Roughly:

About a fifth of the time it pays handsomely, you keep every bit of it, and nothing ever comes of it. This is the outcome that makes the rest worth risking.
Most often it pays well and costs a little — some of the benefit goes away and your standing takes a knock.
Sometimes it pays less than you hoped and costs more than you expected.
Sometimes it barely pays at all and still comes back hard.
About one time in ten it becomes the story — a settlement priced against a year of revenue, on top of real damage across trust, ethics and everything they touch.

Because both ends move together, a huge payoff is not a sign you got away with it, and a thin one is not a sign you will.

The bill usually includes the thing you were given

This is the part that is easy to miss. Most of the time the reckoning does not just damage your reputation — it takes back some or all of what the compromise actually bought. The distributor drops you and the reach goes with them. The structure is unwound and the savings go back onto the cost line. The placements are exposed and the coverage is pulled. The money goes back.

On the two worst outcomes it takes back more than it gave, and that is not the game being unfair: you dismantled your own channel to use somebody else's, and when they walk you are behind where you started. Two things are never taken back — a team that arrived is still yours, and a financing round cannot be un-diluted — so those two carry a reputational reckoning only.

Taken together: averaged over a whole year, a chief executive who accepts every compromise finishes a little ahead of one who refuses every one, with a far better best case, an identical bottom quarter, and the only genuine chance of being fired or wiping out. These are not the profitable line and not the ruinous one. They are the high-variance line, with an ethics bill your board is scoring the entire time.

The bill arrives three to eleven weeks later

Never in the week you accepted. You will have banked the revenue, spent it on something else, and been congratulated for the quarter before it lands — and when it lands it will read like bad luck rather than like the thing you chose. That is not a trick; it is the most accurate thing in this game about how these decisions actually go in real companies. The news feed names what it was for, every time.

Anything still outstanding when your year-one books close is settled right there, before your score is taken. There is no window at the end of the year where compromises are free.

Turning one down costs you something too

Say no and a named rival takes it instead, and their company is worth a little more for it. Nothing is deducted from you for having standards — no ethics penalty, no cash, no Executive Point. What you lose is the upside you walked away from, and you get to watch where it went. Ignoring one until it expires does the same thing: silence is an answer, and it is the same answer.

Nothing is colour-coded

Every event banner in the game — crisis, opportunity, rival move, executive insight — is the same colour, and both buttons on an offer are the same size and the same shade. Neither is labelled "Accept" or "Decline"; they are two things a chief executive could do, and you have to read them to find out which is which. The only colour in the game that carries a verdict is the red on a warning banner, because "the board is close to firing you" is information, not a choice.

Glossary

Executive Points (EP): Your weekly budget for strategic actions. Resets to 3 every week.
Company Value: What your company is worth right now — the basis for most action costs, which are priced as a percentage of it.
Founder Ownership: The share of the company you still personally own, reduced by every dilutive financing round.
Legacy Score: The final ranking figure used on the leaderboard, blending company value, personal wealth, reputation, ethics, and whether you survived the full run.

Economic Terms

Dilution: Giving up a percentage of company ownership in exchange for a cash investment.
Short / Cover: Selling borrowed shares now, betting the price falls, then buying them back ("covering") later — profitable only if the price actually dropped.
Economic Cycle: The macro regime for the week (boom, recession, AI bubble, etc.) that nudges every company's share price up or down.