🐈

3/ you need huge amounts of capital and a long runway to actually get to profitability and even then, you don’t actually make much money day to day. You need yet another injection of capital to reach a new level of daily profit.

4/ some fake numbers: if it takes 100k to get to 1k in profit you need 500k to get to 10k in profit. Trying to get 500k of capital on 1k of profit takes a longggg time.

5/ when you hit 1 dollar in daily profit you reach a point where you can “do this forever”. Doesn’t feel much like a life though. From my perspective it’s just a farm squeezing out widgets.

6/ certain employees have huge effect in small numbers. A handful of sale people can manage ALL the money for a company of 100. 1 or two marketers is enough. Same for sys admins.

7/ the bulk of the output is from managing teams of engineers & designers.

8/ the game doesn’t have a parallel for the product manager role though. It has this concept of “researchers” that generate points you can spend to unlock benefits like company benefits and cooler furniture. (Which lowers attrition)

9/ regarding attrition and salary. when there’s enough capital, the bonuses for restore happiness and salaries don’t matter that much. I just need warm bodies to throw at a job to produce stuff to reach profitability.

10/ the bottlenecks are incredibly hard to figure out. The same amount of time spent untangling the knots can be solved by raw output.

I wonder if really managing a company of hundreds is like this... You’re forced by circumstance to dehumanize your employees. The fun resource game becomes a grind. Etc....

Ok, wrapping up the game b/c I'm bored of it. Final stats are: Retired at age 44 with 110M in the bank post-tax. 26 years of work growing the company to 80M users across 4 products. Some more lessons from running this 'startup':

The sysadmin need explodes when you need to scale. Datacenter growth and managing the servers becomes the bottleneck more so than PDE and marketing. Multiple reasons but one big one is having enough cash to run larger marketing campaigns.

Suped up server racks costing millions of dollars I could just buy a bunch of at a time. The bottleneck was getting the sysadmins to configure them.

Recruiters can optionally research additional info about a candidate w/ more time like salary and benefit expectations. The purpose from my POV was to click the "hire immediately" button instead of having to go through multiple clicks of offer negotiation.

The individual salary number doesn't matter that much. I would regularly drag the slider ab it too far giving a few extra K per month but I didn't care. It wasn't worth the extra click.

Office space similarly become relatively cheap at profitability when it was THE biggest expense early on.

Loans and investment were far less important once I had enough money. E.g. once the company had 100M or so in the bank. Though I suspect I didn't manage the money properly.

A better CEO probably could have put that money to use rather than let it sit. Though I also didn't pause the game very much to squeeze out productivity from every second.

My temperament probably isn't suited to managing huge sums of money. Seems to require a conquerer's mindset. With enough money coming in, the easiest way to use large amounts is via acquisitions.

Even with a ton of money coming in, massive amounts were actually controlled by a few huge whale contracts for the main product. My main site had 40M users with 20M 10M 10M for the other 3.

Losing a whale contract could have easily affected the profit margin by a huge amount. E.g. with a 10M burn rate and contracts of 5M, 5M, 10M, 20M. I have a profit of 30M. But if I lose the 20 my profit is 10M. I lose 2/3rds of the profit.

The smaller websites were there just to make use of employee output. The larger site ended up bottlenecked by more complex requirements but the lower skilled employees still were producing output. The newer sites were to take advantage of their output. Keep em busy...

Managing them was a chore however because they increased the complexity of the output chain. I would always give priority to the biggest site bringing in the largest amount of money.

Upgrading the big site is hard for multiple reasons. One is that every new feature has to be upgraded to the same level as the other existing features. E.g. if I had a basic feature at level 500, if I activated a level 1 feature user happiness would drop.

Reminds me of how everything Apple does has to be Apple quality. (also, innovator's dilemma)

Another reason it's hard is because the chain of requirements for the modules necessary for the more advanced features (for more potential users) is difficult to track. I ended up outsourcing huge blobs of it so I wouldn't have to trace through what each employee/group was doing

Even though every employee was kept busy, the final output was dependent on the bottleneck. The bottleneck is VERY difficult to track. It moves all over the place from team to team, department to department, especially as things change.

The managers in the game r stupid. I could only give them production targets instead of more high level goals like "Make stuff for feature A". I'd have to comb through production plans to track down the bottleneck and often find one time making hundreds of unnecessary stuff.

Marketing is very slow relative to the world population. E.g. something like 20k users a day is huge from a absolute sense but slow at the millions/billions of users level.

Marketing is like watching a plant grow. The user base grows over years and years. This was actually surprising to me. I had a mental model in my mind where getting front page on reddit or something would max you out on all potential users.

Between marketing (actual users), development (potential users), and sysadmins (hosting) I felt like I was managing "streams of growth". Marketing always had to have room to grow so development had to keep pace. Hosting had to keep pace with usage.