Show HN: A game where you invest into startups from history (startupgambit.com)

Not playable on mobile browser

Pretty fun! Only complaint is that the responses from the founders take a bit long to load.

Love it! Very smart! Are all the company names real?

Stopped / crashed Dec 31 2005 with $358K return. Cannot proceed. Fun until then.

Re: backtesting and paper trading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38908537 :

> pyfolio.tears.create_interesting_times_tear_sheet

Fun game! My investing strategy is to flush out quickly who's the team, what's the traction, what's unique insight into the market.

Bullshitters have trash or no answers. Killer companies have one of those 3 that is usually very compelling.

I tried investing in every pitch I got, which seems to be a positive strategy.

This is a genuinely great use of LLMs/related technology. Dynamic characters you can have conversations with to make game choices more informed is a really cool idea, actually feels original and clever. I really enjoyed playing it.

very cool game! needs some juice.

https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice

also, add a leaderboard

This is pretty fun!

Damn. Now I understand VC's a little better.

Some deals I saw "damn the traction is off the chart" and I didn't even care to ask any question I just threw money at them. I saw one startup named Salesforce, a CRM. I guess hindsight is 20/20 on that one lol. Didn't even read the pitch.

This game is awesome

nice game - but you need a UX designer. Almost abandoned it since I thought it was broken... I just didnt know what I was waiting for or didnt know where to click.

I need to be able to type faster, just got done chatting with Mark and I completely missed the opportunity to invest in Quibi.

fun, but it seems if I just invest in everything I don't lose.

I get 3x/4x return on a lot of things but only lose <1x if its a bad investment

I think the forced countdown is a bit unfriendly, especially when LLM delays eat the majority of that. Perhaps limit it to X questions.

Also, having a min / max funding range (e.g, min 100K, max 500K). I might not want to wager the same on each opportunity.

It might also be interesting to base it off real companies. Scramble the names (Paypal -> CashMate or whatever. Enough that the player doesn't know for sure what company its based on. ATi vs nVidia for eg), and also allow investment at multiple points in time. Pre-crash vs post-crash might yield significantly different ROI outcomes.

Illegible in Safari on iPhone :(

This is fantastic. It's pretty frustrating for founders to flat-out refuse to answer questions though, I'd probably make that more subtle