VentureSim
The Ryan Academy presents

Students should not analyse a spreadsheet about a company. They should run one.

VentureSim is a semester-long startup simulation for universities. Every team runs its own company in a live market of twenty, makes one board decision a week, lives with the consequences — and gets a score that explains what would have been better.

Request a demoWalk through it as a student →
The Ryan Academy — crest and wordmark
12months, four weekly sub-rounds each
20companies in one market
5business archetypes
193event families in the inbox
82metrics, one formula each
The week

One loop, twelve times — until the business thinking is the habit, not the software.

Every week has the same shape, so students spend their attention on the company rather than on navigation. Only the decision domain changes: launch settings in Week 1, a marketing budget in Week 3, a funding round in Week 5, a people plan, a strategic move, an investor pitch, a shareholder meeting.

  1. LearnJust enough theory for this week's decision.
  2. DiagnoseRead the evidence: pilots, market report, rivals.
  3. ModelAn evidence-only projection with honest uncertainty.
  4. DecideOne board decision, with a rationale.
  5. CommitForecast the outcome, then the lecturer locks the round.
  6. SimulateTwenty companies are processed together, server-side.
  7. ResultsActual vs forecast vs model, in market context.
  8. ReflectA journal entry — then the system's score is revealed.
Student home in Week 5: the loop, the simulation clock, the company snapshot, the team.
The Week 3 board decision: allocate the acquisition budget across channels, model it, forecast, commit.
  1. 01DDDM & Startup MetricsLaunch settings
  2. 02Customer & ProductDiscovery experiments
  3. 03Marketing & AcquisitionAllocate the budget
  4. 04Events, Response & StakeholdersRespond, communicate, boost
  5. 05Finance I — Financial HealthFunding strategy
  6. 06Finance II — Ratios & RunwayCost programme
  7. 07People & OperationsPeople plan
  8. 08Data StorytellingBoard dashboard
  9. 09Strategy & EventsStrategic move
  10. 10Integrated SimulationOperating plan
  11. 11Investor PitchInvestor pitch
  12. 12Shareholder MeetingShareholder meeting
Inside the week

Every round is a month played week by week: four sub-rounds, a 24-hour clock each, and consequences before the next window opens.

A monthly board decision teaches strategy; it does not teach running a company. In VentureSim the month is played in four 24-hour windows from Monday 9 am to Friday 9 am, each one simulated week and one real engine step; the month is processed Friday morning, released in class, and reflected on over the weekend. At every open an inbox of up to fifty items arrives — a few strategic calls that need a rationale, a run of responses that need a line of logic, and standing dials that carry unless changed — from customers, staff, investors, regulators, the press and rivals. Every item says whether the answer stays inside the company or goes on the market wire for everyone to read.

Hundreds of events, never the same inbox
193 event families across seven themes, each voiced by a named person and scaled to the company's hidden state: security, product quality, morale, trust and cash decide how hard the same headline lands on each team.
Public or private, flagged before you answer
Announcements, price moves, disclosures and campaigns go on the market wire at the close; internal decisions stay inside the company. Rivals read the wire and respond in the next window.
Impact inside the month, attributed
Each window is processed as one engine step. Teams call the direction of two metrics before they commit, then see a pre-round and post-round dashboard for the week with every movement attributed — their own decisions, the competition, market events — by re-running the step without each.
Missed windows cost
Unanswered items take their defaults at the close. No commit at all is a missed window: defaults everywhere and a penalty on the decision score, which staff can waive.
The control room runs it
Windows open and close on schedule. Staff can open early, extend, close, re-open, inject an event, waive a penalty or hide a wire post — every transition audited with actor and time.
Sub-round 3 of 4: the inbox, one item, its nine options, who owns it — and whether the answer is public or private.
The sub-rounds control room: four weekly windows, who has committed, what needs attention, and the controls to move it.
The Global Gazette: the same news for every company, different notes for each — red for danger, green for opportunity, blue for information.
Every round opens on a briefing
Before the first decision, the team reads the month: the challenge, the notes that matter to their company, the agenda of windows — and the paper.
The Global Gazette
Weather, politics, local and global news, the economy and a market update; what rivals announced last month, in their own words; what they did not announce, from business reporter No Z. Parker; sport and puzzles at the back. Generated from the market's state, never by a language model.
Analyst reports on every rival
B. Ian Counter rates all nineteen competitors — Strong buy to Strong sell — with a rationale, last month's announcements and the management team by name.
Last month's reports
A management report that scores each KPI against the team's own forecast and the industry benchmark, and a board report the way a board would read it.
Six functions, owned by the team
Leadership & Strategy, Product & Technology, Marketing, Sales, Operations & Customer, Finance & People — the spine of every inbox, dashboard and report. Members own one or more (a CEO who is also the CRO); the captain assigns; the record follows the round.
The Sub-rounds table
Every move in the round — the team's decisions, the competition's announcements, market events, the news — in one table, filtered by company, function and week, sorted any way the team likes.
The Chair writes
Every company has a Chair of the Board who leaves a voicemail on Monday, emails at each window and texts when a window is about to close unanswered. Investors, the bank, customers, the press, staff and partners write to whoever owns their function — with context, a challenge or an opportunity.
Faces, not initials
Every player and every character has an illustrated avatar, generated from their name in one house style, so the quote in the Gazette, the message in the inbox and the name on the team page are the same person.
The Messages centre: the Chair's Monday voicemail, an investor's challenge on runway, a partner's offer — routed to the owners of the functions.
Week by week: pre-round, post-round, and what moved it — your decisions, the competition, the market, and the business as it was running.
The market

Twenty companies. One market. Nobody wins in a vacuum.

Each team runs a different company in the same student-success industry — a freemium study app, an institutional platform, a tutoring marketplace, a hardware-plus-subscription product, a coaching network. They compete for the same customer segments and bid in the same advertising auctions, so one team's decision moves everyone's costs. Slots no team fills are run by the platform's own strategies, so the market is always twenty.

Every company is a real brand. A logo, a wordmark, a web presence, a brochure, a press release, a board pack, customer emails, an org chart — generated from a brand kit and updated with the numbers each month, so students communicate as a company, not as a study group.

The market report is the evidence. Segment shares, the price map, auction pressure, rivals' public moves. What a rival did last month changed your costs; what you do now changes theirs.

Events arrive from Week 4. Twenty-six cards across the market, the company and its leadership — a privacy ruling, a data bug, a co-founder dispute — with severity that reads the company's hidden state. A team that invested in security meets a different outage from one that did not.

The market report a student sees: segment shares, price-versus-rating map, auction pressure.
Scoring and feedback

The system scores the decision — then shows the better one.

After a round is processed, the engine re-runs each team's week against the alternatives: the rule variants the curriculum lists and what peer companies actually chose, with the same market, rivals, events and seed held fixed. The score is the share of alternatives the team beat. The explanation is built from the engine's own numbers — no language model in the maths.

67Sound

Percentile of alternatives beaten, banded strong · sound · mixed · weak. Founders' value three months out is the yardstick every week, so a Week 5 funding round and a Week 9 strategic move are judged on the same scale.

WhyAlcove’s cost programme: the savings land on the P&L, and the side effects land in hidden state — morale, execution capacity, technical debt, product quality — which the health index and the valuation read before the students do.
BetterWhat Team Orbit did would have left the founders $15k better off at the horizon ($12.06m against $12.05m): 5,945 paying customers and $492k cash against 5,945 and $477k. Scored against nine alternatives, Alcove beat 67 of every 100 — a sound decision, not the strongest one.
WhenStudents see the score and the better options only after their own reflection is filed, so the journal entry comes before the system's opinion. Staff and moderators see it as soon as it is computed.

Never a grade by itself. The score is evidence. The teaching rubric — evidence, reasoning, forecast discipline, reflection, communication — is the grade, moderated by the university's academic administrator before it is released.

A decision scored: the counterfactual verdict, why, what would have been better, and the teaching rubric beside it.
The class heatmap: every team, every week, with the largest missed value called out.
For teaching staff

A control room, not a learning management system.

The lecturer reads the class in seconds — which teams have submitted, which company is in trouble, what the market is doing — and runs the week with four deliberate, audited moves: open, lock, process, release.

Learn Diagnose Model Decide Commit Simulate Results Reflect
Open the next week when you are ready
Each round opens from the control room once the previous one is released; events are drawn at open so teams can respond before the lock.
Lock, process, release
Twenty companies are processed together in one transaction. Results stay withheld until you release them in class.
Grade with a rubric, not a valuation
Evidence, reasoning, forecast discipline, reflection — and communication in the weeks that ask for a memo, a board pack, a pitch or a shareholder letter.
See what students cannot
Hidden state — brand strength, trust, morale, technical debt, security maturity — in a company inspector, with the scores and the journal beside it.
Tutors see their groups
Tutors and teaching assistants act only on the groups assigned to them; the server enforces it, not the menu.
Alerts that matter
Runway under five months, a team still in draft, an ungraded communication — surfaced before the lock, not after.
The simulation control room: twelve rounds, their status, and the next deliberate move.
The teaching control centre in Week 5: submissions, alerts, company health.
For universities

Built as an institution would build it.

One platform, isolated tenants. A course is a versioned academic product; a class is a delivery of it that pins the course and simulation versions it started on, so a running semester never changes under a lecturer's feet.

The Ryan Academy→University→Course→Class→Student group→Student
Scoped permissions
Nobody is "a lecturer". A person holds roles at a platform, university, course, class or group scope, and every consequential action checks the membership that grants it.
Row-level isolation
University data is separated in the database, not by convention. Students cannot reach another group's hidden state, decisions or assessment.
Academic moderation across classes
The academic administrator sees every team's decision, the system's score and the teaching rubric together, moderates with a reason, and releases grades.
Reproducible by design
Same starting state, decisions, events, seed and engine version — same result, every time. Every outcome records exactly which logic produced it.
Audited
Rounds opened and locked, decisions submitted, grades changed, versions published — actor, action, scope, before and after.
Privacy-minded
Only the data the course needs; identifiable records kept apart from de-identified analytics; export and deletion built for institutional policy.
The academic administrator's moderation workspace across every class.
In the classroom

It looks like a company running, because it is.

Teams sit as boards. The wall screen shows the market. Decisions are argued over evidence, committed under a deadline, and defended in the results that come back — the same loop a founder lives.

Photograph to come · Wide, eye level
A team of five at a table, laptops open on VentureSim, the market standings on the wall screen behind them; lecturer mid-conversation at the edge of frame.
Photograph to come · Portrait, close
Two students over one laptop at the moment of committing a decision — one hand on the trackpad, the other pointing at the forecast.
Photograph to come · Wide, from the back of the room
Results released: the lecturer at the wall screen, teams reacting, one person standing to see the standings.
Try it

Walk through the demo from each seat.

The clickable prototype opens fully played to Week 12, with rewind and auto-play, so every screen has a semester behind it. Choose a door; each signs you in as that tenant's demo persona.

The Ryan AcademyPlatform ownerUniversities, master courses, simulation versions, licences and the platform audit trail.Signs you in as Adam Ryan, Platform Owner →UniversityAcademic administrationCourses, classes, people and licence seats — and the moderation workspace across every class.Signs you in as Dr Priya Nair, University Academic Admin →CourseCourse ownerTwelve weeks of configuration: decisions, metrics, events, company profiles, versions.Signs you in as Adam Ryan, Course Owner →ClassTeaching teamThe control room: rounds, submissions, scores, grading, events, analytics, audit.Signs you in as Adam Ryan, Lead Lecturer →StudentTeam memberRun Alcove: learn, diagnose, model, decide, commit, read the results, reflect.Signs you in as Amelia Brooks, Chief Marketing Officer this week →

Demo data only: the companies, people and results are fictional and illustrative. If a door opens on the sign-in screen instead, choose the persona named on the card.

Adam J Ryan — Start · Grow · Scale
From the founder

A simulation built by someone who has sat on both sides of the table.

VentureSim grew out of a startup-simulation unit I designed and teach as a Professor of Practice — a course students consistently name as the one that changed how they think about business. Before teaching, I was part of the founding team at SEEK, and since then a founder, investor, coach, mentor and board member through raises and exits in Australia and California, with time on the advisory board of UC San Diego's Rady School of Management.

The Ryan Academy exists to teach founders the way founders learn: by running the thing, feeling the consequence, and explaining what happened. VentureSim brings that into a semester.

Audendo proficimus · we progress by daring
Request a demo

Bring VentureSim to your course.

Tell us about the unit and the cohort. We will walk you through a full semester in forty minutes, from the first launch decision to the shareholder meeting, and talk through how it fits your assessment.

Opens your email client addressed to [email protected]. Nothing is stored on this page.