Wharton Game Simulation Sirloin

In the Wharton Startup Game Simulation, I was a employee (an Executive, to be specific) and I was end up with being hired by BioBand with 30% equity share and $200,000 annual salary.

Money Money

Looking back, I would not say that we, as a team, did a very good job because we, especially the founder of BioBand, were not very clear about our financing request, resulting in a random valuation and a somewhat "lousy" deal in the first time. The take-away is that in the process of financing, the founder should be very clear about his or her financing request and should have an estimated valuation which can be used as a benchmark to investors' figures. If not, like what happened in our case, the random figures we threw out would not only jeopardize our financing in this round, but also leave us a bad reputation of "don't-know-what-we-are doing" for other potential investors and employees.

In addition, regarding my hiring experience, I was got hired quite quickly because I proactively asked to help the founder in the negotiation with potential investors as well as in the following recruitment process even before I got the offer. And we finished the financing and recruiting targets pretty fast. I think this is the biggest take-away from the simulation which is as an job-seeker in the field of start-ups, I have to show results, in addition to track record, very quickly to impress the employer. Also, during the process of negotiation with the founder, I took trade-off between equity share and annual salary. As I was instructed in the note before the simulation, I took salary cut in order to have significant amount of equity share. In addition to 30% equity share, I ended up being the CEO of the company. Yes, the founder did not want to be the CEO and she was more willing to be the CTO (I guess this is not prevalent in today's start-up world). With that said, her major motivation was threefold: the first was to find an Executive who knows the ins-and-outs of the business, the second was to find employees who were willing to take away with both smaller amount of equity share and smaller amount of annual salary, and the third one was to re-position herself as a CTO who can focus on the technology side of the company (again, werid motivation).

If I did the simulation again as an Executive, I would do three things differently:
1. Before being hired, I would try mutiple start-ups instead of sticking to one during the entire process. Exploring more opportunities might give me a better option at the end with better package and cultural fit.
2. During negotiation, I would focus more on equity share and less on annual salary. The balance is the hard part since either extreme would benefit neither myself nor the start-up.
3. After being hired, I would spend more time with the founder to rationalize our valuation and financing request & strategy. Maybe we could develop several scenarios and simulate internally first before going to the market.