Eras and Research

A Company grows through eight Eras, from the Garage to the Public Era. Each Era brings new request kinds, new failure modes, and new Research. Research is how you buy the tools to handle them: you pay with Insight, which your own traffic produces. So the problems of an Era and the means to solve them arrive together.

What an Era changes#

An Era is a stage of the Company. You leave one by reaching its user milestone and taking (or declining) the funding round it offers. Cash, Burn, and funding explains that choice. Each new Era changes several things at once:

• The request mix. New kinds of traffic arrive, such as writes and logins in Pre-seed, or search, uploads, and bots in Seed. Each kind loads your Design in its own way.

• The market. Each Era has a larger market, which caps how many users you can win. Features can raise it.

• The bar. The Apdex target rises each Era, so a Design that kept users happy before may not now. From Series A, an availability SLO also counts every failed request.

• Prices. A cost index and a salary index scale every price, so Burn stays a real share of revenue.

• Incidents. From Pre-seed, incidents start, and later Eras allow more severe ones.

Here is the Seed Era's request mix:

The Eras reference pages show each Era's milestone, market, targets, mix, and arrivals.

Insight comes in kinds#

Insight is the Research currency. It comes from the Analytics Node, which samples the traffic of Nodes you link into it. A sampled request gives Insight of its own kind: a sampled read gives read Insight, a sampled search gives search Insight. Your Company keeps one pool for each request kind, plus a Failure pool that fills from requests that fail or frustrate users. Insight and observability explains the yield in detail.

The first time your Design serves more than half of a new request kind successfully, that kind's pool also gets a one-time gift of 20 Insight.

Recipes tie Research to traffic#

Each Research item has a recipe: the pools that pay for it. By default, an item's recipe is the request kinds of its Era. Some items use the kinds that show their problem: Caching asks for read Insight, Connection pooling for write Insight. Half of every Reliability item's cost is Failure Insight, because you learn reliability by seeing failures.

So more page views never buy Series B Research. You must serve the new kinds first. This is the pattern of science packs in factory games: the Era's own production line pays for the next step.

You also cannot study an item before its Era, or before the items it requires. Locked items of the next Era stay visible, so you can plan.

Studies run one at a time#

A Research item runs as a Study. One Study runs at a time. You can queue up to 8, reorder them, and switch which one runs. A Study keeps its progress when you switch away. Cancelling one loses its progress and the Insight it took. Its effect starts when it completes.

A Study draws Insight as it runs, not all at once. Each Era sets a base duration, from seconds in the Garage to an hour of sim time in the Public Era. Each second, the Study takes its share of the cost from every pool in its recipe. When a pool runs dry, the Study slows to the rate that pool earns. So the scarcest kind sets the pace. Traffic falls at night, so a Study that needs a quiet kind slows at night too.

You can start a Study with no Insight saved. You cannot hoard much, though: each pool holds only what your Analytics retention window collects at the current rate, and never less than one Study's share. Studies keep running while you are away.

Making Studies faster#

Two things raise a Study's speed:

• A Spike. Put a Spike on a team's backlog, and that team works on the running Study instead of the product. While it does, the Study runs at twice the speed. Research competes with Features for engineers, as it does at real companies. See Team and velocity.

• Study-speed Research. Trace search and Notebooks each add 25%.

Some Observability items also need breadth. Distributed tracing needs its kinds sampled at 3 Component types, because a trace needs more than one hop.

The tracks#

Research is grouped into nine tracks: Infrastructure, Data, Reliability, Observability, Performance, Runtimes, Frameworks, Security, and Product. Tracks are only a way to browse. An item in any track can require one in another. The Research reference lists every item with its Era, cost, and requirements.

Incidents also steer Research. When an incident ends, its postmortem names the first Research that would prevent it and that you can study now. Until you own it, that incident is likelier. How incidents work explains this loop.

Above the Company#

Eras and Research reset when a Company ends. What carries over is Legacy, which you earn at an Exit. Why a Company ends explains that layer. To start, follow Earn Insight and research.