Reference
Exits and Legacy
How a Company ends, the Legacy it earns, and what Legacy buys for the next run.
An Exit ends the Company and pays Legacy on its valuation. Spend Legacy on Perks that make the next Company start stronger, or on Ventures and Mutators that change the rules.
Exits#
Perks#
| Perk | Effect per level | Levels | Legacy cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angel network | Starting Cash ×2 | 5 | 2 · 4 · 8 · 16 · 32 |
| Alumni network | +1 engineer at Pre-seed | 5 | 3 · 6 · 12 · 24 · 48 |
| Institutional knowledge | Keep 1 research through an Exit | 10 | 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 5 |
| Pattern recognition | Insight +20% | 5 | 4 · 8 · 16 · 32 · 64 |
| Founder’s reputation | User growth +10% | 5 | 4 · 8 · 16 · 32 · 64 |
| Better terms | Dilution per round −2 points | 5 | 6 · 12 · 24 · 48 · 96 |
| Night shift | Offline cap 12 h, 18 h, 24 h | 3 | 5 · 15 · 45 |
| Time dilation | Unlocks 20×, then 40× speed | 2 | 20 · 80 |
| Playbooks | Playbook slots 2, 5, 10, 25 | 4 | 5 · 15 · 45 · 135 |
| War stories | Open action items raise odds half as much | 3 | 8 · 24 · 72 |
| Head start | Start in Pre-seed | 1 | 25 |
Ventures#
| Venture | Traffic | Cost | Legacy × |
|---|---|---|---|
| B2B SaaS | Evening peak | 0 | ×1 |
| Consumer social | Twice the users, half the value each; media +50% | 5 | ×1.1 |
| Fintech | Business hours; buy ×4, write +50% | 10 | ×1.3 |
| Streaming media | Late evening peak; media ×4 | 10 | ×1.2 |
| Game backend | Evening peak; realtime ×4 | 15 | ×1.3 |
| AI startup | Flat demand; AI ×3 | 15 | ×1.3 |
| E-commerce | Buy ×2, search ×2 | 20 | ×1.2 |
| Bootstrapped indie | No funding rounds; Equity stays 100% | 0 | ×1.4 |
Mutators#
| Mutator | Rule | Legacy bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Chaos Monkey | Instance failures dominate from Seed | +25% |
| Hacker News front page | Traffic spikes three times as often | +15% |
| Legacy monolith | Large PHP codebase: migrations ×3, debt starts at 40% | +20% |
| One region forever | No Nodes outside the home region | +20% |
| No caches | No Cache, no CDN | +40% |
| Tight budget | Funding grants halved | +20% |
| Single language | Every App Server runs PHP | +15% |
| Postgres for everything | No Cache, wide-column, consensus or warehouse stores | +30% |
| Strict SLO | The SLO is one level higher | +20% |
Achievements#
| Achievement | How to earn it | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Hello, World | Serve the first request | — |
| It Works on My Machine | Ship a bad deploy | — |
| Split Brain | Split the database onto its own Node | — |
| Averages Lie | Research percentiles while p99 is more than 5× the mean | — |
| Metastable | Recover from a retry storm | — |
| Strangler | Finish a migration in four traffic steps with errors under 1% | — |
| Polyglot | Run five languages in production at once | — |
| Zero GC | Run a Rust service at 100,000 rps | — |
| No Cache | Reach Series A with no Cache and no CDN | No caches |
| Postgres for Everything | Reach Series B with only Postgres data Components | Postgres for everything |
| Hug of Death | Survive a ×10 spike with no lost users | Hacker News front page |
| Chaos Monkey | Survive 100 random terminations | Chaos Monkey |
| Blameless | Write 50 postmortems | — |
| Nines | Hold 99.99% for a calendar week | Strict SLO |
| Monoglot | Reach IPO with one language | Single language |
| Default Alive | Reach IPO without raising any round | Bootstrapped indie |
| Unicorn | Reach a $1 billion valuation | — |
| Decacorn | Reach a $10 billion valuation | — |
| Rule of 40 | Reach a Rule of 40 score of 80 as a public company | — |
| Beat and Raise | Beat guidance eight quarters in a row | — |
| Serial Founder | Exit with every Venture | — |
| Histogram | Reach the 90th percentile on any axis of any Challenge | — |
| Pareto | Reach the 70th percentile on all three axes of one Challenge | — |