Hey everyone,
I’m working on a long-term business and capital allocation simulation and I’m looking for feedback from people with a finance / investing background.
The simulation starts at age 18-22 as a setup phase where you establish initial conditions:
* choose whether to attend university or work
* manage tuition through zero-interest education loans
* work part-time jobs with realistic pay vs pressure trade-offs
* balance cash flow, pressure, and academic performance (GPA)
That early phase isn’t the focus, it simply determines starting constraints like debt load, credibility, and early optionality.
The core of the simulation is post-graduation.
**After graduating, the system opens into a long-term operating and capital allocation environment that includes:**
* professional career paths with realistic compensation vs pressure dynamics
* starting operating businesses vs acquiring existing companies
* managing **leverage, debt service, and cash flow** over time
* hiring management and **scaling** operations
* evaluating acquisitions with operational risk and imperfect information
* dealing with second- and third-order consequences of early capital decisions
* navigating **over-leverage, downturns, bad timing, and recovery**
Everything runs on monthly/quarterly decisions with constrained actions. There’s no randomness for drama outcomes emerge from capital structure, operating decisions, timing, and risk tolerance. Aggressive strategies scale faster but create fragility; conservative strategies compound more slowly but survive stress.
The goal isn’t entertainment-first and it’s not a spreadsheet either it’s a systems-driven simulation meant to explore how careers, operations, and capital allocation compound over 10-30 years.
I’m not marketing this yet. I’m **looking to sanity-check:**
* whether the post-grad operating / acquisition loop feels realistic
* where the model breaks vs real-world finance
* what’s missing from a serious capital allocation perspective