Fundraising
Because ‘not raising’ means raising.
The Founder Pack / Playable beta
200 prompts. Zero actionable insights.
A professionally irresponsible collection of everything wrong with startups.
The online beta has 200 prompts and 200 answer cards. The larger physical edition is still being validated.
whatever “agentic” means this week
Cards Against Startups
The board would like an explanation for ________.
Cards Against Startups
an extremely generous definition of ARR
Cards Against Startups
01 / What's inside
All your favorite forms of suffering.
Eight recurring startup wounds inside one playable Founder Pack. Every card is tested against the gold standard: would someone at a founder dinner spit out their drink?
Product
The customer requested Excel again.
AI
Congratulations on your revolutionary wrapper.
Engineering
We'll fix it after the launch.
Growth
Traffic is up 300%. From three visitors to twelve.
Hiring
Seeking founding engineer. Compensation: ownership. Of the problems.
Investors
‘Keep us posted.’
Founder life
I haven't slept since the seed round.
02 / Prompt cards
Mildly inappropriate. Extremely specific.
Reading one feels less like playing a game and more like discovering somebody leaked your investor update.
The fastest way to lose a cofounder is ________.
Cards Against Startups
We accidentally achieved product-market fit with ________.
Cards Against Startups
The board would like an explanation for ________.
Cards Against Startups
We're extending runway by ________.
Cards Against Startups
Our newest AI employee specializes in ________.
Cards Against Startups
The real reason we're pivoting is ________.
Cards Against Startups
Nothing improves retention quite like ________.
Cards Against Startups
YC rejected us because of ________.
Cards Against Startups
03 / Answer cards
We regret putting these in writing.
The safe ones. We're saving the truly career-limiting material for the box.
a button that exports to CSVa 4,700-word system promptproprietary data we scraped from Redditone incredibly patient enterprise customerour definition of active userfounder-led desperationposting ‘we're hiring’ before finding customersa suspiciously enthusiastic design partner$47 of MRRnine months of technical debt in six weekswhatever ‘agentic’ means this weeka Series A personality with pre-seed revenueone metric displayed without an axisan investor who loves everything except investinga customer who accidentally paida landing page three products ahead of realityreplacing six SaaS products with seven AI agentsfiring the AI and hiring an internour Series A deck named FINAL_v18_REAL.pdfa Notion database wearing a company badgeboard minutes written entirely in future tensea board deck that autocorrected burn to growtha retention cohort of oneweekly active cancellationsan agent that delegates everything back to youhallucinations with SSOproduction, our most realistic staging environmentan API documented through oral traditionKubernetes for both usersfive nines, excluding business hoursa funnel shaped like a draina webinar attended by the speakersan A/B test where both variants losea sales forecast narrated as historical fictiona sales cycle entering middle schoola take-home assignment now running in productiona flat hierarchy with one very tall foundera ping at 11:58 p.m. saying ‘no rush’a privacy policy copied from a dentisthumility, now available as a carousel
04 / Current reality
The beta is live. The box is next.
200Startup prompt cards
200Pre-written answers
1Live Founder Pack
Take your trauma offline.
No screens. No notifications. Just people disappointing each other manually.