Startups are games — we’re shaping a community built to maximise your odds of winning. Each week, we equip you with mathematical models to play startups better 🧮, celebrate your wins 🫶, and expand your network 👾.
🫶 Community Wins & Asks
👏 Wins from the Community
Let’s celebrate with them – drop a gg or a 👾 in their comments!
Congrats to Nicolas (CEO & Co-founder @ minitap) for closing their closing their $4.1M seed round 👏 Well played guys! 👾
Got a win you want to share? Share it with us, and we’ll celebrate with you!
💛 Asks from the Community
If you can help, jump in! “We win if you win. You win if we win.”
Something slowing you down? Spend 30s to get unstuck.
👾 Upcoming TechGames
With Christmas on its way, we’re about to run the last IRL game of the 2025 Season already… 😭😭
Our community has globally been super active the last couple of weeks — we’ve all met to play…
🇺🇸 A TechPoker cash game in NYC (Thanksgiving edition 🦃),
🇬🇧 A TechPoker tournament in London,
🇺🇸 A TechCatan in SF,
🇩🇪 A TechCatan pickup game in Berlin,
🌍 An online TechCatan on the Discord
🇬🇧 A Christmas Dinner (one of the very rare times we don’t play)🎅
Ran a few experimental online formats on the TechGames Discord last Sunday with some of you. No VISA was required. 🌍
Anyways, the final IRL TechGame this season will be in London this Friday! 👇🏼
(🇬🇧 London) 5th December - Tech Catan Tournament
Hosting at sequel's very central HQ (VC for world's best athletes - I can't disclose who they got already but think Olympiad medalists, NBA MVPs, Grand Slam winners... 👀). Big shoutout to Alex Macdonald Alberto Tenconi for cohosting! 💛
If you want to play some pick-up games on Discord on the weekend (Catan, poker, chess, LoL, etc) AND/OR host an official TechGame for the community, become a Friend of Techgames 👾 👇🏼
🧮 Startup Game Theory:
Math applied to a startup situation to help you make the game-theory optimal (GTO) move.
Startup Hiring As An Optimal Stopping Problem
1) Startup Situation
You’re hiring, but you’re struggling to commit.
The trade-off is simple:
Hire early → someone starts helping sooner, but you risk picking the wrong person 😩
Wait too long → no one is hired, progress stalls 😩
2) The GTO Play
Set a hard deadline.
Settle on a date on the absolute latest you need your position to be filled by (e.g. in 4 months).Estimate the maximum number of candidates you’ll be interviewing (n) by then (e.g. if you’re getting 5 interviews per week, then 12 × 5 = 60 interviews).
Apply the optimal stopping rule
Interview the first ~30% (i.e. the first 18 people, as 60 × 0.3 = 18) and give them a rating between 0-10. You’re using them as your sampling. Remember the best score - that’s your benchmark (say 7.9/10).
Hire the first candidate who beats your benchmark.
No emotion. No second-guessing. This is guaranteed (mathematically) to maximise your chances of hiring the best overall candidate.
3) More Maths?
Optimal stopping problems are huge in stochastic analysis. The above situation can be mapped to an instance of the secretary problem - the exact ratio is 1/e ~= 30% where e is Euler’s number. The Wikipedia article is a good place to start.
(And yes - this works for dating as well. That’s what I did, but don’t tell my girlfriend.)
If this made you think, smile, or react in any way, hit reply — I read and answer everyone.
🫵 Your Move Now
If what we’re doing resonates with you, please share it with insane startup friends who think like us. The more we are, the stronger we become, the more winners we create.
If you win, we win. If we win, you win!
Game on,
Remy 👾