Instructor Coaching Guide
This guide explains the pedagogical purpose of each simulation feature and provides coaching prompts, debrief questions, and configuration guidance. The goal is to help you connect simulation outcomes to real-world business principles your students will carry into their careers.
Design Philosophy
FounderLab is built on the premise that strategy is revealed through constraint. Every parameter — from starting cash to market shock frequency — creates the conditions under which students must make trade-offs. Your role as instructor is not to prevent students from making mistakes, but to ensure they understand why the mistakes happened and what a better mental model looks like.
FounderLab is designed to work equally well for in-person and remote classes. Every interaction — submitting decisions, reviewing financials, purchasing market intelligence, debriefing teaching points — runs through the platform, so a distributed cohort gets the same experience as one in the same room.
It is built for entrepreneurship students, not general business students. The aim is to teach the most important entrepreneurial skills to students from any background who might one day want to earn an independent living — whether or not they have studied finance or management before. The simulation complements your coursework with the hands-on experiential learning and group dynamics of running a small company: making trade-offs under constraints, coordinating roles, and living with the consequences of decisions across multiple periods.
The Class setup screen is where you define the operating environment your students will navigate. These aren't just technical settings — each one is a pedagogical choice.
Course Format (12-week vs. 6-week)
The 6-week format compresses time, which increases market volatility (±15% swings) and amplifies the impact of shocks. Use it when you want to stress-test decision-making under pressure or when your course timeline is shorter. The 12-week format gives students more iterations to course-correct, making it better for cohorts new to business simulations.
Configuration note: Shock severity is automatically scaled — in W6 mode, shocks hit roughly 2× harder than in W12. This is intentional: compressed time means less recovery runway.
Product Tier (Basic / Market Expansion / Venture)
Each tier adds a layer of strategic complexity:
BASIC
Focuses on unit economics, pricing, and operational balance. Ideal for intro entrepreneurship, principles of management, or students with no finance background.
MARKET EXPANSION
Adds global market entry with four distinct strategies (Direct Export → New Entity). Best for international business, global strategy, or MBA electives.
VENTURE
Full capital markets layer: equity rounds, cap tables, dilution, debt facilities. Use for entrepreneurial finance, venture capital, or advanced entrepreneurship courses.
Capital Structure Settings
The startup loan, equity amount, interest rate, and loan period define students' initial balance sheets. These settings let you align the simulation with real-world scenarios you want to teach:
A high loan-to-equity ratio (e.g., $80K loan, $20K equity) creates financial pressure and forces early conversations about debt service coverage and cash burn. A low ratio gives students more breathing room to experiment — better for introductory cohorts.
Configuration note: Accounts Receivable Days (45 by default) creates a deliberate lag between revenue earned and cash received. Raise this to 60–90 days to teach working capital management. Lower it to 15–20 to reduce that friction for simpler courses.
Coaching prompt: After Unit 2, ask teams: "What is your debt-to-equity ratio, and what does that tell a lender about your creditworthiness?" Most students won't have thought about this proactively.
Shock Frequency & Competition Intensity
These overrides let you dial up or down the environmental difficulty mid-simulation. "Low" frequency means students mostly control their own destiny — appropriate for the first half of a course. "High" frequency creates a crisis-management environment useful for debrief discussions about business resilience.
Configuration note: Shock frequency is defined in the Scenario entity (low/medium/high) and can be overridden per class via shock_frequency_override. Shocks can be injected automatically based on this setting or manually by instructors via the Shock Control panel.
Teaching point: Shock frequency teaches students that strategy is not just about having a good plan — it's about having a resilient one. The best businesses aren't shock-proof; they're shock-resistant.
Per-Unit Processing Penalty
When a team doesn't submit a decision by the deadline, the simulation auto-processes that unit with conservative defaults and applies a revenue penalty. You can control this on a per-unit basis: the Class settings include a penalty grid (one row per unit) where you can enable or disable the penalty and set the percentage for each upcoming unit. Already-processed units are locked; future units stay editable so you can adjust mid-simulation.
Configuration note: The penalty cuts revenue, COGS, gross profit, customers, and valuation by the configured percentage while keeping all operating costs at full value — making the financial impact real. Defaults to 50% enabled for all units.
Your Role in the Simulation
The simulation runs the numbers — but you create the meaning. The most important moments aren't when students make decisions; they're when you ask the right question at the right time and help a student connect a simulation outcome to a principle they'll use for the rest of their career. Every coaching prompt in this guide is designed for that moment.