One of the side effects of spending years in software is that it’s easy to become obsessed with technologies and forget that technologies are usually just tools inside larger business stories.
Many of the most valuable lessons in business are not found in MBA programs or management books. They are hidden inside the histories of companies that succeeded, failed, pivoted, survived crises, entered new markets, or completely reinvented themselves.
Studying companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Netflix is rarely about copying what they did. Most of us are not building trillion-dollar businesses. The value comes from understanding how decisions were made under uncertainty, how leaders evaluated trade-offs, and how seemingly small choices accumulated over time.
That idea became one of the motivations behind Founder, a project I have been exploring recently.
The inspiration comes partly from long-form business storytelling formats such as the podcast Acquired. Acquired does an excellent job of unpacking the history of companies and explaining not only what happened, but why it happened. Listening to those stories often feels less like consuming business content and more like studying a complex case study.
What if that learning experience could become interactive?
Founder explores the idea of learning company history through a gamified “choose your own adventure” format. Instead of passively listening to the story, you step into the role of founder, executive, or decision maker. At key moments, you are presented with the same choices that real leaders faced. Do you enter a new market? Acquire a competitor? Focus on profitability or growth? Raise capital or bootstrap?
After making a decision, the story continues. Sometimes your choice aligns with what happened in reality. Sometimes it does not. Either way, the goal is not to win the game. The goal is to understand the context, constraints, and consequences behind important business decisions.
I find this approach interesting because learning often becomes more memorable when we participate rather than observe. Reading that a company made a difficult decision is one thing. Being asked what you would do before seeing the outcome creates a very different level of engagement.
For builders, entrepreneurs, product managers, and software professionals, studying companies provides a kind of pattern recognition that is difficult to obtain elsewhere. You start noticing recurring themes: the importance of distribution, the power of timing, the dangers of premature scaling, the role of culture, and the countless examples where success was far less predictable than it appears in hindsight.
Technology changes quickly. Human decision-making changes much more slowly.
That is one reason why the stories behind great companies remain valuable long after the technologies they originally built have become obsolete. And it is also why I think there is room to experiment with new ways of learning those stories. Founder is one attempt to do exactly that.