Greenlit, The AI Portfolio Simulator

GreenLIT

The AI Portfolio Simulator

Not every AI project deserves to ship. You decide which ones do.

Welcome to Nimbus

Nimbus survived its AI transformation. Now everyone has an AI idea, and the board just made you Portfolio Lead. You are Claire Nakamura, and you have twelve months, $300k of budget, three engineers, two data people, and a queue of department heads who are each certain their pitch is the one.

The Mission

Greenlit runs on the portfolio triage and capital allocation practice taught in executive AI leadership programs. Most AI initiatives should be right-sized or stopped, not shipped as pitched. Saying no well, and saying "smaller" even better, is the skill this game drills.

How to Play

Four pitch months, eight build months. Read the one-pager, ask the sponsor what he will tell you for free, then spend real money on probes to check the claims before you stamp anything. Fund it at the right size, defer it, or kill it. Everything you fund locks engineers and data for months, so every yes is a no to something else. At the end of the year you are graded on the calls, not the vibes.

About the Creator. Built by Gary Wong, an enterprise AI transformation leader who made this entire game with his team of AI agents.

Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Every company, character, and rollout in this game is invented. Any resemblance to real companies or actual people is entirely coincidental.

This game records the calls you make, so it can be studied and improved. No account, no name, no email, and nothing that follows you between visits. What's recorded →

What am I looking at?

Mo: The month. Newest first, matching the entries below.
Cash: Budget left at the end of that month, after everything was charged and anything earned had landed.
Burn: Token spent that month by everything building, live, or undead. The ordinary running cost of the portfolio.
Bleed: The part of the cost that is avoidable: upkeep on zombies. A zombie failed but did not stop, and keeps taking money and people until you kill it. This is the only line here you can end.
− Written off: Money committed to builds that failed that month. Already spent and gone — shown so you can see when it happened, not as a running score.
+ In: Money that arrived: the quarterly injection, plus revenue from anything live.

Reading the bars. Each column is scaled against its own worst month, not against the other columns. A tall bar under Bleed means your worst bleed month, not that bleed is larger than an injection. Sharing one scale would make a $3k burn invisible beside a $150k injection.

Money out reads −, money in reads +, and Bleed is striped rather than merely red, so nothing here depends on telling red from green.

What's recorded

Recorded: the verdicts you stamp, the evidence you buy, when calls happen, and your final grade.

Not recorded: no account, no name, no email, no cookies, and nothing that follows you between visits. This game has no text box anywhere in it, so there is nothing personal it could capture even by accident.

How your row is marked on the board: each playthrough gets an identifier used once and never reused. Your browser remembers your own years; the server never learns that two of them are yours.

Where it goes and for how long: a database hosted in the United States, kept for twelve months and then reduced to anonymous totals. It is used to work out whether this game teaches anything, which is the only reason it is collected.

Greenlit is written for a professional audience and is not designed for under-18s. If you would rather contribute nothing, playing offline changes nothing about the game: every screen, every number and your own board work exactly the same with the network switched off.

How to play

Twelve months as portfolio lead. Roughly twenty minutes. Read this once and you will not be guessing.

The year

Months 1, 4, 7 and 10 are pitch months. The other eight are build months, where the work you funded either lands or does not.

Read the pitch

Each department head brings a one-pager: the problem, the claim, and the ask. Ask your free questions first. Sponsors are not lying, but they are selling.

Verify before you stamp

Probes cost real money out of the build budget: shadow the workflow $15k, audit the data $12k, interview the worker $8k, interview the sponsor $6k. Diligence you spend is diligence you cannot build with.

Stamp it

Six stamps, four of them sizes: Full AI ($120k, 2 eng, 2 data, 3 months), AI-assisted ($60k), Automation ($30k), Process fix ($10k), plus Not now and Kill. Right-sizing scores better than funding.

Four pools, all scarce

Budget $300k builds and probes. Token $80k pays the monthly burn, and $1 of budget buys $2 of token. Engineering 3 and Data 2 lock for the whole build, so a yes today closes a door in month 7.

You may buy capacity once all year: an intern $25k or a professional $70k, either for four months. It arrives the month after you pay, so you are buying it for a wave you have not seen yet. Hiring closes at the last pitch month, when a new pair of hands would arrive with nothing left to work on.

One action a quarter

Raise one org posture meter: data governance, AI security, AI governance. AI-assisted and Full AI stamps need more than human oversight; each scores its required meters cumulatively. You never get enough actions for everything.

Build months

Projects run on their own. Watch the projected band, rescue what is slipping, and kill the zombies — a dead project keeps eating capacity and burn until you stop it.

The report

At month 12 your year is measured against the best year this deck allowed — a year that paid real money, out of the same budget you build with, for the evidence behind every pitch it funded or killed. Walking away is free there, as it is here. You see that benchmark, what free perfect knowledge would have been worth on top of it, and the one call that would have gained you most.

Welcome to Nimbus

The Mission

How to Play

What am I looking at?

What's recorded

What's recorded

The leaderboard

How to play

The year

Read the pitch

Verify before you stamp

Stamp it

Four pools, all scarce

One action a quarter

Build months

The report

The board has a nickname for you.

How your grade was computed

One more, before your score

Year-end portfolio review

How the board graded you

The call you would take back

Next year, one note