Opportunity Scout — Helveti Labs and the Runway Clock

A four-round, intermediate entrepreneurship simulation set inside Helveti Labs GmbH, a pre-seed venture founded in Winterthur, Switzerland in January 2026 on a CHF 130,000 cantonal grant plus a CHF 30,000 friends-and-family round. Day one of the simulation: CHF 118,000 in the bank, a CHF 22,000 monthly burn, roughly 5.4 months of runway, 40 customer-interview credits and a CHF 12,000 experiment budget — and three unproven opportunities competing for the same scarce attention. On 17 March 2026 the cantonal agency freezes the CHF 60,000 second grant tranche until the team can show validated customer demand by the end of Round 4, and the runway clock becomes real: every week of indecision burns CHF 5,500. Playing the first-time founder, you screen and validate one opportunity through Volery's opportunity-recognition lens and the Lean Startup build-measure-learn loop. Round 1: score SwissCare Scheduling (an AI no-show predictor, ~6,500 medical practices but a 9-12 month regulated sales cycle), FairShip Returns (a fast-to-test returns widget in a crowded category, CHF 29/month willingness-to-pay tested nearer CHF 19) and AlpTrace Provenance (high-margin blockchain provenance for ~300 slow-moving alpine producers, the founder favourite) on a rubric, rank them, and make an explicit kill decision so scarce credits can be concentrated. Round 2: allocate the 40 credits and CHF 12,000 across validation tactics — a smoke-test landing page, structured problem interviews, or a concierge MVP with a paid pre-order / letter-of-intent ask — and read the noisy results honestly, distinguishing falsifiable demand from vanity metrics. Round 3: a well-funded competitor lands on FairShip and willingness-to-pay reads CHF 19; make the core persevere/pivot/kill call against a pre-set falsification condition, pricing every week of delay in burned runway. Round 4: commit one opportunity and pitch the strategic angel's CHF 250,000 SAFE, tying the chosen opportunity to the evidence, the unit economics, the runway plan and the next milestone. The math rewards rubric-led screening, a real kill decision, commitment-based validation read honestly, a disciplined evidence-driven pivot, fast decision-making, and an investable pitch — and punishes the five classic errors with sticky penalties: parallel validation paralysis, passion over score (chasing AlpTrace), vanity-metric validation, pivot denial, and decision delay. The angel's SAFE only closes for a decided company with an opportunity-fit score above 65 and real validation signal, and thin evidence forfeits the CHF 60,000 grant tranche, collapsing the runway. Final KPIs track runway (months), validation evidence (0-100) and opportunity-fit score (0-100), all in Swiss francs.