Commercialize It — Tessellate Labs' Focus Decision

A four-round, advanced technology-entrepreneurship simulation set inside Tessellate Labs Inc., a pre-seed Toronto startup with C$420,000 in the bank, a C$30,000/month burn and roughly 14 months of runway. Its single asset is MosaicQA, a machine-vision model that detects micro-defects in extruded aluminium and polymer profiles from low-cost camera feeds — built in eleven weeks with AI-assisted coding, so engineering is not the bottleneck. On 16 June 2026 the advisory board issues an ultimatum: the team has spread MosaicQA across four candidate markets (aluminium extruders, auto-parts QA, food-packaging inspection, a horizontal defect API) and validated none. The next C$90,000 grant tranche is released only against ONE evidence-backed commercialization plan in 90 days — 'pick the customer you will starve to serve.' Of ~20 critical assumptions, only 3 are tested; a US entrant just raised US$4M for general visual inspection. Playing the founding team, you (1) frame the problem in customer language and risk-rank an assumption ledger by impact-if-wrong, flagging the leap-of-faith assumptions instead of jumping straight to a C$120,000 MVP build; (2) choose an AI-augmentation ideation path — Divergent, Convergent or Synthetic-customer — and keep human ownership of a novelty score, because AI used naively raises idea volume while lowering novelty (Maxwell's thesis); (3) allocate a fixed C$25,000 / 4-week validation budget across problem interviews, smoke tests, a paid pilot/LOI push, a wizard-of-oz concierge and a field test to retire the most risk per dollar — concentrating on one beachhead rather than spraying C$6,250 across four maybes, and reading the signal card that reveals the real budget-holder is the quality manager, not the plant owner; and (4) commit to ONE route to market (direct paid pilots, channel/OEM embed, or self-serve defect API), explicitly kill the other two, set a defensible time-to-MVP tied to a fundable milestone, and defend the runway to win the C$90,000 tranche. The math rewards structured framing, human-filtered novelty, concentrated abatement-of-risk validation and a committed runway-aware route — and punishes the five classic founder errors: build-first, AI-as-oracle, validation spray, selling to the wrong buyer, and optionality addiction. Final KPIs track Runway (months), Validated Assumptions (of 20), Idea-Novelty Score (1–5) and Venture Risk (lower is better).