Growing on Purpose — Racine's Sustainable Growth Decision

A four-round, advanced entrepreneurship simulation set inside Racine SAS, a four-year-old mission-led French B2B SaaS venture in Nantes that helps mid-market food and agriculture companies measure and cut supply-chain waste. By March 2026 Racine has reached €1.4M ARR with 38 customers and a team of 21, grown capital-efficiently on a €900K seed round, and built an unusually dense founder network — an alumni accelerator cohort, two anchor-customer advisors, and a sustainability-investor community. But growth has stalled, the bank shows nine months of runway (€855K cash against €95K monthly net burn), and the largest competitor just raised a €12M Series A. Playing founder-CEO Camille, you must choose a growth path, activate the network, and reconcile identity with funding terms before the runway runs out. Grounded in Vincent Lefebvre's research on sustainable entrepreneurial growth, entrepreneurial identity, and networks for resourcefulness, the simulation treats growth not as maximised velocity but as a rate the venture's resources, identity and relationships can sustain. Round 1 — diagnose why growth stalled (capital-efficient but under-resourced sales), read the runway clock precisely, and name the two identity attributes (mission selectivity and team mission-fit) that must survive any path. Round 2 — activate the founder network for resourcefulness: convert advisors into three warm enterprise pilots, take co-marketing and a shared engineer, and set an attention budget that leverages €400–600K of relationship capital without starving the raise. Round 3 — choose among a €6M Series A at a €24M valuation (with an 'any-customer' clause and a 2x liquidation preference), €1.5M revenue-based finance (identity-preserving, slower), or a €2M strategic partnership (exclusivity plus a board seat); a mid-quarter shock accelerates the VC deadline and hardens the exclusivity demand, and you accept, renegotiate, or reject the strings. Round 4 — build an 18-month plan toward the €3M ARR milestone, commit (or delay) the €180K/yr enterprise sales hire every path assumes, set a sustainable growth rate, and pitch the board. The math rewards funding-path fit, deliberate network leverage, renegotiated terms and a credible sustainable rate — and punishes the five classic errors via sticky run-defining penalties: valuation tunnel vision (the VC trap that collapses identity-alignment from 82 toward 41), identity purism (bootstrapping into a flat ARR while a €12M rival outspends you), the free-money illusion (a partnership whose exclusivity blocks 30% of pipeline), network neglect, and over-conservatism on burn that starves the growth case. Final KPIs track runway (months), ARR (€M), identity-alignment (0–100) and network leverage (€K).