Ain Center
The short version
The full story
Two products. One year. Built both while finishing a master’s at Simon Business School.
VentureForge
Strategy simulations, graded by AI. Students get a scenario, a market entry, a pricing decision, a pivot call, and work through it. The AI evaluates their reasoning, not just the answer. Did they identify the right tradeoffs? Did they consider second-order effects? The grade comes with an explanation of what they missed.
I built this for the Ain Center for Entrepreneurship at Simon. The goal was practice reps. MBA students read plenty of case studies. They rarely get to make the call and see it graded in real time.
Validation tool
The second product. Founders come in with an idea. The tool scores it on market fit, competitive landscape, and execution feasibility. Then it generates personas, synthetic target users based on the idea’s market, and runs simulated user interviews with them.
No researcher needed. No two-week wait for five interviews. A founder can test an assumption in minutes and get a signal before they spend a month building the wrong thing.
How I worked
Product lead on both, simultaneously. Scoped features, wrote specs, shipped. The hardest constraint was time, I was a full-time student building production tools. That forced a discipline I still use: if a feature can’t be scoped to two weeks, it’s too big. Break it down or cut it.
What matters about this
These weren’t class projects. They’re tools the center still uses. Students and founders interact with them. That’s a different bar than a grade, the code has to work when you’re not watching.