New York, NY — November 20, 2015 | #1 Board Game for Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital for Family and Friends Ages 12+.

“The Next Big Thing: The Game of Entrepreneurship” is a board game where players take on the role of startup founders to launch “the next big thing” that will change the world and eventually make them millions or potentially billions of dollars. Players start by bootstrapping their companies using initial cash savings and “superpower” skills such as programming or marketing to create a minimal viable product. They then grow their team, get their first customers, and move into an office. Players will experience many of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship with multiple significant events (good and bad) that happen along the way, take different paths such as an accelerator or a detour with a pivot path.

As players grow their companies, they raise multiple rounds of capital from investors, increasing their company’s valuation, while watching their founder’s equity get diluted. At the end of the game, players must strategize and decide the best path to “cash out” for the most amount of money by choosing either to get acquired or to do an IPO. The player with the highest final Founder’s Value wins!

“This game let’s you go through the roller coaster journey of being an entrepreneur, from beginning to end. You can experience all of this from the safety of a 45 minute to 2 hour board game that you can play with your friends and family. ‘The Next Big Thing’ is a lot of fun and a great way to learn about entrepreneurship and venture capital.” explains co-creator, Jenna Dreher Fernandes.

The board game has received wide support from the venture capital and entrepreneur community, with top accelerators, crowdfunding platforms, and venture funds included on the game box and in the game rules to help educate players of actual investors, including Y Combinator, Plug & Play, 500 Startups, Crowdfunder, SeedInvest, HBS Angels, New York Angels, Sand Hill Angels, SV Angel, Cowboy Ventures, SoftTech, ff Venture Capital, Founder Collective, RRE, FirstMark Capital, Tomorrow Ventures, Greycroft Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, NEA, Battery Ventures, Norwest, Kleiner Perkins, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures.

“The Next Big Thing: The Game of Entrepreneurship” was created by a husband and wife team, J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes and Jenna Dreher Fernandes. Jenna is a serial entrepreneur and was named one of the Top 10 Female Tech CEOs by Women 2.0 and has written articles on entrepreneurship for publications such as Fast Company, Inc., and FashInvest. Sky is a top ranked Venture Capitalist, and founder of the largest venture group focused on retail technology and e-commerce, and a frequent speaker on entrepreneurship and venture capital at Harvard Business School, Wharton, NYU, Bard College, and Bloomberg TV. He also created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck Template for entrepreneurs to use to pitch investors and he gave a TEDx Talk on Innovating The Financing of Innovation. “The Next Big Thing” board game was inspired by their two favorite games: The Game of Life and Monopoly.

Jenna and Sky have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for mass production of the game. Creative options on Kickstarter for pre-buying the board game include meetings with the board game founders and venture capitalists to pitch your idea or ask questions about entrepreneurship and venture capital, a free Udemy course on creating “The Best VC Pitch Deck”, custom created “Founder Cards”, “Preview Board Game Party” in New York City with five of your friends, and dinner with the founders.

Kickstarter page: www.kickstarter.com

For additional information about “The Next Big Thing” please visit: www.nextbigthingboardgame.com and follow the game on Facebook at www.facebook.com and Twitter @NextBigThingBG

Contact Information:

Jenna Dreher Fernandes
NextBigThingBG@gmail.com
812-483-3097