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Strive Hard — Leisure Suit Larry for SF tech founders, live on airomatic.ai
Play it now: airomatic.ai/strive-hard
We pointed Grok Build at a stupidly on-brand idea: what if Leisure Suit Larry grew up in the Tenderloin with a blank X account, an oat-milk addiction, and a dream of becoming a billionaire influencer?
What you play
Strive Hard is a browser RPG (no install, no account, autosave in your browser):
- Pick a founder — 24-year-old tech bro, 29-year-old Asian woman CMO, 20-year-old Indian CS major, or 18-year-old Chinese math genius
- Scoreboard = your fake X account — post selfies and funding rounds; watch followers and engagement climb (or die in the replies)
- iHype phone (Pear Inc. parody) on the side — X, Map, Texts, and a Selfie composer
- Map the Bay — Tenderloin studio, Vibe Code Café, hackathon, Y Combinator Startup School, Stanford, Garry Chan’s sauna, YC SUS yacht afterparty
- Texts from roommates, mom, rival founders, dealflow associates, and VCs who keep inviting you to “put our heads together on some coding problems… on the yacht?”
It’s choose-your-own-adventure slapstick: crude, satirical, and extremely San Francisco.
Why ship this?
Airomatic builds in public — tools, demos, and the occasional game that says something about the culture we’re coding inside. Strive Hard is that culture with the polite filter removed:
- Startup school as free Zoom advice that costs your personality
- Product-market fit as a theorem (or a waitlist of three emails)
- Diligence that happens in a sauna
- A boat literally named Diligence
Chapter 1 runs mattress → café/hackathon → YC → sauna → yacht. More scenarios, character-specific branches, and a real drawn map are parked for later co-writing.
Stack
| Piece | Choice |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Browser only |
| UI | Vanilla HTML / CSS / ES modules |
| Story | Data-driven scene graph (scenarios.js) |
| Saves | localStorage |
| Host | public/strive-hard/ on airomatic-site → Cloudflare Workers |
No backend. No app store. Ship files, hit refresh, strive harder.
Design notes that mattered
- Phone as HUD — X is the scoreboard; Map is travel; Texts are romance / VC heat; Selfie is always-on content grinding.
- Free-roam choices open Map — when the story says “go somewhere,” the iHype actually pops the map app.
- Character chip in the top bar — always know who’s failing upward.
- Rated R for bad takes — not affiliated with any real incubator, yacht, or sauna.
Try it / source of truth
- Play: /strive-hard/ — use Menu → Fullscreen in-game for a larger play surface
- This write-up: you’re reading it
- Build process: Grok Build CLI — same public-shipping loop as Cybertruck Assembly Line, the startup archive, and the rest of the site
Want more locations, spicier routes per founder, or a literal Bay Area map art pass? Tell us — the group chat is always open.
Previous on the blog — Cybertruck Assembly Line · Agentic AI Startup News.