Since start, we have delivered 250+ Scale Up Programs and Masterclasses, supporting 4.000+ founders, investors and ecosystem builders around the world.

This year alone, we’ll deliver 30 programs with nearly 600 participants. From impact founders in Southeast Asia, accelerators in South Africa, ecosystem builders in North America, tech founders in West Africa and top global ocean impact founders at Series A to name a few.

But who attends a Scale Up Program?

And what are their key benefits?

Here are the top 15 user groups we see.

1.    The young crowd

15-25 year old. Young. Excited. Engaged. In Canada, Michael and Stuart regularly run Scale Up! in high schools, proving that even 15- and 16-year old can manage growth strategy, customer discovery and cap tables. The young crowd is not a huge segment today, but we see a fantastic excitement with the participants as they learn entreprenurship, not in books, but by working and competing with their friends and peers.

2. The students

19-25 year old. Young-ish. Thrilled to switch from classroom lecture to team-based competition. Absolutely love working with Scale Up! The students tend to be completely blank on anything to do with cap tables, equity math, but learn quickly.

In Austria, Germany and Italy, Enrico has been teaching Scale Up! for years in various business school programs. In Silicon Valley, Rick regularly use Scale Up! to teach entreprenurial finance. For faculty, using Scale Up! in the classroom is a superb way to make the teaching more engaging, more exciting and making learning stick.

3.    The aspiring founders

20-30 year old. Have never started a company, but planning, hoping or aspire to. Are eager to learn the basics. Quickly realize that start, funding and scaling a new startup is a lot more ‘financing & math’ then they might have expected. They love the hands-on approach, the working visual format and the ability to discuss key terms and structures around the table as we work through the various Boom, Bust, Founder Tasks  and term sheets. In Hokkaido, Japan, Marcus ran the Scale Up Masterclass with a vast group of aspiring, Japanese founders, proving the format can transcend cultural barriers from West to East.

4.    First-time founders

We see a lot of these. First time founders may range from 18 – 45. Many are women starting their first company. Many have tried to learn and about fundraising, but typically had very mixed results to date.

Working with partners like EBRD, GIZ, Swiss EP(Entrepreneur), IFC, (formerly USAID) and Innovation Norway, we run a lot of programs supporting these first-time founders. In most cases, we prepare a pretty extensive pre-read package, giving participants time to read, reflect and complete a number of pre-session.

This year, first-time founder programs are taking our team to places like Estonia (Scott), Taipei (Suhail, Wan Fadzil), Oman (Mohammed) and Egypt (Chris),  to name a few places.

5.    Accelerator founders

Ok, now we are going somewhere. Accelerator founders is a big group, representing ca. 40% of all participants in a regular year. Most are early-stage, typically having raised 1-2 rounds of financing to date, most often through a SAFE or CLA instruments. In most cases, they are lacking the understanding of how SAFEs convert, how to structure the next round and how to shape a long-term capital strategy. Katapult Ocean (global), Savant (South Africa), Madica (West Africa), Net Zero Accelerator (Scotland) are some of the accelerators we have partnered with over recent years.

Within an accelerator, Scale Up! is usually delivered as an integrated part of the program, either in a 3-day format or longer 30-day, investment readiness format.

For founders, Scale Up! gives them a unique chance to experience many of the funding challenges they have ahead of them, and most truly appreciate the chance to build deeper skills in term sheets, cap table intricacies, investment instruments and generally strengthening their investment readiness.

6. Scaling founders

Having left  the messy seed-stages, the scaling founders are typically at Series A or Series B. They have significant experience with fundraising across stages, investor types and investment instruments. Most have had some ‘hard experiences’, or in several cases made every mistake in the book. Many quote, “oh, man, I wish we had had this two years ago…”.

Some people might believe that ‘at this stage, the founders should already know how to raise capital’. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, raising a pre-seed, seed, angel or accelerator round is usually based on future potential, with only limited strategy, DD and terms. Once you pass into ‘adulthood’ (how we explain the transition into Series A, things change. At Series A and B, the rounds tend to get more complex, legal advisors are often involved, term sheets tend to creep from 2-page SAFEs to 50-page equity contracts.

When we run Scale Up! with these founders, we don’t focus too much on the basics, but really dive into advanced term sheets, complex deal structures, investor outcomes and delivering on full and partial liquidity and exit  strategies. For most, we spend a half-day doing a complete IPO process, something most Series A founders have never experienced. “This has helped us completely rethink our Series A strategy”, said one UK founder recently. For Scaling founders, we often work with later-stage accelerators like Katapult Ocean, or with investment funds supporting their top portfolio companies.

In Dubai, our 2023 Masterclass with EO brought together 60+ highly experienced founders, many of them running large, successful companies; yet gaining massive benefits from the Scale Up Masterclass. Here, we mostly focused on the later stages of the journey, with outcomes, exits and holistic financing structures as our key focus points.

7. Accelerator staff

This is an interesting group. Globally, we have trained and certified accelerator staff in 15+ countries. It turns out, that most people working in an accelerator does not really understand what it takes to scale, how to read terms sheets, how to structure funding rounds and how to manage a cap table from pre-seed to exit. That’s ok, we cover all that in our Scale Up Masterclass for accelerator staff.

In places as diverse as Switzerland, Norway, East Africa and South Africa, we have trained accelerator staff to become active users or facilitators of Scale Up! Many of them go on to embed Scale Up! into their programs.

8. Investment firms, VCs, Family offices, Fund-of-funds

On one hand, we might think that professional investors would not need Scale Up. By now, they surely know this, right? Well, not our experience at all.

Scale Up! run for this group throws complex funding structures, complicated scaling strategies and highly challenging exit scenarios on the participants. “How will you avoid massive dilution?”, “how can you best structure your Series A, to maximize non-dilutive financing?”, and “How do you scale revenue fast enough to get maximum payout on the 8X ARR exit transaction, where you realize net debt actually becomes a real thing due to your excessive debt financing on the Series C transaction”. The kit remains the same, but we run this very, very differently with professional investors.

The outcome? They love it. “We know the basic stuff, the early-stage content”, said one investor recently. “but the later-stages, that was entirely new to us”. “Wow, this is really challenging, but gives you a super appreciation for the role the founders have in real-life”, said an investment manager with a European family office. Having taken VCs, FoFs, national climate funds and Family offices through Scale Up!, there is no doubt that investment teams can become even better at their job with Scale Up!

9. Ecosystem builders, innovation agencies, DFIs

We never expected the level of excitement, engagement and competitiveness from a bank, but our 2024 DNB (startup advisor) Masterclass was truly impressive. Six teams, 25 participants and absolutely top notch performance. Who knew that a group of bankers would be some of the most engaged, competitive and excited Scale Up! participants we had seen in years? In fact, we find that banks, innovation agencies, ministries, Development Finance institutions and other key ecosystem developers truly thrive on Scale Up! For many, it is the first time they really get hands on with the key concepts, challenges and complexities of scaling a startup. Many advice founders on a daily basis, but never having built a startup themselves, this is the next best thing.

In Vietnam, we have worked with ThinkZone to build out the Vietnamese ecosystem.  In British Columbia, InnovateBC host ecosystem development Masterclasses and in the UAE, and in Norway, the national innovation agency has been long-term user of Scale Up!

10. Angel investors, angel networks

Many angel investors, it turns out, have capital to invest, but are either unsure of how to invest or how navigate the world of CLAs, SAFEs, pre-money, post-money, cap table, mark-ups and mark-downs. This is where Scale Up (Angel!) comes in. We have been running a dedicated Angel version for years, blending both the scale up founder perspective and the successful angel investor perspective into the same, engaging program.

In places like Cairo, East Africa and the Nordics, we have trained and upskilled 200+ angel investors using Scale Up

For new and experienced angel investors alike, the Masterclass truly allows them to get hands on, deploy (simulation) capital into a portfolio of startups and watch their investment either flat line, go to zero or return a 100+X cash-on-cash in the best cases. More importantly, vs. more traditional classroom based educational angel programs, participants get to feel the competitive pressure, get to sense the panic when their investment takes an 80% down round and the joy at the 500M exit to Google, returning back their investment many, many times over.

Looking ahead there is a massive potential in rolling out more Scale Up Angel! Masterclasses to upskill angels and build better, more active angel syndicates around the world.

11. Innovation clusters

Leadership teams at Innovation clusters were our very first audience when Scale Up! was developed. We did not know it at the time, but it quickly turned out that most clusters were sorely in need of a better understanding of startups, scale ups and basic cap table math. Thanks to a wonderful collaboration with Innovation Norway and the Norwegian national cluster program, 100’s of cluster leaders have built their entreprenurial skills with Scale Up!

Functioning as key ecosystem builders, cluster staff, cluster members and cluster leaders all serve a vital role, in better understanding and supporting young companies. Scale Up! fits this bill perfectly.

12. Corporate innovation, corporate venture capital

One of the best performing teams ever came out of the Accenture London Program in 2024. The Founder Intelligence team (FI, a part of Accenture) have day jobs to support corporate clients on startup engagement, design corporate accelerators and help big companies better work with startups and scale ups.

Naturally, they brought these skills to the Masterclass. The Terrawattz $4trillion IPO (Think, Nividia, just better), set a new record for what can be achieved in a Scale Up! Masterclass.

In the debrief, discussing how the team achieved this extreme outlier performance, the answer was “we fed all our data into ChatGPT, and that helped us…”.

Having run 20+ programs for CVC teams, corporate innovation teams and corporate disruptors like FI,  we  see a strong upside for more corporate teams to experience the ups and downs of the Founder’s Journey with Scale Up!

13. Business school faculty, educators

A group we love working with, but would love to see many more of, is the business school faculty. Scale Up! fits perfectly into a classroom program, having taught 1000+ students to date. Yet, getting faculty and educators to join and invest their time is always an uphill battle.

Honorable mentions include our Silicon Valley friend, Rick Rasmussen, who has been one of the most active Scale Up! educators anywhere in the world. Rick has shown an impressive flexibility in bringing Scale Up! into his many classrooms.

What we do see, however, is that many in the next group,  once certified, are easily stepping into classrooms, taking on roles as visiting faculty to teach entrepreneurship with Scale Up!

14. Mentors, advisors, consultants

Our final group is a broad one. These include consultants and advisors serving startups on their investment readiness and fundraising success. These consultants, mentors and advisors tend to already be highly active in their respective ecosystems. They are usually well versed in the challenges of building a scale up. They understand fundraising challenges, cap table math and love reading term sheets over coffee.

What Scale Up! does for them is provide a single package, a simulation kit, where they can apply their extensive knowledge in a whole new way. Expanding from ‘advisors’ to ‘facilitators’, they realize they can train, support and accelerate a vast cohort of founders, combining their existing expertise with the Scale Up! materials. These people tend to sign up for a Discovery session, complete the certification in record-time and join the Strategy Tools Master Trainer to learn from the source.

In Bahrain, we partnered with Falak Innovation and Tamkeen to deliver the first ever Scale Up Masterclass in the country. For many founders and participant, this was the first time they really got into what it means to build and scale a startup in MENA.  For Suhail Algosaibi as an active mentor and business angel, Scale Up! was just one more way of supporting young companies in the region.

15.   Anyone else?

If you are one of our global, certified Scale Up! experts, who did we miss? Any other group you would like to add? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

What is Scale Up!?

Scale Up! is a team-based, action-packed, ultra-competitive simulation to learn and master the founder’s journey from idea to successful exit. Working in teams, participants choose a case company, and then work through 6-10 years to scale the company into a global winner.

Scale Up! covers a wide range of teaching content, including:

• Scaling mindset
• Foundational equity
• Customer discovery
• Business models
• Revenue growth (ARR)
• Fundraising (SAFE, CLA, Equity) from pre-seed to Series F
• Term sheets
• Outcome analysis
• Partial investor liquidity
• Full exit transaction

Scale Up! is available in the following versions:

• Scale Up Global! (global content)
• Scale Up MENA! (100% MENA content)
• Scale up! Angel (for angel investors)
• with Scale Up Africa Rising! launching in Q1 2026

Learn more? Get certified?

Want to learn more about Scale Up, Scale Up MENA or Scale Up Angel? Check out our website.

Curious to dig into the full Strategy Sims universe and learn more about the methodology, get our latest report, Strategy Sims in Action, co-authored by a global community of Scale Up! experts.