I'm working on Metric, the world's first simulation market.
Since I was in elementary school I have been obsessed with simulations. Sports simulations, war simulations, civ simulations, etc.
History has many lessons. We often take that data for granted. Simulations teach us not to. They expose counterfactuals and path dependence. They sharpen our judgment.
Metric uses money to incentivize people to look at, play with, model, and make strategic decisions with that data. In other words, we are a platform for competitive simulations. We build robust world models in civ development, sports management, war games, political races, etc. Players compete against each other to make better decisions with real stakes.
Metric is currently a one-person project backed by $5.5m in independent capital.
The closest analogue to simulation markets are prediction markets. I actually had the idea for Metric after spending a summer studying prediction markets. At the time I was on the research staff at the Camerer Lab at Caltech, where we examined their fairness and predictive power.
The promise of prediction markets is quite cool. Using the wisdom of the crowd to model the future is a cool idea.
The problem with prediction markets is that they all just collapse into a cesspool of insider trading. In practice, they reward access to information, not good judgment. Over time, they become glorified casinos. Worse, they are casinos where the house is whoever has better leaks.
Metric takes more seriously their original promise. We build very powerful simulation engines that try to model the real world as closely as we can, and update them constantly. We publish research papers alongside major updates to enforce fairness and invite open-source criticism.
To the average consumer, simulation markets are also just way more fun. In prediction markets the time to value is rather long. Say you bet on whether my Dodgers will threepeat. Now you have to wait months to see if the prediction market will resolve. Simulation markets allow you to actively manage the Dodgers and see the outcome the same day.
Eventually I believe Metric will be used for everything from competitive hiring to developing real world Moneyballs and informing industry and commentary. It will be the ultimate platform to test judgment under uncertainty with a public ledger.
Currently we are in the process of working with state regulators and gaming commissions. Our goal is to be in the market by Q2 2026.
I attended Harvard, which I left after two years to build Biography. We worked on tooling for voice artificial intelligence. I shut it down and moved on to Metric.
In high school, I competed in debate, where I became the first American to win both the national and international championships (Louisville 2022 and Hanoi 2023). I finished my career ranked #1 out of ~140,000 American high school debaters.
Email: sungjooyoon at college dot harvard dot edu
Do not use sungjooyoon at latimes dot com. It is out of service.